Koreana Spring 2019 (English)

SPRING 2019

SPECIAL FEATURE

MODERN KOREA

SPRING 2019 VOL. 33 NO. 1

The Road to Modernity

Korea in the Early 20th Century

Jeongdong: Cradle of Hope for Modern State; Legacy of Modern Literary Geniuses; The Awakening of Women: Light and Shadow; Pop Music Blooms in the Depths of Despair; Cultural Globalization: Then and Now

VOL. 33 NO. 1

ISSN 1016-0744

KoreanLiteratureNow.com

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS

IMAGE OF KOREA

Greeting the Spring Kim Hwa-young

Literary Critic; Member of the National Academy of Arts

H © NewsBank

eung and han are the most commonly used concepts to describe the disposition of Koreans. The former refers to the joy of life and impulse to play when earthly and human energies intersect; the latter is pent-up emotion stemming from unresolved problems.

A distinctive manifestation of heung is enjoying the early spring flowers. When March arrives, anxious people impatiently look outside their windows. But it is not until late in the month that the tidings of spring flowers that began on Jeju Island arrive. Then, the number of south-bound trains and buses is increased, and restless souls start making travel plans. The most popular spring flowers among Koreans are pink cherry blossoms (beotkkot), followed by white plum (maehwa) and yellow cornelian cherry (yuchae) blossoms.

Spring flower festivals start in Maehwa Village in Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province. Clusters of brilliant white plum blossoms blanketing the villages along the banks of the Seomjin River present glorious views that attract more than a million visitors each year.

Yet, the highlight is the Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival in early April. This festival started in the 1960s. Cherry trees dotted Jinhae during Japanese rule. The trees around the naval base were removed after liberation, but those inside the base were left untouched and continued to grow. When it was later discovered that Jinhae’s cherry trees were not a Japanese species but the Korean flowering cherry from Jeju Island, a movement started to restore the trees. Every spring, Jinhae is covered in cherry blossoms that shower crowds of visitors with lovely petals.

Rivaling Jinhae is a four-kilometer road lined with over a thousand cherry trees in Hwagae, also in South Gyeongsang Province.

The trees were planted on both sides of the road built in the 1930s to connect Hwagae Market and Ssangye Temple. The road stretches alongside the Seomjin River, meandering around hills and arched by old cherry branches forming a fantastic floral tunnel.

City dwellers who can’t afford to travel are not denied the pleasures of spring. Seoul and all major cities around the country are redolent with the scent of flowers every spring. Some of the most famous urban spring blossom sites are Yunjung-ro in Yeouido and Seokchon Lake in Seoul, Bomun Lake in Gyeongju, Gurye County at the foot of Mt. Jiri, and Dalmaji (Moon Greeting) Hill at Haeundae Beach in Busan.

According to statistics, nine out of every ten Koreans travel to see the flowers in spring; seven of them venture far from home for at least an overnight trip; and one of these seven follows the cherry blossom trail to Japan. Unfortunately, spring in Korea is fleeting.

In mid-April, the heat of summer is almost ready to make one long for chilly weather again. When the tourists are gone after relishing spring, piles of rubbish are left behind. The evanescent nature of spring may perhaps be a thread of han that lingers in the air.

Editor’s Letter

PUBLISHER

Lee Sihyung

History Recalled for the Future

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Kim Seong-in

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Lee Kyong-hee

One hundred years ago, Koreans all over the country took to the streets to proclaim liberty as citizens of a sovereign state. Waving their national flag, the crowds shouted “Manse” (Long live) for their independence. The peaceful struggle, which began at midday on March 1, 1919, in Seoul and six other cities, spread throughout the country and continued for two months. The Japanese colonial authorities responded violently to the nonviolent movement.

Statistics vary depending on sources but historians have long believed that approximately two million people participated in the nationwide movement, leaving some 7,500 killed, 16,000 wounded and 46,900 arrested. Many died in prison, unable to endure brutal torture, as did Yu Gwan-sun. After leading a demonstration in her hometown, which was suppressed with gunshots, the 18-year-old student died, saying that she regretted having only one life to dedicate to her country.

