Koreana Winter 2014 (English)

WINTER 2014

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS

SPECIAL FEATURE

HONGDAE

Hongdae

Seoul’s Cultural Hot Spot Cruising Hongdae on a ‘Burning Friday’; Youthful Energy Shapes a Cultural Melting Pot; A Landmark of Their Own

A Stroll through

VOL. 28 NO. 4

ISSN 1016-0744

IMAGE OF KOREA

The Crockery Terrace, Mother and Home

Kim Hwa-young Literary Critic; Member of the National Academy of Arts

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ost Koreans over a certain age have memories of a beloved rustic childhood home. At a sunny spot in the yard by the wall is the jangdokdae , or crockery terrace. And on the terrace is mother, bending over and peering into the crocks. Childhood home, mother, the crockery terrace — these three images in the mind’s eye can evoke intense yearning for one’s childhood years.

What exactly is the jangdokdae? The name is a compound of three words.

Jang refers to traditional fermented sauces and pastes such as ganjang (soy sauce), gochujang (red pepper paste), and doenjang (soybean paste). It is a slow food made with home-grown soybeans, red peppers, and natural sea salt, as well as much care and patience. Dok refers to the earthen jars and crocks made for storing food. Dae refers to the low terrace or platform in the yard where the jars are

lined up by size. There they stand in the sun, wind, rain and snow, through summer heat and winter cold, breathing steadily through the changing seasons, the food inside them gradually fermenting and maturing.

The crockery terrace was the mother’s territory and hence was placed in a sunny spot close to the kitchen and the household well.

Mother would sit in the open woodenfloored hall and feel happy as she looked out at the aging sauces and pastes, and pickled vegetables. The contents of the jars meant good food on the table and a sense of contentment and well-being. So on sunny days, mother would take the lids off the jars and expose the contents to the sunshine and fresh air, and at any hint of rain she ran to put the lids back on.

The crockery terrace was also a sacred place where mother would pray for the

family’s welfare. In the past, many a mother would go to the well at dawn and fill her cleanest bowl with fresh water, which she then placed on the terrace to pray for the happiness of her husband and grown children who had left home.

These days, when home to so many people are high-rise apartments and life is lived in the city, the old crockery terrace has become a rare sight. With the onslaught of fast food, the value of traditional slow food is rapidly vanishing. Ever more people now eat commercially produced condiments rather than those homemade by mothers. But in the childhood homes in the countryside, mother’s love and fermented sauces and pastes are still aging and maturing. The crockery terrace on a lonely winter night covered in snow, for some reason, brings to mind the image of a mother waiting quietly for her children who have left home for the city.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 1

SPECIAL FEATURE

SPECIAL FEATURE 1

A Stroll through Hongdae, Seoul’s Cultural Hot Spot

04 Cruising Hongdae on a ‘Burning Friday’

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Kim Kyung-ju

SPECIAL FEATURE 2

08 Youthful Energy Shapes a Cultural Melting Pot

Kang Young-min

SPECIAL FEATURE 3

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FOCUS

Tales of Namhan Mountain Fortress Lee Kwang-pyo

1984–2014

Lim San

with his Camera

Song Su-jong

MODERN LANDMARKS

42 Hirotsu House in Gunsan: Vestige of Japanese Colonial Period

Roh Hyung-suk

GUARDIAN OF HERITAGE

46 Kim Gil-seong:

Enchanted by Symbolic Patterns of Rice Cake Presses

SPECIAL FEATURE 4

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An Acoustic Journey through the Night

Seong Gi-wan

SPECIAL FEATURE 5

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A Landmark of Their Own

Jung Ji-yeon

IN LOVE WITH KOREA

GOURMET’S DELIGHT

52 Simon Morley, an English Figure on

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Jeon: A Savory Treat Promising a Feast

Ben Jackson

Joo Young-ha

ON THE ROAD

ENTERTAINMENT

Korean Ground

56 Suncheon: Life in a Cluster of Seaside Villages

76 TV Shows Highlight Relationship with Son-in-Law

Gwak Jae-gu

Yoo Sun-ju

ALONG THEIR OWN PATH

LIFESTYLE

INTERVIEW

36 Noh Sun-tag Probes Reality

Ha Bak-guk

ART REVIEW

30 Good Morning Mr. Orwell:

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Kim Yeong-deung: Hongdae Old-timer Sustains Indie Spirit

Kang Shin-jae

64 50 Years on Stage,

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Park Chan-il

Kim Su-mi

JOURNEYS IN KOREAN LITERATURE

BOOKS & MORE

82 Reality Begets Fantasy, Fantasy Begets Reality

Park Jung-ja Says: ‘This Moment is the Most Beautiful’

‘The State of Fried Chicken’

70 “At Least We Can Apologize”

Chang Du-yeong

Unfiltered Look at Life and Human Relationships

Your Metamorphosis

Kim E-whan

“The Dawn of Modern Korea”

An Intriguing Snapshot View of Modern Korean History

“Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Beliefs” Despite Minor Snags, a Useful Resource on Korean Folk Culture

Charles La Shure

SPECIAL FEATURE 1 A Stroll through Hongdae, Seoul’s Cultural Hot Spot

Kim Kyung-ju Poet and Playwright / Cho Ji-young Photographer

Hongdae is a hot spot in Seoul where young people gather to enjoy culture and the arts. Here, you can see and experience the vitality of Korea’s youth culture at ground zero. Similar to Bangkok’s Khaosan Road, Calcutta’s Sudder Street, or Tokyo’s Akihabara, Hongdae is home to a thriving cultural ecosystem.

At night on weekends, the playground near the main gate of Hongik University is always packed with crowds. A playground for children during the day, it is transformed at night into a festive cultural venue for young adults.

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KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 5

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f you’re wondering what’s the best way to experience the “Hongdae culture,” I would suggest a route that begins at Exit 9 of the Hongik University station on subway line 2, passes through the area nicknamed a “street good for walking,” then the playground area across the road from the university, then the street where the clubs are clustered, and finally ending at the café district in Sangsu-dong. Starting on the periphery and going into the core, this is the best route for anyone who wants to taste the nightlife of Hongdae.

If the day is bulgeum, or “burning Friday,” as Koreans like to call the last day of the workweek (an expression similar to TGIF), you’ll find the area ablaze with dazzling neon signs of numerous clubs, restaurants, and shops, in addition to the flickering screens of smart phones carried by the crowd. Even in winter, this area sizzles with people dancing, drinking, and enjoying the music, with no regard for the cold weather.

Just outside Exit 9, you can immediately feel the vitality of the young crowd gathering in the small plaza near the station. Most of them, with a smart phone in their hands, are probably waiting for friends to arrive.

The ground is often littered with the flyers of night clubs and bars, as well as leaflets for exhibitions or performances by some obscure artists. Things commercial and artistic commingle on the streets of Hongdae as a testament to its two contrasting faces.

The Streets as Artworks Leaving behind the bright lights around Exit 9, the route proceeds to the “street good for walking,” from where the true Hongdae scene begins. This street, leading to the playground across from Hongik University, is perfect for a leisurely walk that takes about 30 minutes at the most. Walking along the street, you can stop and grab a snack at one of the food carts, or browse around artists’ workshops or small shops with their unique displays.

The one thing you must make sure to take in is the cultural milieu created by the artistic performances occurring everywhere along the street. You’ll regret if you just pass by the scenes unfolding here and there, with people cheering and applauding. In the street and at the playground, you might see underground musicians performing songs from their new albums, or a group of girls staging costume plays, or sometimes poets, rappers, or street artists reading aloud

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the Declaration of Artistic Independence. On Friday nights, the playground serves as the perfect venue for busking by indie musicians as well as all sorts of guerilla performances. On weekend afternoons, a flea market opens here with artists selling their works.

Once you’ve warmed up to the street performances, it’s time to jump into the heart of the Hongdae culture, which is clubbing. If you love music and dancing, immerse yourself in the vital energy pulsating from these clubs. Only after doing so can you rightfully claim that you’ve been to Hongdae.

On a “burning Friday,” Hongdae is full of people tipsy on alcohol and excitement. Many foreigners also come here to enjoy drinking, dancing, and Friday night fever. In front of some clubs that are popular for trendy music, lines start to form at an early evening hour. In fact, it is not unusual to wait in line for hours to get into the hottest clubs.

Mingling with Artists A walk from the street where the clubs are down to Sangsu-dong leads to a trendy neighborhood, one of the new places that have sprawled from the original Hongdae area. There are clusters of cozy little cafés converted from small factories, as well as the workshops of various artists. Walk into one of the cafés and drink a cup of tea to experience the neighborhood’s burgeoning salon culture. Actually, this is where many artists have made their homes, so it’s interesting to see what an artists’ community is like. In this area, artists get together to talk about various matters. With the cafés serving as venues for small-scale exhibitions, independent films, public readings by poets and ghost writers, or indie band concerts, the Sangsudong area brims with a pulp fiction kind of atmosphere, not to be found in other clubbing areas.

If you come across any of these artists and show an interest in their work, this is enough to turn you into an instant friend. They might offer you some homemade vin chaud and crackers, accepting you on the spot into their community. You can spend a wonderful night talking with them and listening to their entertaining and sometimes outlandish stories. Although alcohol and music may be seen by some as a reckless means of release, they are a way of being for those who enjoy the night in Hongdae. Today, Hongdae is not just a habitat for artists but a place where they can mix with the public.

1. 1. Buskers, bands and performing artists of all stripes present their acts everywhere along the “street good for walking” leading to the playground across from Hongik University.

2. In Hongdae, long lines of people waiting for hours to get into the most popular clubs are a common sight.

3. Su Noraebang has floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street, entertaining passersby with the amusing antics of people dancing and singing inside.

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On a “burning Friday,� Hongdae is full of people tipsy on alcohol and excitement.

Many foreigners also come here to enjoy drinking, dancing, and Friday night fever.

In front of some clubs that are popular for trendy music, lines start to form at an early evening hour.

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SPECIAL FEATURE 2 A Stroll through Hongdae, Seoul’s Cultural Hot Spot

Kang Young-min Pop Artist

Until the 1980s, Hongdae, or more specifically the neighborhood in front of Hongik University, was no more than a jumble of art supply stores along the so-called Picasso Street leading up to the university’s front gate. It was thus the art students of Hongik University who played the definitive role in turning the area into what it is today: the cultural and artistic center of not only Seoul but the entire country. In contrast to other cultural hot spots in Seoul, such as Insa-dong, Garosugil, and Daehangno, which seem to be fading in relevance with the passage of time, the Hongdae area, both in terms of size and staying power, has steadily grown over the past 20 years. How has Hongdae managed to remain as vibrant as ever, brimming with the passion and energy of popular culture?

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1. The Hongdae area’s identity as an artistic and free-spirited gathering place has its roots in the culture of the art students of Hongik University.

2. In the 1990s, young artists undertook experimental projects based in the area’s cafés and clubs, many of them converted ateliers. A major example is the album “Dosirak teukgongdae” (“Lunchbox Taskforce”), made by the joint efforts of highly influential avant-garde rock bands, such as Sanullim and the Uhuhboo Project.

3. The idiosyncratic studio culture of artists spread to the mainstream, influencing the atmosphere of small workshops, galleries and cafés in Hongdae.

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ollowing the establishment of the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University in 1961, the carefree, laid-back look of the art students going about in soiled, paint-spattered work clothes came to symbolize Hongdae’s trademark artistic ambience. When they graduated, these students had no interest in getting an office job. They did not leave the university area but stayed on and opened their own studios in the vicinity. Back then, the area was mostly filled with ordinary family homes. For an affordable rate, countless poor artists rented space in the garages or basement rooms of houses in this neighborhood, and turned them into studios. Hongdae’s characteristic studio culture emerged as the artists gathered in the neighborhood to socialize and discuss new cultural ventures.

Then, they opened cafés and clubs, and Hongdae began to gain a reputation as a fun place to be.

Cafés and Clubs, Cultural Incubators The unique character of the Hongdae area began to manifest itself in the 80s to early 90s. Around 1988, in the wake of the Seoul Olympics and the liberalization of overseas travel, wealthy Apgujeong in the southern part of Seoul became the center of conspicuous consumption under the influence of the “orange tribe,” the demographic cohort that grew up in affluence and had

© Living & Art Creative Center

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been educated abroad. On the other side of the city, Hongdae was where young artists imbued with new sensibilities pursued their own experimental creativity and cultural alternatives. A case in point was the first Street Art Exhibition held in October 1993. Organized by the student council of Hongik University’s College of Fine Arts, it was planned as a show of resistance against the hedonism of the orange tribe, which had begun to encroach on the area.

The Hongdae culture began to take off in earnest when these young artists opened up creative new venues, for example, Electronic Café, oloolo, Baljeonso (“power plant”), and Gompangi (“mold”), just to name a few. The haunts of a trendy and arty crowd, these places organized provocative, unabashedly liberal, lowbudget exhibitions, concerts, and other performances.

The creative aesthetic immediately associated with the area emerged around this time.

One such establishment worthy of mention is Electronic Café, opened in 1988 by graphic designer Ahn Sang-soo and sculptor Gum Nu-ri. Introducing the then innovative concept of computer networks, it was Korea’s first Internet café — the precursor of PC clubs in the country as well as one of the catalysts for shaping the Hongdae culture. The Communications Art Project held in September 1990, linking Seoul and Los

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 9

Angeles, was perhaps one of the first projects in the world to demonstrate the potential of the computer network to general audiences. In his online chatting messages, Ahn specifically mentioned the creative and open-minded culture of the Hongdae neighborhood.

Against the Mainstream With the political changes brought about by the June 1987 democratization movement (which led to direct presidential elections) and the inauguration of a civilian government in the 1990s, Hongdae culture gained a legitimacy of sorts. It was around this time that the major forces shaping the area’s culture began to shift from art to music. In contrast to the mainstream music scene dominated by pop songs, both Korean and foreign, the clubs and cafés here offered alternative rock, punk, reggae, and electronic music.

Young people in their 20s, with a more cosmopolitan outlook than the previous generation due to their greater exposure to foreign popular culture, started to congregate at Hongdae. You could say Hongdae attracted anyone who sought something more than the cookie-cutter adult culture of the generation before them.

If the youth culture of the 1980s was marked by resistance against the country’s military dictatorship, this came to be replaced in the 1990s by a counterculture movement. Young Koreans, sporting spiked hair, dyed red or yellow, and wearing chains over beat up jeans, turned to the in-your-face fashion markers of defiance adopted by their counterparts the world over, in rejection of the mainstream’s establishment culture and rampant materialism. The Hongdae clubs, breeding grounds for avant-garde and experimental art, took hold as cultural escapes for Korea’s youth.

Moreover, in the Hongdae clubs, the barriers between producer and consumer became blurred. In many a case, yesterday’s customer became today’s artist. Hooking up with others who thought and felt the same way, young artists and musicians sought to express their individuality and in the process create something new. From listening to music in the clubs, they moved on to form their own punk or alternative bands, or debuted on the music scene as club DJs. I myself used to show video art works while I did some “VJ-ing” at Café Underground. Hongdae was a cultural melting pot, where everyone mingled together, and influenced and stimulated each other. When an inter-

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For an affordable rate, countless poor artists rented space in the garages or basement rooms of houses in this neighborhood, and turned them into studios. Hongdae’s characteristic studio culture emerged as the artists gathered in the neighborhood to socialize and discuss new cultural ventures. Then, they opened cafés and clubs, and Hongdae began to gain a reputation as a fun place to be.

esting new place opened, a slew of new cultural projects would get underway.

From Sub-culture to Open Culture Going into the new millennium, Hongdae culture has been enthusiastically embraced by the general public. A prime example is an artists’ flea market first held in the playground in front of Hongik University in 2002, the year when the World Cup finals were hosted

by Korea and Japan. At the flea market, not only artists but any vendor could sell their artworks and handicrafts. It was not just a place to buy and sell goods but a “culture marketplace” where the barriers between art and everyday life, artists and the public, were erased. The event has been lauded for suggesting an alternative to the conventional ways of producing and consuming culture. These days, one of the most notable developments is an extension of Hongdae culture to a daytime way of life, rather than being confined to nightlife. And with this change, an even wider range of people has begun to make their way to this area.

From the mid-2000s, the Hongdae area has become increasingly active in the daytime as well. This can be attributed to the transformation of its streets, now lined with cafés that cater to the brunch crowd. Just as people get used to avant-garde art over time, it is true that the Hongdae culture has become more commercialized, going beyond art and music with a new emphasis on trendy food, fashion, and shopping. When bloggers post news about the latest restaurants and “hot places,” the crowds invariably follow. However, it will not do to disparage the deep-rooted power of Hongdae culture just because of its recent commercialism. This area is simply going through another change — that is, the culture of the area is shifting from its fringe and sub-culture roots to a more open and mainstream culture.

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Hongdae’s Street Art Exhibition was first held in October 1993. Organized by the student council of the Hongik University College of Fine Arts, it has been held every autumn for more than 20 years and is credited for taking art out of the confines of art galleries and making it more accessible to the public.

© Street Art Exhibition

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© KT&G Sangsang Madang

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Although many express concern about the increasing commercialization of the Hongdae area, the production and consumption of alternative culture continues to be as vibrant as ever.

© Street Art Exhibition

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KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 11

KIM YEONG-DEUNG

SPECIAL FEATURE 3 A Stroll through Hongdae, Seoul’s Cultural Hot Spot

Ha Bak-guk Head of the Young, Gifted and Wack

Cho Ji-young Photographer

From Student Activist to Club Owner Ha Bak-guk Some people say that the name of Club Bbang refers not to bread (bbang in Korean) but rather a prison cell (gambbang).

Kim Yeong-deung In my university days, I was what you could call a student dissident. In 1989, I was listed as a “wanted person” and did actually spend some time in prison.

Ha So you’re a student activist turned live club owner?

Kim Even after graduation, I was active in several youth organizations, and in that capacity taught elderly women how to read and write at night school, set up a little neighborhood library where residents could borrow books, and also spent time with young artists. I began coming to Hongdae around 1996 and took part in various projects, such as the regular concerts put on by the clubs in the area under the name “Running Underground,” as well as the underground street magazine “Fanzine Gong.” It was around that time that I took over operation of Club Bbang. When we heard that they were looking for new owners, my friends and I pooled our money and took over in January 1998.

Ha I understand that Club Bbang was first opened near the back gate of Ewha Womans University in 1994.

