Later collectives, such as Ganeunpae and the Institute of Social Photography, expanded strategies of “art of the site” by producing banner paintings and photobooks and deploying the mass media both in the form of print and film.
Kim Hyung-a: sees minjung as a historically specific class that encompassed oppressed peoples sticken by economic struggle and limited personal freedom.
"[6]: 6 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.
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)."
[2]: 14 President 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,[7] exemplified by the Gwangju Uprising, where over 2000 students and protestors lost their lives.
[9] 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.
After the Uprising, and in contrast to Reality and Utterance, the association eschewed a typical indoor art exhibition for kut, a shamanistic ritual of mourning (1980), and outdoor show with over a hundred visitors looking at paintings and performances (1981).
Their interest in education, influenced by recently translated texts like Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, reimagined the artist as facilitators for minjung to produce their own work.
The repetition of motifs and dissolution of individual authorship, and emphasis on the site of the banner in constructing its meaning, all evince an interest in the specificity of place and adaptability that was crucial to later minjung art.
[2]: 70–78 Dureong also worked with local communities in lieu of galleries to create woodblock prints, illustrations, cartoons, banner paintings, and murals.
[10]: 471 Some critics, including Reality and Utterance member Sung Wankyung, accused minjung artists and groups like Dureong of political kitsch and romanticizing folk traditions.
Minjok and minjung artists, while sharing some common aims, and in some cases could be referred to interchangeably, were fiercely opposed to being read as being the same or similar to one another.
These artworks, such as Choi Byung Soo's images of Lee Hanyeol, were indispensable tools for activists in galvanizing protestors, and functioning as symbols for the movement.
Minjung art at the time also utilized mass media (cinema and print) to engage with political issues on a wider scale.
Choi Byung Soo's (born 1960) 1987 paintings and prints reproducing Reuters News Agency photographer Jung Tae Won's photo of Yonsei University student Lee Hanyeol transformed the image into the symbol of the democracy movement.
They were able to reach a wide array of audiences for low cost, leading to directors like Kim Dongwon and leftist filmmaking groups like Labor News Collective (Nodongja nyusu chejakdan) to experiment with the medium.
The stories they would depict were often of Korean martyrs, ills of capitalism, the plight of the poor, corrupt officials, and other politically charged scenes.
[10]: 483, 488–9 In addition to Seongnam Project and flying City, Chunghoon Shin considers Choi Jeonghwa (born 1961) as carrying on the legacy of Reality and Utterance.
Sohl Lee's description of minjung art's complicated relationship to politics offers one reason as to why it may be difficult to offer a straightforward or simplistic narrative for the movement:Born as a visual language of dissent opposing the anticommunist, authoritarian government, minjung art thus assumed, for better or worse, an assertive presence as fierce, symbolic, nationalist, androcentric, and at times as hackneyed and didactic as the dominant power it sought to oppose.
[17]: 112–113 The 1988 Artists Space show featured work by Choi Byung Soo, Dureong, Jung Boksoo, Kim Yongtai, Gwangju Visual Art Research Institute, Lee Jonggu, Lim Oksang, Min Jeongki, Oh Yoon, Park Buldong, The Photo Collective for Social Movement, People's Art School, and Song Chang.
[14]: 15 Beck Jee-sook curated "Battle of Visions" for the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2005, pairing minjung art with work by younger artists drawing on the historical movement.