〈In the Forest〉(1986) series was first introduced at Min Joung-Ki’s second solo exhibition 《Spring of Seoul》 (1986). It is a lithographic series designed and produced like a movie by the artist, who once joined a college theater club. The work shows figures moving in the forest. The scene was originally created consisting of figures with light summer clothes on, and these figures were later pictured as nude. The artist hired three male and female models and told them to act out certain movements in the forest and then instructed the photographer to take pictures of the models. Choi Min explained Min Joung-Ki’s work as “an idea in an experimental play or a cinema verite film.” In this work, Min Joung-Ki claimed that he wanted to deal with the story of a forest as a “banned space” containing an escape route where people cross. Min later created a multicolored lithography in relation to this work to capture the situation of Civil War in the Third World.
Min Joung-Ki (1949- ) graduated from the Department of Painting at the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University in 1972. He held solo exhibitions including 《The Exhibition of People, Glorious Spirits》 (Seoul Art Center, Seoul, 1983), 《From Yanggeun to Odae Mountain》 (Garam Art Gallery, Insa Gallery, Seoul, 1996), 《Min Joung-Ki-WalkScape》 (Marronnier Art Center, Seoul, 2004), 《Min Joung-Ki》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2016), and 《Min Joung-Ki》 (Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2019). He participated in various group exhibitions such as 《Reality and Utterance Group Member’s Exhibition》(1980-1986), 《The 15 Years of Korean Minjoong Arts: 1980-1994》 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art [MMCA], Gwacheon, 1994), 《Gyeonggi, National Highway No.1》 (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 2007), 《Korean Avant-garde Drawing》 (Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul, 2010), 《Land of Happiness》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2016), and 《SEONG: Fantastic City》 (Suwon Ipark Museum of Art, Suwon, 2019). He won the Lee Joong Sup Award hosted by Chosun Ilbo in 2006.
Min Joung-Ki paints the big and small stories of people in landscapes. When he was a member of Reality and Utterance (Hyunsil-gwa Baleun) in the 1980s, he linked these stories to social and political issues. The entire oeuvre of his work, often labeled as kitsch due to their popular and secular characteristics, dealt with the stories of ordinary people. The artist, who focused on the social system and the margins of everyday life in the 1980s, later moved to Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi-do and began to present a series of ancient map-style landscape works. He traveled to villages in each region to learn local history and information through the native population and constructed the vivid image of a village based on his research of oral history. Therefore, rather than reproducing the actual scenery realistically, his works portrayed the appearance of the land and humans living together. By doing so, he created unique art that did not remain in the normative style of map or landscape painting.
