Koreana Winter 2016 (English)

winter 2016

Korean Culture & arts

speCial Feature

Cinema

Feasts of Film Culture; Korean Cinema in the 21st Century: Many Faces of Arrival; The Rise of Powerful Directors; Five Habits of Successful Popular Films; Movie Stars that Korean Audiences Love; Faint Memories of Old Cinemas

KOREAN CULTURE & ISSN ARTS1016-0744 105

vol. 30 no. 4

Dynamics and Dreams Korean Cinema of the 21st Century

IMAGE OF KOREA

The hanbok Revival and iTs Two Faces Kim Hwa-young Literary Critic; Member of the National Academy of Arts

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n the crowded streets around the historic city center of Seoul, especially the quaint neighborhood of traditional homes in Bukchon and the majestic Gyeongbok Palace complex, on any given day, a lot of young women can be seen wandering around, resplendent in hanbok. It makes one wonder if there’s a festival happening nearby. Or are they guests leaving a wedding reception? Is the hanbok, the Korean national dress, back as any day wear? With the opening of the nation’s ports in the late 19th century, the taste for traditional wear began to recede amid an influx of foreign goods and influences. But, until the 1960s, people dressed in hanbok were still a common sight on the streets of Seoul.

Western-style suits and street wear became the norm when the fashion industry began to flourish thanks to mass production of textiles. Hanbok was mothballed, to be brought out only for national holidays, such as New Year’s Day and Chuseok (Harvest Moon Festival), and on special occasions like weddings.

Though long out of sight, the hanbok has indeed come back into fashion in recent years.

How did this happen? The annual Hanbok Day events, organized in 1996 by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, signaled the start. And the popularity of hanbok has been further boosted by the policy of free admission to the historic palaces of Seoul for anyone who comes dressed in traditional attire. Implemented by the Cultural Heritage Administration since October 2013, the free admission applies not only to the four palaces and the royal shrine Jongmyo in Seoul but also the royal graveyards of the Joseon Dynasty in its vicinity.

The hanbok trend really took off when Gyeongbok Palace and Changgyeong Palace were opened to the public for night tours several times a year. To control the number of visitors, only those who have booked in advance are allowed to enter. Competition is fierce, but those wearing a hanbok can enjoy touring the palaces at night, for free, without going through the hassle of booking in advance. You just walk up to the entrance, in camera-ready style. As popular as they are among locals, the program has caught on with tourists as well, drawn by the romance of visiting the palaces at night, promenading around the royal gardens in moonlight and taking part in folk games, dressed in hanbok.

In response to this trend, hanbok rental shops have sprouted near the palaces, enjoying a roaring business. Traditional hanbok is difficult to make and therefore expensive, especially for young people. But now they can rent one for little expense and roam around in traditional dress for a few hours or the whole day. Social media is swamped with photos of couples or friends in hanbok reveling in the experience of gliding gracefully like period film characters around the royal palaces or traditional villages. For a while they are actors and actresses in gorgeous costumes, recording themselves playing out roles to be viewed and shared later online. In those moments, they are on stage and the hanbok a charming prop for acting out a lovely fantasy.

Are these young people aware that, meanwhile, the traditional hanbok industry is collapsing and the crudely made, imported hanbok filling the rental shops are transforming the original beauty of hanbok into colorful kitsch?

Editor’s Letter

May the Festival Bounce Back and Bloom Again Obviously, it was not due to the typhoon alone that had lashed the port city on the day before the festival’s opening, claiming several lives and wreaking havoc along the coast. The festive mood that had energized the streets in previous years was hard to find. The lack of buzz was even more apparent on the red carpet at the opening ceremony: the glitz and glamour were noticeably subdued with fewer stars in attendance.

Despite these ominous indicators, the Busan International Film Festival managed to uphold its reputation as Asia’s premier film event by the time its recent edition wrapped up with noteworthy outcomes. Considering that it almost didn’t happen, a lineup of 299 movies representing 69 countries is no small feat. But figures alone do not speak for the “miracle.” BIFF, as the festival is popularly called, has manifested the solidarity of filmmakers from around Asia and beyond, as well as the unwavering devotion of enthusiastic local audiences.

In this issue’s Special Feature, “Korean Cinema of the 21st Century: Dynamics and Dreams,” Darcy Paquet describes, though cautiously, the atmosphere at the 21st Busan International Film Festival, held on October 6–15, 2016, and the problems that have plagued the festival. The feud is rooted in the festival’s screening of a politically controversial documentary in 2014, despite the host city’s objections. This led to budget cuts and ouster of the festival director and related officials, and partial boycotts by major film organizations that called for the festival’s freedom of expression and programming independence.

BIFF’s growth into a Mecca for film buffs and coveted ground for nurturing and discovering new talents over the past two decades has much to do with the burgeoning vibrancy of Korean cinema today. Without a doubt, the freedom of expression is as vital to cinema as any other art genre — and even more so since movies are viewed by larger audiences. We therefore look forward to the BIFF’s return to glory in the years to come.

Lee Kyong-hee Editor-in-Chief

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KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS Winter 2016

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FOCuS

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Reanimating Nam June Paik

“Human Acts” Indelible Memories of Violence and wounds

Ahn Kyung-hwa

intervieW

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Choi Byong-hyon: Bringing to Life Heroes from Korean Classics

Charles La Shure, Kim Hoo-ran

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in lOve WitH KOrea

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Darcy Paquet

Korean Cinema in the 21st Century: Many Faces of Arrival Huh Moon-young

SpeCial Feature 3

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Walking Toward the Sunrise Gwak Jae-gu

an OrDinarY DaY

The Wonderful Life of Noraebang Owner Kim Joung-won Kim Seo-ryung

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jOurneYS in KOrean literature

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Conjuring Peace and Love with Fiction’s Magic Choi Jae-bong

The Street Magician Kim Jong-ok

Kang Seung-ryul

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Five Habits of Successful Popular Films Hahn Dong-won

SpeCial Feature 5

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Kim Hyun-sook

The Rise of Powerful Directors

SpeCial Feature 4

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Shin Eui-son: A Tajik-Born Goalkeeper Coach

On tHe rOaD

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Kim Dong-hwan

Kim Hak-soon

Feasts of Film Culture

SpeCial Feature 2

liFeStYle

In Smartphone Era, Chat Rooms and Emoticons Aid Personal Connection

‘Bachelor Mom’ and His Kids Build a Future Together

Korean Cinema of the 21st Century: Dynamics and Dreams SpeCial Feature 1

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Kang Shin-jae

SPECIAL FEATURE

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Kim Jin-young

Reviving the Art and Technology of Ancient Fabrics

taleS OF tWO KOreaS

eSSential inGreDientS

Kong : From Humble Roots to Modern Superfood

Chung Jae-suk

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Traditional Korean Instruments Play Heavy Metal

www.koreanfilm.org

Kim Soo-ja: A Needle Woman Mending the Hearts of Humanity

GuarDian OF HeritaGe

“A Hermitage”

Run by Volunteers, koreanfilm.org Could Go Farther

CHO YOON-JUNG

art revieW

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BOOKS & MOre

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Movie Stars that Korean Audiences Love Lee Hwa-jung

SpeCial Feature 6

Faint Memories of Old Cinemas Lee Chang-guy

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SPECIAL FEATURE 1 Korean Cinema of the 21st Century: Dynamics and Dreams

FEASTS OF FILM CULTURE Darcy Paquet Film Critic Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

The ability of Korean filmmakers to connect with an audience with stories and ideas that provoke widespread, and sometimes uncomfortable, discussion is perhaps the prime source of Korean cinema’s dynamism. The audience responds with passion and dedication. Film festivals are where the filmmakers and the audiences engage in lively interaction, spreading word of mouth and generating enthusiasm for good films.

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Director Kim Ki-duk and actors Ahn Ji-hye, Choe Gwi-hwa, and Hwang Geon walk along the red carpet for the opening ceremony of the 21st Busan International Film Festival, held on October 6, 2016 in Haeundae, Busan.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 5

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ometimes it’s the most unexpected, mundane circumstances that turn into the most enduring memories. For me, one of my strongest memories of the Busan International Film Festival is something that took place on Haeundae Beach in 2007.

Busan Then and Now It was an outdoor Open Talk between two Korean actresses: Jeon Do-yeon, who had earlier in the year won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performance in Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine,” and Kang Soo-youn, who won the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival in 1987 in Im Kwon-taek’s “Surrogate Mother.” I had been very curious to hear this discussion between the two highest profile award winners in the history of Korean film acting, but I arrived at the beach late, and the crowd was already overflowing.

After trying for several minutes to push my way into the crowd and catch a view of the actresses, I finally gave up, and simply listened to their conversation from the loudspeaker. I couldn’t see the stage at all, but I had a

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clear view of the faces of the audience sitting in the front row.

Soon I stopped minding that I couldn’t see the stage, because watching those faces was as interesting as seeing the stars themselves. Like a crowd gathered in front of a fireplace, their faces glowed with adoration, a love of cinema, and pride at what the actresses had accomplished. They were concentrating intently on every word, and they responded with warmth and enthusiasm.

You might say I was witnessing at that moment the energy that has powered BIFF to become the leading film festival in Asia. And more broadly, this sort of interest and passion among audiences has been a major factor in the Korean film industry’s success.

People sometimes talk about the economic factors that have contributed to Korean cinema’s explosive growth over the past two decades, from the deep pockets of Korea’s business conglomerates to the financial support provided by the government. But I think another key part of the equation is the strong film culture that has developed in Korea since the 1990s. “Film culture” is an abstract concept, but you can feel it around you if you live in Korea or spend time at its major film festivals. Film culture is about the knowledge and enthusiasm that ordinary people hold for cinema, and also about the way people express and talk about films.

The Busan International Film Festival in 2016 was considerably different from what it was back in 2007. For one thing, the actress Kang Soo-youn has

now become director of the festival, standing at the center of controversy about the independence and future of the event. But just as it was back then, BIFF remains one of the key places to experience Korea’s film culture firsthand.

Dreams of Cinema I could see that Nam Yeon-woo was nervous. The actor-turned-director was standing in the lobby of the Megabox theater, surrounded by friends and the cast of his directorial debut feature “Lost to Shame.” The first screening was about to take place, and after two years of preparation, shooting, editing, and postproduction, he would finally find out what audiences thought of his creation.

Although it was his debut, the director was not entirely new to this situation.

In 2012 Nam had been the lead actor in “Fatal,” a film shot on an astonishingly low budget of 3 million won (about $2,800). That film, which also had its first screening in Busan, won the New Currents award for young Asian directors. A unique film with memorable characters, it had gone on to screen at many other festivals around the world, and win more awards. Later it opened in theaters in Korea, but competing for attention with Hollywood blockbusters and big-budget Korean commercial features, it didn’t sell many tickets.

“Lost to Shame” is about an actor who is cast in the role of a transgender character, and who believes himself to be very open-minded, but is later forced to confront his inner prejudices. It’s an unusual story with impressive charac-

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ters, and so after assembling a team of actors he knew and taking on the lead role himself, Nam shot the film on a micro budget. Post-production was subsidized by BIFF through its Asian Cinema Fund.

As “Lost to Shame” screened for the first time before the audience in Busan, you could feel something electric in the air. You can tell when a film grabs an audience’s attention, and at the question and answer session with the director and cast afterward, many people expressed their enthusiasm with gushing praise.

Also in the audience were programmers from other film festivals around the world, including Cannes. Later, many came up to Nam to personally offer encouraging words. Meanwhile back in the cinema lobby, a long line of fans waited to get autographs and snap photos with Nam and other members of the cast. For today at least, this little known actor-turned-director had become a star.

There are many young directors in Korea who dream of this kind of experience. Director Park Jung-bum, now considered a major independent director thanks to his award-winning films “The Journals of Musan” (2010) and “Alive” (2013), used to visit the Busan International Film Festival in his youth. There, he developed a deep love of cinema, and began to dream of one day shooting his own film and presenting it to audiences in Busan. Hollywood is sometimes called a “city of dreams,” but in Korea, young filmmakers often realize their dreams in Busan, Jeonju, or Bucheon.

Indeed, Busan is not the only festival in Korea that stirs up a passion for cinema. The Jeonju International Film Festival, held in early May, is easily a match for Busan in terms of sold–out screenings and dedicated crowds. Despite its focus on non-mainstream and independent films, the festival draws hordes of viewers each year. (Jeonju’s famous cuisine makes a trip to the festival even more alluring.) As for the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, or BiFan, this is where fans of genre cinema converge. Although the number of young Korean directors making low-budget genre films

1 Ahmad Kiarostami, son of the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, makes an acceptance speech on behalf of his father who was named the Asian Filmmaker of the Year at BIFF 2016.

Abbas Kiarostami died this past July.

2 Actress Kang Soo-youn, director of the BIFF 2016, greets Souleymane Cissé, the Mali filmmaker who was head juror of the New Currents section, and his wife and actress, Aminata Cissé, at the closing ceremony of the festival. At far left is BIFF chairman Kim Dong-ho.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 7

For filmmakers who often endure years of obscurity and hard work in order to make a film, dreams are important … Hollywood is sometimes called a “city of dreams,” but in Korea, young filmmakers often realize their dreams in Busan, Jeonju, or Bucheon.

is not large, BiFan has helped to sustain this community by giving their works a place to meet with supportive viewers.

For filmmakers who often endure years of obscurity and hard work in order to make a film, dreams are important. Not only that, in this day and age, the way a film is introduced to the audience is crucial. The audiences at BIFF or in Jeonju are not ordinary viewers but people with a particularly avid interest in cinema.

When they find a film they like, word of mouth starts to spread, and comments or short reviews appear online. A director’s reputation begins to take shape.

Imagine instead that a filmmaker introduced a film directly through a theatrical release. In the ruthlessly competitive distribution environment where small films are at an extreme disadvantage, a film like “Lost to Shame” would simply disappear without attracting any attention. This is one reason why film festivals, and the film culture that supports them, are so important to filmmakers.

Cinema as Conversation Meanwhile, alongside Haeundae Beach, a 10-minute walk from where Nam Yeon-woo was presenting his feature, another sort of event was taking place.

The major distributor N.E.W. was holding a party for the distribution companies around the world which had bought the hit film “Train to Busan.” The story of a mysterious zombie virus that rages out of control on a KTX high-speed train, “Train to Busan” sold more than 11 million tickets in Korea to rank as the bestselling movie of the year. But perhaps even more remarkable was the unprecedented success the film enjoyed in foreign countries like Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and France. The mood at the party in Busan was buoyant — after all, many of the distributors in attendance had earned a lot of money from this film.

The director, Yeon Sang-ho, is no stranger to the Busan International Film Festival. His debut feature, a low-budget animated film about school bullying, titled “The King of Pigs,” won three awards at BIFF in 2011 and went on to screen at the Director’s Fortnight section in Cannes the following year. His second animated feature, the dark philosophical “The Fake,” was one of the most talked-about films at the 2012 BIFF. Although his style in these early films is far from mainstream, N.E.W. believed in his talent and financed the big-budget “Train to Busan,” despite the industry superstition that zombie movies never work in Korea. The gamble paid off more handsomely than anyone could have predicted.

Ironically, “Train to Busan” was not included in BIFF’s program this year. This was due to a partial boycott by filmmakers vowing to defend the festival’s independence from political pressure. A two-year-old conflict with the City of Busan over the screening of the controversial documentary “Diving Bell: The Truth Shall Not Sink with Sewol” in 2014 led to the ouster of former festival director 8 KOREANA Winter 2016

1 On the eve of BIFF every year, the BIFF Square in Nampo-dong, Busan, is crowded with film fans enjoying the festivities. The photo shows the crowd gathered on October 1, 2014 for the 19th BIFF pre-opening events.

2 Director Lee Joon-ik and the stars of his movie “The Throne” (aka “Sado”) greet the audience at an outdoor event for the 20th BIFF, held on October 1–10, 2015.

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Lee Yong-kwan. Over the past year in particular, BIFF’s status as a home for controversial, outspoken, and often uncomfortable films has been a source of heated debate.

Just as a film festival represents an ideal space for filmmakers to reach a supportive audience, it is also the best place for people to discuss the various issues raised by socially conscious films. This too is an element of the film culture — a widespread, continually evolving conversation that takes place between filmmakers, viewers, critics, and cultural commentators over important issues of our time.

Close to a decade ago, I got to interview the successful Hong Kong director Peter Ho-sun Chan (“The Warlords,” “Comrades: Almost a Love Story”). During the interview, he admitted that he was highly envious of Korea’s film audience. “The audience in Korea is very smart,” he said. “They have great taste, and they support innovative, well-made films.”

In the years since, the Korean audience has grown more diverse, with older viewers now visiting the the-

ater more often than ever before. And it’s clear that through big hits like “Train to Busan,” and also through smaller independent works like “Lost to Shame,” film plays a prominent role in the country’s cultural conversations. This is not true of every country, particularly those in which Hollywood films dominate and local films occupy a very small slice of the market.

A Personal Story When I first moved to Korea in 1997, I knew next to nothing about Korean cinema. Just a few weeks after my arrival, I attended the 2nd Busan International Film Festival and was overwhelmed and thrilled by the audience’s enthusiasm.

Since then I have attended every edition of the festival, and gone on to build a career writing and teaching about Korean cinema. Sometimes people ask me which film inspired me to focus on Korean cinema. But the truth is, what hooked me first was the film culture I experienced in Busan, and the lively conversations about film that took place all around me rather than any one film in particular.

In a similar way, people may wonder how contemporary Korean cinema has become so dynamic, but I think we need to look beyond the films and filmmakers. Underneath it all is Korea’s strong film culture. In most circumstances, a vibrant film culture will ultimately produce quality local films. This is why the film culture is important, and why it needs to be defended.

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SPECIAL FEATURE 2 Korean Cinema of the 21st Century: Dynamics and Dreams

KOREAN CINEMA IN THE 21ST CENTURY

MANY FACES OF ARRIVAL

Huh Moon-young Film Critic Cine21 Photographs

It’s less than two decades since the turn of the century, but if we look at how far Korean cinema has come today, the 20th century seems like ancient history. Changes in the domestic film industry have been immense in the 21st century. And yet, Korea has still not marked out its own territory on the world’s movie map.

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n Korea, up until the 1980s it was not hip to go see Korean movies. For a long time, most Koreans tended to dismiss domestic productions for being down-market tearjerkers. In the 1960s, Korean movies were diverse and distinctive in their own way, but over the next 20 years the industry’s development was hampered by restrictions and censorship under dictatorial regimes, as well as the fast growing popularity of television. Political and social changes thereafter sparked a renaissance in Korean cinema in the mid-1990s. New movements were led by intelligent, and intrepid, young producers and ambitious directors with an artistic eye. Korean movies achieved huge advances in terms of artistry and commercial appeal.

International perceptions began to change as well. In the mid-1990s, a Korean studying film in Paris might well have been asked, “Do you make movies in Korea?” Except for a handful of film experts, very few foreign film enthusiasts had even seen a Korean production. But things changed markedly entering the 21st century. Korean works were invited to prestigious international film festivals and won major awards. And a new generation of directors who had debuted in the latter half of the 1990s, such as Hong Sang-soo, Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, and Bong Joon-ho, attracted a sizeable following among overseas audiences.

Rapid Development Few countries have seen such rapid growth of their film industry as Korea. The number of movie tickets sold exploded from 61.69 million in 2000 to 217.3 million in 2015, while the number of domestic productions jumped more than fourfold, from 57 to 232, and the number of screens surged from 720 to 2,424 during the same period. Box office reve-

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The red carpet event for the VIP screening of “Train to Busan,” held on July 18, 2016 at the Yeongdeungpo Time Square, in Seoul, attracts a huge crowd. This gala event for the opening of a Korean disaster blockbuster shows a slice of Korea's film industry of the 21st century.

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nues hit 2.11 trillion won (about $1.83 billion) in 2015, compared to 1.52 trillion won in 2005. (No accurate box office data prior to 2005 is available.) Still, this is nothing compared to China’s film market. After recording an unbelievable 64.3 percent growth rate in 2010, China’s film industry has continued to surge 30 percent per year. And with the number of movies viewed per capita standing at a mere 0.92 in 2015, robust growth is forecast in the years ahead. Except for China, however, Korea has experienced more rapid expansion of its film industry than almost any other country.

The most remarkable growth is found in the number of movies viewed per capita. In 2000, each Korean saw an average of 1.3 movies. This figure more than doubled to 2.95 in 2005, and then reached 4.17 in 2013, and 4.22 in 2015.

These numbers are especially noteworthy compared to the corresponding figures for 2013: 4.0 in the United States, 3.14 in France, 2.61 in the UK, 1.59 in Germany, and 1.22 in Japan. Even in India, which produces more movies than any other country in the world (1,602 titles in 2013), the per capita figure stood at 1.55.

So, what is the driving force behind these amazing numbers? One possible answer is the government’s film promotion policies. Under a strict screen quota system, each movie screen must show local movies for at least 73 days a year. Directors also receive support from various sources, including the Korean Film Council,

1 Im Kwon-taek’s “Chunhyang” (2000) is the first Korean movie ever selected for the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival.

2 A scene from Lee Chang-dong's “Oasis” (2002), the love story of a woman with cerebral palsy and a social misfit.

3 Choi Min-sik acts as the genius artist Jang Seung-eop of the late 19th-century Joseon Dynasty in “Painted Fire” (2002), director Im Kwon-taek’s 98th feature film.

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regional film committees, local governments, and international film festivals. Once again, aside from China, which imposes strict restrictions on the import of foreign movies, Korea provides the highest level of support for promotion of domestic films.

Thanks to a variety of support measures, the box office has come to be dominated by Korean productions. In 2013, domestic titles held a market share of 59.7 percent and have since continued to account for around half the market, standing at 50.1 percent in 2014 and 52.0 percent in 2015. Aside from the United States and India, where domestic films captured market shares of 94.6 percent and 94.0 percent respectively in 2013, Korea is a rare country where local titles are more popular than American movies, along with China (58.6 percent) and Japan (60.6 percent). Corresponding figures were 33.8 percent in France and 22.1 percent in the UK (including co-productions with other countries).