Kim In those days it was called Café Bbang and it was very much a multi-purpose cultural venue where exhibitions, theater, dance, and other performances were held. Young artists in various fields, including music, film, and the fine arts, moved between genres and mingled in the Sinchon area. Likewise, Café Bbang had a mixed function. It was an open space that could be fully adapted to all sorts of purposes. When the café moved to this area in 2004, its character became fixed as a live club. But you could say it still retains the mood of those old Sinchon days.

From Sinchon to Hongdae Ha In other words, Club Bbang changed and adapted to the Hongdae indie scene.

Kim It happened under some deliberate choices. When I took over I wanted to turn the club into a music-focused venue, probably because my first encounter with the Hongdae scene came about through music. I also wanted the club to be a place where artists

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Kim Yeong-deung carries two business cards. He is the owner of Club Bbang, the live club with the longest history in the Hongdae area, and director of the Living & Art Creative Center, which operates the Free Market, a weekly art market in the neighborhood adjacent to Hongik University. Kim says he began to frequent this area in his 20s, when he was, in his own words, a “country bumpkin.” Now in his 40s, he can be considered one of the old-timers of Hongdae. Why does Kim stay here?

“ It’s not because I’m necessarily good at what I do, but because of the wonderful people that I work with … The people are the reason why I keep doing this. It’s about relationships and mutual influence among likeminded people.”

of all genres could come together and mix. These were my two main goals. But when we moved here, the live club aspect naturally came to the fore. Even so, for more than five years now we have been screening indie films with the cooperation of the Association of Korean Independent Film and Video.

Ha Though Club Bbang was part of the Hongdae club scene, it seemed a little different from most other clubs, which concentrated on one genre. As the club accepted any act with modern sensibilities, regardless of genre, a community of diverse musicians naturally took form here. That’s evident in the countless musicians who have passed through this club. In that respect, I would say the three compilation albums that Club Bbang has produced record the history of Korea’s indie music scene.

Kim I remember the time we put out the first album in 1999.

It was a time when various indie music compilations were being released. Our project started from the simple desire to record the performances of the bands that played mostly at our club, but we really didn’t know how to go about producing an album. We didn’t have the money to hire a studio and do it properly, so we bought some more equipment and recorded in the club, in one take. We thought it was important to leave a record of the musicians who were active in the club at the time.

Ha It’s getting harder and harder to maintain a cultural venue in this area. What’s the situation at Club Bbang?

Kim Operating a live club here is on the easy side. In the past, I used to pay the club’s rent with money I had earned working elsewhere, but these days we get around 20 to 30 people for each performance and so we can operate on the entrance fees alone. And because we are in a basement, the rent is not as high as other places in this area. To keep a live club in operation, the most important thing is good planning on the part of the operator. There’s no point in keeping a place going if it can’t go beyond maintaining the status quo. You need to create and reproduce new value.

In that sense you could say Club Bbang is in a kind of slump.

A lot of the concerts we plan these days are based on interesting concepts. We don’t rent out the club but organize all the performances ourselves. But it’s a fairy fixed system in that we schedule all our regular acts first, then place new acts for the dates in

between. We should be trying to do something different from the planning stage … It’s time we sought change, but these days I don’t seem to have the energy.

From Nighttime Haunt to All Day Hot Spot Ha In spite of what you say, we know you put your heart into your work at Club Bbang, while also operating the Free Market every week. This art market has been recognized for bringing people to Hongdae, traditionally a nighttime haunt, in the daytime as well. For that it won the third Hongdae Art and Culture Award.

Kim In 2002, just ahead of the World Cup finals in Korea, the Hongdae Sinchon Culture Forum was formed. The Free Market was organized as part of its activities. The forum was disbanded after the World Cup but I wanted to continue the Free Market. So, I founded the Living & Art Creative Center. As most of the artists active there are amateurs, I thought it was necessary to establish a system in which we could all work together and ensure that our participation was not a one-off thing. The next thing we needed was a space to work in. So, I founded the Living & Art Creative Space — Saekey, and the Living & Art Creative Store — Key. The former is a kind of madang (open space) where artists gather, work together, and hold joint exhibitions. The latter is a permanent space for selling goods that are featured in the Free Market.

Ha What is it that drives you to keep doing what you’re doing?

Kim I still have my passion and energy left. It’s not because I’m necessarily good at what I do, but because of the wonderful people that I work with. At Club Bbang, when the stream of musicians that come to us stops, that’s when we have to close our doors. We don’t bring people in but create a stage for the musicians who seek us out and we work together with them. The people are the reason why I keep doing this. It’s about relationships and mutual influence among likeminded people.

Ha What are your plans for the future?

Kim I want Club Bbang to be established as a place where new acts can gain the courage and motivation to perform. The Living & Art Creative Center is forming diverse networks in an effort to creative an independent ecology that is autonomous and sustainable.

Things are working out quite well.

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Live clubs in Hongdae are a good place to enjoy performances of indie originals by musicians who create their own music.

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in ts” e e r ts l st tric ura s i t l d u “c ae her ngd o ot ther o d o H o m rom s, but s ove all, t fro nt f n g b e e n r A n ffe e? ildi ffer ope o di h di h bu his plac d s c s n t i u i l a e m s ft sty eye mak al o look ber of t r e t a u p o h o p st la sn ey um . ecia e sound e, clos doe has a n p e s eets a r e t a d h a h s t d g t g e re s is Hon Hon oy thes hat’ .” It he a d d T w , . n n l j n u u u en he f so aro Seo and ity. T hood o l ing l c e l e e o of or str of th ay t ighb When w e t n s “ s. be is a lace s is the p r hi othe rs. T a e r you 14 KOREANA Winter 2014

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fter the Seoul Subway Line 2 was opened in 1984, the Sinchon university district underwent dramatic changes. A large department store was built there, and the streets leading to Ewha Womans University were soon filled with all kinds of fashion shops. When space ran out in Sinchon, the commercial sprawl reached the adjacent Hongdae area. Although the area around Sogang University is closer to the center of Sinchon, where Yonsei and Ewha Womans universities are situated, Hongdae became the new area for commercial development, due in part to the new subway station that provided easy access. In this way, Hongdae emerged as the stamping ground for young people and a base for the indie culture, which grew out of the rock cafés that first appeared in Sinchon in the mid-1980s.

From Rock Cafés to the Indie Scene Drug (currently DGDB), a punk club that opened in 1994 in front of Hongik University, has served as a milestone in the development

of Korea’s indie music scene. In the mid-90s, there was no distinction between the musicians and the audience. When the musicians came down from the stage they would mix with the audience, and those who had been slam dancing on the floor would jump onto the stage and perform. Some would be inspired to become musicians after watching a performance here. In this way, punk rockers came to congregate at the club. They were defiant, but not in any offensive way, and would often go around playing innocent pranks.

Those who could afford it took up skateboarding when it was still quite new in this country.

Gradually, Drug turned into a gathering place for young musicians with a “DIY spirit,” who appeared with the alternative rock boom of the early 90s. Serving as a launch pad for such popular bands as Crying Nut and No Brain, the club came to be revered as the mecca of Korean punk rock. These musicians were also featured at other live clubs, including Spangle and Jammers, building a legacy that has come to define today’s live club culture of Hongdae.

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Busking and clubbing aside, a variety of cultural events taking place throughout the Hongdae area define its landscape as a place for free spirits.

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Is there any indie musician, including me, who has not performed in this playground? Or to put it more directly, is there any indie musician who has not slept in this playground after hours of playing the guitar and drinking makgeolli (unrefined rice wine), and then being awaken by the morning dew on their forehead?

The 1988 Seoul Olympic Games and the 2002 FIFA World Cup marked two watershed events in the history of Hongdae clubs.

The cultural liberation and openness that bloomed after the Seoul Olympic Games resulted in greater acceptance of broad-mindedness and experimentation, which is the essence of Hongdae culture. The frontrunner in experimental popular art was Electronic Café, which opened in March 1988 and operated for three years, and other clubs that followed its lead, like Baljeonso (Power Plant), Hwanggeum Tugu (Golden Helmet), and Gompangi (Mold), the home of Kim Hyeong-tae of the Hwang Sin Hye Band. The club culture in Hongdae has grown its unique resilience based on the young vitality of punk clubs and the initiatives of avant-garde artists.

Spread of Club Culture The 2002 FIFA World Cup helped accelerate the popularization of Hongdae’s club culture, which had once been limited to a rather small crowd. The crowds who gathered at Seoul Plaza for street cheering found an outlet for their excitement in Hongdae clubs, and when the two realms met, like a spark and tinder, they started a fire. “Club Day,” which had existed in Hongdae even before the World Cup, was an outlet for young people who wanted to be with others of their generation to share their excitement. DJ clubs prospered in this period, and the booming sounds of house and techno music resounded throughout the area. The clubs soon mushroomed into the Hapjeong Station area, via the “Parking Lot Road” and Dangin-ri Power Plant. The distribution of these clubs shows how a sprawling entertainment district came to be formed, combining Hongdae with its adjacent neighborhoods of Hapjeong-dong, Mangwon-dong and Yeonnam-dong.

However, it is not just the local clubs that make Hongdae a “neighborhood of sound.” Rather, all its streets are filled with the loud and lively sounds of music. Busking is not an uncommon sight in this area. In fact, Hongdae is paradise for buskers. The main stage is the playground near the university, a place where independent musicians meet their audiences, a place where they come out on a sunny day to bask in the sun while strumming their guitars. The cheerful sounds that attract passersby, the vibrancy of live music played up close — the buskers provide a special treat for the ears. Is there any indie musician, including me, who has not

performed in this playground? Or to put it more directly, is there any indie musician who has not slept in this playground after hours of playing the guitar and drinking makgeolli (unrefined rice wine), and then being awaken by the morning dew on their forehead?

Although the playground, including the adjacent senior citizens’ center, is no different from other such places, the sounds heard here make it very different from an ordinary playground. Anyone passing by is led to listen to the young buskers, performing with a true passion and earnestness as they hope to someday see their dreams come true.

Recently, Hongdae seems to have departed from yesterday’s fringe culture to embrace a broader spectrum of pop culture. Now, the area features a variety of clubs, such as live clubs, techno clubs that hold rave parties where clubbers dance to DJ mixes, hiphop clubs, and Korean music clubs offering a mix of dance music from the 90s onwards. Although the inner part of Hongdae is obviously tilted toward commercialized standardization, the so-called “off Hongdae” area on the broad periphery provides an impressive array of sounds, demonstrating the area’s cultural depth and diversity.

Pilgrimage Continues Until Early Morning Above all, the sounds of Hongdae reveal their true nature at night, after the noises of the day subside. Strolling about the neighborhood and following its rich sounds, you can easily lose track of time and see the dawn break. On weekends, you might see crowds of young people waiting for the first bus to depart at 5:30 a.m. It’s a real sight to see all those people rushing out of the clubs around that time, drunk and exhausted, but still under the spell of the sounds ringing in their ears. Sound does not have a physical form but is merely a flow of vibrations traveling through the air. That is, the atmosphere of a certain place is reflected in the sounds that it makes. To share the sounds is to share the air, which amounts to collective breathing. Perhaps nowhere else in Korea, but in Hongdae, can you experience such a sense of oneness with those around you. Although the vibrations may instantly disappear, the echoes remain, tantalizing your inner being, and the memory of the intense moment will urge you to repeat the acoustic pilgrimage again and again.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 17

SPECIAL FEATURE 5 A Stroll through Hongdae, Seoul’s Cultural Hot Spot

Jung Ji-yeon Editor, Street H Magazine

Cho Ji-young Photographer

People cruise the streets of Hongdae for their own particular reasons. Some come looking for a good time at one of the clubs, some others come to sit and relax over a cup of coffee, and yet others come in search of artistic inspiration.

What makes the Hongdae landmarks their personal favorites?

For the Night Owls Without a doubt, Hongdae is the clubbing mecca of Seoul. The clubs are concentrated in a small area and compared to those of Apgujeong-dong and Cheongdam-dong, which aspire to the luxurious, they are more accessible. You could say they are younger, and more hip.

The current fame of Hongdae clubs owes much to “Club Day” which began in 2001. This event, held on the last Friday

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night of every month, gave clubbers the chance to visit up to 20 clubs in one night with the purchase of a single ticket at the first club visited. Unique to the Hongdae area, it was hugely popular among both locals and foreign residents of Seoul. The street cheering for the 2002 World Cup finals gave rise to a culture of partying that acted as a kind of detonator for the popularity of Club Day. But when the bigger clubs objected to the idea of dividing

the profits equally among all participating clubs, Club Day came to an end in 2011.

Nevertheless, the Hongdae area is still considered the No. 1 clubbing destination.

Among the more than 20 clubs in the area, the best known are nb2 and M2. One of the oldest and biggest of the Hongdae clubs, nb2 caters to all tastes from 90s hip hop to the latest electronic hip hop.

Operated by YG Entertainment, it often hosts album showcase events for the

© nb2

1, 2. Of the more than 20 Hongdae clubs, the most crowded are nb2 and M2.

3. Gopchang Jeongol is an LP music bar.

It is so famous that foreign musicians visiting Korea, such as MGMT, Beirut, and Mogwai, make a point of stopping by to take in the scene after their own concerts.

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3 © M2

agency’s artists. M2 has been around for 10 years, having opened in May 2004. A big club created from the joint investment of several electronica clubs, it features three bars and a giant dance floor. As foreign musicians and DJs are often invited to perform here, the club continues to draw an endless stream of customers.

Clubs aside, there are plenty of other places for a fun night out at Hongdae.

One example is Gopchang Jeongol. The

name refers to a Korean stew-type dish made with beef intestines, but this place is not a restaurant, it’s an LP music bar with a history of over 20 years. The bar’s collection consists of more than 5,000 LPs of Korean pop music from the 1950s to the 1980s. Some of the most frequently played albums are the 1970s psychedelic rock albums by Shin Joong-hyun, Kim Choo-ja, Sanullim, and Songgolmae. The fame of Gochang Jeongol is such that

foreign musicians who come for gigs in Korea, such as MGMT, Beirut, and Mogwai, make it a point to visit the place after their concerts.

And then there is Su, a noraebang , or “singing room,” where the Koreans’ love of singing is apparent to all. Open around the clock, this large noraebang has a number of glass-fronted rooms that face the street so that anyone looking up can watch the people singing and dancing inside.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 19

© Sukara

1. Café Sukara, a popular organic café, serves up healthy dishes prepared with carefully selected ingredients.

2. Yiri Café, operated by a musician, often hosts arts and culture events and is a popular haunt of artists, novelists, poets, musicians and critics.

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Café Society Even for Seoul, the Hongdae area, where many artists, musicians, and designers make their homes, is unusually cram-packed with cafés. The area known as “Hongdae” is actually a rather large area covering contiguous parts of Seogyodong, Donggyo-dong, Sangsu-dong, Hapjeong-dong, and Yeonnam-dong, with a large number of streets lined with cafés.

While many of the cafés are branches of chains, such as Starbucks and Coffee Bean, to get a feel for the real Hongdae it’s best to visit one of the individually owned local coffee shops.

The Hongdae area can be roughly divided into east and west, with the front gate of Hongik University as the dividing point. The most famous café area in the eastern side is around the Sanwoollim Theater. Café Sukara on the ground floor of the theater, owned by the drama company of the same name, which staged the Korean premiere of “Waiting for Godot,” was the first “organic café” to open in the Hongdae area. The name

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comes from the Japanese pronunciation of the Korean word for spoon, sutgarak .

Kim Su-hyang, a second-generation Korean-Japanese, owns and operates the café; he opened it after realizing the value of environment-friendly farming and fair trade while shuttling between Seoul and Tokyo. All the dishes served here are made with produce bought from farmers’ cooperatives or urban organic farms, and macrobiotic food tastings are held from time to time.

In the street alongside the Sanwoollim Theater is the shooting location for the hit 2007 TV drama “Coffee Prince 1.” An old house with a yard remodeled into a coffee shop set, it has been operating as an actual coffee shop since the drama ended.

Framed photos of the actors appearing in the drama are hung on the walls, and fans from China and Japan come by here to take souvenir snapshots.

As for the western side, on the street heading toward Dangin-ri Power Plant from the Sangsu subway station is Yiri Café, where literary readings, meet-the-

author events, mini concerts, and other cultural events are held. Owned and operated by a musician, the café is also a favorite haunt of not only musicians but also novelists, poets, critics, and artists.

Here it’s possible to sit in on a late-night impromptu jam session.

About a five-minute walk from Yiri are two interesting café buildings standing side by side. Café Anthracite is a former shoe factory. This tall industrial-style building with an appealing atmosphere was featured in the movie “Cyrano Agency.” Right next door is a white building housing the café Mudaeryuk, named after a legendary continent. The threestory building is a multiuse structure.

The basement floor has a stage where indie bands play on weekends, while the first floor includes the café and a space for various cultural events, such as a fair for independent publishers. The second floor contains individual office spaces and the rooftop features a vegetable garden tended by several single women living in the neighborhood.

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Artists Searching for Inspiration The Hongdae area is one of the most active publishing districts in Seoul. A robust publishing infrastructure is in place, with numerous publishing houses, magazine offices, design studios, and printing factories. Especially noteworthy is the existence of various alternative bookstores. Near the Sanwoollim Theater you can find Your Mind, which sells artworks and a wide range of local and foreign self-published materials. It is an imaginative space with a huge wooden bookshelf along a high wall that rises up to the cathedral ceiling and cats greeting

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the customers. Every year the shop holds a festival and market named Unlimited Edition, where participants can offer their published works, stationery, music albums, and other items for sale.

A major landmark of Hongdae is KT&G Sangsang Madang, located near the public parking lot in the heart of the area. On weekends, you can see lots of people hanging around there waiting for their friends. Made of curved glass and exposed concrete, the shape of the building is suggestive of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, ready to take flight. Sangsang Madang is a multipurpose cultural space

with an art cinema and concert hall for indie bands on the basement floor, a design shop selling a wide range of goods on the first floor, and galleries for all manner of exhibitions on the second and third floors.

Lastly, for a peek at a vintage furniture collection, visit the aA Design Museum.

This cafĂŠ is owned and operated by Kim Myung-han, who has traveled all over Europe for the past 20 years in search of vintage furniture and lighting pieces.

