2024 DanO-Spring Festival

Ways of Seeing: South Korea’s Social Realism

Friday, June 28th 2024
6-7:30 pm CDT
FREE
St Louis Art Museum: The Farrell Auditorium

As part of the annual Gateway Korea Foundation’s DanO Festival event, Soyang Park, associate professor of liberal arts and sciences, graduate studies at the Ontario College of Art & Design University, will speak about the minjung movement.

In the artist own works.

Seeing is not neutral. To whom does the meaning of the art properly belong? This question was among those raised for the first time in postwar Korean art history by dissident art groups and artists who emerged in support of the popular democratization of the country in the 1980s called the minjung movement. Minjung means (the underprivileged) people, mass, or multitude. Forty years onward from these pivotal years of democratic transition, this talk will help the audience understand the root and development of Korean social realism in art and media, the spirit of which can also be found in the narratives and styles of acclaimed popular entertainment that went global: Parasite (2019) and Squid Game (2021).

Speaker: Soyang Park

Ticket information

Tickets for this free program may be reserved in person at the Museum’s Information Centers or through MetroTix. All tickets reserved through MetroTix incur a service charge; the service charge is waived for tickets reserved at the Museum.

What is Dano?

Shin, Yun-Bok

Dano (端午, May 5th of the lunar calendar) is one of the major traditional festivals in Korea along with Sŏrnal (New Years Day, lunar calendar) and the harvest festival Ch’usŏk (August 15th, lunar calendar). Dano usually falls in early to mid June as measured on the solar calendar, a moment when spring turns into summer and when yang energy is at its peak. It represents a significant turning point in agriculture when farmers have just finished seeding and planting. The day thus marks the beginning of the growing season.

Celebrating May 5th by the lunar calendar is a shared tradition among East Asian countries, but the activities differ widely. The Korean celebration includes traditional outdoor and indoor activities including swinging, wrestling, making special cakes containing spring herbs, washing hair with balsam, and giving gifts of fans for use in the coming summer.

The tradition appears in some well-known art works from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910): in the eighteenth century painting by Shin Yun-bok, and in the “Story of Ch’unhyang”, a famous love story circulated both through written text and through an oral performance tradition called p’ansori.