Other factors contributing to expansion of the Korean film market include the lifting of censorship and the emergence of a growing number of talented young directors. Of course, the market has now clearly entered a new phase. As thresholds are reached in the number of movies viewed per capita and the number of available screens, and as film promotion policies run their course, growth patterns are bound to change in the future.

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Attempts to generalize the character of movies originating from a particular region can create preconceptions that lead people to overlook the unique strengths of individual films. Nevertheless, an indefinable regional color is ingrained, sometimes indelibly, in movies sharing a common origin. Then, what is it that makes Korean movies Korean?

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State of Korean Cinema In 2000 Im Kwon-taek’s “Chunhyang” became the first Korean film selected for the official competition section of the Cannes Film Festival since the festival’s inauguration in 1946, marking a breakthrough for Korean cinema. While a nomination for Cannes’ Palme d’Or is by no means the ultimate standard, it can be said that heretofore Korean productions simply did not exist on the world’s movie map, charted out by Western film professionals and critics. “The Oxford History of World Cinema” (Oxford University Press), published in 1966, does not mention a single Korean movie; in other film-related publications Korea was invisible as well.

But things started to change at the turn of the century. In 2002, Im Kwon-taek won the Best Director Award at Cannes for “Painted Fire.” In 2004, Park Chan-wook won the Grand Prix for “Oldboy” and in 2009 the Jury Prize for “Thirst.” Meanwhile, in 2007 Jeon Do-yeon won the Best Actress Award for her role in Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine”; the director himself won the Best Screenplay Award in 2010 for “Poetry.” Three of Hong Sang-soo’s works and two of Lim Sang-soo’s works were selected for the main competition at Cannes, though they failed to receive any prize.

At the 2002 Venice Film Festival, Lee Chang-dong’s “Oasis” won the Special Director’s Award and lead actress Moon So-ri won the New Actress Award. Kim Kiduk earned the Best Director Award for “Samaritan Girl” in 2004 at the Berlin Film Festival, and for “3-Iron” at the Venice Film Festival the same year. He also captured the Golden Lion for best movie at the 2012 Venice Film Festival for “Pieta.”

With these notable achievements over the past 10 years or so, Korean cinema has been earning high acclaim from international audiences in the 21st century. And

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©Busan International Film Festival, Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival

1 A scene from “The Face Reader” (2013), directed

by Han Jae-rim. Kim Hye-soo acts as Yeonhong, a seductive entertainer and face reader.

2 An iconic scene from “The Thieves” (2012), directed

by Choi Dong-hoon, a comic action thriller featuring 10 thieves chasing one diamond.

3 A scene from “The Chaser” (2008), directed by Na Hong-jin. The thriller features a serial murderer, his victims, and a pimp and former police detective who chases the murderer.

4 A scene from “Veteran” (2015), directed by Ryoo Seung-wan. The film depicts the underworld life of a third-generation conglomerate heir.

5 A scene from “The Handmaiden” (2016), the latest much talked-about film by Park Chan-wook.

6 A Scene from “Jeon Woochi: The Taoist Wizard” (2009), directed by Choi Dong-hoon, a comic hero movie set in the Joseon period.

yet, we can’t really say Korea has carved out a prominent position for itself on the world’s movie scene. Every 10 years the British film magazine Sight & Sound releases a list of “The Greatest Films of All Time,” based on a survey of film critics and directors from around the world. For the 2012 list, no Korean film made it into the top 100. Of course, this was not unexpected. But of the six Asian films that have made the annual top ten lists since 2000, none are Korean.

There’s no real need to take these lists too seriously. They will continue to change in the future, and many movies, as always, will come to receive greater acclaim in the days ahead, rather than at the present. But Korea’s absence from these lists seems to indicate that many film experts do not regard Korean works to be at the vanguard of film aesthetics.

Here, we need to reflect on the designation “Korean movie.” It contains a subtle dualism, as do the tags “Indian movie” or “British movie.”

That is, it’s not clear whether these labels simply denote country of origin or express some greater common point of reference. Attempts to generalize the character of movies originating from a particular region can create preconceptions that lead people to overlook the unique strengths of individual films. Nevertheless, an indefinable regional color is ingrained, sometimes indelibly, in movies sharing a common origin. Then, what is it that makes Korean movies Korean? In other words, what regional character can be found in the creations of filmmakers such as Hong Sang-soo, Bong Joon-ho, and Lee Chang-dong, as well as those of Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk?

There is no simple answer to this question because their movies actually have very little in common. The works of Hong Sang-soo and Kim Ki-duk may belong to a branch of European modernism, while those of Park Chanwook and Bong Joon-ho (and occasionally Kim Ki-duk) can be seen as aesthetic variations of “Asian extreme.” In other words, Korean cinema is a conglomeration of diverse film types that cannot be defined by any single regional character, an aspect that makes Korea’s location on the world’s movie map unclear.

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1 1 Actor Song Kang-ho and actress Kim Ok-bin in a scene from “Thirst” (2009), a thriller featuring a priest turned vampire, directed by Park Chan-wook.

2 Hwang Jung-min acts as a shaman in “The Wailing” (2016), directed by Na Hong-jin, set in a rural village where a series of mysterious killings take place.

3 A scene from “The High Rollers” (2006), directed

by Choi Dong-hoon, featuring a band of underground gamblers.

4 A scene from “King and the Clown” (2005), directed by Lee Joonik, which claimed to be the “first royal court burlesque” in Korean film history.

5 Jun Ji-hyun plays a lead role in “Assassination” (2015), directed

by Choi Dong-hoon.

Critics praised it as the first Korean movie to feature a woman at the center of the resistance movement against Japanese colonial rule.

2 ©Busan International Film Festival

3

4

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5

Directors with Diverse Leanings Korean cinema today is so diverse that it cannot be summed up in a few general characteristics. For the sake of discussion, they can be divided into four broad categories.

The first category can be called “national realism.” Without question, the leader here is Im Kwon-taek. This giant, who has long been the poster boy of Korean cinema, concentrated on mainstream fare in his youth, but from the mid-1970s he struggled to bring a new aesthetic to “national cinema.” He released his 102nd movie, “Revivre,” in 2012. Another legitimate member of this group is Lee Changdong, a moralist who stands on the opposite side of inveterate pleasure-seeking in film. He has been inactive since his release of “Poetry” in 2010. Im Sang-soo, who directed “The Housemaid” (2010) and “The Taste of Money” (2012), also belongs here, though he is much more of a free spirit. These directors have focused on Korea’s regional characteristics in their depictions of historical incidents and reallife absurdities. Also tying them together is the priority placed on theme over style and form. An upcoming younger-generation director who is willing to take on this type of national cinema has yet to appear.

The second category is “modernism.” Hong Sang-soo and Kim Ki-duk can be

placed in this category but their differences are greater than their similarities. Through innovation of form, Hong Sang-soo seeks to create a new sense of reality, whereas Kim Ki-duk is engrossed with the notion of salvation through physical suffering. A handful of younger directors are making films that could be seen in this light, but none of them is widely known yet.

The third category is “genre innovation.”

Directors who belong here are those who have earned a measure of popular and critical acclaim, including Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Kim Jee-woon, and Ryoo seung-wan.

With a fanboy background, they are all captivated by B-grade movies, or genre movies. Their own mixed-genre creations are based on thrillers or action movies with a smattering of comedy and horror and other elements thrown in.

Though mass-audience-friendly, these films at times also reveal aspects of the stubborn stylist. In this category as well, the directors show noticeable differences from one another. Park Chan-wook reinterprets classical tragedies as genre movies while Bong Joon-ho fuses regional politics with genre film dynamics. Ryoo Seung-wan and Kim Jee-woon never abandon fanboy tendencies even when tackling relevant issues. Of these genre innovation films, Bong Joon-ho’s “The Host” (2006) and Ryoo Seungwan’s “The Berlin File” (2015) attracted over 10 million viewers each and have come to serve as a model for many of their fellow filmmakers.

Among them is Na Hong-jin who has come to notice for “The Chaser” (2008), “The Yellow Sea” (2010), and most recently “The Wailing” (2016).

The fourth category is mainstream movies, under which the greatest number of directors fall. For some time, the leader was Kang Woo-suk, but from the mid-2000s he has been replaced by such figures as Choi Dong-hoon and Youn Je-kyun. Indeed, Choi Dong-hoon already has two 10-million-viewer mega-hits under his belt, and all five of his films, from his 2004 debut work “The Big Swindle” to “Assassination” in 2015, have enjoyed commercial success.

It is hard to say that any one category speaks for Korean cinema better than the others. The very diversity generated by these directors is shaping the dizzying yet dynamic face of Korean cinema.

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SPECIAL FEATURE 3 Korean Cinema of the 21st Century: Dynamics and Dreams

THE RISE OF

POWERFUL DIRECTORS Movie directors who have accomplished the “miraculous” feat of earning both commercial success and recognition as “auteur” are no longer rare. Acclaim at a prestigious international film festival can serve as a springboard for the box office success of auteur directors in the domestic market. These powerful directors are now dominating the Korean film scene.

Kang Seung-ryul Film Critic; Professor, Kwangwoon University Cine21 Photographs

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he director wields more power than anyone else on the film set in Korea. This can be a risky generalization, since it’s not true for every director. But still, many exert vast power despite the ever-increasing clout of media conglomerates that have vertically integrated film investment with distribution and screening. Noted directors with megahits which have attracted more than 10 million viewers are setting up their own production companies. Some place their wives in the CEO role while they write their own scripts and are actively involved in the casting, editing, and post production. In other words, these star directors have acquired full control of the entire filmmaking process.

In this sense, it can be said that “auteurism” describes almost all the currently active Korean directors. Here, we seek to chart the topography of Korean film today by pairing big-name directors.

Kim Ki-duk and Hong Sang-soo Kim Ki-duk and Hong Sang-soo were both born in 1960 and debuted in 1996. Kim made his debut with “Crocodile” and Hong with “The Day a Pig Fell into the Well,” which both generated a lot of buzz.

They continued to release movies almost every year, which were generally well received at international film festivals. Both directors are known for the distinct worldview that is infused in their movies, and although they haven’t enjoyed huge box office success at home, their favorable reception abroad means that their fame and reputation are not likely to wane anytime soon.

The premise of Kim’s movies is “sick capitalism.” They are known for blunt and explicit portrayals of marginalized men stuck at the very bottom of the social ladder, who lead a brutish life in a distressed capitalist society. In “Pieta” (2012), Kim brings together all the cinematic elements of his past works and goes a step further. The movie is set in the dark alleyways and rundown shops of Sewoon Shopping Center in Cheonggyecheon, downtown Seoul, once a symbol of industrialization but now facing demolition. There, loan sharks resort to all manner of inhumane acts to get the poor workers to pay up. The story centers around a man who threatens, beats up, and extorts money from people; the extent of his cruelty makes him look like an incarnation of evil, a monster spawned

Veteran directors with 20-year careers, Hong Sang-soo (opposite) and Kim Ki-duk have delved into recurrent themes in their movies.

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by a capitalistic society. But as the story develops, Kim has the character look back on his life and repent, and even superimposes the image of Christ’s sacrifice on him at the end of the movie.

Hong Sang-soo closely adheres to similar themes and characters in all of his films. This can be viewed either as a manifestation of auteurism, or his own mannerism. His movies expose male-female relationships that are stripped of any romance or fantasy. His characters indulge in sensual relationships, usually starting with a drinking party and ending up at a motel, where the display and gratification of desires leave no room for love to blossom. Hong reproduces the many faces of such desire through stylistic experimentation. His movie “Right Now, Wrong Then,” which won the Golden Leopard at the 2015 Locarno

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International Film Festival, features a movie director who meets a young woman in Suwon, with whom he spends the day and ends up getting drunk. The movie is split into parts one and two, each telling the same story but showing two different versions of how things pan out. The juxtapositional structure gives us pause to ponder about life and art.

Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho take the genre film conventions of Hollywood and adapt and indigenize them to fit the Korean situation, ingeniously telling the stories that they want.

Hence, they are more popular than Kim Ki-duk or Hong Sangsoo. Park uses the mystery thriller genre to explore the recurring themes of the burden of guilt and revenge, whereas Bong

shrewdly captures the structural contradictions of Korean society. Another common feature is that, while on the surface their movies appear to follow the conventions of genre films, they are based on creative, imaginative stories.

Widely perceived as a logical and intelligent director, probably more so than any other Korean filmmaker, interestingly, Park leans heavily toward the sentiment of B-grade movies. But he sees them not as low-quality flicks but a genre replete with a subversive imagination that is beyond the boundaries of A movies, with his artistic creativity making up for time and budget constraints. Park’s “Oldboy” (2003) epitomizes his cinematic world. It is the story of the oppressive burden of guilt and vengeance containing incestuous elements; the guilt of not having been able to protect one’s sister and the guilt of not having protected one’s wife and daughter spark vengeance, but when this falls through, it only leads to further irrational acts of revenge.

As for Bong, he has a knack for infusing grotesque humor into his films, which often feature slow-witted characters thrown into an overwhelming situation that they just can’t handle. What makes these stories intriguing is that as events unfold, the structural inconsistencies of Korean society are uncovered and laid bare. For example, in “Memories of Murder” (2003), which is based on the true story of an unresolved serial rape and murder case in the late 1980s, Bong portrays the incompetence of the police and their clumsy investigative methods with elaborate attention to detail.

Im Kwon-taek and Lee Chang-dong Im Kwon-taek and Lee Chang-dong deal with more serious, weighty material in their movies.

Im debuted in the early 1960s and is still a prolific director with more than 100 movies to his credit.

“Sopyonje” is one of his most notable works, which broke his own previous box office record when it was released in 1993. The period movie’s theme of pansori (traditional Korean narrative song) and its adoption of a Western cinematic style garnered widespread acclaim and attention.

Lee is a writer-turned-movie director. Like his realist novels, his movies delve into unfortunate events in modern Korean history or depict the weary lives of people today. Whereas Bong Joon-ho takes a direct approach in exposing the structural inconsistencies of our society, Lee prefers to take a

Im Kwon-taek (opposite), master of the national realism genre, and Lee Chang-dong, successor of the genre.

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But still, many exert vast power despite the ever-increasing clout of media conglomerates that have vertically integrated film investment with distribution and screening ‌ In other words, these star directors have acquired full control of the entire filmmaking process.

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step back as if calmly contemplating the situation.

Lee’s most noted work is “Poetry” (2010). It opens with a scene of children playing on a river bank when the body of a middle-school girl floats by. The movie traces the events that led to her death and how the fathers of the boys responsible for the incident attempt to cover up the involvement of their sons. Using poetry as a literary device, the death of the girl and the associated death of an old lady (who is the lead character) are given a deeper meaning.

Na Hong-jin and Yeon Sang-ho At the forefront of independent films and the Korean New Wave, which shows where Korean cinema is headed, are directors Na Hong-jin and Yeon Sang-ho. Na has created his own distinctive cinematic world with a predilection for cruelty, and yet he is widely loved by the public. Teeming with violence and gore, his movies show how a person driven to the brink can turn into a cold-blooded monster. In “The Wailing” (2016), Na takes this to extremes: a series of mysterious deaths plaguing a secluded rural village; the arrival of a strange newcomer shrouded in mystery and the spread of eerie rumors; the inclusion of elements of the occult — an evil spirit from which there is no escape — and shamanism. With the placement of metaphors and foreshadowing throughout the movie, Na offers viewers hair-raising enjoyment.

Yeon scored a box office hit with his first liveaction film “Train to Busan” (2016), which drew over 10 million viewers, but his animated films have not fared so well. After “Train to Busan,” he went right back to animation with “Seoul Station.” He has written and directed many short and feature-length animated films geared toward adults that deal with controversial themes set in social institutions, such as a school, the military, and religious organizations, delivering biting social commentary through the depiction of “monsters” that our society has created.

It is interesting to note that the recent works of both Na and Yeon have featured invincible zombies. What is suggested by the fact that these Korean New Wave and indie directors have found huge commercial success with their zombie flicks, a relatively new genre in Korea? What does it say about our times?

Park Chan-wook (opposite) and Bong Joon-ho take the genre film conventions of Hollywood and ingeniously adapt them to the Korean situation to tell their own stories.

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SPECIAL FEATURE 4 Korean Cinema of the 21st Century: Dynamics and Dreams

FIVE HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL POPULAR FILMS Hahn Dong-won Film Columnist Cine21 Photographs

There certainly are reasons for a commercially successful film. However, when filmmakers repeat elements of their previous success in new works, cinema fans eventually have to pay a price: they must endure the rampant self-duplication and standardization.

ŠBusan International Film Festival

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here’s a saying in the Korean film industry: “Ten-millionviewer films are a jackpot from heaven.” Nobody knows which film will be blessed. As such, instead of making forecasts, there has been a deluge of post-hoc analyses, which have identified a set of essential elements behind the successful films.

Inspiring National Sentiment The first element is a story that inspires national sentiment. The movies that have attracted millions of viewers by stirring the strong national ardor of Koreans include “The Admiral: Roaring Currents” (2014), “Ode to My Father” (2014), and “Taeguki: The Brotherhood of War’ (2004). It could be said that “Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015) also benefited from this tendency as the Hollywood film made a tidy profit in Korea by shooting some action scenes in Seoul, even out of the dramatic context.

The second ingredient is criticism of the privileged class. Applying this proven success code, “Assassination” (2015) rekindled the latent rage of Koreans against the descendants of pro-Japanese collaborators who have retained their social and economic privileges over seven decades since national liberation; “Veteran” (2015) aroused public resentment against the wrongdoings committed by third-generation conglomerate heirs; “Masquerade” (2012) provoked outrage with politicians for indulging in wasteful partisan struggles in disregard of the public’s welfare; “The Attorney” (2013) stirred antipathy for the then president; and “The Host” (2006) roused public indignation over the environmental pollution caused by the U.S. Forces Korea as well as their privileged status here and the Korean government’s alarming lack of capability to cope with disasters. (The recent “Train to Busan” had a similar approach.)

The third factor is timing. “Frozen” (2014) premiered during the Christmas season; “The Attorney” at a time when the public’s disenchantment with the incumbent government resulted in a nostalgia for the previous administration; “Assassination” just ahead of Liberation Day (with a storyline about one of the most despised proJapanese collaborators that alluded to a chaebol family then waging a nasty internal feud); and “Veteran” when news about corruption and immorality among the heirs of business tycoons dismayed the general public.

Quest for Quality The fourth key element is the Korean audience’s receptiveness to high-quality films with timely themes and engaging stories.

In fact, nothing is more hackneyed, and also inaccurate, than the assumption that highly successful films must be essentially banal.

This is not true, at least in Korea. To say that is neither flattery nor complacency. All 18 movies that have attracted more than 10 million viewers in Korea testify to the keen discernment of local cinema-goers. Titles like “King and the Clown” (2005), “Interstellar” (2014), “The Thieves” (2012), “Assassination,” “Masquerade,” and “The Host” are well-made even if they may fall short of being “mas-

terpieces.” In addition, “Avatar” (2009), “Veteran,” “The Attorney,” “Silmido” (2003), “Frozen,” “Train to Busan,” and “The Admiral” are also of a quality that makes their popularity convincing, so long as one is not overly critical. Individual differences in evaluation notwithstanding, it is reasonable to say that about 70 percent of the 18 ten-million-viewer movies are better than average.

Relying on Star Actors As for the fifth element needed to make a mega-hit, the capability, popularity, and reliability of the directors and actors are critical. Directors like Choi Dong-hoon, Bong Joon-ho, Lee Joon-ik, and Christopher Nolan have gained the confidence of Korean audiences with their capacity to satisfy popular tastes while preserving (or seeming to preserve) their interests and originality — that is, their ability to balance movie quality and box-office performance. Youn Je-kyun is another talented director and producer, although his work (like “Tidal Wave” from 2009) has been consistently labeled as “benchmarking of Hollywood blockbusters,” while critical response to his films has varied as well. As for actors, Oh Dal-su has earned the nickname “the ten-million fairy” for his mostly supporting roles in a number of films that exceeded the coveted magic number of ticket sales. But as suggested in the saying, “Baseball is a game of pitchers, and filmmaking of leading actors,” reliable actors like Song Kang-ho, Choi Min-sik, Hwang Jung-min, and Lee Byunghun, who are known for their on-screen aura and performance, are essential for big box-office successes.

Incidentally, global warming could also be counted as a factor, especially this past summer, because it boosted the number of people seeking relief from the sweltering heat in the air-conditioned coolness of the cinema.

Soundtracks that are Far Too Kind At any rate, past success alone is no guarantee that the good fortune will continue. Even so, the key elements that have proved successful in previous films have an undeniable importance for investors. Filmmaking is a high-cost, high-risk, high-reward business, and the ever-increasing costs for production and marketing are raising the stakes even higher. Since investors seek to minimize risk and uncertainty, the abovementioned success factors — especially of the recent mega-hit films — are still likely to wield considerable influence over production.

In today’s Korean film industry, a handful of major distributors dominate the entire process of investment, distribution, and screening under a vertically integrated system. They account for over 90 percent of the market (based on ticket sales), and are extending their grip on new media platforms, such as VOD, IPTV, and DMB. Moreover, the monopoly has gone almost unchecked. Under these circumstances, it is natural for proven elements to remain at the forefront, shaping the quality and style of future films.

One of the most obvious common traits is the way music is KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 25

ŠBusan International Film Festival

If the market were structured in a way that three or so customers bought up approximately 90 percent of, say, all the pies baked, the bakers would not go to the trouble of satisfying the variegated tastes of those buying the remaining 10 percent. Naturally, their highest priority would be appeasing the appetites of the three big buyers....

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applied. Listen to the soundtracks of the so-called Korean blockbusters released in recent years, including those made with relatively large investments and more than two big stars. Most of their scores seem to readily set up the audience for what they should feel during a certain scene. Sad or solemn scenes overflow with adagios that sound as if all the string sections of all the orchestras in the world are playing together. And then, comic scenes providing relief from the dramatic tension are filled with scampering melodies of the double bass and woodwinds interspersed with countless brief rests. This kind of “emotional cuing” goes so far as to dictate a specific emotion, sometimes even in advance. Using predictable scores is an age-old practice in Hollywood, known as “mickey-mousing.”

Implying that the audience has no more capacity for concentration and understanding than young children who enjoy Mickey Mouse cartoons, this term is rather insulting to the audience, but also quite fitting.