Arranged stylishly there are such finds as a 1920s street lamp from the Thames riverside, lights designed by Tom Dixon, and chairs by Charles and Ray Eames.

Š KT&G Sangsang Madang

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1, 2.

KT&G Sangsang Madang is a multipurpose cultural space featuring an art cinema, concert hall for indie bands, design shop, and galleries.

The distinctive building is a popular meeting place.

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© Living & Art Creative Center

New York’s Soho, a once low-profile Bohemian neighborhood, is now a bustling urban center filled with boutique stores, galleries, and restaurants, while Brooklyn, once the retreat of artists driven out of Manhattan by soaring rental rates, has been transformed into a highpriced residential district. The Hongdae area is undergoing a similar kind of transformation.

Due to skyrocketing rents, small shop owners have been forced to relocate to the outskirts, such as Sangsu-dong and Hapjeong-dong. The latest hot place is Yeonnam-dong.

Located south of Yeonhui-dong, a genteel residential district, Yeonnam-dong has for some time been known as “Little China,” where many overseas Chinese reside. Being close to Hongdae but more affordable with relatively lower rents, Yeonnam-dong has increasingly attracted artists and young entrepreneurs who have made their homes there. The new hot spot in this area is the Dongjin Market alley. Along the back alley of the old market, which had largely lost its function as a shopping place, trendy restaurants began to appear, one after

another, creating a newly hip neighborhood that invariably draws crowds every weekend.

TukTuk Noodle Thai, Café Libre, and the Japanese restaurant Himeji have been joined by small galleries, bars, and various restaurants. This year, a social cooperative took out a long-term lease on the old market area where produce brought in from the countryside is now sold directly to consumers.

A notable enterprise in this area is Share Store (Eojjeoda Gage in Korean), an old house that has been renovated and divided into eight shops. It is a community of likeminded people, a stylish commercial space, and an architectural experiment all in one. Housing a malt whisky bar, pie shop, café and lounge, hairdressing salon, and handmade crafts studio, this complex operates on the basis of sharing and mutual growth. It’s an innovative place where you can enjoy a tasty sandwich or red-bean bingsu (flavored shaved ice), or have a coffee or malt whiskey. Share Store, as the name suggests, is about the joys of sharing, or making life more fun by doing things together.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 23

FOCUS

Tales of Namhan Dubbed the “country of fortresses,� Joseon maintained a number of fortifications, including sanseong , or mountain fortresses used as shelters during emergencies; eupseong , or fortresses surrounding towns in the provinces; and doseong , a larger version of the town fortress to protect the capital. Of these, it is the mountain fortresses that bear the most evident traces of the numerous conflicts throughout Korean history. Now, lend an ear to the tales of Namhan Mountain Fortress, which was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in June this year.

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Mountain Fortress

Lee Kwang-pyo Staff Reporter, The Dong-A Ilbo

Š Namhansanseong Culture & Tourism Initiatives, Gyeongi Cultural Foundation

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 25

Martial arts performance in front of Seojangdae, the two-story western command post installed at the highest point along the fortress wall for strategic observation.

N

amhan Mountain Fortress, or Namhan Sanseong in Korean, holds bitter memories for Koreans. During the 17th century when Qing China invaded Joseon, King Injo (r. 16231649) fought against the invaders but eventually had to surrender.

In December 1636, Qing arrived on Joseon territory with a massive force of 130,000 soldiers, after crossing the Amnok (Yalu) River, and conquered Hanyang (present-day Seoul) in only five days.

There seemed to be no way of stopping their advance. Just before the capital fell, the crown prince hurriedly sought refuge on Ganghwa Island. Thereafter, the road leading to the island was blocked off, so the king and his ministers retreated to Namhan Mountain Fortress. But the Qing troops soon laid siege to the fortress.

The king, his officials, and 15,000 soldiers fiercely resisted for 47 days. However, at the end of January the following year, King Injo stepped out of the fortress and surrendered to the Qing emperor at a nearby riverside dock, vowing that Joseon would serve as a tributary state. This was a scene of utter humiliation and tragedy that would never be forgotten.

Namhan Mountain Fortress was first built during the Three Kingdoms period. After Silla unified the three kingdoms and seized control of the Han River basin, it built an earthen fortress there in 672. At the time, Silla was struggling to drive out the Tang allied

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forces in its quest to complete the unification. The mountain fortress was built to protect the northern territory from Tang’s forces.

It subsequently played a key role in fending off the Mongol invasions in 1231-1232 during the Goryeo Dynasty.

Legacy of National Defense, Glory and Shame In the 17th century during the Joseon Dynasty, the earthen structure was rebuilt as a stone fortress. In 1621, Prince Gwanghae (r. 1608-1623) ordered that the fortress be reinforced with stone to defend against an invasion by the Jurchens, who founded the Later Jin Dynasty in the north, and to protect Hanyang. Construction was suspended temporarily and then resumed in 1624, when Injo took the throne, and completed in 1626. The fortress walls extend over some 8 kilometers, and together with Bukhan Mountain Fortress, north of the capital, this fortress served as the military garrison for defense of the capital.

A second Manchu invasion occurred in 1636, a decade after the reconstruction of the fortress was completed. Notably, Injo did not surrender because the fortress had fallen to the invaders. An account of Namhan Mountain Fortress in “Taengniji ” (Ecological Guide to Korea), written by Yi Jung-hwan in 1751, goes: “The inside of Namhan Sanseong is low and slightly sloping, but the outside

Namhan Mountain Fortress, an impressive historical site registered as UNESCO World Heritage in 2014, is a popular tourist attraction and retreat for the residents of the capital area. Recently, five walking trails were completed so that visitors can enjoy the beautiful scenery along the fortress wall.

is high and steep. When the Manchu soldiers came, they could not even brandish their swords, much less take over the fortress.

However, King Injo came out of the fortress because there was no food and Ganghwa Island had fallen.” Ironically, the impenetrable military stronghold had backfired on those resisting from within.

In 1896, when the Righteous Army rose up to fend off the Japanese invasion in the Gyeonggi region, the fortress yet again played a vital role, and during the Japanese occupation period, the residents used it as a hub in carrying out their independence struggles, such as the March 1 Movement in 1919.

For over a thousand years through Korean history, Namhan Mountain Fortress witnessed critical battles and hence shows the evolution of Korean military fortifications. It was built as an earthen fortress in the seventh century by Silla, and was subsequently fortified in various ways over the ensuing periods. It is therefore a showcase of the construction techniques from the Three Kingdoms period up to the Joseon Dynasty.

Traces of Everyday Life Among the mountain fortresses of Korea, Namhan Sanseong boasts exceptional geographical and topological advantages. “Yeojido seo,” a compilation of the maps and geographical texts pub-

lished by each county of Joseon, describes the fortress as follows: “It is flat in the middle and rugged on the outside. Its grand shape resembles a mountaintop wearing a hat.” The fortress perimeter extends along the rugged natural contours, at 500 meters above sea level, making it difficult to launch an assault from the outside.

The geographical location helps make it a natural stronghold.

The military facilities that remain within the fortress are reallife examples of the warfare and weaponry of the past. The fortress was elaborately designed with facilities for offensive and defensive purposes. It comprises inner walls and double outer walls. The walls were equipped with various defense mechanisms such as chemise walls, cannon platforms, main gates, secret gates, battlements, and command posts.

The chemise (ongseong ) is an extension of the outer wall surrounding an entry gate for added protection. Invaders have to penetrate the semicircular bastion to reach the gate, while defenders on top of the wall are able to fire down upon intruders from three directions.

Currently, the most impressive fortress structure is the western command post, Seojangdae. Command posts (jangdae) are two-story open pavilions from which commanders directed battles. They were installed at the highest spots along the fortress,

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 27

The walking trail to the side of the snowcovered Jwaikmun, or the Left Wing Gate, is a favorite with hikers. It is the east gate of Namhan Mountain Fortress and remains intact from the 17th century.

At this historic mountain fortress we come to an understanding of the history of hardships that our nation has overcome. We can learn from history about the disgraced king who was forced to kowtow before the invaders. And we learn about honor and integrity from the death of the three scholars who refused to yield. providing strategic observation points. Larger fortresses had several such structures for the coverage of a broad area. Originally, Namhan Mountain Fortress included five command posts (two in the east and another three in other directions), but today only the western command post remains.

In between the four main gates in the north, south, east, and west, there were secret gates (ammun) placed at locations that were difficult to observe from the outside. These narrow passageways without a gate tower were used to carry supplies in and out, provide access for reinforcements, or allow soldiers to sneak in and out to deliver messages when the fortress was under siege.

Sixteen hidden gates remain in Namhan Mountain Fortress today, the most of any palace or fortress compound in Korea.

Due to the painful lessons of the second Manchu invasion, Nam-

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han Mountain Fortress was expanded to enclose a self-contained town. People settled there under a state policy, and the fortress developed beyond its defensive function into a town fortress where it was possible to engage in everyday life. Within the fortress there were 125 guard posts, and between the posts there remain traces of sites where salt and charcoal had been stored for emergencies.

Temporary Palace for the King Namhan Mountain Fortress encompassed a temporary palace (haenggung ) where the king would stay when away from the main palace in the capital. In the event of an external invasion or serious internal unrest like a coup, the king could stay in a safer place, which served as a temporary capital. The fact that such a palace existed inside this mountain fortress means that from the very

Between the four main gates in each direction, ammun , or secret gates, were installed to sneak food, weapons and messages in and out of the fortress.

outset, it was designed not for defensive purposes alone but for potential use as a provisional capital as well. Of the 10 or so temporary palaces that were established nationwide during Joseon, only the palace here was equipped with a royal ancestral shrine and altars for the gods of land and grain, the two most essential facilities to accompany the royal palace. This palace comprised the king’s bedchamber and living quarters as well as administrative offices so it could serve as the provisional capital during a state of emergency.

A notable feature of the provisional capital is the traces of an everyday living environment combined with various defense facilities. Three scholars who faced death for their adamant refusal to submit to Qing are remembered at Hyeonjeolsa shrine for their patriotism. Another shrine, Sungnyeoljeon, is where Onjo, the first king of Baekje, one of the ancient Three Kingdoms, is venerated along with the foreman who supervised the original fortress construction. At Cheongnyangdang, rites were held to appease the souls of the construction workers, while locals would pray for good fortune at the foot of the 350-year-old juniper in front of the shrine. Also remaining inside the fortress is the pavilion where the noblemen studied and relaxed, as well as traces of the market that

used to open on the military training grounds.

The recently created trails that enable visitors to appreciate the beauty of the mountain ridges along the fortress wall and enjoy the splendor of the four seasons are popular walking courses. However, it is not only the tangible cultural heritage that touches the hearts of visitors to this ancient mountain fortress but its history of both humiliation and honor. The tragic history has inspired numerous artists. For example, poet Lee Yuk-sa wrote a poem, “Namhan Sanseong,” during the Japanese occupation period as he yearned for the nation’s independence. The contemporary novelist Kim Hoon wrote a novel, also titled “Namhan Sanseong,” that brings to life the unpredictable lives of the people amidst violent turmoil.

At this historic mountain fortress we come to an understanding of the history of hardships that our nation has overcome. We can learn from history about the disgraced king who was forced to kowtow before the invaders. And we learn about honor and integrity from the death of the three scholars who refused to yield.

Inscription of Namhan Mountain Fortress on the UNESCO World Heritage List will serve to boost appreciation of not only the tangible architecture but also the intangible legacies.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 29

ART REVIEW

Good Morning Mr. Orwell 1984 2014 Lim San

Professor, Department of Curatorial Studies and Art Management, Dongduk Women’s University

© Nam June Paik Cultural Foundation

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The comforts of modern life brought about by industrialization have compelled us to adapt to the uniformities of a globalized world. Spawned through the TV and print media, and even commercial films, today’s stereotypes approach us as flamboyant images at times, and in the form of trivial catchphrases at other times. They cast a heavy spell, causing us to overlook the reality of dehumanization or to mindlessly succumb to such contradiction. Have not the intellectuals that mankind boasts of, such as Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Charlie Chaplin, already proven to us that the power of art can overcome these threats? If we were to include another artist to this list, it would be Nam June Paik.

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1. Screenshot of Nam June Paik’s “Good Morning Mr. Orwell” (1984).

2. A screening of “Good Morning Mr. Orwell” (1984) in its entirety at the exhibition “Good Morning Mr. Orwell 2014” was intended to rediscover the contemporary meaning of Paik’s message.

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am June Paik (1932–2006) spoke of the eras and art as a writer, engineer, and prophet. He not only freely transcended the conventional boundaries of music and art, but also demonstrated the boundless horizon of his creative spirit in various forms of visual images and sound, using “text” as a medium. Irmeline Lebeer, who published “Du Cheval à Christo et autres écrits,” a compilation of articles, letters, scores, and scenarios that Nam June Paik wrote over 35 years, lauded Paik for his prosaic power: “[Paik’s] endless aspiration towards the vast space of freedom saturates his writings. He can no longer be confined within a single language.” He also pioneered genres like performance music, video sculpture, and media performance, applying the logic of electronic technology to art. His application of science combined with his literary talent became an inspiration for art, surpassing the imagination of the present to predict the future.

Interrelation and Interaction Nam June Paik’s singular creativity took form in earnest while he was in Germany. Born in Seoul, Korea in 1932, he fled to Japan during the Korean War and graduated from Tokyo University with a thesis on the music esthetics of Arnold Schönberg. In 1956, he left for Germany for his “German era,” during which time he constantly learned new things and conducted experiments with them until 1963. At that time in Germany, young musicians who had been inspired

by Schönberg came to advocate “Die Neue Musik” through various styles of performances and teaching programs, along with avant-garde artists who examined interactions between music and painting, the human body and sound, and man and machine.

Amidst this progressive ambience, Paik used his unique language to shed light on the hidden relationship between the media and society through his first exhibition in 1963. The communication method and electronic nature of the television, which became a recurring theme of his, formed a foundation for audacious media art.

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Paik’s artistic spirit is remembered through a variety of approaches at the Nam June Paik Art Center, located in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province. The recent exhibition “Good Morning Mr. Orwell 2014” (July 17– November 16) is one good example. The exhibition was held to commemorate the television show “Good Morning Mr. Orwell” that Paik produced and aired on January 1, 1984 and to rediscover the message that had been conveyed to people of that time. Accordingly, the work that attracted the most attention was a video recording of the original show that was simulcast to several continents 30 years ago. The program was aired live in Seoul, New York, Paris, and Berlin, through satellite broadcasts, enabling viewers across the globe to enjoy a common experience of art in real time. About 100 artists presented performances, including New York’s avant-garde artist and dancer John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and popular entertainers such as the French-Italian heartthrob Yves Montand and the American rock band Oingo Boingo. During the one-hour program, the audience was able to glimpse the future of media that would no longer be “controlling” but “communicative.”

The motif and inspiration of “Good Morning Mr. Orwell” came from the novel “1984” by the British writer George Orwell, published in 1949. In the authoritarian society of the future, the dystopia’s all-encompassing surveillance and suppression, in the mind of Orwell, used such media as ubiquitous telescreens and audio systems to curtail freedom of thought through the official Newspeak language. The all-powerful “Big Brother” was at the heart of such a suffocating totalitarianism. Orwell’s prediction was seen

by Paik as being only “half-correct”; he demonstrated to the world the artistic potential of media and art that Orwell had overlooked.

Future of Communicative Media The monumental significance of “Good Morning Mr. Orwell” was revisited by the artists who participated in “Good Morning Mr. Orwell 2014.” Together, they reflected on the technology, as well as the social

1, 2.

“Good Morning Mr. Orwell” (1984) was an international satellite television broadcast aired on January 1, 1984. The event linked WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris via satellite and hooked up with broadcasters in South Korea and Germany. The show featured performances by over 100 artists worldwide.

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3 4

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1. “Pointing at Fukuichi Live Camera” (Finger Pointing Worker, Japan), 2011, 1-channel video, color, sound, 24’ 50’’ 2. “Counter-Music” (Harun Farocki, Germany), 2004, 2-channel video, color, sound, 25 minutes 3. “PR” (Liz Magic Laser, USA), 2013, 5-channel video installation, 17 minutes 4. “So Much I Want to Say” (Mona Hatoum, Lebanon), 1983, 1-channel video, black and white, sound, 5 minutes

The works exhibited at “Good Morning Mr. Orwell 2014” sought to repudiate the harsh oppression that man has come to bear in an increasingly stratified society.

They also called for a dynamic and sophisticated awareness of the situation rather than indifference or evasion, making viewers reflect on the potential and responsibility of artistic freedom that Nam June Paik had conveyed to the world through his landmark satellite broadcast 30 years ago.

and political influences, of the media, while dissecting the “Big Brother” that represents the face of this era’s media.

The single-channel video “So Much I Want to Say,” by the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum from London, presented a voice that espoused an escape from such oppression. Over a relatively brief five minutes, a “slow scan” technique, used to record disparate images, conveyed the theme with a powerful intensity, despite its overall simplicity. The piece also utilized satellite transmission. The “satellite” media, which had been placed under the control and supervision of the government during the Cold War, was transformed by Paik into a mystic experimental tool for pondering whether dialogue conveyed through art could transcend time and place. Likewise, Hatoum called for an artistic flight from the media’s pervasive influence on society.

Various artists who took up the issue of the everpresent surveillance and censorship warned of by Orwell were also part of the exhibition. The American artist Jill Magid intentionally exposed herself to a surveillance camera in Liverpool, England and produced a video from the “official” surveillance recordings. Sompot Chidgasornpongse of Thailand compiled a video with scenes from a movie that had been expurgated by government censors. The South African artist William Kentridge’s work “Stereoscope” (1955) expresses, in a unique pictorial animation, the mechanical structure of the communication media that penetrated into the everyday lives of people back then and their resulting emotional suffering.

Paik’s 1984 conversion of the one-way transmission of the television into a two-way medium incapaci-

tated its hierarchical structure by proposing an alternative model of TV broadcasting. Likewise, the “Telecommunication Café” and “Web Art Café” at the 2014 exhibition presented video works by Douglas Davis, a leading researcher of two-way media, and the art collective Jodi to demonstrate communicative art’s interactive potential in a networked society. As mentioned in Paik’s essay “Art & Satellite” (1984), such artistic endeavors underlined the epochal duty of artists to “not only discover new relations between various thoughts but build a network among them.”

