Abstract

When, in 2002, South Korea co-hosted the FIFA World Cup with Japan, Koreans of every age group garbed themselves with red adornments and especially a shirt bearing the stylized slogan of the team’s official fan club, “Be the Reds!” While works by many leading contemporary artists in South Korea were enfolded into this excitement, a large-scale photograph by Jo Seub, titled Do Bring Seub Back, stands out for its burlesque detournement of the so-called Red Devils phenomenon. The photograph portrays the artist reenacting a well-known image of the student activist Lee Han-yeol being hit by a tear gas canister during a protest in 1987—an event that would lead to the June Democratization Movement and ultimately the end of a succession of brutal dictatorships. In recreating the historic photograph, Jo wears a “Be the Reds!” shirt, thereby invoking a parodic attitude toward martyrs for democracy. This attitude marked a departure from the art movement associated with democratization efforts in the 1980s: namely, minjung (“People’s”) art. Marking the emergence of a distinctly post-minjung approach to politically provocative art, I argue that with Do Bring Seub Back, Jo Seub defied the theatrics of decorum that both the state and independent fan organizations sought to choreograph for the televisual world stage, in turn unmasking a vexing spate of phenomena associated with the era of authoritarian politics that subsisted in the present. This ranged from civil unrest and acts of violence committed by the occupying US military, to the militarized condition of South Korean society itself.