“Pictures with scores like that are probably not injured by them.

Chances are the music is not the only cliché in the movie. It’s probably loaded with them,” said Sidney Lumet, a master Hollywood director. His observation holds true for Korean movies today, especially those with “tear-jerker” endings.

In line with the emotional traits and disposition of Koreans, who like to experience intense catharsis, whether from laughter, rage, or sorrow, the formula of “nine bursts of laughter and one bout of weeping” has been exploited so frequently that it has practically become an industry standard. For this “one bout of weeping,” many recent films have been all too willing to adopt overly contrived situations or an implausible turn of events. Too often, the characters try to squeeze tears from the audience by weeping and wailing themselves, before you can appreciate the sadness. Now, the weeping is prolonged; the acting and directing are excessive; and the orchestra tears your eardrums with tragic melodies. The screen and the speakers are determined to drive the audience to a good cry before letting them out of the theater.

Repetition of Social Themes Korean television was once dominated by “makjang (dead-end) dramas,” which sought to attract viewers with increasingly outrageous subplots and characters. As this trend showed, exposure to repeated stimuli will blunt the audience response, calling for more dramatic stimulation to get the same effect.

Perhaps, the most evident indicator of movies caught in the trap of “something stronger” can be seen in the sub-genre called “action noir as social criticism.” Featuring characters in positions of power, such as prosecutors, politicians, journalists, business tycoons, and police officials, these films attempt to portray their underhanded practices and covert strife as realistically as possible.

This genre, specific to Korean film, has arisen and grown from the extremes of Korea’s competitive society, institutional absurdity, eco-

nomic polarization, and lack of political interaction. Most Koreans empathize with the message of these movies, as demonstrated by their box-office results. In these films, audiences can enjoy a temporary escape from the frustrating reality of their society and an indirect way of expressing their opinions.

One thing that is overlooked, however, is how these social commentaries seem unable or unwilling to overcome their own cinematic/aesthetic tautology and self-duplication. Duplication is undoubtedly one of the basic properties of cinema as a genre. But recent Korean productions claiming to be “action noir as social criticism” look too much like identical twins, only packaged with different names and outfits. Every film seems to build characters first by arranging a pack of cards on the table, with each card representing a character type, such as a prosecutor, policeman, business tycoon, journalist, or gangster. Then, selected characters are shuffled together to produce something similar to the signature roles of famous actors. The only variation seems to be the level of criticism and the degree of explicit description in the story.

The idle practice of repeating the successful elements of previous films with little variation, and the consequent standardization of the genre, is not simply about filmmakers’ capabilities and attitudes. And the fact that Korea’s aspiring directors take the “Robert McKee Manual” as their Bible may not be the cause, either. At the root of this self-duplication and standardization is the desire of big capital, through its control of the entire movie-making process, to come up with the next “ten-million-viewer film.”

For instance, if the market were structured in a way that three or so customers bought up approximately 90 percent of, say, all the pies baked, the bakers would not go to the trouble of satisfying the variegated tastes of those buying the remaining 10 percent. Naturally, their highest priority would be appeasing the appetites of the three big buyers, who have the power to provide the ingredients, assistant cooks, ovens, trucks, and even display cases. They thus control the distribution channels to sell the ten-million pies baked.

How many cooks would dare to ignore, or defy, such power?

Eventually, it is the viewers who pay the price. Today, most cinema screens are occupied by the films with the strongest profit potential, with stories and styles not much different from those presented not long ago. There are ever fewer screens for small, lowbudget films, if only for brief runs. Furthermore, the big buyers are reaching out to influence the so-called “art house” market as well.

It took only 15 years for Korean cinema to achieve its robust growth of today. Korean film fans have grown not only in numbers but also in discernment, thanks in part to the filmmakers who have struggled to defend their originality in the face of commercial pressures and restraints. In light of what happened in the advanced film industries of Hong Kong and Japan at the time when Korean cinema was still developing, no one can deny that the appearance of similar symptoms in Korea is an unmistakable warning sign.

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SPECIAL FEATURE 5 Korean Cinema of the 21st Century: Dynamics and Dreams

MOVIE STARS THAT KOREAN AUDIENCES LOVE Movie actors and actresses are a mirror of the times. So who are the favorite film stars of Korean audiences today? On whom do we project our dreams and aspirations? Here we picked out three who have dominated the big screen and seem set to continue to do so for quite a while.

Lee Hwa-jung Reporter, Cine21 Cine21 Photographs

Song Kang-ho Tectonic Shift that Began 20 Years Ago With the success of his most recent movie “The Age of Shadows” (2016), Song Kang-ho has become the first actor in the history of Korean cinema to attract a cumulative 100 million viewers for the movies he has headlined. His achievements cannot be gauged by numbers alone, but the 22 movies that he has starred in during his 20-year career are sufficient proof of why he is widely regarded as one of Korea’s greatest and most influential screen actors.

Song Kang-ho is the face of our day, shaped by the changing times. He made his mark as a third-rate gangster in “No. 3” in 1997. It was a minor role but he captivated audiences with his comic acting, heightened by his strong Busan accent. Koreanstyle gangster movies combining comedy and action were enjoying a boom at the time, and Song just seemed to be a standout among the many supporting actors in that genre. Unknown to many, his entry into the movie scene had set off a tectonic shift in the Korean movie industry.

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Song did not fit the movie star mold of that time. He did not have the chiseled features of popular actors, and his Busan accent was far from chic. Back then, no one thought that he would one day become a household name, helping to attract audiences of over 10 million each with “The Host” (2006) and “The Attorney” (2013), and break into the Hollywood scene with “Snowpiercer” (2013).

Firmly grounded in the solid acting skills he cultivated on stage, Song’s understated naturalistic style, coupled with his distinctive accent and gestures, were a fresh departure from the norm. Director Park Chan-wook, who worked with Song on such films as “Joint Security Area” (2000) — in which Song gives an impressive, pathosfilled performance as North Korean Sergeant Oh Kyeong-pil, solidifying his status as a leading actor — “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” (2002) and “Thirst” (2009), describes Song’s acting: “I think the word that defines Song Kang-ho’s 20 years of acting is ‘modernity’ — modernity in acting.

He started out in genre movies, but eventually expanded his scope to encompass

all types of movies. I think that is what’s so special about him.”

Song does not hesitate to work with new directors. Han Jae-rim, who worked with Song on his second movie, “The Show Must Go On” (2007), recalls how Song willingly agreed to do it without even seeing the screenplay, though he had already worked with several prominent directors. Song has one rule for choosing the movies he wants to do; he steers clear of similar characters to avoid being typecast.

The keyword of Song’s acting is the “ordinary man.” “I get offered a lot of those roles. They’re right up my alley. I can’t picture myself playing the part of a super rich, intelligent guy or a melancholic character,” he says with a laugh. His characters that stand up for the regular guy have resonated deeply with audiences. In “The Show Must Go On,” he turns in a convincing performance as the underboss of an organized gang who struggles to provide for his family like any ordinary middle-aged man. In “Memories of Murder” (2003), he blurts out the impromptu question, “Have you eaten?” to show that detectives are human, too. In

“I can’t picture myself playing the part of a super rich, intelligent guy or a melancholic character.”

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“I just go with whatever speaks to my heart. I don’t obsess over having to play a different character from my previous works.”

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“The Host,” he plays an ordinary father who runs a small food stand with his family at the Han River Citizen’s Park. He then struggles against all odds to save his daughter from the monstrous creature that has abducted her. As for this type of character, the most prominent is Song Woo-seok in “The Attorney,” modeled after former president Roh Moo-hyun in his early years as a human rights lawyer. The court scene where he declares passionately, “Sovereignty lies with the people. All authority is granted by the people. The people are the nation!” is a brilliant example of Song’s powerful screen presence.

Regarding the close-up of Song’s face at the end of “Memories of Murder,” film critic Kim Yeong-jin says, “It is an expression that sums up an era in Korean history.” He goes on: “Song is an actor who is capable of internalizing any character he takes on and transforming it into a Song Kang-ho type persona.

He creates the aura of his character according to its occupation, social status, and personality, and in this sense he is an artist who brings the sensibilities of ordinary, everyday life to the screen.”

Song is currently shooting “Taxi Driver” in which he plays yet again an ordinary citizen, a taxi driver named Man-seop, who happens to pick up a German reporter and takes him to Gwangju, where the reporter risks his life to cover the May 18 Democratic Uprising of 1980.

Jeon Do-yeon world Star Respected by Fellow Actors On May 27, 2007, at the closing ceremony of the 60th Cannes Film Festival, Jeon Doyeon received the Best Actress award for her role in “Secret Sunshine” (2007) — the first such honor for a Korean. She earned critical acclaim for her intense performance as Shinae, a woman who has to live with the heartrending loss of her child. Jeon smiled radiantly as she accepted the trophy from actor Alain Delon. At the time, her co-star, Song Kang-ho, was mentioned as “one of the future faces of Cannes.” The modifier “world star” has been attached to Jeon’s name ever since.

Jeon worked part-time as a magazine model in high school, and began her acting career in TV dramas before turning to the big screen. Her baby-faced, plain looks didn’t stand out among the glamorous actresses and she was simply considered “a supporting actor who knows how to act.” Her debut film, “The Contact” (1997), produced by Myung Films, unlocked her star potential. To start with, she made some bold style choices for the role. Putting aside a desire to appear pretty on screen, she opted for light makeup and a rather ordinary short perm, a daring look for a lead actress at that time. With its modern directional style, the movie presented a new type of melodrama in Korean cinema, and Jeon played a key part in its novelty.

Jeon’s filmography covers a wide dramatic range: “A Promise” (1998), “The Harmonium in My Memory” (1999), “Happy End” (1999), “I Wish I Had a Wife” (2001), “No Blood No Tears” (2002), “Untold Scandal” (2003), “My Mother, the Mermaid” (2004), “You Are My Sunshine” (2005), “My Dear Enemy” (2008), “The Housemaid” (2010), and “Memories of the Sword” (2015). It’s hard to define in one word, for there doesn’t seem to be a common thread or a well-calculated purpose in her choice of movies or characters. In “Happy End,” Jeon took on the role of a woman who has an adulterous affair, acting some steamy love scenes. She said that the movie marked the start of the second act in her acting career. It is well known that when her parents expressed their concern about her starring in a sexually explicit movie, saying, “You won’t be able to marry if you do it,” Jeon persuaded them by responding, “You didn’t have me become an actress so that I could marry well, did you?”

Apart from “Secret Sunshine,” which she readily agreed to do because of director Lee Chang-dong and co-star Song Kang-ho, she chooses movies strictly based on the screenplay. If it’s convincing, then she shirks at nothing to fill the role.

“I can’t really pinpoint what I look for in a screenplay,” she says. “I just go with whatever speaks to my heart. I don’t obsess over having to play a different character from my KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 31

previous works. I realized early on that things don’t pan out the way you wanted or planned.

So, I just try to make the best choices when the opportunity comes my way.”

From the very beginning, looking gorgeous on screen has never been Jeon’s prime concern. To prepare for the action scenes required by her role as an underworld character in “No Blood No Tears,” she did 3,000 push-ups a day. As a female diver of Jeju Island in “My Mother, the Mermaid,” she didn’t hesitate to do the diving scenes, despite not being able to swim.

Jeon is respected by her fellow actors.

Gong Yoo, who starred opposite her in “A Man and A Woman” (2015), lavished praise on her acting: “She is a meticulous actress. She gives tremendous energy to other actors on the set.” Last summer, she generated enormous buzz for her return to the small screen in 11 years with the TV drama series “The Good Wife.” People are anxious to see what her next move will be.

Ha Jung-woo A Venturesome Star Actor Ha Jung-woo proved his star power once again with the runaway hit “Assassination” in 2015, which drew over 12.7 million moviegoers. Then in 2016, he further demonstrated his box office prowess with “The Handmaiden,” directed by Park Chan-wook, and “The Tunnel,” directed by Kim Seong-hun.

Ha’s first starring role was in the movie “The Unforgiven” (2005) by Yoon Jong-bin. Thereafter, he took on widely differing roles in films, such as Kim Ki-duk’s “Time” (2006) and “Breath” (2007), and Hong Sang-soo’s “Like You Know It All” (2009), consolidating his status as a screen idol.

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“It is better to do something and regret it afterward than regret not doing it.”

Ha was the vivid persona delivering the storylines of director Yoon Jong-bin’s “The Unforgiven,” “Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time” (2012), and “Kundo: Age of the Rampant” (2014). He was an icon of Na Hong-jin’s bloodcurdling movies, “The Chaser” (2008) and “The Yellow Sea” (2010), and the driving force behind large-scale projects, like Ryoo Seung-wan’s “The Berlin File” (2013) and Choi Dong-hoon’s “Assassination” (2015). His body of work runs the gamut from blockbusters to low-budget flicks to movies by first-time directors, such as Kim Byung-woo’s “The Terror Live” (2013).

Ha’s multifaceted talent as an actor who can shine in widely differing roles, from the heinous serial killer in “The Chaser” to the charismatic gang boss in “Nameless Gangster” and a novelist inept at romance in “Love Fiction” (2012), blows the mind. Behind his versatility is an arduous zeal to take on new challenges, and an unswerving self-confidence and jocularity that border on audacity. Audiences are easily captivated by the allure of his distinctive on-screen persona.

“The Unforgiven,” directed by Yoon Jong-bin for his graduation project at Chung-Ang University with a budget of just 20 million won (about $18,000), has been hailed as an exceptional work that exposed detestable abuses in the Korean military. The movie was invited to the Un Certain Regard section of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Ha teamed up with Yoon again on “Beastie Boys” (2008) and “Nameless Gangster.”

Despite his influence and star power, earning him the nickname “Great Ha,” he doesn’t have grand or ambitious plans for the future.

To him acting is just a part of life; he focuses on doing his best each day and deciding what to do the next day. He is a venturesome actor who prefers to knock down a stack of bricks and try something new rather than simply continuing to pile up more bricks, believing, “It is better to do something and regret it afterward than regret not doing it.” He has steadily broadened his boundaries, getting involved in planning the documentary “577 Project” (2012), and directing the movies “Fasten Your Seatbelt” (2013) and “Chronicle of a Blood Merchant” (2015). He also loves to paint in his free time.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 33

SPECIAL FEATURE 6 Korean Cinema of the 21st Century: Dynamics and Dreams

FAINT MEMORIES OF OLD CINEMAS

Lee Chang-guy Poet and Literary Critic Shim Byung-woo Photographer

Cinemas have changed along with society. A double-feature movie house at the entrance of the local market used to be a kind of neighborhood cultural space, but it has been replaced by a multiplex built with big business investment. The age of the single-screen movie house is now long gone, and multiplexes offer a variety of choices in one place.

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j

ust like an ancient Greek statue or a tortoise shell with early Chinese inscriptions excavated from deep under the earth after an eternity, memories uncovered from the past are prone to shed their darker sides and occupy brightly illuminated areas of the memory. Individuals and groups alike do not hesitate to edit or embellish bits and pieces of an ordinary life into more dramatic scenes. Thanks to this surprising flexibility of reminiscence, we all cherish our childhoods and some even go so far as to create their own sacred myths. Walter Benjamin’s well-known attempts to exclude the word “I” from all his miscellanies, except for personal letters, point to a strict and conscientious literary scientist’s frustrated desire to avoid such tricks of memories. On the contrary, I have no qualms about haphazardly going over my memories, which are neither special nor coherent, because my intention is not to reach the essence but to describe the atmosphere.

Light and Darkness I remember the day I went to the movies with my mother for the first time in my life. Unusual for her, she wore a nice sky-blue hanbok (traditional Korean dress) and held a small parasol. We went over the hill and walked under the blazing sun along the narrow-gauge tracks of the SuwonIncheon Line. Following my tall 39-year-old mother, I occasionally glanced at her, trying to hide my excitement and an inexplicable feeling of guilt. It was 1967, and I was in second grade, my summer vacation drawing to an end. That day, we saw the animated film “Hong Gil-dong” (a Korean equivalent of Robin Hood). My brief research tells me that the film premiered in January that year, attracting 100,000 viewers in three days, probably during the Lunar New Year’s holidays. The film was rereleased in August, and that was when we went to see it. I won’t tell you how much I begged and nagged my mother to take me. At the time, I was a devoted reader of Children’s Chosun Ilbo, which was running the cartoon series “The Hero Hong Gil-dong,” by Shin Don-wu. So, I must have known early on that it had been made into a movie.

I don’t remember the content of the film, but I do remember the theater. The thick, soft curtains brushing against my face as soon as I opened the door, the smell of sweat and mildew emanating from the darkness, the air lukewarm from the audience’s warmth. I stepped into the darkness, shuffling and groping along the wall. The dark hall had a stepped floor, and I could vaguely see a row of chairs on each level and the outline of a head on top of each. Nothing seemed to guarantee our safety in the darkness, but my mother had no difficulty leading me to an empty chair and seating me there. A ray of light passed over my head, and dust particles danced in the blue beam.

Even now, coming out of the theater after a movie, I always feel as if I were thrown out of my mother’s womb into the fierce brightness of the street. It always takes a considerable time for my dark and irregular heart to beat to the rhythm of the calm, strange street.

The now extinct Gukje Theater near Gwanghwamun, central Seoul, is crowded with movie fans during the Chuseok holiday in September 1962.

wang Yu and Li Ching After this memorable trip to the cinema, I started to frequent the neighborhood theaters with my friends. Generally, they were located in the markets. In their concealed halls packed with people, all kinds of bold crimes unfolded, as well as dramas revolving around people loving, betraying, and taking revenge. For boys who had nothing to do to amuse themselves but to dig up kudzu roots or watch trains chugging by, going to the movies was a pastime both irresistible and dangerous. We managed to avoid the brutish guards who would bully underage customers, but were always scared and puzzled by the presence of the “spot inspector’s seats,” reserved for policemen, on either side of the theater at the back. These special seats had been installed during the Japanese colonial period to censor films, and were retained long after liberation under the pretext of maintaining order in the theater. These seats, usually left unoccupied, made me wonder how such a haven for exciting entertainment could also be an improper place that needed surveillance and control.

Nonetheless, we were enthralled by Wang Yu (aka Jimmy Wang) in “One-Armed Swordsman” (1967) and shed tears over “Susanna” (1967) starring Li Ching. The former is about a man who loses his right arm in an unfortunate incident but trains himself to master a one-armed style KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 35

of swordplay to avenge his father’s death and repay his teacher’s care. The story itself was interesting enough, but I was especially fascinated by the leading actor, Wang Yu. I held my breath when his shifty, steely eyes glinted in the darkness. Any boy who had seen this film would have tried to imitate his swordplay with his right arm tucked inside his shirt, defeating an imaginary enemy, on his way home.

At the 2013 Busan International Film Festival, Wang Yu received the Asia Star Award for Best Male Actor. Then 70 years old, the actor said in his acceptance speech, “Thank you for remembering me.”

BIFF’s Executive Programmer Kim Ji-seok took the stage and said, “How could we possibly forget you?

Almost every middle-aged Korean man probably remembers and appreciates you.” That was no exaggeration, I swear.

I was as deeply impressed by “Susanna,” but in a different way. I would go up the back hill overlooking the sea at sunset and think of Li Ching’s heartrendingly lovely eyes, playing on my harmonica the theme song that begins, “The sun sets down in the sky; the wind blows away the leaves.”

The Ventures and the Spotnicks It is not that I went to see only the commercially successful, well-made foreign movies at the time.

I often giggled through a vulgar comedy or a tacky action movie, and also went with adults to watch propaganda films, clapping when everyone else did. One of them was “Mountains and Rivers of the Eight Provinces” (1967), featuring an elderly couple who travel all over the country to visit their married daughters. The purpose of this idyllic family drama was to praise Korea’s economic development on its way to industrialization, leaving behind the bleakness of war and poverty.

In the 1970s, I became an adolescent to whom the cinemas presenting obvious propaganda or banal high-teen movies were no longer a place of interest. Besides, television was introduced around that time and the weekend “Masterpiece Cinema” more or less quenched my thirst for “good movies.”

The small neighborhood theaters, the shabby landmarks in the alleys of outdoor markets, started to disappear one by one, and so did the boy who would whistle and holler with adult members of the audience every time the film broke in the middle of a show, plunging the theater into darkness.

But in my mind, I can still see the scrawny boy with a serious face who would run to the cinema whenever he heard the instrumental hits of the Ventures or the Spotnicks, even when he had to break his piggy bank to buy the ticket. The Spotnicks’ “Last Space Train” and “Johnny Guitar” filled the double-feature cinema when the first film ended and the projectionist was getting the next one ready. Although I’ve always liked the cheerfully powerful rhythms of “Walk, Don’t Run” by the Ventures, the Spotnicks’ electric guitar sounds, as clear as the cold, bright Scandinavian sky and as maudlin as can be, have the power to instantly transport me somewhere into space, even now.

And, oh, the unforgettable “Karelia”!

Somewhere along the way, I realized I 36 KOREANA Winter 2016

Gukdo & Garam is a 143-seat art cinema in Daeyeon-dong, Busan.

Located in a quiet neighborhood, it is a stronghold for independent and arthouse films, which find it hard to break into mainstream multiplex cinemas.

The small neighborhood theaters, the shabby landmarks on the alleys of outdoor markets, started to disappear one by one, and so did the boy who would whistle and holler with adult members of the audience every time the film broke in the middle of a show, plunging the theater into darkness.

was more interested in the music than the story. The films that I saw in my teenage years, spent in a mysterious lethargy, are stored in my memory in the form of music rather than stories or scenes. Thinking of Ha Gil-jong’s “The March of Fools” (1975), I hear the husky, bluesy voice of the singer Kim Jeong-ho. Lee Jang-ho’s “The Stars’ Heavenly Home” (1974) is inseparable from Kang Geun-sik’s bittersweet guitar play. And Lee’s “It Rained Yesterday” (1975) reminds me more of Jeong Seong-jo’s flute melodies than of the leading actress with a pretty smile.

Steeped in anguish and sadness, these films portrayed, each from a slightly different angle, the struggles of young people wearing blue jeans and playing folk guitar in the dismal era of developmental dictatorship in the mid-1970s. Around the time this new trend in Korean film culminated in the genre known as “hostess films” (literary films featuring bar girls and sexploitation), I drifted away from the world of movies. Now, there were plenty of other forms of entertainment, and most of all, I was becoming an adult. Not that I have completely stopped going to the cinema, but films have never been more than a simple pastime or just another form of cultural enjoyment.