Power of Art to Overcome Reality As such, the works exhibited at “Good Morning Mr. Orwell 2014” sought to repudiate the harsh oppression that man has come to bear in an increasingly stratified society. They also called for a dynamic and sophisticated awareness of the situation rather than indifference or evasion, making viewers reflect on the potential and responsibility of artistic freedom that Nam June Paik had conveyed to the world through his live satellite broadcast 30 years ago. To that end, the exhibition has served to enlighten us about the reason why Nam June Paik’s art still remains so relevant and essential. The proliferation of media and its trite information may indeed have led to the loss of our human dignity, as Orwell had foretold. However, if we were to clarify what needs to be recovered, it would not simply entail restoring the holistic form of man that was lost but rather an effort to bring about mature humanistic relations vis-à-vis changes in the media and language. The vitality of Nam June Paik’s artistic spirit remains alive and well among us today, as mankind strives to overcome its current reality.

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INTERVIEW

Noh Sun-tag Probes Reality with his Camera Song Su-jong

Planner of Indie Art Exhibitions

Photographer Noh Sun-tag, 43, won the 2014 Korea Artist Prize from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (NMMCA) for his exhibition titled “Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence.” Recognized for his compelling artistry in exploring complex issues in contemporary Korean society, he has consistently approached social problems from a universal perspective, instead of seeing them simply from an ideological standpoint, visualizing them with his unique sense of imagery.

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oh Sun-tag’s keen perception has enabled him to observe the social ramifications of national division. Starting out as a photojournalist, he has published several books of photographic collections, including “Smells Like the Division of the Korean Peninsula” (2005), “The Strange Ball” (2006), “Red House” (2007), and “State of Emergency” (2008). The consistent theme of his works is about exploring how the ideology of division has impacted Korean society. Naturally, his works are rooted in Korea’s politico-social environment. During the seven decades of the nation’s division, it seems that everybody has become inured to the situation and spin-off issues like the incessant cross-border tension. But this reality still has varying influences on our everyday life.

Noh Sun-tag, who is the first photographer to receive the Korea Artist Prize, sat for an interview with me on September 26, at the NMMCA in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province.

Legacies of the Korean War in Everyday Reality Song Su-jong Please tell us about your work and how you feel about winning the 2014 Korea Artist Prize.

Noh Sun-tag I’m trying to find out how the legacy of the Korean War lives on in our reality. We’ve locked the war and national division in a frozen history, and once in a while we will interpret them to our own advantage. One such example is the political power that has taken advantage of the national division. I’m trying to

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reveal the true nature of such political power by digging deep into its insanity and silence, the consequent benefits and damages, the black humor and cynicism. But it’s not easy.

Song In most of your works for which you earned the prize, you focused not on the scenes of events, but on the cameramen who took pictures of them. What motivated you to take a constant interest in the photographers?

Noh My latest exhibition, “Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence,” focused on scenes of numerous social conflicts and clashes that have inflamed Korean society over the past 10 years. It featured current aspects of society as reflected in people’s resistance against the expansion of a U.S. military facility in Daechu-ri, in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province; residents’ fight to stop the building of a naval base in Gangjeong Village on Jeju Island; the disaster at the Yongsan redevelopment site that claimed people’s lives; mass layoffs at SsangYong Motor; Miryang residents’ struggle against power transmission towers; North Korea’s sinking of the Navy corvette Cheonan and shelling of Yeonpyeong Island; and the April 16 ferry disaster. These are terrible scenes. I think they were brought about not by cruelty, but by incompetence.

Who are they who carry cameras and carry out their duties in these “scenes of incompetence”? How do the cameras work? Are the photos, which, at a glance, look transparent, objective, and

Noh Sun-tag seeks to deliver vital messages through his photographic essays depicting scenes of social conflict and clashes over controversial issues. (“Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence” - XIII050101P, 2013)

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unbiased, really trustworthy? Can “competence” be the opposite of “incompetence,” even if photos exercise “competence”? I conjured up images of photography, a “young” medium that was invented 175 years ago, slithering along just like a snake in the “scenes of incompetence.” This was the theme of my latest exhibition.

Song Everybody in the photos carries a camera. What does photography mean to you? And what is photography to us?

Noh Every person carrying a camera takes pictures of scenes of events from their own angle. I’ve thought of infinite potentials in the processing of photos that look similar but are never the same.

Photographic processing itself is neither beautiful nor nice. Even if photos look nice, their processing is never nice. I wanted to show this process, particularly the entire process of turning scenes of social conflict into images. In those scenes, all photographers may carry similar-looking cameras and take similar or unique postures to take pictures. But even if you take pictures of the same scenes, their messages don’t lie in the images, but in the

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context they represent. Photography is an ambiguous medium.

It’s never clear-cut, objective, transparent, or unbiased. Situated in different contexts, even the same photos will be interpreted completely differently.

Photography: An Ambiguous Medium Song You are the first photographer to have received the Korea Artist Prize given by the NMMCA. It’s significant that a photographer was awarded such a prestigious prize for contemporary art.

Noh What was most impressive was that the people in my photos congratulated me. Considering that many of my photos were taken at scenes of public protests or events like that, it might not be good to stand out in my photos. Moreover, it would not be good to see their own images highlighted in photos hung on the plush walls of a museum. Despite their hearty congratulations and encouragement, I feel, more than anything, both sorry and thankful to those people standing out in my photos for expressing their appreciation to me.

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1. In Noh Sun-tag’s documentary series, his camera captures his fellow photographers taking pictures on the scene of confrontation, seen from his own viewpoint and viewfinder. (“Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence” - XI030701, 2011) 2. Local residents protesting the expansion of a U.S. military base confront police in riot gear in Daechu-ri, Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province. (“The Strange Ball” - 29, 2005)

Song You started out as a photojournalist. And you’re still visiting scenes of events and taking pictures there. What’s interesting is that you write stories and post a lot of messages about your exhibitions. For this reason, many people are curious about your true identity.

Noh In fact, I owe a lot to those scenes of events. The people in my photos — protesters in Maehyang-ri (the U.S. military bombing range in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province), Daechu-ri, or Gangjeong Village, or those [taking action] against mass layoffs — are sometimes in dire need of help. They post articles on online media when they urgently need to let other people know of the seriousness of their situation. If need be, I supply them with photos they can use or join them in their activities. In that sense, I’m still a photojournalist, as well as an activist. Now, I don’t want to deny what I’ve done. I just feel the need to think more seriously about what caused the reality I’m looking at. There are some things I can never show you in the form of stories. In many cases, I have [to address] the fundamental question of why such a thing should

happen, instead of its simple cause and effect. You can’t reveal its hidden side with too explanatory a method. Exhibitions are a way for an artist like me to find solutions.

Song It seems that you’re keeping some distance from certain events, instead of delivering a strong message. Is there any motivation for you to make your voice heard or to create your own style?

Noh When the conflict over the expansion of the U.S. military facility in Daechu-ri came to a head, I opened a weekend photo studio at the request of Father Moon Jung-hyun, a friend of mine, at the scene. I even lived there briefly. One day, a big white sphere, which was visible from everywhere, began to catch my attention.

None of the old villagers knew what it was. Someone said it was a water tank. While I posted data online and gathered information about it, I came to know that the sphere was a U.S. military reconnaissance radar. The thing, both an intelligence-gathering device and an instrument of war, looked like a full moon, a huge golf ball,

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1. A small segment of the multitudes that thronged the streets of Seoul to pay tribute to the late president Roh Moohyun during his state funeral, which included traditional rites held at Seoul Plaza on May 29, 2009. (“String-Pulling Theory: An excellent mystery of the great wall made by 2MegaByte” - IX052901, 2009) 2. Stacks of cargo containers wall off sections of downtown Seoul to prevent protesters from marching on major streets. (“String-Pulling Theory: An excellent mystery of the great wall made by 2MegaByte” VIII061003, 2008) 3. Noh Sun-tag is a photojournalist who records political and social events in contemporary Korea through documentary photography. His photo series works reflect his own wide-ranging observations and carry a sense of mordant humor, while focusing on scenes of fierce conflicts.

© Park Seung-hwa

I sometimes wonder who I am.

Photography is a tool, with which I can look around.

I always have questions that cause me to hesitate and link my thoughts.

But I still don’t know what the answers are.

mark. It’s a sort of clumsy counterattack, telling them that their “achievements” won’t be seen the way they want.

I’m nothing but a photographer who tries to satisfy his curiosity about society with photographs. The reality seen through my eyes dovetails with myself as a photographer who looks at it, just like both sides of a blade. I love, handle, and study photography, but I can’t be a spokesman for it. Likewise, I record events of society with photos, but I can neither change the reality nor show all of it completely. What’s obvious is that the scenes, where events occur, are my main workplace. But it’s not easy to spend tough times there.

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or a water tank. It resembled us — the people who are living under surveillance and control as if nothing were happening. I found it a little absurd and ridiculous. While taking pictures of the sphere at various angles to make it possible to interpret it in different ways, I came to break away from my previous explanatory method for the first time.

Song The primary subjects of your works are the bitter fragments left by the national division. They’re people who have been pushed aside socially and economically. Your latest exhibition pays attention to the photographers who are recording these scenes. What meaning do the “scenes” have for you?

Noh I’m curious whenever I visit a scene — what’s happening there and how is it viewed by media? I’m interested not in a pathetic situation somebody is faced with, but in somebody else’s brutality and viciousness. I try to uncover dysfunction in the statelyand orderly-looking mechanisms of the state. It’s a kind of ridicule or cynicism. I’ve taken notice of the way that power holders record their achievements, on which I want to leave a little scratch

Keeping an Eye on Dysfunction Song Lastly, a critic once said that your sincerity comes from your boundless curiosity and doubt. We want to know what viewpoint you have of the world or how you view yourself as a photographer.

Noh The title of a column I’ve been writing for a weekly film magazine for a few years now is “Hair of Photos.” Though hair itself may mean nothing, there’s no hair that doesn’t come from the body. Photographs are the hair, not the body, of the world.

It’s possible to track the body down based on the obvious fact that hair is part of the body. I can neither say that photos represent reality, nor believe that what we see is a moment in time.

Our society seems to be functioning well enough, but we sometimes take even dysfunction for good functioning. I’ve always paid attention to dysfunction. I’ve tried to peek into what we delude ourselves into [believing]. I’ve sometimes tried to take photos of black humor — something that is sad and funny at the same time.

In fact, I’m just showing the world in my own way. I’m rushing about for no purpose. And I have no firm belief in people, society, and photography. I sometimes wonder who I am. Photography is a tool, with which I can look around. I always have questions that cause me to hesitate and link my thoughts. But I still don’t know what the answers are.

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MODERN LANDMARKS

Hirotsu House in Gunsan

Vestige of Japanese Colonial Period

Roh Hyung-suk Staff Reporter, The Hankyoreh

In the port city of Gunsan in southwestern Korea, which faces the West Sea (also known as the Yellow Sea), you can find many structures from the country’s early modern period, vestiges of its colonial days as a treaty port and merchant town. Gunsan’s buildings from this period date back to 1899, when its port was officially opened to international maritime trade. The Japanese colonists used this port to transport rice and mineral resources from Korea to their home country. Over time, the port area came to be filled with buildings for trade and commerce, and remnants of this era still stand and make their mark on the city today.

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Treasure Trove of Early Modern Architecture The Sinheung-dong area in the city of Gunsan used to have a large number of houses built by influential Japanese nationals who lived there about 70 to 80 years ago. In the residential district laid out in a grid, you can still find a number of Japanese-style houses. It was said to be a high-class neighborhood where a house for rent was nearly impossible to find.

But now, it just looks like an ordinary urban residential area in Japan.

When Gunsan Port was officially opened to international trade, the Japanese started to use the port as their base for shipping Korean commodities to their home country. As a result, a sizable population of Japanese expatriates settled in the city. Facing small islands scattered off the coast, the port sits on the edge of a small peninsula formed by the mouths of the Geum River above and the Mangyeong River below, with a wide expanse of plains between the waterways.

Here, the Japanese constructed a modern downtown area, along with port facilities as well as commercial and administrative buildings, including the now-

Š Korea Tourism Organization

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his is an extraordinary house. A single glance is enough to realize that. From the street, the first thing that catches the eye is the impressive red ochre outer wall topped with distinctive ceramic roof tiles. Behind the wall is the residence with two buildings, one of them two stories high, with the two connected buildings featuring three different types of roofs: gable, hip, and hip-and-gable. The dark green foliage between the roofs and the outer wall creates a sense of peace and quiet. Strangely, however, its main gate is so small and insignificant that it looks more like a side door. The gate is hidden on the narrow side wall of a nook formed between two long expanses of walls. Called a yashiki (mansion or palatial estate), this type of house was a typical residence for a samurai warrior during the 16th-century Warring States period in Japan.

This large traditional Japanese mansion is located in a residential neighborhood which was popular among Japanese colonial expatriates, at 58-2, Sinheung-dong in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province. Built as the home of a wealthy Japanese dry goods merchant named Hirotsu Keisaburo, the Hirotsu House, as it is still known today, stands intact and remains impressive, in its original form.

1. Located in Sinheung-dong in the city of Gunsan, the Hirotsu House was built in the style of a traditional Japanese house for a samurai warrior of the 16th century. When Gunsan Port was opened to international trade in the late 19th century, the city served as a base for many Japanese living in Korea, and a number of Japanesestyle houses constructed at the time have been preserved until today.

2. Inside the narrow main gate almost hidden on the side of a nook in the imposing red ocher wall, the garden is cozy and unexpectedly spacious.

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defunct railway station along the Gunsan Line, the former customhouse building, and the onetime Gunsan Branch of the Bank of Chosen (predecessor of the Bank of Korea, Registered Cultural Property No. 374).

Further inland from the port lies a residential area on the sunny hillside divided into Sinheung-dong and Wolmyeong-dong, where many Japanese of wealth and influence took up residence. After liberation, however, the city went downhill due to dwindling trade with Japan and China. In an ironic paradox, the port’s decline spared the city from the destructive consequences of rapid industrialization and urban development, preserving many of the city’s early modern buildings.

Among the colonial-era houses in Sinheung-dong, the Hirotsu House is the only one that has, in large part, been maintained in its original form. Hirotsu Keisaburo, who built the house, operated a dry goods store and small farm in Gunsan. Unlike many other affluent Japanese in the region, who owned large plantations, he became wealthy through commerce. He built this house in the 1920s using materials almost all brought from Japan. It seems that Hirotsu wanted to show off not only his wealth but his refined taste in architecture as well. Although the smallish main gate is tucked into a narrow side wall, the house is surprisingly spacious.

The buildings are in harmony with the garden, and the interior of each building is elaborately detailed. The composition and layout of the buildings are not much different from the residences of high-ranking samurai families found in Izuhara town on Tsushima

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 43

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Island, or in the village of Chofu near Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and well-preserved neighborhoods of Kyoto.

Inside the gate is a cozy garden with juniper, pine, and magnolia trees. The two-story main building and the single-story annex with guest rooms are connected at a slight angle to the tranquil garden, adorned with a stone lantern and other stone objects. Inside the main building, there is a unique round window on one of the walls of the hallway, its shape and bamboo lattice design reminiscent of Chinese-style windows.

Despite being a traditional Japanese house, rooms with tatami straw flooring are found only on the second floor, while most rooms on the ground level have ondol underfloor heating systems, just like any Korean house. The hallway on the first floor runs along six ondol rooms, the kitchen, dining room, bathroom, storeroom, and a tatami room. As for the use of ondol, it seems that the Japanese who lived in Korea at that time would have Korean-style underfloor heating systems installed in their homes to provide warmth during the cold Korean winters.

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Aesthetic Architecture with a Painful History One of the most attractive features of the Hirotsu House is the view of the landscaped garden from the hallways on the first and second floors. The view changes depending on your location along the lengthy hallways. Exquisitely decorated with glossy rocks, neatly pruned trees, and elegant stone figures, the Japanese garden boasts a kind of beauty that is quite different from Korean gardens that emphasize natural beauty. The garden bathed in sunlight in the morning and suffused with the orange glow of the setting sun at dusk must have given daily pleasure of aesthetic experience to the Hirotsu family.

The largest room of the house is a quintessential Japanese room, complete with oshiire, a deep, capacious closet for storing bulky futons and other bedding items, and tokonoma , an alcove decorated with hanging scrolls and potted plants. The ceilings of the hallways, finished with evenly spaced wooden rods that look like rafters, reveal the original owner’s utmost attention to every minor detail.

It is also interesting to look around the interior of this house, which belies its simple outward appearance. Like a medieval manor, albeit on a smaller scale, the layout of the house is complex and almost maze-like. The hallways, lined with windows on one

1. One attractive feature of the Hirotsu House is the landscape of the garden that unfolds panoramalike from different spots along the hallways of the first and second floors. Viewed from the hallways, the garden exhibits a beauty that is quite different from traditional Korean gardens.

2. The house has ondol underfloor heating systems on the first floor for the cold winters in Korea, while the rooms upstairs all have Japanese tatami strawcovered floors.

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Like a medieval manor, albeit on a smaller scale, the layout of the house is complex and almost maze-like. The hallways, lined with windows on one side, meander through the house, connecting rooms in the middle. One room leads to another along these hallways, evoking a strange sensation of wandering through a mysterious place. side, meander through the house, connecting rooms in the middle. One room leads to another along these hallways, evoking a strange sensation of wandering through a mysterious place.

In the back of the main building, there is a secondstory concrete storage area, in which the Hirotsu family is said to have stored their money and other valuables. The shape of the garden is also noteworthy, widening as it approaches the rear of the house. All in all, the house exemplifies the typical grandeur of an affluent Japanese residence as well as an aesthetic sense of space. For this reason, the house is highly praised for capturing the period’s atmosphere, and has been

used for shooting films set in the Japanese colonial period, including “The General’s Son” (1990) and “The War of Flower” (2006).

After the liberation of Korea, Hirotsu returned to Japan leaving behind this house and his other assets in Korea, his ties with the country severed for good.

Considered enemy property, the house was confiscated and then sold off to the owner of Honam Flour Mills. (Currently, it remains the property of the company, which has since been renamed Korea Flour Mills.) In 2005, the Hirotsu House was placed on the list of Registered Cultural Properties (No. 183), and after the completion of renovation work in 2010, it has become a popular tourist attraction with an endless flow of visitors.

