The arts encourage us to wake up, often by shocking us into a novel consciousness (Ayers, Greene, & Alexander-Tanner, 2012). Further, from the perspective of the artist, the basic human right to creative activity provides a vehicle for "talking back" (hooks, 1990, p. 337) in response to threats to social justice. Such is the case in the story deployed here. It concerns the creative activity of the artist Sung-dam Hong and how it provided a threshold for subversive resistance to injustice within the recent government of South Korea. Sung-dam Hong is an activist artist from Ansan, South Korea who created woodcut prints about the Gwangju Democratic uprising of May 18, 1980. The voices and perspectives in Hong's art reveal his dissatisfaction with both South Korean President Park and the U.S. government, which he believes has impeded the realization of democratic ideals in South Korea. Visual art and design educators may use the metaphor of Hong's "talking back" in their teaching. They may use it to help students learn to develop and liberate their own voices in the face of injustice, oppression, colonization, or exploitation.