The aim of this paper is to review the history of studies on oil painting and visual culture of the past 20 years. Early modern art scholars dealt with the oil painting of Korea during the modern period only as a part of colonial art distorted by Japan. But the inclusion in art history of the artists who defected to North Korea is a characteristic that differentiates early modern art history from the art history of the post-1950s. With the development of the art market in the 1970s and other changes in the art environment such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art’s planned exhibitions and discovery of new works, the study of modern Korean art history began in earnest. At the time, critics saw the history of modern oil painting as an unfolding of Greenberg’s modernism. In other words, they created a stylistic pedigree, from the Impressionists of the Japanese colonial era to the Informel of the 1960s~70s and to Korean minimalism, and made abstract art the mainstream art of Korea. Such formalism began to be criticized by Minjung Art critics after the 1980s. Through studies of the 1920s and ‘40s socialist art as well as of the artists who defected to North Korea, rather than modernism, Minjung Art critics sought to restore the disregarded relationship between art and society. Oil painting studies after the 1990s went beyond the dichotomous conflict of modernism and realism and became more diverse. Scholars trained by university art history departments appeared, and various methodologies including post-structuralism, Feminism, Post Colonialism emerged. The research interests of this period were in the social contexts in which modernity and race are constructed, instead of style or class. Also studies attempting critical and deconstructive reading of not only abstract art that has been the mainstream art for some 40 years but also Minjung Art are gradually increasing. But as these studies lean heavily toward an art movement or group study, they lack considerations of analysis or methodology regarding artists or their works. Hence considerations of empirical studies and new methodologies regarding artists and art works must be done side by side in the future.