Hirotsu might have believed that his family would prosper in this house, generation after generation. Rumor has it that he designed it to have large spare rooms in the hope of accommodating his children and their families in the house. After Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945, however, these hopes and dreams were dashed by the raging currents of history.

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GUARDIAN OF HERITAGE

Kim Gil-seong

Enchanted by Symbolic Patterns of Rice Cake Presses

Kang Shin-jae Freelance Writer

Cho Ji-young Photographer

Kim Gil-seong opened the chest sitting in the corner of the living room and brought out his treasures — wooden rice cake presses that he has collected over the past four decades. The scent of old wood lingered in the air. The numerous wooden presses, some rectangular with varying lengths, and others round with handles, are carved with traditional designs with symbolic meanings.

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ntil about 20 years ago, Kim Gil-seong worked at a construction company. But his job was a constant source of agony. “What do you think a house is built with?” he asks. “Concrete? Steel bars?

No, a house is built with curses and headaches. It was a job that I was destined to leave.” As his dissatisfaction accumulated with every story added to the buildings he worked on, he happened to come across a handsome rice cake press. That was in 1975. As a young man who was fond of trees and keen on growing potted plants, he was immediately attracted by the feel of old wood. “I can tell what kind of wood it is just by feeling it, because each species is different in terms of the sensation at my fingertips,” Kim, now 64, explained. “Rice cake presses are usually made of a dense, fine-grained hardwood without a strong scent.

I could feel the subtle charm of the wood.”

Some people laughed at the idea of collecting rice cake presses and molds, saying that they were hardly considered collectibles. But Kim paid no heed. He said: “I wanted to collect things engraved with traditional designs, but it was very hard to find anything apart from Buddhist items. Among the artifacts that had been handed down in private households, those with engraved designs were typically woodblocks for printing book covers or stamps for patterned paper, both of which were extremely rare. On the other hand,

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it was possible to find a considerable variety of rice cake presses. For a collector, it’s no fun to reach the limit of your collection too soon because the items are scarce, nor to find an endless flow of artifacts without much effort. There’s just the right level that keeps up your interest in collecting, which is the case with rice cake presses.”

The Beauty and Meaning of Patterns After arranging his collection on the living room floor, Kim showed the presses one by one, explaining the meaning of each design. Talking about his preference for artifacts from the Joseon period (1392–1910), he said, “The designs of the rice cake presses from Joseon are mostly about wishes for longevity, wealth and honor, and the birth of many sons. After that period, other designs started to appear, reflecting the changing times. Some items made after the Korean War have designs with the characters for ‘peace’ and some made after the May 16 military coup in 1961 even have the word ‘reconstruction.’”

Among the piles of rice cake presses on the floor, the most common motifs were those of animals and plants: fish symbolizing wealth and fecundity, butterflies meaning bliss or conjugal happiness, and plum blossoms representing rejuvenation. There were also various geometric patterns, including long stripes as

Kim Gil-seong collects antique rice cake presses and tea cake (dasik ) molds. The two kinds of wooden tools are different in function but similar in form.

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People in the past tried to select the right designs to express their wishes for each occasion. In this way, the designs represented earnest wishes from the heart and sharing the rice cakes adorned with the carefully selected designs amounted to sharing such wishes.

a wish for longevity, lattice designs with talismanic symbolism, and designs adapted from the taegeuk (Great Ultimate) and palgwae (Eight Trigrams) patterns. Also included were the classical Chinese characters with auspicious meanings, such as “joy” (喜) and “long life” (壽), in diverse styles of calligraphy.

In Korea, rice cakes (ddeok ) were an essential part of all major ceremonial events in life, including coming of age, weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites. For each event, Koreans in the past would spare no effort to have elaborate designs applied to the surface of steamed rice cakes by pressing them with long rectangular wooden plates engraved with exquisite designs. Such designs on the foods prepared to celebrate significant events meant more than mere adornment. Rice cake presses or molds, called ddeoksal , had been widely used in Korean homes until the early 1970s, before rice cake production became mechanized and commercialized. Therefore, it would not be right to discount them as relics from an ancient mode of life. People in the past tried to select the right designs to express their wishes for each occasion.

In this way, the designs represented earnest wishes from the heart and sharing the rice cakes adorned with the carefully selected designs amounted to sharing such wishes. Likewise, rice cakes in the past not only satisfied physical hunger but also helped to appease spiritual hunger.

But rice cake presses were not used for symbolism alone. As household articles, the presses served practical purposes. Since they were usually made to fit the size of serving dishes, they were useful in evenly cutting long pieces of rice cake into the right size.

When the table was set, the small pieces of rice cake would be neatly stacked up on a dish, such that the raised and patterned surface of each layer helped to stabilize the stacks. In addition, air could flow through the grooves made by the surface impressions, allowing the rice cake to maintain its freshness. “The part

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of the rice cake that is pressed with the designs is more delicious than the other parts. It is denser and chewier,” Kim said. “Besides, the sesame oil on the rice cake stays in the grooves, making it all the more savory.”

In the past, some households would make their own presses and molds and share them with their neighbors. Often the owner of a particular piece could be recognized by just looking at the design. Otherwise, people would inscribe their name or address to prevent their items from being misplaced. Some ancient presses even have poetic phrases engraved on the sides, such as verses to celebrate special occasions or in the case of a gift, a personal message from the giver. The process of making rice cakes, imbued with meaning and sincerity, also gave people the opportunity to enjoy a moment of artistic inspiration in their daily lives.

Abandoning Craving and Obsession Kim believed in his own connoisseurship when he started his collection, which once included 2,000

Fish motifs symbolize wishes for wealth and fecundity. The patterns used in the wooden molds also show regional variations, with rabbits and roe deer more common in mountainous regions while crabs, fish and shrimps are more popular in coastal areas.

1. Some of the tea cake molds in Kim’s collection are inscribed on the side or back with comments or verses from the gift-giver.

This kind of personal thouch enhances an item’s value for collectors.

2. The motif of a bird sitting on a tileroofed house represents prayers for domestic happiness.

3. Despite the variety in the engraved designs, these rice cake presses are all made of a dense, fine-grained hardwood without a strong scent, like that of a persimmon, jujube, and birch trees.

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items. It was a fairly exhaustive collection that encompassed almost all types. As his collection grew, however, he came to experience ever greater anxiety. “There is the story of a man with 99 lambs who wanted to rob another man of his only one to reach his goal of 100 lambs. A keen collector craves as many articles as there are, regardless of what he already owns. When he finds a piece that he likes, he doesn’t even consider if he can afford it but just goes ahead and buys it. It’s only later that he tries to work out how to pay for it,” Kim said. “Craving and curiosity are what keep a collector going. As far as I’m concerned, I expect a collector, any kind of collector, to be an interesting person, but I don’t expect him necessarily to be a man of good character.”

It must have been in the same vein that Kim hesitated to mention the highest price he has ever paid to obtain a piece. Instead, he observed that as a collection grows the collector seems to gain an increasingly subjective sense of value. As for himself, an item may be worth only 10,000 won, but he would never sell it even for one million won if it is one of a kind among a collection of thousands. But that is not to say Kim has bought up everything he could get his hands on.

He is a collector who cannot bear to see his collection becoming “an accumulation of irrelevant odds and ends.” In the collecting process, he sometimes reaches a point where he loses interest or realizes the impossibility of his quest. In such cases, he ends his

collection, without too much regret. To do so has been, on the one hand, his way of living as a professional collector, and on the other hand, the result of his connoisseurship growing keener through experience.

He firmly believes that “a true collector should know how to organize his collection, study the objects, and show them to people to make them known more widely.” So he has raised the funds needed for expanding his collection by publishing books and holding exhibitions. In fact, he put an end to his collection of 4,000 embroidered pillow ends after publishing his book “Traditional Embroidered Pillow Ends from Korea” and holding a related exhibition. Looking back on that time, he said, “After I write a book about a certain collection, I try to shed my obsession with it because I know it’s not mine to possess but should go to others. In the end, a collector, whether an individual or an organization, should be satisfied with just a book as the final product of his work.”

Lingering Human Touch It has been 25 years since Kim published “Wooden Presses for Traditional Korean Tea Cookies and Rice Cakes,” a book containing his lifetime research on the subject. Even thereafter, however, he has found it difficult to give up some one thousand rice cake presses, which is about half of his original collection. The other half has been given to a university museum.

Although he does not think twice about getting rid of items that no longer satisfy his tastes, his attraction to rice cake presses has never wavered during the long time that he has spent collecting a variety of other works of folk art.

At the end of the interview, Kim stopped talking and stroked the wood grain of a piece, as if pondering over his lifelong fascination. His quiet gesture seemed to summon up collective memories of life from the distant past: the coarse hands of a woman carefully pressing it onto a piece of warm rice cake; her light steps as she heads home with a press with nice designs borrowed from a neighbor for an important family event; the fragrance of the wood growing stronger with use for all the happy and sad events in the village; and the long period of time over which it has been handed down, generation after generation.

Such evocative power is retained only in relics of folk art, and can never be matched by artifacts that have spent ages on display behind glass.

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IN LOVE WITH KOREA

Simon Morley, A an English Figure on Korean Ground Ben Jackson Freelance Writer / Cho Ji-young Photographer

The accidental foreigner is an increasingly common character in Korea. Perhaps Simon Morley falls into this category: chance and a taste for the unknown arranged his first visit for a three-month residency in 2008. In 2010, the artist was back again and has since remained in Korea most of the time.

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fter studying modern history at Oxford University, Morley began a journey into art that has led him, via Milan, Paris and New York, to a sunlit studio-cum-home in Gwacheon where a portly cat peacefully coexists with Morley, his partner Chang Eung-bok, and numerous artworks.

After several exhibitions in Seoul, the artist continues to explore the theme of differing perceptions and ways of thinking in Western and Eastern cultures, especially when it comes to distinguishing figure and ground on a canvas. Despite the chance nature of his first encounter with Korea, the country’s philosophical and artistic traditions have fallen neatly within the scope of Morley’s artistic inquiry, taking it in fascinating new directions.

Morley confesses to having known little about what was to become his new home upon his initial arrival.

“I first came to Korea in 2008 for three months,” he says. “Before that, I had almost no idea of what it was.

I knew about the Korean War as I had studied modern

© Kim Dong-ryul

“Quaint Korea (1985),” 56 x 77.5 cm, watercolor on paper, 2011

history at university. And then I knew about the whole mad North Korea thing. I knew a few funny things like that ginseng came from Korea and I knew one particularly good Korean artist, Lee Ufan.

But I didn’t know what that meant, or what made a Korean different from anyone else. Then I saw Kim Ki-duk’s film ‘Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring,’ which made me realize there was something distinct about Korea, different from China and Japan.

But I couldn’t define the difference and still can’t.”

Unfamiliar Territory But the aesthetic differences between Korea and England have proved a source of endless stimulation for Morley. At first, he says, it was a shock: Seoul’s apparent lack of aesthetic homogeneity; the sensation of getting lost in Gangnam, a world that seemed to have no structure (style is another issue altogether).

“It’s very disorienting,” he says. “It must be something that has to do with the speed at which these places are built. There’s no time for any layers to settle into place, which create some kind of resonance with our human emotions. I felt Korea really has lost its connection with its own past.”

This severance from traditional roots produces a flexibility, Morley argues, that makes Koreans “a work in progress.” However it is conceived — as a tug of war between tradition and modern impulses or a forced rupture from the past and consequent loss of orientation — Morley is touching upon a theme that has fascinated foreigners ever since they first began visiting Korea in

significant numbers and trying to make sense of it from their own perspective.

Unfortunately, this movement occurred at a time when Korea’s traditional world was reeling from a collision with “modernity” as delivered by the gunboats and diplomatic coercion of the great powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and eventual colonial occupation by Meiji Japan. Interestingly, one of Morley’s first series of works in Korea is connected to this period via the book collection of former British Ambassador Martin Uden. In “Korea Land of the Dawn and other Paintings” (2011), Morley produced a series of acrylic and watercolor paintings, hanging linen scrolls, and video works based on early modern foreign language books on Korea from Uden’s collection. The 10 white acrylic “Book Paintings” are near-chromatic white reproductions of covers and title pages from these books. The watercolor works in the series, meanwhile, are paintings of the titles of other works also in Uden’s collection, spelled out by Morley using twigs, leaves, and acorns collected from near his home.

“I saw Hangeul and Chinese characters like shapes, sticks, or bits of wood. I couldn’t understand what they meant as language.

So I thought I would play with that idea and make my own language from bits of nature,” he explains.

Questions of Perception Morley’s doctoral thesis is titled “The Anadyomene Movement: Metamorphics of Figure-Ground,” which he describes as “very

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© Lim Tae-jun

1. “LOST HORIZON I,” 35 x 70 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2013 2. “Korea and Her Neighbors (1898),” 40.5 x 30 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2011

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pretentious.” In it, he explores the figure-ground relationship in art, taking a comparative approach that contrasts East Asian artistic traditions with those of the West.

“Normally we simply focus on the figure and don’t even notice that there’s a ground,” he explains. “There’s a sort of segregation, where your vision is biased toward one part of what you see and you ignore the rest. Apparently, Westerners are much more about separating the figure from the ground, whereas East Asians are much more adept at flipping between the figure and the ground.

One way you can see this in traditional Korean art is their interest in empty space — the void — not just as something that’s not of any visual importance but as a key part of the whole.”

Morley addresses the figure-ground relationship directly in his art, creating works that trip up the viewer in search of easy distinctions.

“You have to hone in on what’s the figure and what’s the ground, otherwise it’s just blotches,” he says of one of his “Book Paintings.”

“And the text … well, that’s another story. I work with images and texts mixed together and a monochrome idea.”

The In-between Morley goes on, “Since I came to Korea, I’ve been very interested in the way Koreans are comfortable with this ‘inbetween.’ In Korean, they say — ‘sai ’ — I was very happy to discover that that’s part of my name: ‘Sai-mon.’ For Westerners, it’s annoyingly not one thing or the other, because we like something to be A and something to be B. But this in-between is AB; it’s a place that’s not clearly defined, and I find that a place that keeps things open rather than closing them down. It’s got potential.”

“I’ve been working with that in my pictures, which give an indistinct feeling of something emerging or vanishing. I was

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© Kim Dong-ryul

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doing that before I came here, but when I arrived I realized that it’s got some kind of cultural significance in Korea. We can see that in traditional Korean landscape painting and so on.”

Morley’s most recent series of works has moved on from the reproductions of existing book covers and title pages, and consists of juxtapositions of background images with embossed text (which he describes as “almost invading the image, like a tattoo or a scab”). One depicts, in near-monochrome, a still from Michalengelo Antonioni’s 1962 film “L’Eclisse,” superimposed onto an excerpt from the index of a book on Buddhism: “Ice cold Identity, theory of Ignorance (avidya) Incense, a stick of” “I like the way you have that kind of fragment and it con-

Morley is well aware that the traditional boundary between text and image that his works explore is rapidly being blurred, if not obliterated, by new technologies such as the mighty digital pixel. But in Asia, he maintains, the boundary may not have been so clearly defined in the first place.

jures something for you,” says Morley. “The sequence of words evokes something, then it meets this image. What do they do together? They’re all connected visually. There’s a connection on the visual level.”

In the Classroom Since the early days of his artistic career, Morley has also worked as a teacher. He is currently a faculty member at Dankook University’s Fine Art Department, where teaching Korean students offers further insights into cultural differences between East and West.

“Aside from the language barrier, my students have a different way of tackling problems to equivalent age groups in England,” Morley says. Speculating about general tendencies, he points to the contrast between the Western analytical approach that involves categorization and distance, and the East Asian holistic attitude, whose subscribers are “inside what they’re experiencing, as a whole.”

“They can’t easily articulate verbally what they’re thinking, they can’t tell me why they’ve painted something, separate style and content, or detach themselves from what they’re doing,” he says.

“But that doesn’t mean what they’re doing is inferior to our ways; in fact, I think in many ways it’s superior. I think our detachment is of limited value.”

Swings, Roundabouts, and Speed And yet everything is fluid: Korea’s rush to catch up with the world’s first generation of “developed” nations has created a situation where old and new ways of thinking and seeing the world exist side by side in each young Korean.

“Now what’s happening in Korea is incredibly weird because they’re a hybrid: having embraced Western culture, they can embrace both analytical and holistic thinking; they can flip from AC to DC. So in some ways, Koreans are the future.”

This pendulum of change has not stopped swinging, however.

As witnessed through their shifting attitudes to the relationship between humans and nature, a common indicator of position on the holism-reductionism scale, Koreans may now have become more “Western” than Westerners, Morley speculates.

“Koreans enthusiastically welcomed technology. You can see by the way they all want to live in giant microchips. Even when they

go to the mountains, they dress in unbelievably unnatural colored clothing and listen to little music players and make a lot of noise.”

On the Digital Threshold Morley is well aware that the traditional boundary between text and image that his works explore is rapidly being blurred, if not obliterated, by new technologies such as the mighty digital pixel.

But in Asia, he maintains, the boundary may not have been so clearly defined in the first place. And in Korea, the historical use of both Chinese characters and the indigenous alphabet, Hangeul, makes matters even more intriguing.

“In a digital interface, it’s all pixels,” he says. “Whether it’s images or texts, it’s all the same and it’s all completely fluid. Text can morph into an image and an image can morph into a text. In a very obvious way the old distinctions between word and text are no longer technologically prescient. Asians — the Chinese in particular — are less inclined to distinguish them because their writing is ideographic. Koreans are different because they developed Hangeul, which is phonetic. There is a whole theory that our consciousness is very much modeled around the way we use language, and alphabetic thinking is more linear: it reduces the whole oral side of language to the visual.”

Cosmopolitan Future Is Morley in love with Korea? He laughs. “Well, I’m in love with a Korean.” Though his partner, textile designer Chang Eung-bok, may expand her business into the West in the coming years, the couple looks set to remain based in Korea for some time. “Let’s say this is the future and Europe’s the past,” he says, referring to the crisis and “loss of confidence in Europe and the active art scene in Korea.”

“Koreans are suddenly waking up to the fact that foreigners are actually here, doing things,” concludes Morley. “They’re not just coming here to do a show and then leaving. They want to be here.

The big thing Korea needs to do is become more cosmopolitan: that’s the next step towards becoming a truly modern society. And in order to become cosmopolitan you need a real mix of peoples.”