Around that time, my interest was directed toward poetry. Perhaps as the latent legacy of my earlier love of films, my first poetry collection contains a piece that goes, “If only music flowed in the moments of people’s lives, just as in TV dramas.” The last film that I went to great lengths to watch must have been Im Kwon-taek’s “Sopyonje.” With shoulders hunched and heart fluttering with expectation, I stood in a long line to buy my ticket in front of Dansungsa Theater.

Going to the Cinema with My Son Recently, I began to return to the cinema with my son. Around 1998, movie theaters started to be transformed into multiplexes by big-money capitalists. The age of single-screen theaters, exuding the elegance of a tailored suit, had to make way for multiplexes offering a wide selection of films in one place, like ready-made clothes. Accordingly, the old method of film distribution — with the prints circulated around the first-run, re-release, and double-feature cinemas, consecutively — has become obsolete. Despite a now modernized system, not all titles are allowed to compete on a fair basis. While profitable films are assigned more screens to maximize their showings, obscure titles are presented only a couple of times a day, usually at odd hours, before disappearing altogether. That’s why my son and I sometimes had the luxury of a spacious theater all to ourselves, the only problem being that the films we saw were all of my son’s choosing — Japanese horror films.

A credit card company’s 2015 survey revealed that one out of four viewers bought a single movie ticket, reflecting the recent increase in the number of solitary moviegoers. The figures roughly correspond to the proportion of single-person households, which stood at 27.2 percent that year, according to Statistics Korea. Over time, the cinema landscape has evolved. But one essential thing has not changed: those who go to watch films, whether alone or with others, are people who cannot sit back at home and let the world pass them by. Their will to go out and see for themselves what lies beyond their limited private worlds compels them to sit next to strangers in a darkened theater, staring ahead. They are bored with their everyday lives and also curious to know what lies beyond. I hope they will not be thrown out, crestfallen, into the reality of our stuffy world again, after wandering around a land of illusion and deception for a couple of hours.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 37

FOCUS

REANIMATING NAM JUNE PAIK Nam June Paik created a worldwide sensation with his live international satellite show “Good Morning Mr. Orwell,” linking New York and Paris on New Year’s Day 1984. To mark the 10th anniversary of Paik’s death, various commemorative events and retrospectives are being held throughout 2016 in Korea, which prove the contemporaneity of the works of the pioneer video artist who liked to cross artistic boundaries to convey philosophical speculation through the medium of video technology.

Ahn Kyung-hwa Chief Curator, Nam June Paik Art Center

A 1993 work by Nam June Paik, “Turtle” is a giant sculpture made of 166 TV monitors, surrounded by a three-dimensional media wall. It is on exhibit at the “The Nam June Paik Show,” a retrospective commemorating the 10th anniversary of the artist’s death, held from July 20 to October 30, 2016 at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul. It is 6 meters wide, 10 meters long, and 1.5 meters high.

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KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 39

“M

y experimental TV is not always interesting but not always uninteresting, like nature, which is beautiful, not because it changes beautifully, but simply because it changes.” — Nam June Paik, “Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television,” 1963.

Tenth Anniversary Events On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Nam June Paik’s death, a series of commemorative events and exhibitions is being held in 2016 to celebrate his life and work, looking at his art world from various angles. “Nam June Paik ∞ Fluxus” (Seoul Museum of Art; June 14–July 31) showcased the artworks of Paik in the hands of local collectors alongside works by his Fluxus colleagues. “Homage Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota” (Hankuk Art Museum, Yongin, Gyeonggi Province; May 13–July 10) is another notable exhibition, which looked back at the life of the artist couple in New York. The exhibition also marked the first anniversary of Kubota’s death. Retrospective exhibitions are also under way in Japan where the artist spent his youth. The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, which organized the exhibit “Bye Bye Nam June 1 Paik” in 2006, after his death, hosts “The 10th Anniversary Retrospective of Nam June Paik — 2020: Who is the One Grinning ?+?=??” to present works from its collection, including “Robot K-456” and his collaborations with Joseph Beuys, as well as books and other materials about the artist published in Japan.

Other 10th anniversary events include the “respect” musical performance and fashion show held at an outdoor venue near Hongik University, and a workshop hosted by the Nam June Paik Cultural Foundation which featured collaborative presentations.

These events demonstrate that the artist Nam June Paik and the art world he created remain relevant as “something curious and interesting” a decade after he passed away.

TV Utopia In 2001, five years before his death, Paik began discussions with the Gyeonggi provincial government about building an art center that he wanted to be named the “house where Nam June Paik lives on.” With the vision of illuminating and popularizing the ideas and art of Paik, the Nam June Paik Art Center has func40 KOREANA Winter 2016

tioned as a pivotal institution for research, exhibitions, and relevant events since its opening in 2008. The center’s first commemorative event this year was the “Utopian Laser TV Station,” a three-day event that opened on January 29, the anniversary of his death.

In his 1965 essay of the same title, Paik had expressed his concern that the increased freedom afforded by advances in information and communications technology would enable the strong to prevail. He also wrote that with the use of high-frequency laser signals, thousands of small broadcasting stations could be established, which meant that anyone could produce and broadcast their own programs. He even made a TV program guide for a laser broadcasting station that featured performances by Fluxus artists. Apparently predicting the multi-channel Internet broadcasting environment of today, Paik expressed his utopian view that the emergence of numerous TV stations, big and small, would help stop the monopoly of broadcasting by commercial behemoths.

During the three-day commemorative event, the NJP Art Center turned into a broadcast station transmitting Paik’s video art. Related activities included a memorial ceremony at Bongeunsa, a Buddhist temple in Seoul; online tributes consisting of 1 Nam June Paik poses before his fourlive and pre-recorded interchannel video installation “Fin de views of Paik’s acquaintancSiecle II” (1989, 1220 x 327 x 152 cm) es; screenings of some of the made up of 201 television sets, in July 1989. artist’s most famous media 2 Marking the 30th anniversary of artworks, such as “Good “Good Morning Mr. Orwell,” the Nam Morning Mr. Orwell,” a rebutJune Paik Art Center held the exhibition “Good Morning Mr. Orwell 2014” tal of George Orwell’s dysfrom July 17 to November 16, 2014. topian vision of 1984, which Images from the monumental live was viewed by over 25 milinternational satellite project 30 years ago are displayed on large screens. lion people worldwide when it 3 “TV Garden” (1974/2002) first aired on January 1, 1984; and tribute performances by artists and disk jockeys. Each of the programs signified, as envisioned by Paik, an independent broadcast channel.

‘wrap Around the Time’ Paik’s utopian vision of a future in which advancements in media technology would positively impact communication among people was the impetus behind the bold (and seemingly reck-

He was a forward-looking optimist who believed that mankind and the world could change for the better. His works subvert common sense and challenge existing values, showing us different ways of looking at the world.

3

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 41

ŠNJP Art Center

2

less at the time) undertaking of the “satellite trilogy” project — “Good Morning Mr. Orwell” (1984), “Bye Bye Kipling” (1986), and “Wrap Around the World” (1988). Some 100 or so renowned mainstream and avant-garde artists participated in “Good Morning Mr. Orwell,” a live satellite broadcast linking New York and Paris, and hooking up Germany and Korea. Paik conceived and coordinated the program from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Of this 50-minute show that combined television and satellite technology, Paik said that it would not only “amplify the mystery of meeting someone new in our trivial lives,” but generate a feedback loop wherein an unexpected encounter gives rise to something new, and that in turn leads to another new encounter.

“Wrap Around the World,” the final part of the satellite trilogy, was produced and aired in time for the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics. The project embodied Paik’s vision of a harmonious future — a horizontally networked world. With the participation of many countries in the East and West, including China and Russia, it was a symbolic representation of the end of the Cold War era and an attempt to break down the boundaries between different genres and cultures.

As an extension of “Wrap Around the World,” the NJP Art Center organized the special exhibition “Wrap Around the Time.”

Seeking to interpret Paik’s art in a new light, it was a global collaborative project that brought together curators, critics, and scholars from Korea, Japan, America, and China. Each participant selected and studied one of Paik’s works from the center’s collection and either picked out an artwork with a similar concept by a contemporary artist or recommended an artist to create a new work, to be shown in the exhibition.

The Beginnings of Nam June Paik, the Artist Paik is recognized as “the father of video art” for his experimentation with television as an art medium. He produced mediabased works consisting of live television broadcasts and satellite projects, along with TV and video installations for showing the video images he had created. But the roots of his art can be traced to music. Born in Seoul in 1932, Paik went to Japan in 1950 and graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956 with a thesis on the modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg. Then he moved to Germany, where he worked on electronic music production for the public television channel WDR from 1958 to 1963. During this time, Paik familiarized himself with television and broadcasting equipment, which apparently inspired him to transform television into an artistic medium. To him, television was “not a medium that captures something that is there, but a state of always becoming something.” The many artists at that time who were enthralled with television, the latest technological creation, tried to find ways to control or fix the images transmitted through the cathode ray tube TV set. Paik, on the other hand, was more interested in rewiring the television receiver circuitry or inviting the 42 KOREANA Winter 2016

audience to participate, thereby transforming television into a two-way medium.

To define Paik simply as a video artist does not do justice to the vast scope of his work; he freely traversed artistic boundaries encompassing music, performance art, cinema, video art, sculpture, and laser art, while combining various aesthetic forms, such as sounds and images — still and moving, and abstract and figurative. In a short essay from the 1970s, Paik wrote: “Research into the boundary areas between various fields, and the complex problems of interfacing these different media and elements, such as music and visual art, hardware and software, electronics and humanities in the classical sense … this had been my major task since 1958.” The word “interface” opens up the possibility of newly interpreting his diverse thoughts on the relationships between different art forms, art and man, art and technology, and art and nature. It also allows us to consider, in a new light, the influence of his ideas on the major characteristics of contemporary digital art and culture.

The Power of Nostalgia This past September, the NJP Art Center hosted the international symposium “Gift of Nam June Paik 8. Reanimating NJP: Nam June Paik’s Interfaces.” It sought to shed light on the “interfaces” suggested in his artworks and writings, the “gifts” he left us, and explore their connections with the historical and contemporary trajectories of media art and culture. The symposium, which included presentations about his well-known projects, such as the “Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer” and “Global Groove,” also highlighted his lesser-known digital experiments at Bell Labs, thereby imbuing his works with new images and movements.

During the past eight years, the NJP Art Center has tried to revive the spirit and art of Paik in the present, and to contemplate the future through his eyes. The years to come will continue to be filled with events celebrating his life and work. Similar to this year, an array of commemorative events were held both at home and abroad in 2012, the 80th anniversary of his birth. The NJP Art Center organized “Nostalgia is an Extended Feedback,” a special exhibition titled after an essay Paik wrote in 1992. The exhibit that opened on July 20, 2012, the 80th anniversary of his birthday, was more than a conventional retrospective; it was organized with a thematic focus, featuring works that embodied Paik’s vision of the future — cybernetics. Paik believed that nostalgia was not simply a yearning for the past or an act of recalling memories, but that it could lead to an awareness tantamount to or even greater than feedback received from others. He was a forward-thinking optimist who believed that mankind and the world could change for the better. His works subvert common sense and challenge existing values, showing us different ways of looking at the world.

1 3 1 Young visitors look at “Easy Rider” (1995, 164 x 148 x 180 cm) at the 10th anniversary retrospective “Nam June Paik ∞ Fluxus,” held June 14–July 31, 2016 at the Seoul Museum of Art. 2 A visitor participates in the graffiti drawing “Monotone Rectilinear (VLF energy scavenging antenna),” a 2016 work by Joyce Hinterding, showcased at the 10th anniversary exhibition “Wrap Around the Time,” held from January 29 to July 3, 2016 at the Nam June Paik Art Center.

3 “Piano and Letters” (1960s) by Nam June Paik and Mary Bauermeister 2

©NJP Art Center

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INTERVIEw

CHOI BYONG-HYON BRINGING TO LIFE HEROES FROM KOREAN CLASSICS

Cho Yoon-jung Assistant Editor, Koreana; Professor, Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, Ewha Womans University Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

Professor Choi Byong-hyon compares translating ancient Korean classics into English to “swimming without water, and fighting without an enemy.” His solitary battle over decades has finally earned recognition with the publication of his works by prestigious university presses in the United States. The National Academy of Sciences acknowledged his efforts at producing essential texts for Korean studies programs overseas by presenting him with its 2016 annual award.

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S

ome say it is the translator’s lot in life to be invisible. It is considered a professional virtue: all attention should fall on the original work. At times, the translator comes to the fore, as witnessed recently when “The Vegetarian” by the South Korean novelist Han Kang received the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. The prize was awarded to both Han and her novel’s British translator Deborah Smith, but those working in the classics largely go unnoticed.

“Without notice, without a name” is how Professor Choi Byonghyon describes the situation. Working alone in his office at Honam University in Gwangju, over the past 20 years he has quietly translated some notable Korean classics: “The Book of Corrections: Reflections on the National Crisis during the Japanese Invasion of Korea 1592–1598” (Jingbirok), “Admonitions on Governing the People: Manual for All Administrators” (Mongmin simseo ), and “The Annals of King Taejo: Founder of Korea’s Choson [Joseon] Dynasty” (Taejo sillok).

Poet, Novelist, Translator “If I hadn’t been a professor at a regional university, all of this would have been impossible,” Choi says. “It was quiet. Nobody bothered me. My office was beautiful. I had a lovely view of the surrounding forest. You could say that the time was long, you could also say it was short. Anyway, I wrestled with those texts all those years, and last year I retired [from the university].”

Despite the serenity of his words and the look of peace on his face, the massive tomes were by no means easy to produce.

“The Book of Corrections” (2002, University of California, Berkeley) is a war memoir written by the Joseon Dynasty scholar and chief state councilor Ryu Seong-ryong, who directed state affairs during the Japanese invasions of the late 16th century. Its translation took four years to complete.

The second work, “Admonitions on Governing the People” (2010, University of California Press), was written by the scholar-official Jeong Yak-yong, a leading propounder of Silhak, or “Practical Learning.” A manual for local officials, it contains examples of corruption, and deals with topics such as taxation, justice, and famine relief.

Professor Choi Byong-hyon, director of the Center for Globalizing Korean Classics, forges ahead with the translation of Korean classics into English with the mission of addressing the lack of available works in this field.

Running over a thousand pages, it took Choi 10 years to complete.

Jeong Yak-yong had lived inside Choi’s head and heart for such a long time that during a commemorative lecture he gave in Gangjin, where Jeong wrote the book during his 18 years in exile, Choi had a vision of the Joseon scholar sitting in the audience, dressed in a traditional coat. “It was a strange experience,” Choi recalls, wondering about it even now. For his translation, a 10-year endeavor, Choi received a grant of 20 million won (about $18,000).

The most recent publication, “The Annals of King Taejo” (2014, Harvard University Press), is the official chronicle of the reign of Yi Seong-gye who founded the Joseon Dynasty in 1392. This translation also took four years.

In addition to working with the original texts, Choi wrote extensive footnotes to aid readers’ understanding. There were countless names of government offices and positions, hard to understand even in Korean, for which he had to find English equivalents. The Internet offered little useful information.

At this point, one can only wonder why he started on this path in the first place.

At the time, Choi had a stable job as professor of English literature at Honam University and was also an award-winning poet and novelist. His first poetry collection, “Piano and Geomungo,” written in English at the age of 27 while studying at the University of Hawaii, won the Myrle Clark Award for Creative Writing in 1977. His novel “Language,” written in Korean, won the first Hyun Jin-geon Literary Award in 1988.

When he wrote “Language,” Choi was studying for his master’s degree in English literature at Columbia University, a time that he describes as the most difficult in his life. While serving his mandatory military duty in the 1970s, he spent a week on his knees as punishment for voting against the dictatorial government’s Yushin Constitution and suffered through the investigation of his family and others close to him. When he went abroad to study he swore never to return. In America he came under all kinds of new influences. In the 1980s deconstructionism was all the rage. Choi began to wonder, “Why has language itself never been the main character of a novel?” and through language he began to deconstruct everything he had known up to that point. The resulting “poetic novel” features the rhythms of traditional pansori and modern rap. Its leading characters, named Sa Il-gu (April 19), Oh Il-yuk (May 16), and Sam Il (March 1), are textual symbols of major resistance movements in modern Korean history. “Language” was the synthesis of many of Choi’s ideas about politics, language, and literature.

Choi envisioned bringing together East and West, as suggested in the title “Piano and Geomungo.” One of his poems in the collection, “Confession,” contains the line, “Why did I choose the way I cannot tell.”

“I thought I would integrate English literature and world literature,” he says. “I didn’t know it would take the form of classics translation.”

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 45

Selecting the Texts to Translate In 1997, Choi was invited to teach every Saturday at the Korea campus of the University of Maryland. “I taught English literature in the morning and Korean literature in the afternoon. English literature was relatively easy because there was a lot of good material.

But Korean literature was difficult. It was tedious, because there were no texts available in English,” he recalls. “So for every class, I began translating parts of the texts that I wanted to use, Goryeo period literature such as Pahanjip (Collection of Writings to Dispel Leisure), for example.”

Later, while teaching Korean literature at the University of California, Irvine, as a Fulbright scholar, he ran into the same problem.

One of Choi’s beliefs about learning is that it should be put to use, and it seems this led him to what he calls his “manifest destiny.”

“I realized what I had to do — English literature not for the sake of English literature but using it as a springboard for making Korean culture and history known around the world. And as soon as I started to think that way, I started to torment myself,” Choi says with a rueful smile.

In selecting the texts to translate, Choi decided that the most important thing was to convey the voice of the Korean people. Then he set down two principles: themes that are local and universal; and contents that are timeless and temporal. Hence his first choice fell on “The Book of Corrections,” which shows a leader’s wisdom in a time of national crisis and holds lessons for future generations.

At the time he was translating the book, Korea and other countries were reeling under the Asian financial crisis. “Near the end of the 16th century people did not understand why Hideyoshi invaded Joseon. The same with the financial crisis of 1997. No one really

understood why it happened. In both cases, people were busy passing blame. It was the perfect text,” Choi says, explaining his choice.

Translation of this book and those that followed was, in Choi’s words, “Like swimming without water, and fighting without an enemy. Every birth was difficult.”

The search for Korea’s heroes appears to be another guiding principle in Choi’s translation of the classics. In seeking to “directly revive the voice of our ancestors,” he has brought to life Ryu Seongryong, Jeong Yak-yong, and King Taejo for an international readership, and he hopes to bring attention to many others. At home, they are popular historical figures whose lives have been dramatized often in movies and television series. “They were value-oriented and goal-oriented — men with a mission,” he says. These Korean classics may not have the romance and excitement of the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey,” but shining through them is a spirit that Choi defines as integrity.

The Mission Imposed on Himself Choi, no doubt, has a mission of his own — the globalization of Korean classics. As director of the Center for Globalizing Korean Classics, he wants to make Korea’s heroes famous outside the country also. Fortunately, all his translations have been published by prestigious university presses in the United States after passing their rigorous standards. Thanks to the universities’ distribution systems and influence, the books are now found in university libraries around the world, and are must-read texts in all Korean studies programs.

The books have also caused quiet reverberations at home, raising awareness of the need to encourage work in the classics. In 2014, Choi was asked to head the (now-defunct) Center for Korean

“I realized what I had to do — English literature not for the sake of English literature but using it as a springboard for making Korean culture and history known around the world. And as soon as I started to think that way, I started to torment myself.”

While teaching English literature over the past 20 years, Choi Byong-hyon has also managed to translate some important classics, such as "The Annals of King Taejo: Founder of Korea's Choson Dynasty," "Admonitions on Governing the People: Manual for All Administrators," "The Artistry of Early Korean Cartography," and "The Book of Corrections: Reflections on the National Crisis during the Japanese Invasion of Korea 1592–1598." These are precious resources for Korean studies scholars.

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Classics Translation at Korea University. There he worked with a team of scholars on “Discourse of Northern Learning” (Bukhakui)

by Park Je-ga, scheduled to be published in 2017. This year he was asked by the Poongsan Group to write a biography of Ryu Seongryong, author of “The Book of Corrections,” who is a direct ancestor of the group’s founder. Though yet to be written, the biography has already been titled “Ryu Seong-ryong, Heroic Minister of Korea.”

Heroic in what sense, one may ask. “How can a scholar-official be a hero?” Choi answers: “The concept of a hero is different between the East and the West. In the West the hero is a warrior. In the East the hero is a scholar, the Confucian ideal of the ‘superior man’ (gunja, or junzi in Chinese). The true meaning of a hero lies in spiritual rather than physical power.”

The new book will be written in English. Thanks to his work and a total of 18 years studying and living in the United States, Choi is just as comfortable with English as with Korean. More so perhaps, because English, he says, has a flavor of its own, “That particular cleanness.” The great thing about his translations is that they are easy to read. In wonderfully clear English, they make accessible primary sources that are actually rather daunting in their original Chinese or Korean language versions. This clarity is based on Choi’s expertise in the subjects covered by his material, ranging from politics, war, and Confucianism to agronomy, geography, and the arts.

Every year as October draws around, Korea tends to tense up when the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature is announced. But rather than making a fuss about the elusive Nobel Prize, Choi advocates a change in the country’s international profile through the globalization of its classical works. “If they want to give Korea a prize for any modern literature, first they will want to know about the

country’s roots,” he argues.

The biography is a step in that direction. His model is the John Adams biography by David McCullough, among others. This may be a move away from classics translation for himself, but having “cut the cord,” he hopes many others will take up the work. It’s a tall order. Funding for classics translation is limited and in-depth knowledge of classical Chinese and Korean studies is required.

It also calls for years of hard work without recognition. In short, it requires a sense of mission.

This may sound like ivory tower idealism but Choi believes there are people “like salt, like flowers hidden in the mountains” who are working hard in their given places. “We need to bring those people to the light,” he says. As with Choi’s motto “Without notice, without a name,” recognition would be welcome if it comes, but it can take a long time. Choi was happy to wait. “I’m like [the ancient Chinese statesman] Jiang Taigong, who spent his years in exile fishing without a hook, waiting for someone to come for him,” he says. He speaks of a time frame of a thousand years, no less. If recognition doesn’t come in this lifetime, then perhaps in posterity.

