Abstract

In the process of the dismissed workers’ struggle to return to the South Korean guitar manufacture company Cort and Cortek, a group of Korean artists from the art collective Dispatch Art stood alongside the workers and communal protestors. The Dispatch Art artists, who are successors of Minjung activists in the 1980s, shared their solidarity with contemporary social minorities, including dismissed workers and displaced residents. Dispatch Art’s notion of and approach to socially engaged art differ from the art world’s conventional engagement with political art, typified in the dominant model of Avant-Garde art and defined by principles of artistic autonomy. Dispatch Art’s collective members and their collaborative projects can be found more at protest sites than inside art institutions. Exactly how artists can socially engage the public and become politically active leaders of underrepresented social issues may be questionable. This article extends this line of questioning. Here, I analyze Dispatch Art's factory occupation project that included emphasizing workers as artists, various visual protest tactics and object displays to extend worker presence, and deliberately peaceful demonstrations with broader worker struggle to strengthen ties among workers and cultural producers. Dispatch Art's collaborative, visual, and peaceful artmaking with the Cort-Cortek dismissed workers functioned as prefigurative elements for the workers’ partial reinstatement. From the factory, where the workers protested, to the streets, where the workers shared solidarity with other marginalized communities, Dispatch Art constantly inspired the workers to protest non-violently through cultural praxis. This article underscores Dispatched Art’s cultivation of genuine and ethical human relations with South Korean social minorities.