With artists such as Morley pushing old dichotomies and distinctions to the breaking point, contemporary art fans worldwide can look forward to plenty of new possibilities and exciting developments in the years to come.

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ON THE ROAD

Suncheon Life in a Cluster of Seaside Villages

The name of the city of Suncheon means “to submit to the ways of heaven.” To be born as a sentient being and follow the will of heaven, to live as the name means. What could be more wonderful than that? To have humble dreams, to labor diligently, to study truthful things, and to share anything in me that is worthwhile with souls in difficulty — how beautiful life would be if one could live this way.

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Gwak Jae-gu Poet Lee Han-koo Photographer

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have this old memory. I was on the way to Suncheon on a train.

Being too young to travel alone, I naturally had a companion. It was my uncle, and I was sitting on his lap looking outside the window at the scenery. My uncle called over the man pushing through the aisles a cart loaded with simple snacks and drinks to sell. He looked all over the cart and picked up a bag of sweets.

It was filled with “star candies” about the size of a middle fingertip. When much time had passed and my uncle was about to pass from this life, I went to see him and, holding his hands, told him my memory of the star candies. It was so long ago that he couldn’t remember buying his young nephew that magical bag of sweets.

Instead, he said, “When you were young, I often took you on train trips. That’s when I was busy working on construction projects in Suncheon, and sometimes I took you with me.”

My mother did not have much time to devote to me as a child so my uncle often took me with him when he visited construction sites. When I think of Suncheon, I think of those train trips and the memory of the star candies comes vividly alive again. If there is a speck of warmth or a glimmer of hope that can be felt in my works produced after I became a professional writer, it is owing to those childhood memories of Suncheon.

1. Hwapo, located at the western end of Suncheon Bay, is a small village of about 40 households. This is where the fishing boats return when twilight falls. A golden sunset backdrops a fisherman at dusk, as he tends to the day’s catch.

2. Fishpens made of bamboo and nylon mesh are lined up along Suncheon Bay. In this traditional method of fishing, the fish are caught in the ebb and flow of the tide.

3. Yeojado is a small island south of Suncheon. Fishermen of the island use small coastal liners to sell their catch to other parts of the country.

The Beauty of the Setting Sun against the Tidal Flats Fifteen years ago, I went back to Suncheon. I was traveling on my own. At the time I was exhausted from the business of living. In those days I wrote more than thirty pieces a month, not only poems but anything that came my way, including newspaper serials, children’s stories, articles for corporate journals, and travel sketches.

The repetitive grind put my life as a writer at risk. I even began to despair that I would never be able to write again. To escape my predicament, I went to a quiet seaside village in Suncheon.

A vast stretch of tidal flats unfolded before the eyes of this man who had fallen into despair. The setting sun embraced the entire expanse of sea, suffusing the waters with a golden glow. Suddenly, a fishing boat appeared out of the dusk and headed in the opposite direction away from the setting sun. Mindlessly, I was watching the boat when I saw that the sky on the opposite side was also bathed in a red glow. That’s when I first realized that the sunset colors not only the western sky, where the sun sets, but the eastern side of the sky as well. That’s when I first appreciated the vastness of the sunset, which colors not only the sky but also the seemingly endless tidal flats. As I looked at the sunset which bathed both the sky and the land with a glowing light, an elderly gentleman came up to me.

“Sir, what’s the name of this village?” I asked.

“It’s called Waon,” he answered. “Wa means ‘to lie down’ and on means ‘warmth.’ This sea where the sunset is so magnificent is also called the Waon Sea.”

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Slowly, I wrote the name of the village in the sand in Chinese characters. Only when I wrote the character for on did I understand that it was a composite of water (氵), mouth (口), human being (人), and blood (血). That is, the character on (溫), for warmth, suggests a process in which the water that enters a person’s mouth is turned into blood. When I heard the name of the village I felt a warm flow of blood surging through my body. The thought came to me that, in this village, I would like to let go of my life for a moment, and I began to nurse the hope that I might be able to write again. In this way, Suncheon helped me to pull my mind and body together again.

Time passed. I returned to Suncheon and now call it my home.

Habitat for Winter Birds Waon is a seaside village lying along the cusp of Suncheon Bay. The tidal flats are vast and briny-fresh. The smell common to the tidal flats of the west coast cannot be found here. This can be attributed to the extensive fields of reeds that border Suncheon Bay’s tidal flats. The bay encompasses 39.8 kilometers of coastline, 21.6 sq km of tidal flats, and 6 sq km of reed fields. Reeds grow equally well in freshwater and saltwater, and thrive even more in estuarine areas where freshwater and saltwater mix.

Suncheon Bay provides the perfect conditions for reeds to flourish, for here the waters of Dongcheon, the stream that flows through the city of Suncheon, meet the outflow of the river Isacheon.

Thanks to the natural vitality of the tidal flats and the self-cleansing function of the reeds, this area has become an ideal habitat for migratory birds. In 2006, it became the first Korean coastal wetland area to be registered under the Ramsar Convention.

One day when snow was falling heavily, I went out onto the bay in a bird-watching boat. The winter birds were resting peacefully in the reeds, while a flock of swans was gliding about on the water.

The birds were floating on the water so quietly. We had turned off

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1. Suncheon Bay is surrounded by fields of reeds stretching some 16 kilometers. When the white reed plumes, bathed in sunlight, start waving in the wind, the fields turn into a glorious golden plain.

2. Suncheon Bay is a cozy wintering home for migratory birds.

In winter, tens of thousands of birds of some 230 species such as the hooded crane and Baikal teal come to this protected coastal wetland on the rump of southern Korea. The number of birds coming to the bay is increasing every year.

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We had turned off the boat’s motor and were watching the birds when they began to take flight. That huge flock of birds flew into the flurrying snow and in an instant vanished without a trace. It was hard to tell whether the snow had covered up the birds or the birds had covered up the snow.

the boat’s motor and were watching the birds when they began to take flight. That huge flock of birds flew into the flurrying snow and in an instant vanished without a trace. It was hard to tell whether the snow had covered up the birds or the birds had covered up the snow.

It was thanks to the dedicated efforts of individuals on a mission, like the “Return of the Duri” project, that have enabled Suncheon Bay to become such a paradise for migratory birds. Duri is the affectionate nickname for a hooded crane (Grus monacha , Korean name heukdurumi), which has been adopted as the mascot of Suncheon. The hooded crane is a rare, at-risk species due to its fast-shrinking habitats and wintering grounds. Duri was one of the few hooded cranes that wintered in Suncheon. Left behind when the flock returned to its place of origin in Siberia, Duri was fed and cared for by the citizens of Suncheon for more than ten years. Then

after one year of training to survive in the wild, Duri flew back to Siberia with the rest of the flock the following spring. Though the wireless tracking device attached to Duri’s leg fell off when the bird passed beyond Korean borders, the people of this seaside village remember Duri well and fondly look forward to its return.

Suncheon Women Extract Life from Mud Hwapo is another seaside village, which along with Waon is a landmark of Suncheon Bay. If Waon is the northern pole of a horseshoe-shaped magnet, Hwapo is the southern pole. Filling the basin between the two villages are the waters of Suncheon Bay. The fish and shellfish that thrive in the fresh tidal flats of the bay — like short-necked clams and razor clams, octopuses, oysters, and blue-spotted mud hoppers, to name a few — are the best in Korea,

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renowned for their excellent taste and freshness.

The late novelist Park Wan-suh (1931-2011) was particularly fond of grilled razor clams from Suncheon.

I remember the day she was watching a group of women pushing their wooden sleds across the mud and remarked that the labor of the women was even more beautiful than the tidal flats. The sleds, called neol , are about three meters long and thirty centimeters wide, and look like wooden skis. The women load their sleds with the shellfish they have gathered, and with one knee on the sled they push with the other foot to move across the mud flats. It may look easy, but it’s a tough job, as revealed in the work song that they like to sing: “Mother, Mother! Why did you give birth to me and make me push this sled!”

As she watched the women of Waon laboriously pushing their sleds, Park Wan-suh said that one day she would like to live in the village. When I heard this, the thought occurred to me that perhaps this elderly writer wanted to spend her last days pushing a sled across the mud alongside the women of Waon and Hwapo.

The city of Suncheon, which holds the small seaside villages and clean tidal flats in its embrace, hosted the International Garden Exposition Suncheon Bay Korea 2013 (Suncheon Bay Garden Expo 2013) for six months last year, which served to publicize the natural beauty of this area to the world. The event would not have been much of an attraction without the wondrous tidal flats and reed fields of Suncheon Bay, the migratory birds that stop by here, and the lives and toil of local villagers. If life is tough and your work seems pointless, on a snowy day make your way to Suncheon Bay. You’ll encounter the rhythm of hardworking residents and feel the warmth of blood flowing from your heart.

An Old Lady’s Salt Fields

It was winter, three years ago, when I happened to visit a small village named Parangbagu on Suncheon Bay. It was beginning to snow when an old lady walked out of the senior citizens’ hall in the village. I stopped the car.

“Where are you going in this snow?” I asked.

“We old folks were playing flower cards in the hall, but my luck was no good today, so I left. I should go and turn over the fields in the mountain,” she said.

“It’s snowing. You should have stayed and

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played a little longer.”

“If I don’t work when it’s still broad daylight I feel as if I’m committing a crime.”

That’s how the old lady and I started our conversation. The old lady told me the story of her life. It was a love story of the kind only possible for a person who has devoted a lifetime to one dream, one goal.

“When he was young, my husband was a handsome man. He was smart. He didn’t have a chance to go to school but after we were married he taught himself to read and write. He was good at composition and always won big prizes in the

village literary competitions. I can’t read at all.

Those were the good old days. We were living happily when one day he suddenly came up to me and told me that I was small and ugly, and then threw me out of the house. He told me to live out of his sight, so I went to that mountain over there and built a small hut and made my home there.

You see that reed field over there? I lived alone and made a salt farm there. I worked like a fiend.

When I tended the salt farm, the price of salt began to go up. So, I made a lot of money. One day, when I came home from the salt fields, I found my husband sitting in my room. He looked at me and

Seonam Temple Founded in the ninth century during the Unified Silla period, this is one of the most prominent Buddhist temples of Honam, or the southwestern region of Korea. It is a historically significant temple with a number of noteworthy cultural properties, including the western and eastern threestory pagodas (Treasure No. 395), the main hall (Treasure No. 1311), and a stone arch bridge. With its elegant old buildings amidst an ambience of profound serenity and the forest surrounding its grounds filled with trees hundreds of years old, the temple is a favorite place for many people.

Songgwang Temple To the east of Mt. Jogye is Seonam Temple, while to the west is Songgwang Temple.

Within the temple grounds, some 80 buildings seem to be arranged in a series of concentric circles. The temple is home to a number of cultural assets, including Guksajeon, a 14th century building that houses the portraits of 16 national preceptors produced by the temple. It is known as the temple of the sangha (the Buddhist community) jewel, where monastic traditions are well preserved, and is hence one of the “three jewel temples” of Korea, along with Tongdo Temple where relics of the historical Buddha are preserved, and Haein Temple where the 80,000 printing woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana are preserved.

started scolding: ‘Hmm. Your husband’s here. Are you just going to stand there?’ So I put the rice on to cook and started to prepare some side dishes. I was crying but I was happy.”

There is nothing more beautiful than to see a person grow old doing the thing that he or she loves the most. The old lady, after asking me where I had come from, walked quickly up the hilly road leading to her fields. My eyes were fixed on the short hoe in her hand. Truly, the old lady’s hoe and the gentle wrinkles around her eyes were more endearing than the large flakes of snow drifting over the quiet seaside village.

Cockle farming is an important income source for the residents around the tidal flats of Suncheon Bay. Women by tradition are tasked with the backbreaking labor of harvesting the tasty bivalves, pushing wooden sleds across the thick, waist-deep mud probing for air holes that will turn up cockles and clams.

Suncheon Bay Gardens Suncheon Bay Gardens encompass an ecological garden area of about 560,000 square meters. Created on the site of the 2013 Suncheon International Garden Expo, it is a complex of some 70 theme gardens, including the traditional gardens of various countries that participated in the expo, corporate-sponsored gardens, and gardens created by artists and ordinary citizens, as well as a variety of gardens for all manner of flowers and herbal plants.

Nagan Town Fortress The entire village within Nagan Town Fortress (Nagan Eupseong) is a popular tourist attraction that has been designated Historic Site No. 302. The housing style of the Joseon Dynasty is well preserved here, along with thatched roof houses with narrow front verandahs as well as kitchens with cooking and heating furnaces that can be found throughout the village. The ancient county office also remains intact.

The current residents of the village make a living by farming and offering accommodations to visitors.

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ALONG THEIR OWN PATH

50 Years on Stage, Park Jung-ja Says:

‘This Moment is the Most Beautiful’ Stage actress Park Jung-ja has played a leading role in Korean contemporary theater. She has performed continuously for over five decades since her debut in the Greek tragedy “Phaedra” in 1962. Even now, when she is well beyond 70, she still works full-time, her personal charisma as strong as ever. She enjoys the highest accolades — “Park Jung-ja, the greatest stage actress of Korea” — and nobody would say otherwise.

Kim Su-mi Editor-in-Chief, Cultural Space, Monthly Journal of the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts

Park Jung-hoon Photographer

W

e are enthralled by Park Jung-ja’s fervor. But despite her passion, she is a cool-headed person. She never arrives late for appointments. Meticulously prepared, she behaves differently from other actors in rehearsal halls or makeup rooms.

Like a priestess preparing for a rite, she is reverential and thoroughgoing at all times. The characters she plays on stage after such preparation are powerful and persuasive. Audiences applaud not because they are impressed by her consummate acting skills, but because they are unexpectedly touched by her honesty and purity. Theater critic Koo Hee-suh once likened Park’s portrayal of characters to the entasis pillars of ancient Korean buildings, an iconic feature of traditional Korean culture.

Honest and Pure Acting “This is just like the sculptural beauty of entasisstyle pillars in ancient architecture. In tall pillars, cylindrical or polygonal, the middle section tends to look thinner than the rest of the column. Due to this optical illusion, the middle area is often made a little thicker.

This method gives the pillar a more stable appearance. The characters that Park Jung-ja plays look as if they have been created this way.” (From “Stage Actress Park Jung-ja,” Theater & Humans , 2002) With keen insight, Koo sees beyond the plainly vis-

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ible by applying scientific calculation to find visual stability in reality. This notable critic should be commended for deriving this scientific understanding from the non-scientific and intangible properties of the actress’s prowess. We can say all this is the inner strength and balance that keeps Park tense and taut as an actress.

As such, a true appreciation of Park comes through an understanding of the hidden character inside her.

Passion and Professionalism Park Jung-ja started acting in 1962 as a member of the Theater Club of Ewha Womans University. She was no stranger to theater or film because she had been watching movies since she was nine years old thanks to her older brother, who dreamed of becoming a movie director. At the time, college theater clubs introduced the works of foreign playwrights under a wellestablished system and staged performances at the National Theater in Myeong-dong or the Drama Center at the foot of Mt. Nam with the assistance of professional directors.

Park, though majoring in journalism, took a keen interest in acting. Theater directors did not find her appealing, however, because she was not as slender and beautiful as the typical actress. With an ordinary Asian face and uniquely low voice, Park was never considered for lovely and sprightly characters like Anton

Park Jung-ja performs in “Bodas de Sangre� (Blood Wedding), staged at the Arco Arts Theater in 1988.

The Spanish play was first introduced to Korea by the Theater Club of Ewha Womans University in 1964.

After its Korean premiere in 1982, it went on to be staged in Spain in 1985, followed by acclaimed performances in Japan, the United States, and Venezuela.

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Chekhov’s Nina or William Shakespeare’s Juliet. Her first role was as a court maid in “Phaedra” (1962) by Jean Racine. While she followed Phaedra around on stage, she had just a dozen or so lines to speak. The following year, she played an old woman over 80 in “La Casa de Bernarda de Alba” (“The House of Bernarda Alba,” 1964) by Federico Garcia Lorca, and a mother in “Bodas de Sangre” (“Blood Wedding,” 1963). She was cast as a mother again in “Demons” (1965) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which marked her debut in professional theater. Her lifelong relationship with the theater company Chayu (Freedom) started when she played a maid in “Misery and Nobility” by Eduardo Scarpetta.

For some 10 years after her debut, Park primarily played supporting roles, such as a maid, mother, or old woman. But rather than the female protagonists, the audiences tended to remember Park, a notso-glamorous minor actress with a husky resonance in her voice. Gradually, Park attracted the attention of

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critics and journalists. She won her first acting award for her critically acclaimed portrayal of the old mother in the final scene of Choi In-hoon’s “Where Shall We Meet Again?” (1970). “I played the fool Ondal’s mother,” Park recalled. “As I trudged haltingly through the twig gate of the house on the stage, I tried to portray the old woman as a lonely soul who had been left behind, all alone in the vast universe. And a suffocating tension arose … I was only 28 years old at the time.” (From “Park Jung-ja and 50 Years of Korean Theater,” published by Suryu Sanbang in 2012) Around that time, she met Kim Jung-ok, a promising young theater director who had studied in France and founded the theater company Chayu. The two have since remained close friends and coworkers who understand each other’s passion for theater. Regarding Park’s acting, Kim said, “I remember that she often stole the show even in a minor role … If the character had an unusual destiny, Park played it in such a way as

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2014 1. “ Where Shall We Meet Again?”

2. “The Woman’s Role” 3. “ Portrait of a Shaman” 4. “ Mother Courage and Her Children” 5. “Harold and Maude” 6. “ Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri”

to bring its conflict and philosophy, rather than its fate, to the fore.” (From “Park Jung-ja and 50 Years of Korean Theater,” Suryu Sanbang, 2012) Theater was a faith and religion for Park. She was thankful for every role and did her utmost to bring that role to life on stage. It became evident that she possessed a great deal of “the mother,” or “maternal instinct,” from her portrayals of mother characters as the essence of life, the root of human beings, and the source of life. In “Night, Mother” (1990) by Marsha Norman, for which she received the Paeksang Arts Award, she depicted a mother who could make all daughters of the world weep. In “At Fifty She Discovered the Sea” (1991) by Denise Chalem, she was a paragon among mothers in their 50s. And in “Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder” (“Mother Courage and Her Children,” 1997)

by Bertolt Brecht, she was likened to Helene Weigel, Brecht’s widow and a legendary German actress who had played the title role in the original play. Park was

acclaimed for demonstrating her mastery of gestus , an acting technique developed by Brecht, in this play.