Fortunately, Choi’s wait was far shorter than a thousand years.

In addition to acclaim for his work overseas, in September this year he was named one of six winners of the National Academy of Sciences Awards. He sees the award as recognition of translation as an academic field of study in its own right. His wife, who was invited to stand on the podium with him when he received the award, is pleased that his quiet effort over the past decades has been noticed.

The same for his daughters in the United States, who had sent him a Kindle to comfortably carry around the vast collection of books that he needs in his work. He doesn’t like leaving home without it.

ART REVIEw

KIM SOO-JA A NEEDLE WOMAN MENDING THE HEARTS OF HUMANITY

©National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

48 KOREANA Winter 2016

Kim Soo-ja has been on the road most of the time for the past 25 years or so, expressing life through her fabric works. The current exhibition, which comes four years after the New York-based artist’s previous show in Korea, is titled “Kim Soo-ja — Archive of the Mind.” The nine works presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, show how her needlework is approaching ever closer to the origin of humankind.

Chung Jae-suk Editorial Writer and Senior Culture Reporter, The JoongAng Ilbo

“Archive of the Mind” (2016), by Kim Soo-ja, is an installation for audience participation, consisting of an oval table with a diameter of 19 meters. Visitors knead clay at the table listening to “Unfolding Sphere,” a 16-channel sound performance.

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herever she appears, her silhouette will catch your eye. Wearing long, black clothes with her long hair simply tied, Kim Soo-ja has the image of an ascetic seeking truth. The simple style of the artist, almost nearing her sixties, reveals the consistency of her art world.

Sitting on a heap of wrapped bundles, her trademark bottari , she has wandered in that style like a Zen master around major cities of the world, circling the globe several times.

In her first solo exhibition in Korea after a long break, Kim reviews the traces of her 30-year career, apparently putting it into order. In particular, she seems to have wrestled with the question of how to induce viewers’ participation and communicate with them naturally. Stepping down from her position as an internationally renowned artist, and taking a break from her murderous travel schedule, she holds out a hand to visitors, suggesting they take a moment to join her in pondering the question: “What has made me so immersed in my work?”

Sitting on a Heap of Bottari The first work that vaulted Kim Soo-ja onto the international art scene was the “Bottari Truck.” It was photographer Joo Myung-duk who made her known to the world with his landmark photo of her sitting on a heap of colorful bottari, with her back to the camera. This photo elevated one woman artist’s creative experiments from the commonplace wrapping of things to a truly unique concept of connecting people. For Kim, who depicts people through fabric, the needle is a tool in her hand and extension of her body — an extension of her heart, in fact. Kim recalls the moment when she “encountered” the needle: “As I was stitching a quilt with my mother, I realized, through the movement of the needle, the natural course of life and death, inhalation and exhalation, and yin and yang.”

She had already begun to search for the deeper meaning of life while she was an art student at Hongik University: “I decided to become an artist because it was the way I 50 KOREANA Winter 2016

could live my life contemplating its deeper meaning.” Pondering how to reveal the structure of the world, in a way that can express the vertical and horizontal on a two-dimensional surface, she felt her encounter with sewing was opening the door to her artistic journey. The characteristics of bottari — two dimensional when unfolded but three dimensional when wrapped — made it the ideal tool and concept for Kim, who sought to embrace every realm of humanity’s magnanimity, flexibility, and variability.

“My name, Soo-ja, sounds like the Hindi word for needle,” Kim says. Then, had her fate been predetermined? Kim saw herself as a needle when moving through the middle of a city in conflict and discord. Following the “Bottari” series, her subsequent work on “A Needle Woman” and “A Mirror Woman” series made her one of the busiest artists in the world.

Destined to wander What would be the most objective standard for assessing an artist’s international fame?

In the past, it was most often the prices that an artist’s works could fetch at an auction or global markets. Now there is another criterion: flight mileage.

Kim Soo-ja keeps a hectic schedule, spending five months of the year in New York, where she has lived since 1999, one month each in Seoul and Paris, and the remaining five months traveling from city to city for solo and invitational exhibitions. Art journalists receive emails from Kim Soo-ja’s studio on a nearly weekly basis, informing them of her latest and upcoming shows.

Kim’s works are inspired and based on the new ideas and tools of her global journeys; the essence of her work is the people she encounters on the road. Through the people who are her medium, the artist also has evolved. She says her work is characterized by “spa-

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1 Kim Soo-ja stands in front of her video work, “Earth, Water, Fire, Wind.” Six pieces out of this series were installed on the oil retaining wall at the Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant (later renamed Hanbit Nuclear Power Plant) in 2010.

2 “Deductive Object” (2016). Steel, paint, mirrors.

Sculpture 1.5m (D) x 2.45m (H). Mirror 10 x10 m.

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A few women are weaving and unweaving something, employing themselves as human needles.

Perhaps that’s all there is to the path walked by humankind — being sewn into nature, breathing in and out, and permeating the void.

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tiality, spirituality, and identity,” but the overriding theme is people and the future they create. “Earth, Water, Fire, Wind,” an installation unveiled in September 2010 at the nuclear power plant in Yeonggwang, South Jeolla Province, is a video work that expresses the reality of the Korean Peninsula where nuclear threat looms. At the nuclear power plant, which contains the dual meaning of the destructive potential of nuclear power and its possible future to help address our energy needs, the artist exposes the perspective of a nomad with the message: “Rely on the natural circulation of earth, water, fire, and wind.”

©National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

1 “A Study on the Body” (1981). Series of silkscreen photos of Kim’s own performance. Each photo 54.5 x 55.5 cm.

2 Kim Soo-ja is known as “bottari artist,” because she first received attention with her performance of sitting on a truck loaded with cloth-wrapped bottari, as she traveled around the world.

3 “Thread Routes V” (2016). Still images from a 16mm film with sound, 21 minutes 48 seconds.

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Cutting Off the Edges of the Heart Upon entering the exhibition “Archive of the Mind” (July 27, 2016–February 6, 2017), visitors are confronted with a gigantic oval table with a diameter reaching some 19 meters. Far too large for an ordinary room, the table can be seen as an image of the mind or a galaxy, depending on one’s perspective. Visitors can take a seat at the table and knead a ball of clay, feeling the texture, something they seldom get to do.

While rolling the clay around, they might think, “Why do I have to make only a ball?”

But the artist’s intentions are expressed in this method of participation.

As she explained in a talk session about her exhibition, “It’s a place where you can empty your heart and cut off the edges.”

There are so many edges in human affairs.

The edges of conflict and division can lead to terrorism and war. The rotating action of touching and rolling the clay with the hands leads visitors to look into their inner state of mind. It enables them to feel something from the friction in their palms. The primitive tactile sensation and repeated hand 52 KOREANA Winter 2016

movements enwrapping the void, suddenly evoke the circular illusion of nothingness.

The new sound performance work, “Unfolding Sphere,” exhibited along with the title piece of the exhibition, overwhelms the audience with a cosmic sense of space that corresponds to the image of the table’s surface scattered with clay spheres.

Traces of the Body “Geometry of the Body” consists of a yoga mat hanging on the wall, the actual mat that the artist has used for the last 10 years, devoting herself to the exercise. It’s a kind of “body painting” with traces of the touch of hands and feet, the sweat and tears that have brought changes to the material. The mat here is not a ready-made object of the sort that has been used in art for a long time, but a “used object” that reflects the traces of the body. Such traces have created a new concept of painting.

Since deciding to become an artist, Kim Soo-ja has inquired into the question of the vertical and the horizontal. “A Study on the Body,” from 1981, is a visual expression of her attempts to answer this question during her early days. In this series of 45 silkscreen photos of her own performances, the body seems to be the base from which she perceives herself and the world as well as the root of her work.

“One Breath” is a digital embroidery piece that records the waves of inhalation and exhalation. The artist gave shape to the structure and form of breathing, as a prerequisite of survival, by pushing the needle through the fabric. While looking at the cycle of breathing embroidered on the satin fabric, one comes to wonder about the border between life and death. This work was based on the graphic depiction of sound waves in “The Weaving Factory,” a breathing sound performance presented in 2004.

"Deductive Object," the casts of two arms alone on a wooden table, looks lonely. Is it

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because it represents the void? The thumb and index finger on each hand of the artist’s own casts are touching each other.

From Bottari to Anthropology The finale of the exhibition is the new chapter (Chapter V) of the serial work “Thread Routes,” which is being shown for the first time. While traveling around the world, since 2010 Kim Soo-ja has been making a 16mm documentary film series titled “Thread Routes,” of which the fifth of six installments is now complete. Exploration of the world’s weaving culture, a theme the artist has pursued throughout her entire career, is contained in a video of 21 minutes 48 seconds. It was filmed on a reservation for Indians in the New Mexico area, which is home to Navajo and Hopi people, the original natives of the American continent. Critics have called this work a “visual poem without narrative” and “visual anthropology.”

On a remote plain that gives rise to

imaginings about the origin of mankind, the desolate ruins reminiscent of the Stone Age, lofty stone peaks, and the distant horizon reveal themselves as the base of the screen. A few women are weaving and unweaving something, employing themselves as human needles. Perhaps that’s all there is to the path walked by humankind — being sewn into nature, breathing in and out, and permeating the void.

The little needle woman who used to sew small bundles, has now become a great needle woman sewing the earth, traveling the galaxy, as always.

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KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 53

GUARDIAN OF HERITAGE

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REVIVING THE ART AND TECHNOLOGY OF ANCIENT FABRICS Kang Shin-jae Freelance Writer Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

In the mid-18th century, the Joseon Dynasty king banned the production of gold-brocaded silk fabrics in order to curtail extravagance. Members of the royal family and the nobility, who prized the sumptuous fabric for their court and ceremonial garments, imported the material from Qing Dynasty China. Over time, the elaborate, millennia-old brocade weaving skills were about to disappear into oblivion. But Professor Sim Yeon-ok at Korea National University of Cultural Heritage has revived the forgotten weaving technology through painstaking research and experimentation.

54 KOREANA Winter 2016

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high. Then, she turned her attention to the gold patterns on fabric artifacts, which had given splendor to the wardrobes of royalty and the nobility in the distant past. She began by studying the gold thread. First, she had to figure out how the gold thread had been made. Together with her students, she reviewed 111 reference sources from Korea and abroad, as well as 68 ancient artifacts from Korea, China and Japan. The studies led to surprising discoveries. First and foremost, she found that the gold threads in the relics were not solid gold fibers, but thin strips cut from sheets of polished gold leaf glued to mulberry paper.

Unraveling Ancient Secrets Sim recalled: “We analyzed the components of a gold thread “Excavated clothing artifacts from the Joseon Dynasty have been from the Goryeo Dynasty [918–1392] and found that the thread conrestored in large quantities. We Koreans are very good at restoring the styles of period clothing and replicating them faithfully, down tained traces of traditional Korean paper made from paper multo the exact needlework of the time. The problem is often with the berry [Broussonetia kazinoki ], the same kind used for the Budmaterial. Re-creating the clothes of Baekje, Goryeo and Joseon dhist scriptures that were excavated together with it. It was thus with fabrics bought at Dongdaemun Marconcluded that Koreans in the past made their own gold threads and used them in ket — that’s just a half-baked restoration,” weaving fabrics. In Central and Western laments Professor Sim Yeon-ok at Korea Asia, leather was used instead of paper; National University of Cultural Heritage in leather sheets could be pounded thinner Buyeo, South Chungcheong Province. Her than paper. In places where leather was not voice is firm and assertive, a noticeable readily available, animal intestines were change from her soft and easy-going tone used. Japan and China did use paper, made of just a moment ago when talking about from different plants — Gampi [Wikstroher daily life.

The first step in the restoration of an emia trichotoma ] in Japan, and mulberry ancient garment should be to reproduce [Morus alba ] and bamboo in China. What the material, and only then can its form be had been unknown until that point was discussed. But in general, this has not been finally clarified.” the case in Korea. Sim explained: “As for She did not stop at discovering the silk woven with golden patterns, the tradimethod and material, but went on to make actual gold threads and weave fabrics tion of hand-loomed pattern weaving was using her re-created loom. The process of discontinued long ago. Since King Yeongjo reproduction was like trying to find one’s of the late Joseon era issued a royal decree way in an unfamiliar landscape. She had in 1773 that prohibited the production of to determine optimal qualities of the mulgold-woven fabrics, the craft has become extinct. Furthermore, automation swept berry paper for making the threads, and 2 every aspect of production in the 20th cenrepeatedly experimented to find the glue’s 1 Professor Sim Yeon-ok of the Department of Tradiproper consistency. She also had to figure tury. Now, all that remains are automated tional Arts and Crafts at Korea National University out exactly how a sheet of gold leaf and a power looms and all that matters is speed of Cultural Heritage demonstrates patterned silk sheet of paper could be perfectly joined.

— how much they can weave per minute. weaving on the 16th century loom replica that she has re-created.

The procedure that was most difficult to These machines can only weave fabrics 2 Gold thread is made painstakingly in the old way by perform was shredding. She had to put all that are flat with no sense of dimension.” gluing polished gold leaf onto a sheet of mulberry her heart into the task of cutting the gold Sim re-created the patterning loom by paper and cutting it into fine strips. leaf-coated mulberry paper into 0.3mm studying old and new literature and materistrips. The cutter blade had to be repeatedly sharpened, as was als. She analyzed the illustration of the loom contained in the “Sixher acuity and concentration, in order to properly execute the intriteen Treatises on Rural Economy (Imwon gyeongje ji),” an encyclopedic book on practical technologies written by Seo Yu-gu in the cate work. Weaving patterns on a loom using the hard-won threads, early 19th century during the Joseon Dynasty, along with examinshe also had to fight off any stray thoughts because the strands snapped too easily whenever she was distracted. Finally, she sucing similar types of looms still extant in China. The outcome was an intricate wooden loom, measuring 6 meters long and 4 meters ceeded in reproducing three kinds of fabrics with gold-woven pato what extent do we know about the past? When I read an article that reported on how the secret to the ancient method of making gold thread had been finally solved, I had to think about the depth of my knowledge about ancient fabrics. Were we talking about the golden patterns on traditional clothing even without knowing how the gold thread had been made? How much do we know about our heritage from the past, including the so-called cultural property?

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 55

terns — one from Goryeo and two from Joseon — reviving a lost technology in the ancient craft of handloom weaving.

duced to Korea not in the 14th century, as was then believed, but had already been cultivated in Korea some 700 years earlier. Sim recalled still another instance of discovery: “I came across a small piece of cloth from what I assumed to have been a women’s trinket, but then I noticed that it was a patchwork of over 15 kinds of cloth interwoven with gold thread applied with an array of handicraft skills, including gold leaf imprinting and embroidery. It was so beautiful that I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

Her accounts of fabrics are elaborate and resourceful: “Silk is extremely good at mixing with other materials, and knows how to reveal its luxuriance. Silk is excellent at transformation. On the other hand, ramie is so pure and delicate that you shouldn’t tamper with it. Cotton seems to be plain, pure and naïve, but it is the fabric that can give you the most trouble. Spun from cotton fiber, the yarns are very easily broken before they are woven into a fabric.”

Moments of Discovery Sim humbly plays down her role by saying that it was “just a small accomplishment in the restoration of traditional fabrics.”

Then, as the author of “Five Thousand Years of Korean Textiles,” an illustrated catalogue of Korea’s textile history that focuses on technological aspects, she went on to discuss restoration of fabrics in a broader sense. Fabric restoration, as she puts it, is like solving a jigsaw puzzle in which you have to complete the entire picture working with just a few pieces of evidence. Studying fabrics that had been buried underground for a long time, sustaining severe damage, means investigating small scraps of torn cloth. To restore ancient fabric-making technology, Sim analyzed every single ingredient of the scraps and reassembled the broken brocade patterns into their origiFabrics in Modern Life nal form based on historical Sim said there are over 500 references. Thus she created a kinds of traditional fabrics curproper fabric sample. rently produced in Korea. HowShe went through a similar ever, most of us don’t see or process with the cloth fragtouch them in our daily lives even though we begin and end ment recovered from the Saky1 our days covered in fabrics. She amuni Pagoda at Bulguksa Temple, built in the 8th cenShe had to put all her heart into the task of cutting criticized the “all-season polytury, when it was dismantled ester hanbok ,” and elaborated the gold leaf-coated mulberry paper into 0.3mm on her view of traditional Korefor maintenance work. “It was strips. The cutter blade had to be repeatedly a severely damaged piece of an dress losing its aesthetic cloth with its patterns no lonand functional diversity: “The sharpened, as was her acuity and concentration, particular dress has ruined our ger visible and fibers torn apart in order to properly execute the intricate work. traditional textiles. In the old into messy bits and pieces. I days, hanbok was made from a decided to count all the intervariety of fabrics, by season. A certain fabric for today, and another laced strands one by one — it had tens of thousands of strands and for tomorrow when it grows a little colder. People wore ramie and it took three months to count them all. Finally, I could decipher the Chinese fine silk [eunjosa ] in mid-summer, raw silk [saenggosa ] pattern and reproduce the actual shape [of the material], which I figured to have been a drawstring cloth bag in five colors made with when it got cooler, silk organza [sukgosa] after Chuseok [autumn excellent craftsmanship. It was a significant undertaking, especially harvest holiday], and then silk gauze. When it got cold, people wore because there had been no fabric specimen from the Unified Silla silk gauze padded with cotton, followed by solid cotton for all seaperiod,” she explained. sons, and then twill damask [neung]. In the early modern period, Sim went on to mention several other moments of discovery. She they also used brocade.” recalled a time when a golden spot that had looked like a piece of In the days before indoor heating, clothing was critical to help the gold leaf at first glance was later determined to be a gold thread, body cope with seasonal changes. Naturally, a vast array of fabrics based on the trace of a papery element she found. Most memorawas needed for making seasonal garments. But today’s clothing, with a focus more on design than on fabrics, could do well without bly, by demonstrating that an unearthed piece of old cloth woven so much variety. with uniquely spun strands was a cotton scrap from the Baekje Sim asserts that the exquisite hand-weaving skills of our ancesKingdom (18 B.C.–A.D. 660), she proved that cotton had been intro56 KOREANA Winter 2016

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tors are also useful in this modern era, and hopes that the aesthetics and charm of each and every fabric can be rediscovered to enrich our everyday lives. She believes traditional textiles are a treasure trove of ideas for contemporary arts.

Threads of Connection: Teacher and Student How have Sim’s thoughts and ideas been transmitted to her students? “Fabrics help make me be myself. Talking about our basic needs, we Koreans say ‘clothing, food and shelter.’ I often wonder why we put clothing ahead of the others although we know that food and shelter are just as critical for survival. I think it’s because clothes, or fabrics for that matter, help us to be our own selves,” said Keum Da-woon, one of Sim’s students, when asked what textiles meant to him.

Professor Sim, who had been making tea, stopped to listen. The teacher had stressed that all the projects at the Research Institute for Traditional Textile Restoration at the school get started, progress, and are completed thanks to her students. What is it, I asked the student, about the professor he wanted most to emulate. His reply seemed to transcend the question: “I don’t think it’s my way to like my teacher because of her merits or achievements. As the

1 Gold thread patterns are woven into silk fabric using the patterning loom.

2 Gold-brocaded fabrics make elegant and splendid garments for ceremonial wear.

relationship between a parent and a child is a given, not a choice, I feel that our beings are connected. It’s also true of my studies.

I feel most comfortable and natural doing my studies, just like I do in these clothes that I’m wearing.”

Silently, Sim gazed at the tranquil face of her thoughtful student. Whenever talking about her accomplishments, she would mention her own teacher, Min Gil-ja, who laid the groundwork for research on traditional Korean textiles during her lifetime. Seemingly lost in contemplation, she may have been thinking of her own teacher’s words: “It’s most important to first live as a human being. You come first, and then your academic pursuits.”

Or, she may have thought about the last moments with her teacher who had bequeathed to her an extensive collection of her beloved books, saying, “I appreciated it when you didn’t covet these books, trying to learn one thing at a time on your own.”

Without asking Sim what she was thinking, I left the place laden with stories of teachers and students, where the theme of fabrics and humans are sure to blossom into more stories of life from the ancient past.

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TALES OF TwO KOREAS

‘BACHELOR MOM’ AND HIS KIDS BUILD A FUTURE TOGETHER “Gajok” (Family) is a group home that serves as alternative family for 10 teenage North Korean defectors now living in Seoul without parents or any relatives to look after them. Kim Tae-hoon, a 40-year-old unmarried man who heads the home, has been single–handedly raising an unusual brood over the last 10 years. Neighbors call Kim “Bachelor Mom.” Kim Hak-soon Journalist; Visiting Professor, School of Media and Communication, Korea University Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

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im Tae-hoon is very busy every morning, getting up at 6 o’clock to prepare breakfast, wake up the kids, feed them, and send them off to school.

After the hectic morning, he then cleans every corner of the house and does the laundry to eliminate the “odor” of the home’s 11 male occupants. This is his routine day in and day out.

“I wash clothes in two washing machines every day.

We have heaps of laundry because they’re boys,” he said. Among other things, he gives careful attention to cleaning the bathroom. He has even come up with an ingenious idea of cleaning the toilet with toothpaste to get rid of ammonia smell.

The boys call him Uncle. The assumption that many of them must be misfits who have failed to adapt to South Korean society is nothing but prejudice, Kim says. “Let me boast of my kids. There’s a painter, a writer, a musical actor, a student council president, and the winner of Korea’s Best Volunteer Award. Aren’t they amazing?”

Thanks to one of the boys becoming a student council president, Kim even had a chance to “flex some muscle” at the boy’s school as the president of the parents’ council, he chuckled. According to Kim, it was the first time that a teenage defector has ever become a student council president by winning a hotly contested election at a regular school. The hero, Han Jin-beom, has come to have a greater sense of responsibility since he became a student leader. This has, in turn, renewed Kim’s sense of mission.

The Road Taken Kim never thought that he would be living this way.

