Vindictive Spirits

Oh Yoon (1946-1986) was a leading artist of popular art who criticized social reality based on realism and inherited and developed it in an ethnic style. The 1980s, when he worked, was a time when the military regime and the capitalist system were at odds. In his short life, he recorded stories about ordinary people who are struggling in reality and creating Korean society as his own creative language using woodblock prints as his main medium. In particular, he had a perspective on realism, but since the mid-1980s, he has built his own world view based on the balance between "realism and mysticism," "grudge and life," and "transcendence and gravity" through the expansion of imagination through meditation, public awareness, and the exclusion of scientific civilization. Therefore, Vindictive Spirits (1984) in the form of a scroll, which was expressed as an emotion of transcendental 'grudges' from the viewpoint of realism of criticism of reality, can be interpreted in the same context.
This work, which was made in the form of a scroll, is incomplete, but it shows the tragedy of Korean history and the people's "Han" in a panoramic way, apart from the main aspect of dealing with the Korean War at that time. In particular, the figures of the people who were killed in tragic situations in Korean history, such as the révolution Donghak, the Korean War, and The Gwangju Democratization Movement are depicted in the form of ghosts who died with a grudge. It is a very tragic situation, but the writer can catch a glimpse of the writer's sensibility in a calm and warm manner through the concept of descriptive time, subtle colors, and the embodiment of mind.