The impact she made was so great that for a long time nobody could imagine a more tough-minded Koreanstyle mother.

The shaman was another role that became Park’s trademark. In Korea, a shaman is more than a psychic, but a kind of priestess who influences life in the beyond. Those who saw Park in “Ieodo” (1977) were fascinated by her obviously possessed state. Her finest depiction of a shaman was in “Portrait of a Shaman” (1994). Mohwa, the lead character, is wholly different from others in that she is a shaman who stabs her son to death. The combination of these two roles — shaman and mother — exudes a powerful energy.

They find common ground at some point beyond logic and reason. Park made such a powerful impression in this role that speculation arose as to whether she was a real shaman. She had indeed learned the

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68 KOREANA Winter 2014

“I refuse to be stereotyped … I feel true strength in women like prostitutes, women in crisis, or women who elope with their lovers, abandoning their children — those women with tumultuous lives have stories to tell.

I think there’s a bit of that in me, too.” byeolsin-gut (shaman rite) performance from a real hereditary shaman.

We met Park Jungja in a coffee shop at the National Theater of Korea early one morning, before her rehearsals for “Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.” Laughing off her busy schedule, she calls the rehearsal room her “paradise.”

An Actress Who Knows Herself Instinctively, Park knows what characters she can play well and what those roles require. She has earned several roles after appealing directly to the directors about her own potential. And she never failed to surprise directors by achieving things that they had never imagined or even thought possible.

“Generally, when an actor has done well in a particular role, directors tend to cast him/her in similar roles for a while thereafter. But when an actor can play roles that were once considered unfit for them, well, that’s real acting, isn’t it?” Park said.

This fall’s repeat run of the “Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri” by the National Theater Company of Korea follows the box-office success of the same work last year. Many people who saw the play commented on Francesca, who appeared briefly in one scene. “No wonder she was so good,” they wrote, after realizing that the character had been played by Park. It was Park herself who had proposed that she play Francesca, the woman of passion who falls into Hell after having an affair with her brother-in-law. The director could not have made a better decision.

Such professional resolve was also evident in 1999, when Park played the queen in “Phaedra,” the same work in which she had played a maid 37 years earlier.

Her depiction of the Greek mythological heroine was so impressive that it seemed as if the role had been written for her.

In “The Woman Destroyed” (1986), a play adapted from Simone de Beauvoir’s 1967 novella, she played an attractive middle-aged woman in her 40s. And this monodrama proved to be another turning point in her acting career.

“At the time, the director asked me to find a good actress who could be cast in the role. While discussing the matter, I suddenly said, half-jokingly, ‘What

about me, Park Jung-ja?’ He said I was far from the ‘destroyed’ type, but some time later he asked me to do it. We began rehearsals the following day,” Park said. That year “The Woman Destroyed” garnered three major theater awards and attracted widespread attention from middle-aged women.

Park still gets nervous before going on stage, and even has nightmares about being late for rehearsals or forgetting her lines. After all, what we have seen is only a part of her, a flawless actress who has managed to overcome anxiety, confusion, and fear with a professional approach at all times.

“When I was in the college theater club, the university imposed strict restrictions on off-campus activities. I was so naive that I gave up my studies. I dropped out of school early in my junior year, even after I had paid the tuition. Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison had no college degree, did they? They were a solace to me.

It was when I received an honorary diploma from the university that I realized I had not taken the wrong turn in life. I found compensation in that piece of paper,” Park said.

Over the past five decades, Park has played one role after another without taking a break. These days, she plans and produces special performances, such as “reading shows,” and travels across the country to present them. She does not hesitate to take these works to remote areas. She remakes existing works, jumbles together Shakespeare’s plays, or gives storytelling performances accompanied by music. This winter, she will play a refreshingly naive elderly woman who loves a young man in “Harold and Maude” by Colin Higgins, a play that she has performed almost every year since 2000. This is part of her efforts to keep her own promise to “perform every year until I am 80.”

“I refuse to be stereotyped. I don’t like theater directors’ biases, either,” she says. “I feel true strength in women like prostitutes, women in crisis, or women who elope with their lovers, abandoning their children — those women with tumultuous lives have stories to tell. I think there’s a bit of that in me, too. They do what they have to do in the face of the fate they have to accept. Perhaps, they’re the most human of humans.”

Park Jung-ja has lived on the razor’s edge. It’s the kind of life possible only for those who can endlessly spur themselves on to ever greater heights. She still stands on the precipice. So for her, the present moment is always the most beautiful.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 69

Charles La Shure Professor, Department of Korean Language and Literature, Seoul National University

BOOKS & MORE

Unfiltered Look at Life and Human Relationships “At Least We Can Apologize”

By Lee Ki-ho, Translated by Christopher J. Dykas, 185 pages, $13.00, Champaign, Ill., U.S.; London; Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press (2013)

L

ee Ki-ho’s 2009 novel has a novel conceit: there exists an agency whose sole purpose is to offer apologies on behalf of others. This sounds like a recipe for comedy, and it is, but perhaps not the type of comedy one might expect.

The novel opens with the protagonist and his friend Si-bong in a psychiatric institution. Instead of being treated, though, they are simply drugged and beaten daily by their two “caretakers,” sadistic nephews of the superintendent. When they are finally released from the institution, the narrator cannot remember where he lives, so the two go to the home of Si-bong’s little sister, Si-yeon. After a while, Si-yeon’s boyfriend encourages them to find work,

but their history in the institution and lack of experience make this impossible. And this is when they stumble upon a brilliant idea: to apologize for others.

However, their “apologies” are not simply words of contrition.

While in the institution, the caretakers would beat them until they apologized, even if they had to fabricate wrongs to apologize for.

Thus the concept of “apology” becomes inextricably intertwined with physical abuse. So while they use the term “apology” for whatever they do, it is in fact much closer to atonement or penance. The quasi-religious undertones are not accidental; later in the book, a character who hears of what the protagonists do says, “Huh, I thought there was only one Jesus.”

“At Least We Can Apologize” puts a twist on this theme of atonement, though. Rather than washing away wrongdoings, the protagonists’ atonement seems to only uncover more problems. While they believe they are doing good, what they are in fact doing is pulling at loose threads, threatening to unravel the fabric of human relationships — or is it the wool that we pull over our own eyes so that we don’t have to face the truth? The story grabs us by the collar and forces us to take a closer look at the wrongs we commit, to think about why we keep them hidden, and to realize that perhaps atonement is not even possible, let alone desirable. There is a lot to unpack in this relatively short work; with its dark humor and unfiltered look at life and human relationships, the story will leave the reader with much to chew over long after turning the last page.

Despite Minor Snags, a Useful Resource on Korean Folk Culture “Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Beliefs” http://folkency.nfm.go.kr/eng/folkbeliefs.jsp, Seoul: National Folk Museum of Korea

70 KOREANA Winter 2014

This online resource is the second in a series of English-language resources produced by the National Folk Museum of Korea; the first was the “Encyclopedia of Korean Seasonal Customs,” and six more encyclopedias will be added in the future.

The original Korean version of this online source consists of six parts that cover shamanism and the worship of village and household deities. This English version is an abridged version, edited to facilitate comprehension.

The encyclopedia contains over 250 articles divided into six major subjects: Rites and Officiants, Divinities and Sacred

An Intriguing Snapshot View of Modern Korean History

that comprise the book are mostly of this kind, beginning with and elaborating on a specific milestone or watershed event in Korean history. These are intermingled with essays that cover decades or specific periods. As a result, the book provides more of a snapshot view of Korean history than a continuous narrative; rather than attempt an “The Dawn of Modern Korea” exhaustive discussion of history, it gives us a kaleiBy Andrei Lankov, 366 pages, 13,000 won ($12.30), Seoul: EunHaeng doscopic view of the changing times.

NaMu (2007) As with all history, the transformation of the modern era in Korea was brought about by the interaction between old and new values. In large part, particularly in the beginning, the old values were native, while the new values were ideas and technologies from outside. But as these values clashed and gave birth to a new, modern nation, they produced something that was uniquely Korean. The focused depictions of the transformations arising from this or Andrei Lankov, formerly of Kookmin University in Seoul and clash of ideas are the book’s most notable merit. But it is interestcurrently at the University of Oslo in Norway, it is the modern ing to note not only what is included, but also what is left out. While era, an era of “record-breaking social and economic transformathere are of course many references to the role of Japan as colonition, which, for the first time in the country’s history, has made al ruler, missing from the milestones are such well-known events Korea a major player in the world of global politics and economas the Treaty of Ganghwa, the assassination of Empress Myeongics,” that stands as Korea’s greatest. Based loosely on a column seong, and the annexation of Korea by Japan. Thus much of the Lankov wrote for The Korea Times beginning in 2002, “The Dawn tragedy that one normally encounters in a history of modern Korea of Modern Korea” follows, as the subtitle indicates, “the transforis missing. Whether this is a good thing will be left to the reader’s mation in life and cityscape” over the past hundred or so years. judgment, but the overall effect is that Korea as a modern nation The book begins with a prelude of sorts in 1784, the year that feels less like a passive victim of fate and more like an empowered marked the arrival of Christianity on the Korean Peninsula. Korea agent that can in large part shape its own destiny. is quite unique in this regard, as Christianity was introduced not Lankov’s collection of essays is not a typical history book; in this by foreign missionaries but by a Korean who was converted in case, that is an advantage. Readers new to Korea will find this an China. The book then skips forward nearly one hundred years to approachable and easily digestible introduction to her modern his1871, when the first photographs were taken in Korea, and begins tory, and old hands will discover many fascinating and intriguing in earnest in 1881, the year in which the first group of Korean stutidbits that will deepen their understanding of the nation. dents travel abroad to learn modern technology. The 97 essays

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Entities, Ritual Props, Ritual Offerings, Ritual Venues, Concepts, and References.

Each can be browsed in alphabetical order, or the search function can be used to find a specific article. The articles are accompanied by photos, which can also be browsed separately under the “Multimedia” heading. The materials provide a detailed look into the many aspects of Korean folk culture that have shaped Korea as a nation.

There do seem to be some kinks that still need ironing out. Headword search, for one, is nonfunctional: the search results page displays the number of hits but is otherwise blank. There is also no

way to limit a search to either of the encyclopedias available; searches will return results from both. In practice, this is not necessarily a problem, as the two encyclopedias are part of the greater whole (“Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture”) and there is some overlap between the two, but it can be a little confusing at first.

And, in the long term, it may be helpful to be able to search individual encyclopedias, especially when the project is completed and we have eight different resources at our disposal. In terms of the organization of information, the “Multimedia” section lists both photos and videos, but there is

also a separate “Films” section that contains the same videos.

With the exception of the defective headword search, these are all relatively minor issues. The value of the content itself far outweighs any problems with the information architecture. Even as modern Korean pop culture has carved out a place for itself on the world stage, aspects of traditional Korean folk culture remain largely unknown. This resource, and the resources that the National Folk Museum plans to add in the future, are an important step toward making these aspects of Korean culture more accessible to English speakers.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 71

GOURMET’S DELIGHT

A Savory Treat Promising a Feast Jeon is a catch-all term for savory pan-fried dishes made with a range of ingredients, such as meat, fish, and vegetables that are coated with flour and dipped in beaten eggs. The ingredients, turning golden-brown in an oil-coated pan, gain added flavor from the sizzling oil. From jeonyueo, which used to be served exclusively to the king, to bindaeddeok , a popular street food, the status and variety of jeon have evolved over time with the emergence of new ingredients and flavors. But Koreans still associate the sizzling sound of jeon being fried in the pan, and its appealing aroma, with a feast sure to follow.

Joo Young-ha Professor of Folklore Studies, Graduate School of Korean Studies, Academy of Korean Studies

Lim Hark-hyoun Photographer

‘‘A

round the time of the third day of the third lunar month and the ninth day of the ninth month, on a warm day without strong wind, women of the family went out carrying a cauldron, which would be set upon rocks at the base of a cliff. Then, they gathered chrysanthemums and other wild flowers to make jeon, along with mugwort soup. Laughing and frolicking, their merriment lasted from morning to evening.” This is a passage from Myeongdeokdong gi (Record of Myeongdeok Village), written

by Chae Je-gong (1720–1799), a scholar-official during the Joseon Dynasty, depicting how village women enjoyed a picnic in a field of flowers.

The picnic in the great outdoors was long awaited by the women, who were not allowed to go out freely at other times.

Never missing from such an occasion was hwajeon (flower pancake). To prepare this delicacy, you first make a light dough with sticky rice flour. In a pan coated with oil, the dough is spread thinly, and flower petals, plucked fresh from nature, are pressed onto the dough surface for a decorative touch. Then the sticky rice dough is pan-fried in the oil, with the tantalizing aroma whetting the appetite. In the spring, azalea and pear flowers are used, while in the fall, chrysanthemums are in season. With the flowers’ fragrance and shape retained, hwajeon is truly a dish for enjoying a taste of the season’s fresh pleasures.

Precious Food Cooked in Precious Oil Nowadays, consumers can easily find an endless variety of cooking oils, but people during the Joseon period had to make do

72 KOREANA Winter 2014

with only sesame oil and perilla oil. Before Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving holiday in the eighth month of the lunar calendar, an important task of farmers harvesting sesame and perilla pods was extracting oil from their seeds, which would be used for panfrying the aromatic and delectable jeon. The fragrance of sesame oil, made from seeds originally found in the lands bordering Western China, made the oil very precious, hence the Korean name chamgireum, meaning “real oil.”

It was no easy matter to obtain oil for cooking. An 18th-century record describes a tool for pressing perilla seeds: “A boat-shaped container made of hard wood or stone is used. Steamed perilla seeds are put into cloth bags and then placed in the frame to be pounded hard — like hammering out the sole of a leather shoe — until the oil trickles down through an opening (called ‘mouth’).”

With sesame oil also obtained through the same method, these valuable oils were readily available for cooking in only the royal palace.

Banquet Food During the Joseon period, one of the favorite foods pan-fried with sesame oil in the palace was jeonyueo. In the palace kitchen, various fish from the West Sea would be dried and stored, and when there was a banquet, the dried fish was sliced and coated with starch and egg yolk before being pan-fried in sesame oil, to make this sumptuous dish.

In 1765, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of King Yeongjo’s enthronement on his birthday, a banquet was held at Gyeonghi

Croaker jeonyueo, made from an expensive fish, was prepared traditionally for royal dining and palace banquets during the Joseon era. Eventually, many varieties of thin-sliced fish and meat panfried in oil came to be served on special occasions even in common people’s homes.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 73

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Serving food pan-fried in oil was a quintessential gesture of hospitality …

Perhaps the sizzling sound and the savory aroma make people remember the bygone days when it was a special dish fit for a king’s feast.

Palace, a detached palace of the royal family. Following the orders of the king who typically preferred a modest celebration, only 10 dishes were served, of which one was jeonyueo. Interestingly, as if one kind of fish jeonyueo was not enough, pheasant meat was also cooked in the same method and served. Therefore, actually two of the 10 dishes were jeonyueo.

By the late Joseon period, jeonyueo had come to be served on the feast tables of noble families and eventually of common people as well. And not only for celebrations! Joseon mussang sinsik yorijebeop (The Premier New Korean Cooking Recipes), written in 1924 by Yi Yong-gi, an expert on Korean cuisine, states: “Jeonyueo is served everywhere — at weddings and funerals, a memorial service or birthday party, as well as at banquets and get-togethers for drinks, even at daily meals.” For a major occasion like a lavish feast, sesame oil was considered the best for frying, but if unavailable, perilla oil was also acceptable. Serving food pan-fried in oil was a quintessential gesture of gracious hospitality.

From King’s Dish to People’s Delicacy As various kinds of cooking oil became available at much lower prices in the 20th century, this traditional delicacy became all the more popular. A favorite variety is bindaeddeok, the so-called “Korean pizza.” Probably derived from bindaebyeong , meaning “pancake for treating guests,” bindaeddeok is pan-fried in pork fat instead of sesame oil. Pork fat was often used for frying food by

74 KOREANA Winter 2014

the Chinese settlers who came to Korea around the late 19th century. Bindaeddeok, made of mung bean batter mixed with various vegetables and pieces of pork, and pan-fried in pork fat, was, for many ordinary people, comparable to jeonyueo in the royal court.

During the Korean War, which followed soon after liberation from Japanese colonial rule, when Korea experienced widespread chaos and poverty, bindaeddeok made of cheap ingredients became a popular street food. The warm bindaeddeok, drenched in pork fat, was beloved by the masses. Hence, it came to be a nutritious alternative that anyone could enjoy at a time when meat was hard to come by.

Today, all traditional markets have “jeon alleys.” Passing by those alleys, you will find it hard not to stop, as not only the thick large bindaeddeok, but also many other kinds of jeon with perilla leaves, laver wrap, squid sausage, and mushrooms, give off an irresistible aroma as they are being fried in oil. You can select your favorites from those on display and wolf them down together with chilled rice wine, makgeolli. You might at first feel uncomfortable eating with strangers at a market stall, but a merry mood soon takes over as people enjoy the delicious food together. Although jeon has become a common food today, the many varieties of this age-old delicacy still serve to pique everyone’s anticipation as a celebratory dish. Perhaps its sizzling sound and enticing aroma make people recall the bygone days when it was a special dish fit for a royal court banquet.

1, 2.

Jeon is the catch-all name for dishes made by pan-frying various ingredients. It is made by coating ingredients with flour and dipping them in beaten eggs before pan-frying, while bindaeddeok is made by pan-frying sliced vegetables, meat, or fish mixed with batter. The seafoodand-green-onion jeon, made by pan-frying a mixture of green onion, squid, clam, shrimp, and batter, is a popular snack to accompany a drink of makgeolli .

3. eon gives the J ingredients savory flavors by simple cooking. Through panfrying alone, common vegetables such as perilla leaves, green pumpkins, and Korean cabbage gain a more delectable taste.

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KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 75

ENTERTAINMENT

TV Shows Highlight Relationship with Son-in-Law

Yoo Sun-ju TV Columnist

Two programs on a similar theme presented from different perspectives have been featured on Korean TV this year. The KBS drama “Wang’s Family,” which focused on the conflict between a mother-in-law and her son-in-law, who was unable to properly support his family, enjoyed over 40 percent viewer ratings. On the other hand, the SBS reality show “Jagiya, Forever Guest” shows sons-in-law who behave like real sons, earning the epithet gungmin sawi , meaning “the nation’s sons-in-law.”