He came to his new calling by happenstance. In 2006, while working as a volunteer in a program to help recent defectors adjust to a new life in the South, he felt compelled to babysit a young defector boy he found home alone while the mother was away looking for a job. Kim was then dividing his time between a decent job at a publishing house and doing volunteer work at Hanawon, a facility run by the Unification Ministry where defectors undergo a resettlement program. One

1 The boys of Kim Tae-hoon’s Gajok, an alternative family for parentless teen defectors from North Korea, enjoy a quiet weekend evening of stories and books around the table in the living room of their group home.

2 The Gajok under Kim’s devoted care was a beehive of activity as the boys prepared for a concert this past autumn to mark their 10th anniversary as a family. They gave a successful performance at the Arirang Cine Center in Seoul on November 18–20.

of the defectors informed him of her new address in Seoul. When he visited her apartment in Yangcheon District in western Seoul, he found a boy, a fourth grader, sleeping alone in darkness with the TV on. His mother had gone to another province to find a job, leaving the boy alone behind in this rented apartment provided by Hanawon.

Kim opened the refrigerator and found nothing to eat inside. His heart ached.

A good cook himself, he went to a nearby grocery store to shop for food. He cooked a meal, which he ate with the boy. Suddenly, the boy began talking about his hometown back in the North. Then, he asked Kim to stay for the night with him. Kim accepted the invitation gladly.

Unable to leave the boy alone, Kim slept at the apartment a few more nights.

Sometime later, the boy’s mother found a job in a distant province and had to stay near her workplace. Kim decided to live in the apartment with the boy.

Eventually, he took charge of more and more parentless children that Hanawon sent to him. After moving around several rental units, he bought a house at the foot of Mt. Bugak in Seongbuk District, northern Seoul, which became a permanent shelter for a total of 10 teenage boys from the North.

Whenever a new boy arrived, Kim made careful efforts to help ease the youngster’s adaptation into South Korean society. For his young wards, blending in was a particular concern. With the boy’s consent, Kim discarded most of his old clothing and the odds and ends in his pockets. He then took the boy to a barbershop and bought him new clothes at the Dongdaemun shopping mall.

These children are very sensitive about their clothing and physical appearance because they don’t want to stick out and be marginalized as defectors at school.

Kim’s boys either have no relatives in South Korea or their parents are too busy eking out a living here to properly care for their children. Most of them are from remote areas in North Korea, including the provinces of North and South Hamgyong, and Ryanggang Province. Jeong Ju-yeong, a third grader who used to live with his grandmother, fled the North when he was six years old with the help of a missionary. The youngest boy in this house, he can’t remember his 2 parents’ faces.

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Since arriving in Seoul, the boys got to experience many firsts, like wearing their first school uniform, seeing the sea for the first time, and celebrating their first Christmas. The older boys still expect Santa Claus to come to their home with presents. They had their own birthday parties here for the first time. Kim treats each new arrival with a surprise party to celebrate his first birthday as a new member of the family. Before accepting a new boy, Kim calls a “family meeting” to seek their agreement.

Unusual Family, Overcoming Obstacles It is no easy task to feed and take care of teenage boys. Kim spent all his savings, but soon faced limits.

He had to move frequently and worried about how to make ends meet, as the number of boys he had to care for swelled. Then he came to hear about group homes, a kind of alternative family service, in which a caregiver lives together with parentless children to help them adapt to society. And he realized that it would be possible to ask for financial support from the government, civic organizations, and welfare foundations, or appeal to corporations with social responsibility programs. In 2009, he officially became the head of a group home for teen defectors and was thus qualified to request financial aid from concerned agencies and businesses.

Still, it is a daunting challenge for him, as well as his boys, to overcome the public’s prejudice and bigoted views toward defectors from North Korea. He often felt disapproving stares of neighbors who didn’t like see-

ing an unmarried man living with many young boys.

One day, police officers came to his house to check on a rumor that he was living with child panhandlers.

He also has to heal the wounded hearts of the boys who come home almost every day perturbed by hearing schoolmates talk disparagingly of North Koreans — that they go around in rags, and go to bed hungry; or by being excluded from regular student activities.

Yeom Ha-ryong, the boy who motivated Kim to take on this task in the first place, recalls, “I speak with a strong accent. So my South Korean friends used to make fun of me, calling me a ‘pinko.’ I didn’t know that such a word even exists in the South.” For Lee Eokcheol, who grew up in the family and is now a student in the Department of Nursing at Pukyong National University, the sense of not quite belonging still rankles: “I 1 A fine arts major in still hate it when people look at me with pity because college, Kim tae-hoon I’m from the North.” is also art teacher to For Kim, stern disapproval from his own parents his boys, showcasing their works in an exhiloomed large over his decision to pursue an early altrubition every two years istic impulse as his lifework. It’s quite understandable to help them commuthat his parents never liked the idea of their eldest son nicate with the world through their painttaking care of total strangers and remaining unmarings and writings. In ried. He had to keep out of touch with them for the first 2014, their exhibition two years. “At first, I was worried very much that my of oil paintings was titled “Would You mom might come and say hurtful words to the boys,” Listen to Our Story?” he said.

2 Kim spends quality time with his boys in As it turned out, his mother and father are now his their home’s wellmost stalwart supporters. On Lunar New Year’s Day in appointed study.

2013, his parents received respectful traditional bows from the boys and allowed them to join a memorial rite for family ancestors, thus accepting them as their adopted grandsons. Since then, Kim and the boys have been visiting his parents’ home freely.

Fortunately, most of the boys are growing up in good physical health, never getting demoralized. Ha-ryong won the grand prize in a national volunteer contest for secondary school students. And he went on to represent South Korea in a world volunteer contest held in Washington, D.C. He is now a student majoring in sociology at Kyungpook National University. After serving as student council president, Jin-beom, now a high school senior, has already been admitted to the Department of Sports Leadership at Kwangwoon University under its early admissions program this year.

“Only one or two of every 10 teen defectors complete regular high school,” Kim notes. “Most others drop out, and then take the general equivalency diploma test or transfer to alternative schools for teen defectors. That’s why I’m so proud of my boys who have adapted well to regular schools and are growing up healthily.”

“We all will leave home sometime in the future. But we believe we are a family who will remain close to each other all our lives.”

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Nurturing Altruism, Building New Dreams Together with the boys, Kim traveled to an Akha hill tribe village in a remote region of Thailand three times to have them experience and cultivate a desire to help needy people. Their travels were funded mostly by Koscom, a securities information firm. Thailand is a transit country through which many young North Korean defectors pass before they reach South Korea. Lee Jin-cheol, who is now a freshman in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Kyungpook National University, looks back: “I was afraid at first when I visited Thailand again, because we had earlier traversed the country for eight hours across the Mekong River by boat when we were fleeing.”

In 2012, while he was still in high school, Jin-cheol helped build a water tank, a parking lot, and the foundation for a public library building at the Akha village as a participant in a Global Village volunteer program. He worked so hard that one of the village elders asked him if he would marry his daughter. He revisited this village in summer 2013 and participated in building a clay house for foreign volunteers. The participants also painted an awesome mural on the village wall.

“I had thought of the boys merely as young kids. But they worked real hard there. Furthermore, what they did was not simply volunteer work. I felt that they, as well as I, had grown spiritually through the experience,” Kim said.

On occasion, the boys travel to the rugged northeast near the border with North Korea to give a hand to Catholic priests and nuns of the Claretian Missionaries, which provide services for abandoned elderly, handicapped people, and children in Wontong, a needy rural community in Gangwon Province. After harvesting crops, threshing dry beans, and tilling the fields with tractors, they get to enjoy relaxing in the area’s natural surroundings. They even had a chance to take a dip in the East Sea, another first-time experience.

A fine arts major in college, Kim is carefully nurturing the boys’ artistic sen-

sibility by teaching them and helping develop their aptitudes, showcasing their works by holding art exhibitions every two years. Disagreements arise and mistakes are made during the preparations for exhibitions. But their pride in each other’s gifts and the joy from working together collaboratively shines through each time.

The story of Kim and his boys has been shared with the world through a musical titled “Are We a Family, Too?” and “We’re Really Pissed Off,” a collection of the boys’ articles with their own illustrations. Their story has also been made into a documentary film titled “Our Family” (directed by Kim Do-hyun), which was screened at the Fifth DMZ International Documentary Film Festival in 2013.

Kim is preparing to take a big leap: to establish a social enterprise. He is planning a project to revive a regional economy, while helping defectors stand on their own, based in Cheorwon, an area adjacent to the DMZ in Gangwon Province. He plans to set aside a third of the revenue from the project to support other group homes for young defectors.

“We all will leave home sometime in the future. But we believe we are a family who will remain close to each other all our lives,” the boys said in unison. Kim Tae-hoon, their “Bachelor Mom,” believes that what he is doing now is part of preparations for the eventual unification of the Korean nation.

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iN loVE wiTH KorEA

SHin Eui-Son Shin eui-Son A TAjiK-BorN TAJIK-BorN GoAlKEEpEr CoACH Valeri Sarychev, a Tajik-born goalkeeper, is a former star player in the Moscow premier league. He arrived in Korea with his family in 1992, when he was scouted by a professional Korean football club. The media soon started calling him the goalie with “the hand of god” for continuing to make save after save, oftentimes miraculous. So for his Korean name he chose Shin Eui-son, a literal translation of his nickname. Now a naturalized Korean citizen, Shin coaches young Korean goalies.

Kim Hyun-sook CEO, K-MovieLove Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

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As a young goalkeeper, Shin Eui-son was hailed for making save after save, earning the nickname “the hand of god.”

Since his retirement as a player in 2005, the Tajik-born naturalized footballer has coached young Korean goalies for several clubs. Currently, he is goalkeeper coach for the Icheon Daekyo Women’s Football Club.

t was lunchtime when I visited the Icheon Daekyo Women’s Football Club in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province.

In the cafeteria crowded with 20-something female players, I had no difficulty finding Shin Eui-son, 56, the 192-cm-tall bald-headed coach. When I handed him my business card, he introduced me to two goalies, Chung Ji-soo and Kim Jae-hee, who happened to be at the same table. “Other clubs have three goalies on average, but our club has four. Jun Min-kyung, a former national football team member, is also in our club,” Shin said proudly.

Shin assumed his goalkeeper coach job at the women’s football club this year. It is in fact his second stint at Daekyo after a five-year hiatus. Earlier, he worked as the club’s field trainer and goalkeeper coach from 2008 to 2011. The team has been on a roll in the WK League, the women’s football league in Korea, the morale of its members greatly boosted since Shin’s comeback.

Jun Min-kyung, especially, has made a fresh resolution. Coached by Shin, she had played a leading role in her team’s winning ways in the WK League in 2009 and 2011.

“Our country’s goalies mostly use their hands, but Coach Shin teaches us to use our feet as well. So we learn how to use good footwork. We now have the advantage of using both our hands and feet,” Jun said.

“When Coach Shin left for the Busan IPark club in 2012, the Incheon Hyundai Steel Red Angels won the women’s league title for three consecutive years. But now that he’s back, it’s our turn to win again.”

During lunch, Shin kept cracking jokes, making everybody laugh. “Can’t you speak Korean? You speak it better than me, you know,” he said to no one in particular. Kim Jae-hee whispered to me, “He’s always very considerate. He keeps trying to cheer us up if we look tired or depressed.”

Shin winked at me, saying, “I’ve coached male players for six years and female players for five years. I think it’s harder to take care of female players, spiritually and emotionally.” All the goalies’ nerves are on edge because only one of them plays in each game, he added.

ordeal after Glory Shin now has a remarkable presence in Korea. A famous goalie in Russia, he leapt to stardom as a foreign import here at age 32 and became the best goalkeeper of all time in Korean soccer history. He set so many records that it is now impossible to discuss professional Korean soccer of the 1990s without mention-

ing his stellar play.

Shin was born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, then a part of the Soviet Union. He started playing soccer when he was 10 years old and joined a professional football club at age 18. From the age of 22, he spent 10 years as a premier league player in Moscow. His moment of glory came when he was inducted into the Lev Yashin Club, a group of Russian goalkeepers dedicated to honoring the legacy of the legendary Russian goalkeeper. In 1991, Shin was named the Goalkeeper of the Year in the Soviet Top League.

That year, Park Jong-hwan, the then manager of the Cheonan Ilhwa Chunma Football Club (currently Seongnam Football Club) asked a friend who traveled frequently to the Soviet Union for business to look for a good goalkeeper there. At that time, prior to the Soviet Union’s collapse, Seoul and Moscow were engaged in brisk trade with each other. Shin, then known as MVP Valeri Sarychev, automatically topped the list of best goalies. Park invited him to Korea in October that year for a tryout.

“After only two practice games, Manager Park asked me to sign a contract. So, I played for the Ilhwa Chunma FC from 1992,” Shin said.

At that time, there were only six professional soccer clubs in Korea. Despite its charismatic manager and talented players like Ko Jeong-woon, Shin Taeyong, and Lee Sang-yoon, Ilhwa Chunma was ranked in the bottom half of the K League due to its lack of a good goalkeeper. The first year “Brother Chev” from Russia joined the team, Ilhwa Chunma finished second and won the Adidas Cup. The team then went on to win for three straight years until 1995 and even won the Asian Super Cup and the Continental Cup in 1996. Ilhwa Chunma became a legend by giving up the fewest goals for three consecutive years. Needless to say, this was all made possible by the watertight defense of Sarychev, who yielded only 0.87 goals per game on average.

That’s when the press started calling him a goalie with “the hand of god.”

“One day, I was watching sports news on TV, when I saw a subtitle alongside my name. I asked a Korean friend what it meant, since I wasn’t that familiar with the Korean language. He told me it meant ‘the hand of god.’ I was surprised. My love for Korea got a sudden boost,” Shin said.

When fans began to shower him with attention, however, other people began to envy him and showed jealousy, blaming him for depriving Korean goalkeepers of opportunities.

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“A newspaper carried an analytical feature about Korea’s professional football clubs. It said that Ilhwa had made a clean sweep of the league thanks to a cheap foreign import for goalkeeper, while other clubs had spent huge amounts of money to sign foreign strikers and midfielders,” Shin said. “The newspaper article turned out to be a seed of misfortune for me. The next year, all the nine other clubs imported foreign goalkeepers. They also did it cheaply, for half the price they would have had to pay for strikers or midfielders.”

Thereafter, the Korea Professional Football League imposed a limit on the import of foreign goalkeepers and their playing time in league matches. Even worse, in 1999 foreign goalies were banned altogether from playing in the league. A potential MVP recipient, Shin was outlawed by the league. It was his toughest ordeal during the seven years he had spent in Korea.

reborn as a Korean Citizen Because of his age, it was not easy for Shin to join a foreign club. He was thinking seriously about returning to Russia for good when Cho Kwang-rae, the then manager of FC Anyang (currently FC Seoul), offered him a coaching position. Though reluctant to leave Ilhwa, Shin decided to join FC Anyang as a goalkeeper coach, even if it was not what he had planned. He still wanted to play goalkeeper and indeed Cho needed him in that position. He believed victory would be assured if Shin would agree. Then, Cho suggested that he acquire Korean citizenship: “You can play as much as you like if you became a naturalized Korean citizen.”

“I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t,” Shin recalls. “So I began thinking about it seriously. I thought I could do anything if only I could play goalie again. I started studying Korean history and language right away. When the players went to Cyprus for a month of training, I hit the books and passed the naturalization test.”

He still vividly remembers that day: “I took a written

test first. I had to answer 20 questions in 40 minutes.

I was too nervous to understand what the questions were about. Some people left the room just five minutes after the test had started. How I envied them! I stayed until the bell rang. We then moved to another room for a speaking test. A TV camera crew followed me. Looking perplexed, an interviewer in the speaking test asked me a few very simple questions and told me to leave. I thought I had failed.”

He laughed for a while, joking that he suspected his football club of using some media influence. Sarychev then became the progenitor of the “Guri Shin Clan,” adopting Guri in Gyeonggi Province as the hometown of his new clan lineage in Korea. Guri was the city where the Anyang LG Cheetahs were based at the time. That year, Anyang won the league title thanks to Sarychev, who was now Shin Eui-son.

“After I became naturalized as a Korean citizen, I was given the jersey number 44. I decided then and there that I would continue playing for four more years, until I turned 44, and then retire,” Shin said.

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Shin is credited for making great contributions to the K League in two regards. First, he has shown that goalkeepers play an important role and can be star players in their own right. Second, he has created the position of goalkeeper coach.

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1 As goalkeeper for the Anyang LG Cheetahs, Shin Eui-son makes a save in a 2001 match against the Suwon Samsung Bluewings, the archrival of his team.

2 Shin Eui-son coaches a young goalie of the Icheon Daekyo Women’s Football Club. He hopes the goalies he is training will make it into the national football team some day.

At his retirement ceremony he shed tears during a TV interview, saying, “As long as I can, I will work for the development of Korean soccer, as a Korean.” In fact, he was recruited by Hong Myung-bo, the then manager of the national under-20 football team, as a goalkeeper coach in 2009 and helped the team advance to the quarterfinals of the FIFA U-20 World Cup in Egypt.

life as a Soccer Coach Shin is credited for making great contributions to the K League in two regards. First, he has shown that goalkeepers play an important role and can be star players in their own right. Kim Byung-ji and Lee Woon-jae rose to the top as outstanding Korean goalies, because they had modeled their play after Shin. Second, he has created the position of goalkeeper coach. Except for the national team, it was unusual for teams to keep a coach exclusively for the goalkeepers. Other field players had their coaches, but goalkeepers were expected to train themselves by watching senior players and foreign star players on video.

Shin said he wanted to prepare a manual and educational video for goalkeepers. His resolve has grown stronger while coaching professional soccer players as a head coach or a goalkeeper coach for the FC Seoul, the FC Gyeongnam, and the Daekyo Kangaroos, and sometimes as a coach for young soccer players.

When he first arrived in Korea with his wife, Olga Sarycheva, his daughter was eight years old and his son was six. Currently, their daughter lives in Canada, and their son in the United States. “I had planned to stay here for only two or three years. But it’s been 24 years now,” he said, as if suddenly realizing the fact.

As for Shin and his wife, who has always supported his decisions, they now live a mere 10-minute drive from the Daekyo Training Center, located in Siheung, Gyeonggi Province. Shin neither drinks nor smokes, and his only hobby is listening to music. He boasts of having as many as 700 LP records at home, including complete collections of the Beatles and Genesis albums, but his favorite is rock music, whether it be rock and roll or progressive rock.

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oN THE roAd

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Walking ToWard The SunriSe Gwak jae-gu Poet Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

in Korea, the sun rises first on Homigot, a small fishing village in pohang that juts out into the sea like a tail from the rump of the peninsula. people from all over the country gather here on New Year’s day to watch the sun come up and walk along this easternmost point of land as they look out to sea.

Reaching up toward the rising sun, a large bronze hand, one of a paired sculptural work called “The Hands of Harmony,” emerges from the tidal foam of the East Sea lapping ashore in Homigot.

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W

hen I feel the winter sunlight on my face, I suddenly become more aware that I am alive. It’s cold, it’s soft, and it’s also somehow empty.

The Sun rises on the road to the East Sea Sometimes people ask me, “What was the happiest moment in your life?” As soon as I hear this question I go over the pages in my memory, one by one. Happy moments, big and small. I find it hard to choose one among them. Because some moments, so fleeting that they are scarcely remembered, have the power to shake up your soul.

So I like to ask in return, “What was the saddest moment in your life?” But the sad moments that people talk about come across as happiness to me. Likewise, of all the sadnesses in life I can’t say which is the saddest. So I like to respond: “When the sun doesn’t rise in the morning.” It’s not something I have ever experienced, but for everyone surely this would be the saddest thing that could happen. Life and death, mystery and beauty, spirit and fate. In the time between the rising and setting of the sun, human beings write their memories.

Bowing Before the rock Carvings When I travel to the East Sea there is a place that I always stop by, like a ritual. It’s the rock carvings at Chilpo-ri in the city of Pohang. Lying by the side of a quiet country road on the way to the East Sea, off National Highway No. 7, they were etched in the Bronze Age some 3,000 years ago. When I first saw them, my mind seemed to fill with light. It was as if some special stars were shining in the Milky Way. They reflected the dreams dreamt by prehistoric people as they looked up at the night sky.

I took a few turns around the rock. And when I looked at the carvings again I saw a big vase. It was full of flowers. Three thousand years ago someone had carved a vase and flowers on this rock. To me the carvings seemed to be that person’s picture of the universe and the song of praise he offered to it. At that moment, the sun emerged from behind the clouds. The sun’s rays quietly stroked the rock surface. I nodded. I put my hands together before the rock and bowed.

In Eastern India, there is a marvelous monument called the Konark Sun Temple. A UNESCO World Heritage site, the temple is built in the shape of a colossal chariot dedicated to the Sun God. It is mounted on 24 chariot wheels, each three meters in diameter, symbolizing the cycle of the seasons and the months. I visited the Sun Temple on January 1, 2010. The relief carvings of deities and kings on the chariot, originally 50 meters high, were enigmatic and beautiful.

The temple was crowded with pilgrims from all over India and the orange saris that they wore dazzled in the sun. The temple swarming with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of orange-clad pilgrims, looked like one huge rolling sun. Walking among the crowds, I felt the energy of the sun rising within me.

Later that year, I headed back to the Sun Temple during the rainy season. When I reached Puri, the city was flooded and the road to Konark was cut off. All the drivers shook their 1 heads. Then, one man in an orange sari came

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2 ŠPohang City

1 Guryongpo, an estuary named after a legend of nine dragons rising heavenward from the spot, seen from the air.

2 Large crowds converge at Sunrise Plaza in Homigot to greet the first sunrise of the New Year. On the left is the National Lighthouse Museum, where the history of Korea’s navigation aid technology can be explored.

3 The rock carvings at Chilpo-ri in the city of Pohang are dated to the Bronze Age, some 3,000 years ago.

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up to me. “Why do you want to go to Konark?” “I want to see the Sun Temple.” “The road is flooded, and even if you could get there the temple would be closed.” “I’d look at it from the outside.” I don’t know why I was being so obstinate. The man was a rickshaw driver.

In a ramshackle three-wheeled auto rickshaw we drove over the flooded roads. On the way, the rain stopped. Storm water began to drain from the roads and when we reached the Sun Temple three hours later, the sun had begun to shine. That day I found the happiness of walking around the temple with a small number of other pilgrims. When my mind becomes clouded, I think of that day. If anyone were to ask me about the best thing I’ve done in my life, I would talk about that day.

