Park Chung-hee was assassinated in 1979, and what followed under the military government of Chun Doo-Hwan was a period of political, economic, and social strife, exemplified by the Gwangju Uprising, where over 2000 students and protestors lost their lives. Under these fraught conditions, minjung art of the 1980’s began to take form within these protests in the form of ephemeral banners, posters, and pamphlets. Minjung art formed in spite of political repression during the late 70s and 80s, and can be connected to a longer history of art centered on realism in Korea since the early twentieth century. Developing concurrently in literature and art, realism dominated cultural production during the time in response to the political climate. While the original intent of minjung art was to critique the institutional academic art system, it evolved into a political avant-garde that was active in the pro-democracy movement. Thus minjung artists often saw themselves in contradistinction to dansaekhwa, seeking to counter what they considered to be the latter's distance from the public and lack of overt political engagement. Art historian Chunghoon Shin argues that minjung artists' anti-formalist rhetoric against abstraction was a response to the growing institutionalization of the art world that drew art away from the public. Origins of Minjung Art While there were a vast array of reasons as to why artists were invested in the minjung art movement, there was an overall consensus that art should apply a figurative or narrative style in order to represent the plight and reality of the working class. Reality and Utterance During the first meeting of Reality and Utterance in 1979, members criticized what they saw as dansaekhwa's turn away from reality. This interest in how to define and engage with reality and thus expand the boundaries of art led Reality and Utterance artists to declare their intentions through a manifesto, refer to mass media and consumerism through material and form in their work, and organize group shows beginning in November 1980. By the mid-1980s they organized an umbrella organization in response to government censorship of realist art, exemplified by the cancellation of the 1985 "Power of the Twenties" show at the Arab Art Museum in Seoul due to their inclusion of images of the Gwangju Uprising, but faced accusations of elitism. Art historians have typically considered Reality and Utterance's anti-modernist work as preceding the later development of hyeonjang misul (art of the site)