‘‘T

he son-in-law is the apple of the mother-inlaw’s eye,” “A son-in-law is an eternal guest,” “Don’t live with your wife’s family unless you’re starving” … these are old Korean sayings that express the relationships between a son-in-law and his wife’s parents from different perspectives. For parents whose only wish is their daughter’s happiness, the son-in-law can be a kind of permanent guest who should be treated with the utmost hospitality, while the son-in-law tends to maintain a distance from his wife’s parents so as to avoid their intervention in his life.

Since the late 1990s, however, the relationship between the son-in-law and parents-in-law, and their behavior toward each other, has started to change as lifestyles changed, invalidating these old sayings. With the increase in the number of working couples, the wife’s mother is more involved in raising the grandchildren due to the closeness of mother and daughter. As more couples choose to live near the wife’s parents, the son-in-law and mother-in-law come into contact more often. While pop culture has traditionally dealt with conflict between daughter-in-law and mother-inlaw, it has now started to pay attention to the conflict between son-in-law and mother-in-law.

Changing Relations with Sons-in-Law In the MBC dramas “Roses and Bean Sprouts” and “Last War” and the SBS drama “Woman on Top,” the son-in-law is overshadowed by his wealthy parents-

76 KOREANA Winter 2014

in-law, or the mother-in-law is dissatisfied with her son-in-law who seems far too inferior to her successful daughter. These dramas reflect the emergence of a new generation of women, different from those of the earlier generation who invariably gave up their careers as soon as they married, and men as failed breadwinners after the 1997 financial crisis.

In the early 2000s, a strong mother-in-law character emerged, replacing the previous father-in-law role and providing new subject matter and situations for the storyline. In earlier Korean dramas, the future son-in-law usually approached the father-in-law to obtain permission to marry, while the father-in-law would test the drinking habits of his future son-in-law by inviting him for a drink. This scene has since been replaced, as in the 2005 MBC drama “My Name is Kim Sam-soon,” by the would-be son-in-law trying to make a good impression on the mother-in-law, by entertaining her at a noraebang (karaoke, literally “singing room”). When the rich restaurant owner (Hyun Bin) visits the baker Sam-soon’s (Kim Seon-ah) home, Sam-soon’s mother tests his drinking habits by plying him with generous amounts of fruit alcohol and then taking him to a noraebang. The scene of Hyun Bin with his necktie tied around his forehead, passionately playing the tambourine as his future mother-in-law sings, sparked a string of similar scenes with a future sonin-law unreservedly mingling with his girlfriend’s parents, regardless of different family traditions.

Clockwise from left: scenes from MBC dramas “Fated to Love You” and “My Name is Kim Sam-soon,” and the SBS reality show “Jagiya, Forever Guest.”

Of particular interest this year is how the MBC drama “Fated to Love You,” the remake of a Taiwan TV drama from 2008, has adapted the relationship between mother-in-law and son-in-law to Korean culture. The set-up of both dramas is the same: Getting their hotel room numbers mixed up, a man and a woman spend the night together, the woman gets pregnant, and an unwanted marriage takes place. In the original, the mother-in-law’s influence on the couple is not significant, but in the remake, the husband (Jang Hyuk), still feeling awkward around his wife (Jang Na-ra), draws closer to his mother-in-law, who treats him like her own son. He enjoys the warmth of family ties and is willing to do anything for his wife’s family.

Gap between Fantasy and Reality Several years ago, the media reported that, as a reason for divorce, the conflict between son-in-law and parents-in-law had exceeded the conflict between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. This is reflected in the increase of talk show programs in which celebrity sons-in-law and their mothers-in-law openly discuss their resentment of and disappointment in each other. One such program, “Jagiya, Forever Guest” has gained popularity for revealing, in its reality show format, the daily life of sons-in-law living in the homes of their wives’ parents. It is refreshing to see how the sons-in-law can take care of their parents-in-law with

While pop culture has traditionally dealt with conflict between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, it has now started to pay attention to the conflict between son-in-law and mother-in-law. devotion, even though they sometimes argue with each other about the trifles of everyday life. But if we look into the reasons why the typical young couple lives close by the wife’s parents, it can also be seen that they actually need to maintain a certain distance to resolve conflicts caused by their closeness.

According to a 2012 survey by WoORizine (Women’s Online Resource and Information, www.woorizine.or.kr), six out of 10 married couples live near or with the wife’s mother for the purpose of child rearing.

Since the government’s social welfare program cannot sufficiently cover the cost and efforts needed to care for the young children of working couples, the conflict between mother-in-law and son-in-law is likely to continue. Also, under society’s perception that raising children is a woman’s responsibility, it is assumed that the void created by a working mom will have to be filled by her mother. Korean TV programs that focus on the conflicts caused by headstrong mothers-in-law or depict fantasy-like situations of sons-in-law who behave like real sons obviously gloss over the complexity of real-life issues.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 77

LIFESTYLE

‘The State of Fried Chicken’

Park Chan-il Chef Cho Ji-young Photographer

The most important reason for my daughter to be happy having a chef as dad is probably because I can prepare fried chicken that she loves. She never brags about her father being a well-known chef in Seoul who even writes and has published several books. She boasts only about one thing: “I had fried chicken yesterday! My dad made it. Are you jealous?” That’s proper behavior indeed for a young citizen living in “The State of Fried Chicken.”

I

recently had a special experience in Milan. A junior cook, whom I had asked to recommend a good local restaurant, took me to a chicken restaurant.

That was a surprising choice. I had expected elaborate handmade ravioli or fine risotto cooked with saffron Milano style, or perhaps osso buco, a Milanese specialty. With the accustomed fried chicken in my mouth, however, I had to give it a big thumbs-up. Tender-moist inside and crispy-savory outside, even spicy, that was for me a well-loved taste of home.

Korean-style Chicken’s Gourmet Appeal The fact that fried chicken was being served in the middle of an Italian city was for me simply amazing. Isn’t Italy a place where traditional food reigns supreme? Italian men love to have food cooked by their mothers, if possible, and want to order similar food when eating out — though if the waitress is attractive, they wouldn’t refuse even a hamburger. To my surprise, fried chicken, usually considered a kind of fast food, is popular in Italy. My guide explained to me that the Italian chicken dish was adapted from the Korean-style chicken dish — the Korean use of the English word “chicken” meaning specifically “fried chicken.”

An American-based international group of experimental chefs, Modernist Cuisine, has developed a keen interest in Korean-style chicken, stirring a buzz among fine food aficionados. The group, consisting of eminent chefs and food specialists, introduced, surprisingly, a recipe for “Crispy Chicken Wings, Korean-Style” to fine food enthusiasts and gourmets. The sauce used

78 KOREANA Winter 2014

in this recipe was made with a unique spicy ingredient developed in Korea, a spicy-sweet chicken sauce that’s undeniably addictive.

Also worthy of note is the recent craze in many Asian countries over chimaek — the mixed English and Korean portmanteau abbreviation of chicken and beer. In a scene from the Korean TV drama “My Love from the Star,” which was a huge hit in China and several other countries, the lead female character enjoys chimaek on a snowy night, which has become a great favorite. In Hong Kong, several hundred Korean chicken restaurants suddenly opened, leading to cutthroat competition, bad for business but great for customers.

Koreans’ Crazy Love for Chicken Probably no country other than America can rival Korea in fried chicken consumption. But Korea is likely first in per capita consumption. According to the “Analysis of Current Domestic Chicken Business 2013” released by the KB Financial Group Research Institute, the annual consumption of chicken in Korea amounts to some 800 million chickens, while the domestic chicken market has expanded rapidly in the past 10 years, from $330 million to $3.1 billion, a more than nine-fold increase! Korea clearly deserves the title: “The State of Fried Chicken.”

Korea’s fried chicken has evolved over time, arriving at today’s deep-fried style only quite recently. Not only was cooking oil precious in the past, poultry was a highly valued livestock.

From the mid-1960s, after chicken breeding had

Š Pelicana

Koreans’ appetite for chicken is seemingly insatiable, as shown in the annual consumption of chicken meat in the country, amounting to some 800 million birds, according to survey results.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 79

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A common scene at that time was fathers coming home from work with a yellowish paper bag containing a roast chicken.

That was a popular choice for the busy Korean fathers who were unable to live up to the idealized dad image by doing carpentry in the backyard or mowing the lawn.

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improved and mass production of chicken feed was undertaken locally, along with the industrialization of agricultural and livestock production, the chicken industry developed rapidly. By the early 1970s, for the first time, a domestic business produced and distributed bean-based cooking oil on a large scale, which boosted the chicken market’s robust growth.

The original Korean chicken eatery business is said to be the Myeong-dong Nutrition Center, which opened in 1961 in Myeong-dong, downtown Seoul, where rotisserie chicken was introduced. Many people can still remember the slowly turning chickens on a long skewer being roasted in an electric broiler. A common scene at that time was fathers coming home from work with

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a yellowish paper bag containing a roast chicken. That was a popular choice for the busy Korean fathers who were unable to live up to the idealized dad image by doing carpentry in the backyard or mowing the lawn.

Like many others of my generation, I also have memories of waking up late at night to the delicious smell of roast chicken brought home by my father.

Soon after, in 1982, the first Korean chicken franchise, Pelicana, started operations in Daejeon with its new sauce-coated chicken, while the popularity of KFC, which landed on Korean shores in 1984, inaugurated a heyday for the local chicken market. The launch of Korea’s professional baseball league in the 1980s also played a role in the growth of chicken consumption. It became a habit for sports fans to enjoy eating chicken as they watched baseball games on television. With the 2002 World Cup, the chicken business reached its peak. Not just at home, but also at chicken restaurants with wide-screen TVs, and even in the streets, large crowds watched the matches on huge screens on the walls of high-rise buildings and cheered enthusiastically, attracting the world’s attention as they shouted cheers for Team Korea, drumsticks held high in their hands.

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1. A 1968 Kyunghyang Daily News ad for rotisserie chicken roasted in electric ovens.

2. The trend at that time called for fathers to bring home a roasted chicken after work as a treat for the family.

3. In Asian countries where the Korean television drama “My Love from the Star” was exported, the scenes with chimaek became the talk of the town, spawning a craze for fried chicken and beer in Southeast Asia as well as at home.

Fried Chicken and the ‘IMF Crisis’ Koreans’ craze for chicken has not been without its own stories of misfortune, however. Jeong Eunjeong, author of “History of Korean Chicken,” pointed out one important fact in her book: “In Korea, chicken has never, even once, lost its first place standing as the most favorite dish for eating out since 1997. The year 1997, when chicken became the country’s No. 1 dining out choice, was when the ‘arduous march’ started in Korea.” Amid the Asian financial crisis and the subsequent IMF bailout of 1997-98, many breadwinners, who were laid off overnight, opened up chicken restaurants to support their families. They did this because opening a chicken restaurant required no special skills or knowledge and they could start out with relatively limited capital. Thereafter, for the Korean baby boomers, who found themselves out of work but still in their 40s and 50s, too young to retire, opening a chicken restaurant became a popular choice for their livelihood.

Today, there are about 25,000 chicken franchise restaurants throughout the country, and together with non-franchise establishments, the total reaches 50,000, which means there is one fried chicken restaurant for every one thousand Koreans. The number

of chicken businesses that end in failure is quite high.

According to the aforementioned KB research analysis, 7,000 new restaurants opened annually, whereas 5,000 of existing businesses closed their doors. The average survival time for a chicken restaurant is only 2.7 years. Some years ago, a major discount retailer started to offer fried chicken at half price, which immediately incurred the wrath of small chicken restaurant owners. They were already struggling to stay afloat, and the last thing they needed was big businesses engaging in ruthless price cutting. Even the public shared the outrage! If TV sets or refrigerators, or even ramyeon had been offered for half price, there would have been no such backlash.

While fried chicken is mainly a fast food in the West, chicken in Korea can be seen as a kind of “soul” food.

Not only in times of joy and happiness but also in times of anger and despair, fried chicken has always been there for the Korean people. It’s like a friend who stays with you through life’s ups and downs, joys and sorrows. Still today, after work, friends and colleagues will gather together to enjoy fried chicken and mugs of beer to forget about all of life’s anxieties and troubles.

That way the soul’s hunger is sated.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 81

JOURNEYS IN KOREAN LITERATURE

CRITIQUE

Reality Begets Fantasy, Fantasy Begets Reality Chang Du-yeong Literary Critic

Kim E-whan has steadily built up his stature in the realm of genre literature. He started writing online in 1996, and after graduating from university in 2000, he began to make a name for himself among genre literature readers by publishing his fiction series online. From the publication of his first printed book, “Ghosts of Evitagen,” in 2004, readers have been given glimpses of his varied interests, such as science fiction, fantasy, computer games, animation, film, myth and legend, and horror.

T

he early years of the new millennium, when Kim E-whan began writing in earnest, can be seen as the period when fantasy fiction reached its prime in Korea with the widespread popularity of Lee Yeongdo’s “Dragon Raja” series. “Dragon Raja” was similar to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” adopting the same basic structure as well as the tribes and magic of Tolkien’s fantasy world. The success of “Dragon Raja” spawned a plethora of imitations, making the world of dragons and magic the literary trope of Korea’s fantasy fiction. Moreover, when this framework started to be adapted for online gaming, it became cemented in place as the convention of fantasy fiction in Korea.

In contrast to this trend, Kim E-whan’s works mostly depict an intersection of reality and fantasy within the context of the space and time of day-to-day life.

For example, in “The Sock Gathering Boy,” reality and fantasy get intertwined when the protagonist discov-

82 KOREANA Winter 2014

ers a secret passageway through which he can enter a fantasy world. In the real world the main character is just an ordinary teenager, worrying about getting into university and finding a girlfriend, but through his coming and going in the land of fantasy he develops into an extremely dynamic and influential person.

In “5 p.m. Alien” as well, we see reality and fantasy coexist; it cannot be seen on the surface but in fact extraterrestrial beings in disguise are strutting around on the streets that people frequent, and an otherwise ordinary-looking café turns out to be a secret hideout for special agents tasked with tracking down and apprehending the aliens. In Kim E-whan’s fiction, fantasy runs in parallel with the mundane of everyday life.

Having reality and fantasy exist side-by-side, Kim E-whan’s fictional writing is often seen as an allegorical presentation of the world we live in. The novel “The Orb of Despair” — which shot Kim E-whan to fame after he was awarded the first Multi-Literature Award in 2009 — reveals his keen insight into human existence and greed. The backdrop for the novel is Seoul, just as it is today. A mysterious black orb suddenly appears and starts to devour humans, one after another, growing in strength each time. It reaches a point where the orb’s insatiable appetite has brought the entire human race to the verge of extinction.

While an unidentifiable mass that consumes humans is an image well known from horror movies of the past, in this context it has been employed as a liter-

ary device, both familiar and unsettling, which can be understood as a symbol of death, while at the same time being a metaphor for the rapaciousness of Big Capital, and exposing the vastness of human greed.

The coexistence of reality and fantasy provides an integral viewpoint for genre literature and more traditional literature as well. In light of the common criticism leveled at genre literature, such as that it is “not a reflection of reality but rather confined by genre fantasies and merely self-reflexive,” or that it displays a “tendency for escapism,” Kim E-whan’s works take on exceptional significance because they show the potential for such literature to offer a penetrating observation of reality. In addition, from the perspective of traditional literature as well, the originality that invariably underscores works of science fiction and fantasy, a willingness to push the boundaries of imagination, and that certain charisma which keeps readers hooked, are all traits that deserve due attention.

In this context, “Your Metamorphosis” clearly demonstrates the potential for imagination to blur boundaries, which is characteristic of Kim E-whan’s novels. This story, published in 2010 by Munhakdongne [Literary Community], is a revised version of his “Metamorphosis!” published a few years earlier in the fantasy literature webzine Mirror (mirror.pe.kr). The basic idea behind this story — “What would happen if humans could remodel their bodies with ease?” — has its roots in the traditions of science fiction with cyborg and robot themes. “Metamorphosis!” is a compilation of 20 or so brief articles that look like extracts from reports written by scientists of the future. “Your Metamorphosis” is the result of adding in the characters, “You” and “I,” to this work and weaving in various incidents and events to create the bones of the narrative, then filling in the picture with subjective descriptions and conversations between the two characters. While “Metamorphosis!” gave an impression of fiction striving to stimulate an active imagination, in “Your Metamorphosis” the reach and depth of this imagination has been significantly broadened, giving the work a far greater literary value.

As a result, while “Your Metamorphosis” deals with the science fiction curiosity of peering into the future, at the same time it also offers a powerful introspection into human desire. In various passages we can see traces of homage to and parody of the animations or films that depict a dystopian future. Other passages may be interpreted as the application of “queer studies” theory, or psychoanalytical concepts, to fiction. The imagination and introspection then is not simply about the future; it reveals a dynamic perspective, at times turning to ancient Greece and at other times hovering around today’s Seoul. Following the trajectory of imagination about the future world, at times exciting, novel, or downright absurd, and running with it, in the end the question comes

back to the present reality. The novel begins with the question “What might happen in the future?” Bringing the story to a close, it asks the reader: “What is it that you truly desire?”

In his novels, flashing between reality and fantasy, Kim E-whan captivates readers at various points when the familiar is accompanied by the unfamiliar that had hitherto been undetected. These moments feel somewhat like the sense of wonder at suddenly discovering something after endlessly wandering in the zero-gravity environment of boundless imagination. There are times when the discovery is an acute comment on our social condition, at other times a prudent call for caution against excessive human greed. In the short story “Sneezing with a Cup of Coffee in Hand,” Kim E-whan depicts a farcical daydream in which he converses with a snail that has slithered out of a drain. After chatting away interminably in an exchange filled with whimsical imagination, the story ends with this sentence: “Reality gives rise to stories, stories give rise to reality, and the two giving birth to each other make the lives we lead.”

If we recall that for Kim E-whan stories brimming with the imagination of science fiction and fantasy fiction are in fact stories which are rooted in fantasy, this sentence could be changed to read: “Reality gives rise to fantasy, and fantasy gives birth to reality.” And this is where the potential looms for genre literature and traditional literature to break out of their conventional boundaries.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 83