My pilgrimage to the Chilpo-ri rock carvings over, I headed for Homigot.

Greeting the Sun on the Tiger’s Tail The name Homigot means “a cape in the shape of a tiger’s tail.” In the early 20th century, the modern writer and intellectual

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Choe Nam-seon compared the shape of the Korean peninsula to a tiger, with its front paws embracing Manchuria. The tiny point of land forming the tiger’s tail is Homigot in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province. This is where the sun rises first in Korea. When their country was forcibly annexed by Japan in 1910, many Koreans would come here and pray for the country’s liberation as they watched the sun rise above the horizon. For Koreans, the sunrise on Homigot is not just any sunrise. Choe Nam-seon considered it to be the best of the ten most beautiful sights of Korea.

If you are a foreign visitor traveling in Korea in winter, watching the sunrise at Homigot will be a special experience. Even better if the sunrise you see is the first of the New Year. On that day, warm rice cake soup, a traditional dish eaten on New Year’s Day, is handed out free to all visitors. All the people gathered here at the seaside on the year’s first morning can enjoy breakfast together as they watch the sun come up. A tide of goodwill washes over everyone as they gaze the blazing sun rise over the water. May the world be a better place! May everyone be healthy and love and care for each

The waves crash high against the seawall. The brilliant spray created by the sunbeams break through the waves. They could have been seen as the nine legendary dragons, perhaps? Just ambling along the snowy wharf, the image of a long lost dragon etched in your mind, is enough to make a visit to this place worthwhile. other! As I watch the people put their hands together to pray in the glow of the rising sun, I also say my own prayers. May the warm and beautiful hours of unification come in our lifetime!

In Homigot there is a pair of large bronze sculptures of cupped hands, named “The Hands of Harmony.” One hand rises from the sea and the other emerges from the ground. The two hands face each other. It seems people’s hearts are in greater sympathy with the hand in the sea. They sense a greater vitality from the hand that shoots above the ocean waves. There comes a moment when the sun rests upon that hand, and everyone is busy clicking away on their cameras. They seek to capture the energy of the sun in their own lives. Following the quiet road beside the wharf to its end, there appears a stone monument engraved with the poem “Green Grapes” (Cheongpodo) by Lee Yuk-sa.

Pohang Canal, a manmade waterway flowing between Songdo-dong and Jukdodong, is a popular tourist attraction for romantic boat rides down its winding 1.3 kilometer course.

In my hometown July is when the green grapes ripen.

The village legends bloom in clusters And the dreamy sky faraway descends on the grapes, Under the sky the blue sea bares its bosom And when the white-sailed boat comes in, My long-awaited guest will come With weary body wrapped in green, Then I will pick these grapes for him Happy to get my hands soaked.

Come here child, prepare the table With a white cloth on the silver tray.

Seoul 365km

hyangno peak pohang

Pohang

Chilpo-ri Rock Carvings Lee Yuk-sa poetry Monument homigot Yeongildae Beach Jukdo Market poSCo

pohang Station

©Pohang City

Sites to Visit in pohang

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Arrested several times during the Japanese colonial period for his resistance activities, Lee died in prison in January 1944. It was less than a year since he had been imprisoned, so the tortures that he suffered can easily be imagined. A year after Lee’s death, another young Korean poet died in a Japanese prison, the 28-year-old Yun Dong-ju. The death of these two poets, whose lives and writings epitomized this age of suffering, was a tragic loss for Korean literature.

passing the portside Villages People call the roadway that wraps around Homigot the “Homi Cape Trail.” Along this road are a handful of seaside villages redolent with the essence of Korean people’s everyday lives. Guryongpo is an estuary in the shape of nine dragons soaring skyward, which is the meaning of its name. The waves crash high against the seawall. The brilliant spray created by the sunbeams break through the waves. They could have been seen as the nine legendary dragons, perhaps? Just ambling along the snowy wharf, the image of a long lost dragon etched in your mind, is enough to make a visit to this place worthwhile. Visitors to Guryongo always seek out the local delicacy, a dried fish called gwamegi. Mackerel pike caught in the East Sea are dried in the sea wind, and then repeatedly frozen and thawed until the oil is extracted. The flesh becomes tender but retains the deep flavor of the sea. The sight of fishermen sitting by the wharf grilling the dried fish and drinking soju is homely and enchanting at the same time. More so, considering that they have endured a lifetime, with the spirit of the legendary dragons living inside them. “Where are you from?” “Have a drink.” Laughing jovially, these dragons push a shot glass in front of me.

Seen from the Homi Cape Trail at night, the lights of the POSCO plant are truly spectacular. The steelworks sitting in the middle of Yeongil Bay, POSCO Pohang Works is the second-largest steel plant in the world. Here, steel sheets for automotives, shipbuilding, home appliances, and other products are made.

POSCO steel sheets played a vital role in Korea’s growth to the 11th largest economy in the world. No wonder the Pohang locals take great pride in the steelworks.

Beyond the lights of the POSCO complex, there is another pride of the locals. Pohang Canal, completed in January 2014, is a 1.3-kilometer canal winding its way through the city of Pohang. The manmade watercourse runs through an area that had long been filled with squalid housing units and the foul odor of factory wastewater. Now it’s a pleasure to stroll along the canal banks and visit the galleries, cafes, and playgrounds that have replaced the slums. For tourists visiting Pohang in autumn, a festival will bring back memories of their childhood. The highlight of the festival is the bangti race. Bangti is the local word for a large tub.

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72 KOREANA Winter 2016

1 Mackerel pike caught in the East Sea are hung up and dried in the open, lashed by wintry wind from the sea.

After repeated freezing and thawing, the half-dried fish are transformed into gwamegi , a local delicacy of Guryongpo.

2 Where Pohang Canal reaches the sea lies Jukdo Market, which has some 2,500 stalls selling fresh and dried seafood, and 200 restaurants serving raw fish dishes. It is the largest fish market on the east coast.

2

One person sits in a tub, not quite a meter across, and maneuvers it along the canal by hand toward the finish line. This canal race through the city is full of nostalgia and the romance of yesteryear.

The old Fish Markets One of the greatest pleasures for tourists might be the Jukdo Market at the end of the canal. The biggest fish market on the east coast, it includes more than 2,500 stalls selling fresh and dried fish, and some 200 restaurants that specialize in fresh raw seafood. As you walk among the stalls brimming with fish of all colors, as well as shellfish, octopus, and prawns, the clamor and the briny smell of the fish market will permeate your body. This has to be the greatest cure for travel fatigue. For a moment, memories of old fish markets of the past come to mind.

I once traveled to Puna on the Island of Hawaii when I was commissioned to write a story about the city. With the help of the local tourist office, I boarded a mini-submarine and explored the undersea waters. I saw fish and corals in a multitude of colors. Watching

the fish swim through the sea vegetation, I thought it wouldn’t be bad to be born a fish in the next life and live in this ocean. According to my itinerary, the next day I went to the fish market at the crack of dawn. Fresh fish were laid out on the stalls and the voices of the fish sellers were loud and cacophonous. For the first time I found the dynamism and vitality of the fish market uncomfortable. It was because of the fish I had seen in their habitat the day before.

I once went to a fish market in Russia, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I was on my way to visit a Korean student and his family. It was the middle of winter and king crabs and cod fish were piled high in mounds. I had been wondering what to buy for a gift and decided on the crabs and cod. I bought enough for four people but it only cost me ten dollars. The temperature was minus 20 degrees. There was no heating in the apartment, but as we cooked and ate the seafood for dinner it didn’t feel cold.

As I walk by the Pohang seaside, little by little I grow more alive.

The never failing sunrise seems to embrace the meager stories of my life and give them warmth.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 73

AN ordiNArY dAY

Formerly an office worker, Kim joungwon started a new life a year ago when he opened a noraebang in the center of Seoul near his home. He now leaves home in the afternoon and works until the early hours of the morning. Sitting at the counter greeting the customers, ranging from local high school students to elderly couples, and then sending them on their way again, he loves and cherishes his everyday life.

S

inging is a powerful form of self-expression.

Surely there are few places on earth where people have as much need to express themselves and let off steam as they do in Korea. And so wherever people live and work, there is always a noraebang (literally “singing room”) or two nearby. We go to noraebang when we’re sad, and when we’re happy. If you’re about to burst with emotion, the natural thing to do is let it all out at a noraebang.

While the singing skills of the contestants on Korea’s open audition programs are indeed impressive, many ordinary people who don’t get up on stage also have incredible talent. Just put a microphone in their hands and see how they let their hair down and sing a song or two so well they could rival a pop star. It’s hard to tell whether people love to sing so much because of the noraebang, or there are so many noraebang because people have such a strong urge to sing.

74 KOREANA Winter 2016

The Wonderful Life of Noraebang Owner Kim Joung-won Kim Seo-ryung Director, Old & Deep Story Lab Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

lone Customers on a rainy day In the basement of a mixed-use office and residential building near Gyeongbokgung Station is one of Seoul’s ubiquitous noraebang. The sign reads “Seochon Singing Practice Room.” Is this the owner Kim Joung-won’s way of saying that not just people who want to sing but those who need to practice their singing are welcome too? That said, this is not a place with singing coaches on standby.

Kim divides his customers into a few groups such as office workers, school kids, families, and friends. But of late, a new group has emerged: customers coming in on their own. Just as dining solo and drinking solo are now the trend, the number of people singing solo has increased noticeably. Particularly on a rainy day, there are many customers who come in alone, sing their hearts out to sad songs, and then leave.

“It wasn’t long after we’d opened the place,” Kim says. “On a rainy night someone came in and kept extending his time. He ended up singing alone for about three hours. I could sense his mood and began to feel a bit like that too, so when he was paying I said, ‘You must be feeling down because of the rain.’ I said it with the best intentions, but he seemed annoyed at having the guy running the noraebang catch his mood. He never came back. It might be that he was passing by and just dropped in … But anyway, I’ve made it a rule never to

Having opened a noraebang say anything that suggests I know or understand about a year ago, Kim Jounghow a customer is feeling.” won finds great satisfaction in People who come in large groups have usually his work when his customers are obviously feeling happy. had a bit to drink. Of course, most customers are well-mannered, but there’s also the odd customer who, after a few drinks, behaves rudely and probably won’t remember anything about it the next morning. But it is Kim’s job to treat all of his varied customers in the same friendly way. “They’re people who have come here to let off steam. They’re quicker to speak informally and can be demanding. You have to know how to brush that kind of thing off. If you’re going to work in a noraebang it helps to have a cheery disposition like me,” Kim notes.

From 3:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.

Kim's daily routine is relatively simple. The doors open at three in the afternoon and close at two in the morning. On Saturdays and Sundays they close “early” at about 10 o’clock at night. Having turned 41 this year and resolute that “You have to earn as much as you can while you’re young,” Kim runs the place single-handedly, with occasional help from his wife or mother-in-law. He only closes on special occasions such as the two big national holidays (Lunar New Year’s Day and Chuseok, the mid-autumn festival), as well as Children’s Day,

Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day. “Most noraebang are open every single day of the year, so I actually have more time off than everyone else,” Kim says. He lives nearby, so 10 minutes in the car is all it takes to get to work. He gets there at 2:00 p.m. and spends an hour cleaning the office and six singing rooms before opening up. From October through mid-December, the first customers come in as soon as he opens the doors.

“Those coming in at 3:00 p.m. are mainly students from the high schools nearby who are preparing for exams. They come in small groups,” Kim says. “People say that kids these days have no manners, but around here the students are polite and well turned out. They jump around and sing for an hour or two, then politely say good-bye to me as they leave. Most of them will be heading straight home to study for the next day’s exams.”

On the afternoon I went to interview Kim, there were groups of high school students singing loudly KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 75

“When customers say that all their stress has disappeared, my stress disappears too. Running a noraebang isn’t particularly strenuous work, and you don’t have to use your head that much either. But there are plenty of times when I feel a real sense of satisfaction so I think it’s a pretty great job.”

in three or four of the rooms. The door of one room opens and the deliberately cutesy voices of students ring out. “Please mister, can you give us just ten more minutes?” Kim replies amiably, “I’ve given you another thirty.”

“Strangely, we hardly ever get any university students. I guess they’re working so hard to prepare for the job market they don’t have any free time,” Kim says. “Also, they can’t get money from their parents as easily as high school students, so they probably don’t have money to spend on noraebang anyway.”

The small rooms are 15,000 won per hour, while a large room for bigger groups is 30,000 won. But Kim gives the high schoolers discounts and lots of free extra time. The students leave, and after six o’clock things quiet down. Then from around eight o’clock, after dinner, office workers start to appear.

This is the peak of the working day in a noraebang.

There are lots of orders and lots of requests so the time flies by in a busy haze. Kim flits from one room to another, smiling all the while.

“All the groups of work colleagues who come with their managers have something funny in common. The managers always ask me for extra time, while their staff flash their eyes at me and say that it’s OK, they don’t need extra time. When the boss is in tow, even singing is an extension of the workday,” Kim says.

Going from room to room like this, it’s soon 11 o’clock. By around 11:30 all of the office workers have left, like the ebbing tide. Now it’s time for those who come to sing alone. Generally, they prefer quiet songs to lively ones. With their arrival Kim’s mood calms down too. Past midnight, there are waves of rowdy customers who’ve had a few rounds of drinks after dinner, and while dealing with them the time comes for Kim to start closing up.

Kim started out as an ordinary office worker.

When the company he worked for folded after an unfortunate incident, he began to wonder what kind of work he would like to do if he could start his own business.

76 KOREANA Winter 2016

“Twenty years ago my father ran a noraebang in Yeoju, Gyeonggi Province.

Business was good so he was able to make a fair bit of money. I guess I missed those days because the idea of a noraebang just popped into my head. I liked singing too, and I was confident that I could deal with customers in a friendly manner,” he recalls.

From office worker to Noraebang owner When he first opened up shop, having scraped together the funds to buy an empty shop in the remodeled basement of an officetel and had it outfitted, Kim would often go into one of the empty rooms and sing on his own. There were many days when the whole family — his wife, fifth-grade son, and first-grade daughter — would sing to their heart’s content “in our noraebang with our equipment.”

“Now that it’s been over a year this place has gotten busier, and strangely enough I hardly ever end up singing anymore,” he says with a laugh.

Kim has more freedom now because there’s no need to second-guess his

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2 1 Customers of Kim’s noraebang are largely divided into a few groups, such as office workers, friends, families, and students of nearby high schools.

2 Kim gets to work at 2 p.m. and spends an hour cleaning the six singing rooms. He is meticulous when cleaning the microphones because they go through so many customers’ hands every night.

colleagues or the management. If there’s one downside it is that he finishes work so late. After closing up, getting home and taking a shower, it’s already past three in the morning. Sleeping so late, he ends up waking up late, but even so, compared to when he worked in an office his life has become much more leisurely.

“It’s good because I can spend more time with my wife than when I was always rushing to get to work on time. My wife waits up for me at night. She says she can’t sleep because she’s sorry that I have to be out so late,” Kim says.

With that he brings up the story of a couple in their eighties who come by hand-in-hand every Wednesday: “Apparently the husband was a dentist. They live nearby and come at the same time every week, sing for an hour and then leave again. Their faces are so bright and healthy looking. I made a firm promise with my wife that we will live just like that when we get old.”

There’s also one customer he will never forget. A middle-aged man who always came alone and only picked out songs about mothers. It turns out he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

“He came here every day for over 10 months. Once he even collapsed while he was singing, and so I escorted him back home. He hasn’t been here for a couple of months now, so I’m getting really worried.”

Noraebang is not just a place for singing, it is a place of interaction and healing. The same goes for Kim as he sits at the counter greeting customers and then seeing them off again. So, when it comes to the occasional rudeness of customers, he has no problem laughing it off.

A pretty Great job How many customers come on an average day? 100? 200?

“Because we charge per room rather than per person, the actual number of customers isn’t important,” Kim says. “The takings vary depending on the season and the state of the economy. Our revenues ... do you really want to know? It probably works out to more than the average office worker’s salary.

But these days because of the new ‘Kim Young-ran Act’ we’ve had a noticeable decline in customers.”

How could an anti-corruption law aimed at preventing the solicitation of public officials have an effect on noraebang? “The number of work-related dinners has gone down,” Kim explains. “We’re right by the Central Government Complex here. There are lots of famous traditional Korean restaurants in the area, and after dinner it was only natural to move on to a noraebang.”

On days when famous customers come in, Kim gets excited too. Like the day a popular female newscaster came in with her boyfriend, or when a pro boxer he’d adored from his youth and a singer he was a huge fan of stopped by. “With people like that coming into my place, what more could you ask for?

All I have to do is enjoy the situation and make sure they can relax and have a good time. When they say that all their stress has disappeared, my stress disappears too,” he says. “Running a noraebang isn’t particularly strenuous work, and you don’t have to use your head that much either. But there are plenty of times when I feel a real sense of satisfaction so I think it’s a pretty great job."

Nothing could be more positive than that.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 77

Charles la Shure Professor, Department of Korean Language and Literature, Seoul National University Kim Hoo-ran Culture Editor, The Korea Herald

BookS & MoRE 78 KOREANA Winter 2016

Indelible Memories of Violence and Wounds “Human Acts” By Han Kang, Translated by Deborah Smith, 224 pages, £12.99, London: Portobello Books [2016]

In May 1980, civilians demonstrating for democracy and protesting General Chun Doohwan’s military coup clashed with government forces. Soldiers fired on and killed unarmed civilians, and the protests grew into an uprising that engulfed the city. But this uprising would not lead to the democracy the people so longed for. Instead, it left scars on the nation that have yet to fade. As one character in Han Kang’s novel “Human Acts” puts it: “Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded.”

There are many currents running through “Human Acts,” but overriding them is this idea of wounds remaining fresh despite the passage of time. As the chapters progress, we find ourselves looking at snapshots of the future after the uprising: five years, ten years, twenty-two years, thirty years. Yet while time has moved on and the people affected by the events of that spring have built lives for themselves, none are truly free from those memories. In a way, it is as if no time at all has passed, as if the clock had stopped in that fateful moment and everything beyond that is just the long shadow of the now-motionless minute hand.

Han Kang is known for her powerful and often disturbing imagery, and in “Human Acts” she approaches the events of May 1980 from a unique angle that makes very effective use of such imagery. Rather than leaning on the drama of moments of action, she begins the story by focusing on the consequences of that action, namely the ever-increasing number of bodies of those killed in the protests. Through the eyes of a middle school student named Dong-ho, who becomes caught up in the bloody turmoil, we witness the horrible aftermath of the initial killings as the nameless bodies accumulate and begin to decompose. Dong-ho begins to question what it means to be alive, to have a soul. “How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies?” he wonders.

In answer to this question, the story then shifts to the point of view of the boy’s friend. Once again, rather than the violence, we are shown the aftermath. When the boy’s narration begins, he is already dead, his soul desperately trying to understand what has happened to him and why. Subsequent chapters follow different characters: people that Dong-ho had known during his brief time at the provincial government building, or others with some connection to those people. All of them carry on with life because they have to, but they have been irrevocably changed by their experiences of those ten days.

As these chapters move on, we are given further glimpses into the past, into memories of the uprising, until it is possible to piece together roughly what happened. We never get a complete picture, though, because “Human Acts” is not a history but a psychological examination of deep trauma. It is true that it relies on a common knowledge of events shared by most Korean readers, and for this reason it may not resonate quite the same way with an international audience. On the other hand, the novel transcends this particular event and touches on themes that are universal to the human experience, presenting us with characters who attempt to make sense of the senseless, who strive to move beyond that which can never truly be overcome. It thus reaches beyond national and cultural borders to become something that can connect with all readers.

Traditional Korean Instruments Play Heavy Metal “A Hermitage” By Jambinai, London: Bella Union [2016]

The three-member band Jambinai refuses to be boxed into a specific genre. Its second regular album, “A Hermitage,” released worldwide in June this year, starts off with a fast piece titled “Wardrobe” featuring a long heart-thumping drum intro in heavy metal style. First-time listeners to Jambinai — the band debuted in 2010 with an EP titled “Jambinai” and released its first regular studio album in 2012 — would not be incorrect in thinking it a heavy metal group.

It is not until well into the second track, “Echo of Creation,” that the strain of the two-string fiddle, haegeum, and the haunting vocal give any indication that this is not your typical heavy metal band. The album naturally progresses to reveal the group’s identity — a trio of musicians playing traditional Korean instruments as well as bass and drum in styles that are anything but traditional. “For Everything You Lost” with its soothing meditative Eastern sound is what you typically expect from a crossover gugak (traditional Korean music) group.

Run by Volunteers, koreanfilm.org Could Go Farther www.koreanfilm.org

Not to be confused with www.koreanfilm.or.kr, an English-language site on Korean films run by the Korean Film Council, www.koreanfilm.org is a private effort led by a Korea-based American and a group of volunteer contributors.

Darcy Paquet, a film critic who has been living in Korea since 1997, launched koreanfilm.org in 1999 with the aim of filling information gaps for English-speaking audiences of Korean films. Many features of the site have since become inactive, but the upcoming events section continues to be updated on a regular basis. The information on subtitled screenings in Seoul and elsewhere in the country and abroad is particularly useful.

Plucking of the six-string zither geomungo yields a deep, masculine base line in “Abyss.” The band’s true identity is called into question yet again in the piece that layers rapid-fire rap by Ignito over geomungo base and haegeum melody.

“Deus Benedicat Tibi” stands out in the album as one piece that stays close to a traditional Korean music form. For those with some background in traditional Korean music, the reference to traditional funereal music is obvious with its loud clanging of cymbals and the trance-like atmosphere created by the combination of cymbals and wind instruments that build up to a frenzied climax.

Jambinai’s first studio album, “Difference,” was named the Best Crossover Album at the 2013 Korean Music Awards. The group has since come into the international spotlight, performing at major music festivals around the world, including SXSW and the Glastonbury Festival. In the last four years, it has given some 100 concerts in all corners of the world, attesting to the universal appeal of its brand of music.

Several pieces on this album can be appreciated solely as rock/metal compositions. “Naburak,” for example, is a head-banging worthy piece where Jambinai’s origin as a crossover band is nowhere to be found, at least to casual listeners.

