and was first used in Korea during the late 1800’s to refer to the resistant force against Japanese occupation. In the late 1960s, the term referred to the oppressed social class and pro-democracy protesters during the military dictatorship. Below are a selection of different scholars' takes on who artists were referring to when creating minjung art. Beck Jee-soo: considers the minjung as people who are the exploited and oppressed masses while also being the revolutionary subject of social/ political change. She goes further to connect the parallels between the minjung theology of the 1980s to the liberation theology in Latin America which both understood the minjung to be analogous with Jesus’ suffering. Han Wan-sung: defines minjung as people in a society who are economically, culturally, and politically deprived of power. Park Hyun-chae: uses Marxist distinction between bourgeoisie/proletariat and defines minjung as a byproduct of Korean proletarianization. Park sees the minjung to be the economically oppressed (laborers, armers, poor). He also takes into account how the pre-existing class delineations influenced by Confucian philosophy expedited the proletariat formation during Korean industrialization. Kim Hyung-a: sees minjung as a historically specific class that encompassed oppressed peoples sticken by economic struggle and limited personal freedom. To Kim, the idea of minjung coalesced around an emotional response to nationalism, anti-imperialism/capitalism. Like Park, Kim sees minjung as a concept born out of Western philosophy. Namhee Lee (b. 1960): The professor of modern Korean history at UCLA argues that while the term "minjung" can be translated as "common people," it is an abstract and elastic term that "required a constant shoring up of the counterimage of the forces considered to be inimical to minjung: the military dictatorship, corporate conglomerates, and foreign powers." Therefore while factory workers and farmers were presented as the face of minjung during the 1970s and 80s, the term later included small business owners and segments of the military. Minjung Art Minjung misul, meaning "people's art," was used interchangeably with terms like minjok misul (national art), minjok minjung misul (national people's art), and saeroun misul undong (new art movement). It was only in 1985 that minjung misul became the standard term when a national newspaper wrote about the government censorship of the exhibition "Power of the Twenties (20 dae eui him)." Some artists associated to the movement pushed back against the use of the term. History Groundwork (late 1970s - early 80s) Political Context President