Reviews are also up to date and the music video genre gets a separate section, although it only features a handful of reviews, the most recent being the 2015 “Shake that Brass.” However, the top ten films of the year list stops at 2013 and the last interview dates back to 2008. The information on actors and actresses also needs a major update, not to mention the coverage of new significant players who have since come onto the scene.

Whereas it fails to provide updated information in a more consistent manner, koreanfilm.org is a useful source for the numerous links to other websites related to Korean cinema. The pages dedicated to five Korean directors, most of them popular abroad, such as Bong Joon-ho and Kim Kiduk, are also a good jumping board for anyone interested in Korean cinema.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 79

ESSENTiAl iNGrEdiENTS

Kong From Humble roots to modern superFood Yi ik, an 18th century intellectual who was a foremost proponent of Silhak, or “practical learning,” once noted: “if we did not have beans growing in our country, poor people would hardly have survived.” Beans had long been a basic food of the needy commoners and a low-cost source of protein for most Koreans. But today, beans of every kind, prepared in every form imaginable, can be found on the finest dining tables.

Kim jin-young Representative, Traveler’s Kitchen Shim Byung-woo Photographer

“F

ield meat” is an old Korean reference to beans, called kong. The United Nations has designated 2016 as the international year of pulses — beans and peas that are harvested dry — to underscore the importance of beans as a highly nutritious food vital for people’s survival and sustainable future. As a hardy and versatile food crop much less dependent on chemical fertilizer, beans are an ideal and critical element of humanity’s food basket and a means for attaining the goal of ecological food security.

Manchuria and the adjoining Maritime Province of Siberia are known as the ancient Asian home of beans.

The area includes former lands of the ancient Korean kingdoms of Gojoseon and Goguryeo. Between the Maritime Province and the Korean Peninsula flows the Tuman (Tumen) River, whose name literally means “River Full of Beans.” The river is said to have been so named because after each autumn harvest, it would be teeming with boats loaded with sacks of beans. The history of growing beans in Korea dates back to antiquity, and the Korean people have eaten beans in vari80 KOREANA Winter 2016

ous ways. According to recent data, per capita annual consumption of beans by Koreans is about 8 kilograms, ranking third after rice and wheat.

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1 Condiments such as doenjang (soybean paste) and gochujang (red pepper paste) are fundamental ingredients in Korean cooking.

2 Superfood tower, from top to bottom: red beans for topping over shaved ice (patbingsu ); mung beans for bindaetteok pancakes; soybeans for tofu and fermented bean blocks (meju ), the base material for sauces; black beans for sweet-salty kongjaban ; and kidney beans to cook with rice.

Soy Sauce and Soybean paste Beans are an essential food item in Northeast Asia, including Korea. It is part of traditional dishes as well as contemporary cuisine in multifarious forms. This is due to a culinary culture rooted in fermented sauces, called jang . Korea’s traditional cuisine invariably includes one, two, or all three fermented condiments, as seasoning or a base: doenjang (soybean paste), ganjang (soy sauce), and gochujang (red pepper paste).

Ganjang and doenjang are made with soybeans, called baektae (“white beans”), that are combined with water and salt, and then are helped by the sun, wind, and time.

To make meju, the base material for soy sauce and soybean paste, the soybeans are soaked in water for a whole day in late autumn after the first frost, when

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1 Savory-sweet konggomul (seasoned bean powder) is crucial for the taste of injeolmi (sticky rice cake).

2 Boiled tofu served with sautéed kimchi is a popular appetizer and bar food.

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the days are chilly. The beans are then cooked in an earthenware steamer and cooled. In the old days, just-cooked steaming hot soybeans was a special treat, with a delightful aroma and savory flavor, especially for children, who could enjoy them only once a year on the day when meju was being made. The cooled beans are coarsely mashed in a mortar and then kneaded into round wheels or square blocks, depending on each family’s traditional preference.

One has to have much experience to

determine just how much mashing and kneading is right; mostly, it’s done by “feel.”

If the beans are mashed too fine, or kneaded too dense, the inside of the meju block might rot because of lack of air circulation. In Korean cooking, we often use the expression sonmat (literally, “hand taste”) instead of precise measurement, probably because the success or failure in making meju, the base for every dish the family will eat all year, depends so heavily on “hand taste.” Delectable sauces for the year are

derived from well-made bean blocks, and good sauces lend tasty flavors to a family’s daily food. An old saying tells us that a good sauce flavor leads to sharing, and generosity is rewarded with good fortune.

The painstakingly made meju has to first be left to rest in a warm room for several days for proper fermentation of its microorganisms to get underway, and then suspended from a rope made of rice straw in a bright, airy place, such as under the eaves of a house, which is exposed to direct sunlight. Before spring arrives, the fermented and dried bean blocks are placed into a large earthen crock, together with salt and water, and left to further ferment. After about two months, the well-fermented liquid is soy sauce, while the remaining mash is soybean paste.

The tradition of each household making the family’s supply of sauces has all but disappeared these days, with most people buying commercially made products at the market. There are various brands of sauces on offer, ranging from those made by well-known local clan families, using their secret recipes, to branded products of big food companies, available in a wide range of prices and quality. The choice is up to consumers’ tastes and affordability.

Easy Tofu dishes One thing that simply must be mentioned when talking about beans is tofu, or dubu in Korean. Tofu is made by coagulating the soy milk produced by soaking, grinding, boiling, and straining soybeans.

The soy milk is simmered and salt added, forming a curd which is then pressed into a mold. Tofu can be eaten plain, drizzled with spicy soy sauce, braised, or added to

From soy sauce and soybean paste, soybean oil to soy milk, bean curd to savory pancakes, beans cooked with rice or as side dishes and desserts — beans in every form and shape enrich and enliven the Korean diet today as in the days of yore.

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stews. Tofu fried in a hot pan with sesame oil or other vegetable oils makes a perfect side dish for steamed rice. Tofu fried with sancho (Chinese pepper) oils is special and tasty. The sharp tang of sancho goes well with tofu’s mild flavor. This dish is available at popular tofu restaurants in Wonju, Gangwon Province and Jecheon, North Chungcheong Province.

In Seoul, the Golden Bean Field (Hwanggeum Kongbat) in Ahyeon-dong, Mapo-gu is known for its excellent tofu. The restaurant, which serves tofu made fresh daily with locally grown soybeans, is regarded as one of the best tofu restaurants by gourmands. The fried tofu and tofu-and-mushroom stew are mouthwatering. Chilled makgeolli, brewed by the restaurant onsite, is an ideal drink to accompany the tofu dishes.

There is a variety of black beans called seoritae (“frost beans”) because they are harvested after the first frost. Recently, it has come to be hailed as a superfood, with a rich content of anthocyanin, an antioxidant. The skin is black, but the seed inside

is bright green. Today it is said that black beans are more nutritious than yellow soybeans, so some types of tofu are now made with black beans. After being soaked in water, the black beans can be added to rice before cooking, which coats the rice with a subtle purple gloss. An especially beloved side dish of Koreans is kongjaban, made of black beans boiled down in soy sauce, flavored with sesame oil and oligo-sugar, and topped with a generous sprinkling of roasted sesame seeds.

Injeolmi, a traditional rice cake, is a popular delicacy. It is made of sticky glutinous rice, which is soaked, steamed, pounded into an elastic dough, cut into small pieces, and coated with bean powder. The bean powder, called konggomul , is the most important ingredient of this rice cake. To make the powder, steamed beans are dried, roasted, ground into powder, and mixed with salt and sugar, to highlight the beans’ savory taste. Of course, people nowadays will rarely make this delicacy at home since it is available at any rice cake shop, which promotes it as a kind of health food.

red Bean desserts Danpatjuk , or sweet red-bean porridge, is a favorite dish eaten mainly in wintertime. It is available at traditional tea houses in Insa-dong, the popular tourist district in central Seoul. In summertime, it is replaced with patbingsu , sweetened red beans served over shaved ice. Both are sweet desserts made with red beans, called pat . In Nagwon-dong, an area connected by footpaths that wind through narrow alleys from Insa-dong, famed rice cake shops continue to draw loyal customers.

Have a taste of their various rice cakes mixed with beans, including the injeolmi described above.

From soy sauce and soybean paste, soybean oil to soy milk, bean curd to savory pancakes, beans cooked with rice, or as side dishes and desserts — beans in every form and shape enrich and enliven the Korean diet today as in the days of yore.

That is why the annual consumption of beans is the third highest in Korea, after the staple rice and wheat.

2

liFESTYlE

IN SMARTPHONE ERA, CHAT ROOMS AND EMOTICONS AID PERSONAL CONNECTION 오전 10.06

< 그룹채팅 15

여자친구랑 헤어졌다. ㅠ.ㅠ 오후 6:30

“진짜?” @@ 오후 6:31

“왜?” 네가 잘못한 거 아니냐? 오후 6:32

얼른 가서 빌어 --;; 오후 6:34

The chat room has become an integral aspect of people’s daily lives in hyper-connected Korea. people come together by the dozen to share news, thoughts, and feelings through messages posted on chat windows. dantokbang, or group chat room, on the free mobile app of the Korean instant messaging provider Kakao Talk, is familiar to every household.

Kim dong-hwan Reporter, Digital News Desk, The Segye Times

84 KOREANA Winter 2016

“h

ey, guys. I’m feeling beaten down. My girlfriend broke up with me.”

The usually quiet group chat room suddenly comes to life.

“Really?”

“Why?” “What did you do wrong? Go tell her you are sorry.”

Every time my friends post a comment, my smartphone rings out an alert. Six of my friends fill the chat room with words of concern and advice about my predicament.

Chat rooms — A New Necessity It is no exaggeration to say that every Korean smartphone user belongs to at least one group chat room. By no means are they anonymous users interacting with strangers through the Internet; driving the dramatic advances in online technology and their applications are the quantum leaps in people’s work environments, lifestyles, and human relationships that continue to give shape to the many varieties of communication that are available online today. For hyper-connected Koreans, chat room buddies are mostly their friends, family, or people from work.

“I spend very little time with my family because of my work. I sometimes give them a call on the weekend to say hi, but you can only say so much and the conversation is always the same. I set up a family chat room to communicate more easily.”

A woman in her 30s whom I interviewed for this article explained why she uses the group chat room on her phone. She said she left for Seoul to get a job and it has been three years since she moved away from home.

She likes how the conversations in chat rooms are quicker, easier, and simpler. She is happy with the new mode of communication because “I can write ‘I miss you’ and ‘I love you’ more easily, whereas these words don’t come so easy to me on the phone. I chat with my family almost every day, so I feel as if we still live together although we are far apart.”

The group chat rooms can also help narrow emotional distance between family members who do live together under the same roof. Words like “thank you” and “sorry” that can be heard frequently among colleagues and strangers are less often spoken among family members. Thanks to chat rooms, these emotions can now be shared through a wide selection of expressive emoticons.

According to the OECD’s “Quality of Life” report published in 2015, Korean parents spent a scant 48 min-

utes out of the 24 hours each day with their children.

This is one-third the average of 151 minutes among OECD member countries, ranking Korea dead last.

Thus it is good to hear that chat rooms can serve as a helpful connection between parents and children who may otherwise be out of touch with each other most of the time. In June this year, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family surveyed 1,000 parents and 635 children in fourth to sixth grades who reside in five metropolitan cities in Korea to find out from each group what qualities they think make a “good parent.”

The results showed that children thought “parents they could talk to” were the most desirable parents. Listening to their children and being aware of even little things going on in their lives through family chat rooms brought the parents that much closer to being good parents.

The downside: on Call 24/7 Are group chat rooms just as beneficial in the workplace?

An employee of the marketing department of a company based in Seoul felt harassed by chat messages from his boss, especially after work. For example, on his way home after a dinner appointment with a business partner, the boss wanted him to report how the dinner went, whether there were any issues, and when the next meeting was going to be. It was long after office hours but the group chat room remains accessible around the clock. If he did not reply to the message, it would be the same thing as ignoring the boss. That is why the group chat room is called a prison at the workplace.

Employees are not free to simply leave the chat room because they are afraid if they are not part of that online space, they may be left out of real-life interaction with their co-workers. It is also true that they often have few other ways of keeping up with the latest information about workplace activities.

The stressed out employee opted for the secondbest choice: turning off the message alerts of the group chat room. He is happy with this so far. “I realized there were so many messages that did not require instant feedback. It did not cause a problem or make any difference when I checked the messages once every hour or two. I also realized that my work productivity and personal life changed for the better after I turned off the alerts.”

A senior member of another company read an article that described how instructions issued by the boss KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 85

through a group chat room can heighten stress among employees and could actually decrease work productivity. He decided not to use the group chat room to contact his subordinates after work hours, putting himself in the shoes of his staff. It may be a harmless message, but coming from the boss, it may feel like a continuation of work. He notes, “It did not take much thinking to come to such a decision. Wouldn’t a wise boss look after his people and respect their private time after work hours?”

Magic Symbols for Fast Communication “Emoticon” is a portmanteau of the words “emotion” and “icon.” It is a digital communication tool used to denote the sender’s feelings as part of a text message.

Emoticons started out as simple combinations of different keyboard symbols suggesting facial expressions.

Today, alongside the evolution of mobile data and messaging technology, pictographic (as opposed to typographic) symbols, or emoji, have evolved into everyday means to convey a wide range of emotions, such as joy, anger, love, amusement, surprise, sadness — and a lot more.

The first emoticon I came across was the double caret (^^) which resembles the eyes of someone smiling. One day in 1999, I entered a chat site on my PC and someone typed hi to me with this emoticon. Back then I 86 KOREANA Winter 2016

did not know what this symbol meant and I remember asking for clarification.

With the cellphone’s rise as the predominant device for digital communication, emoticons became so much richer and more colorful. When you are on the move and you want to end a conversation on a happy note, you must have experienced how ^^ works so much better than typing out “I am not upset but I have to go.”

Koreans also express sad faces with the Korean vowel combinations, such as ㅠㅠ, ㅜㅜ, and ㅜㅡ, indicating tear drops. They have come to discover a whole new world of emoticons.

With the ubiquity of smartphones, emoticons have evolved into single-character cartoonish symbols which convey the facial expressions or situations users can choose from. Animation brings more expressiveness to the emotions. The emoticons have become so popular that they are even available as character merchandise products. Kakao Talk, a free multiplatform mobile messaging app for smartphones in Korea, has been enjoying bumper sales of its emoticon characters and associated items.

The Kakao Friends flagship store, located in Gangnam-gu, southern Seoul, sells Kakao Talk merchandise. Ryan is the favorite character among female buyers, and many people line up in front of the store to purchase various character items that appear in Kakao

Emoticons started out as simple combinations of various keyboard symbols suggesting facial expressions. Today, alongside the evolution of mobile data and messaging technology, pictographic (as opposed to typographic) symbols, or emoji, have evolved into an everyday means to convey a wide range of emotions, such as joy, anger, love, amusement, surprise, sadness — and a lot more.

Talk. The store employees stand guard at the entrance and control the number of customers allowed into the store so as to avoid overcrowding. On the first day of its opening last July 2, more than 3,000 people flocked to the store, clear evidence of the high level of consumer interest. Within one month, the store attracted some 450,000 visitors. Line Friends, which also competes for market leadership at home, operates 22 character shops in 11 countries, including China, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

Snowballing demand When asked how much revenue the company has recorded from its recent emoticon sales, Kakao Talk said that it was difficult to provide accurate figures.

Instead, data released in November 2015 by the company to celebrate its fourth anniversary revealed that the cumulative number of emoticon buyers jumped from 2.8 million in 2012 to 5 million in 2013, 7.2 million in 2014, and surpassed 10 million in 2015.

The number of emoticons sent by Kakao Talk users is beyond imagination: 400 million emoticons a month in 2012, which then soared to 1.2 billion in 2013, 1.8 billion in 2014, and more than 2 billion in 2015. As of 2015, this translates to 67 million emoticons transmitted every day. (The statistics for emoticons sent are collected by counting the emoticon codes in the users’ SMS

transfer database, regardless of type of conversation.)

Today, group chat rooms abound with fresh new emoticons. They only cost a few dollars per set so people are tempted to purchase them whenever new emoticons come out, and teenage users’ enthusiasm for them surely make a dent on their parents’ wallets.

There are tips for smart emoticon shopping. Once a friend of mine constantly pushed me to participate in an event hosted on one of the chat apps. This friend told me to donate the points earned, emphasizing that I could make donations several times. I could not disappoint him so I sent him my points, which he used to purchase a set of new emoticons.

It is not that everyone is so much into the latest emoticons, or emojis in the proper term. I for one have never bought any of them because I believe I can express myself with just the phone software’s embedded icons that are provided for free. Sometimes I feel guilty even when I use only a limited number of emoticons in chatting because I feel I am not being sincere enough by replacing words with a single emoticon when I am too tired to type the whole text. I remember when I only interacted with emoticons in a group chat room that I did not really want to belong to. Someone made the comment, “I guess Dong-hwan does not want to talk to us.” Well, here is my belated reply: “That is correct. I am not that close to you anyway.”

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 87

jourNEYS iN KorEAN liTErATurE

CriTiquE

CONJURING CONJURING PEACEAND ANDLOVE LOVE PEACE AND LOVE PEACE WITH FICTION’S FICTION’S MAGIC MAGIC WITH Choi jae-bong Reporter, The Hankyoreh

“T

he Street Magician” that marked Kim Jong-ok’s literary debut was the winner of the annual New Year literary contest of the Munhwa Ilbo newspaper in 2012. For this same story, Kim received the Young Writers’ Award the following year from the publishing company Munhak Dongne [Literary Community]. The award was for the best short story or novella published in the previous year by writers who had debuted within the past 10 years. This means the debut work of a new writer won a noteworthy literary accolade usually received by writers with up to a decade more experience. There must have been something special about this work.

The story deals with the issue of group bullying and ostracism in schools, through a retelling by a student named Heesu of the circumstances that drove a fellow student, Namwoo, to jump to his death from a high window ledge. While talking to a lawyer friend of the mother of Taeyoung, the boy suspected of harassing Namwoo to such an extent that he ended up killing himself, Heesu recounts the events which led to the tragedy. At the same time, she recalls and ruminates on her memories of Namwoo before his death.

As this is a story of bullying, which ends in the death of the victim, deciphering culprit and victim, good and evil, and the related context, should be a straightforward matter, but “The Street Magician” does not choose such a predictable approach. By taking the perspective of Heesu, a third party, rather than the culprit or the victim, the writer eschews pointing the finger of blame, and in doing so creates the distance and freedom to look at the incident in a multifaceted and comprehensive way.

This should not be misconstrued as an indefensible rational88 KOREANA Winter 2016

ization for remaining a spectator to a critical cascade of circumstances which brings about the death of a young and vulnerable student. Although Heesu describes how, at the time when Namwoo fell to the ground from the high-up window ledge, “a kind of magic” occurred “that conjured for a moment a completely peaceful world,” or how “in that moment, this world looked achingly beautiful,” her recollections should not be chastised for signifying moral indifference or lack of ethical sensibility. In the following sentence, “It must have been because Namwoo had fallen to the floor in place of us,” you can surmise that Heesu sees Namwoo as a scapegoat, or even some kind of redemptive figure.

Does the writer also see Namwoo as a scapegoated redeemer? There seems to be ample room for varied interpretations and debate as to whether Heesu’s perspective, as the story’s focal point and narrator, is the writer’s own, projecting her rejection of shared culpability. By saying things like “Namwoo wasn’t being bullied.

He just didn’t have any friends,” or “You could even think we didn’t exclude Namwoo but that he excluded us,” Heesu tries to evade any indirect responsibility for Namwoo’s death; it can be said that her ruminations tend to estheticize and thereby obfuscate the events surrounding the tragedy. However, it is clear that among all of the characters in the story Heesu is the most empathetic toward Namwoo. It may be possible to fault her for failing to translate her understanding and friendship for him into a more supportive expression or action, but it does not seem appropriate to accuse Heesu of willful negligence, or as an accessory to a wrongful death.

The street magician of the story’s title refers to the magician

“Aren’t some happenings magic and some not? Believing that the things happening now are beyond our control, that they are a firm reality which cannot be altered — might this conviction not be the result of some trickery?”

that Namwoo has seen performing on the street.

For Namwoo, the magician appears as a person who makes impossible things happen. After telling Heesu all about the things he saw the magician do, Namwoo says, “I’ll show you some magic,” and so finally, near the end of the narrative, the reader realizes that the series of actions which Namwoo makes may have in fact been the “magic” that he had spoken of.

The story closes with a scene in which Heesu herself meets the magician, and through him she confirms again how dearly she had clung to Namwoo’s name and what fond memories she has of him. But even in this very last scene there is no way for the reader to know whether this encounter really happened or if it was simply the stuff of her imagination.

As noted above, Heesu appears to be neither a perpetrator nor a bystander in Namwoo’s fate; all the same, she clearly performs the

role of representing a certain moral standard. In her conversation with the lawyer, Heesu says, “There must be such a world somewhere, filled with peace, like some kind of miracle. (…) I think someone, some force, a good force, can create and protect that kind of place.” Up to this point she remains very much the young student that she is, with innocent hopes wrapped in fantasy, but the words that follow come to the reader with a philosophical depth: “You can’t see goodness if you don’t have eyes that have seen evil. You can’t see it if not through evil.” Rather than looking at Taeyoung as a culpable perpetrator, she looks straight to the heart of the matter: the group bullying and all that lay at its core is evil, not any one person.

She concludes that in whatever way, standing up against this is a force for good. This kind of level-headed reasoning, not typically expected of a young student, and the hot tears which she shows in the final scene of the story, marks Heesu out as a character who can be trusted.

In a short piece of prose written upon his receipt of the Young Writers’ Award, Kim Jong-ok put it this way: “I think we really do need magic. Magic that makes the world become peaceful for a moment, makes everyone love one another — magic that makes us call each other’s names in the most tender voice.”

Is not the magic that Namwoo performed and that Heesu witnessed actually the magic displayed by Kim Jong-ok through his stories? His enchantment with and belief in the magic of the novel is evident not only in this story but also throughout his first collection of short fiction, “Gwacheon, the Thing We Didn’t Do,” which was compiled and published in 2015.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 89

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