The March First Movement led to the establishment of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai, China. The efforts of independence activists continued at home and abroad, some resorting to diplomacy and others to armed campaigns, until Korea regained independence at the end of World War II. In the process, their activities helped form Korean diaspora in a number of regions around the world.

No less importantly, the spirit of nonviolence underlying the March First Movement inspired other Asian nations to resist colonial oppression by peaceful means.

On the occasion of the centenary of the movement, Koreana looks back at Korea a century ago. The Special Feature, “The Road to Modernity: Korea in the Early 20th Century,” largely focuses on the realms of arts and culture. Though limited, the stories explore how Koreans, especially artists and writers, coped with the tides of change in an era of despair. We remember history in hopes of finding wisdom needed to resolve our current problems and avoid repeating past mistakes.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Han Kyung-koo

Benjamin Joinau

Jung Duk-hyun

Kim Hwa-young

Kim Young-na

Koh Mi-seok

Charles La Shure

Song Hye-jin

Song Young-man

Lee Kyong-hee Editor-in-Chief

Yoon Se-young

COPY EDITOR

Matthias Lehmann

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Ji Geun-hwa

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Cho Yoon-jung

Ted Chan

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Kim Sam

EDITORS

Park Do-geun, Noh Yoon-young

ART DIRECTOR

Kim Do-yoon

DESIGNERS

Kim Eun-hye, Kim Nam-hyung,

Yeob Lan-kyeong

LAYOUT & DESIGN

Kim’s Communication Associates

44 Yanghwa-ro 7-gil, Mapo-gu

Seoul 04035, Korea

www.gegd.co.kr

Tel: 82-2-335-4741

Fax: 82-2-335-4743

TRANSLATORS

Chung Myung-je

Hwang Sun-ae

Min Eun-young

Park Hyun-ah

Suh Jung-ah

SUBSCRIPTION/CIRCULATION Price per issue in Korea 6,000 won Elsewhere US$9 Please refer to page 104 of Koreana for specific subscription rates.

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KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS Spring 2019

10 Achasan-ro 11-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul 04796, Korea Tel: 82-2-468-0361/5 © The Korea Foundation 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior permission of the

Published quarterly by THE KOREA FOUNDATION 55 Sinjung-ro, Seogwipo-si, Jeju-do 63565, Korea https://www.koreana.or.kr

Korea Foundation.

The opinions expressed by the authors do not necessarily represent those of the editors of Koreana or the Korea Foundation.

Koreana , registered as a quarterly magazine with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (Registration No. Ba-1033,

“Deoksu Palace” Kim Bom 2010, Acrylic on canvas, 162 × 130 cm.

August 8, 1987), is also published in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.

SPECIAL FEATURE

The Road to Modernity: Korea in the Early 20th Century 04

SPECIAL FEATURE 1

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SPECIAL FEATURE 3

Jeongdong: Cradle of Hope for Modern State

The Awakening of Women: Light and Shadow

Suh Young-hee

Kim Chi-young

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28

SPECIAL FEATURE 2

Legacy of Modern Literary Geniuses Song Sok-ze

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SPECIAL FEATURE 5

Cultural Globalization: Then and Now Jung Duk-hyun

SPECIAL FEATURE 4

Pop Music Blooms in the Depths of Despair Chang Yu-jeong

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FOCUS

Time Travel in Dictionaries Hong Sung-ho

64

ON THE ROAD

Following King Jeongjo to his ‘Brilliant Fortress’

78 AN ORDINARY DAY Mending Soles in Seoul Kim Heung-sook

Lee Chang-guy

42

INTERVIEW

Dalparan: Thriving on Different Notes Lim Hee-yun

72

TALES OF TWO KOREAS

A Well-Knit Unification Plan

82 ENTERTAINMENT Korean Twist on Zombies Jung Duk-hyun

Kim Hak-soon

48

GUARDIAN OF HERITAGE

Producing Premium Spineless Brushes Kang Shin-jae

76 BOOKS & MORE ‘The Court Dancer’

84

ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS

Taste and Nutrition Meld in Laver Jeong Jae-hoon

Novel about the First Korean Woman in Paris

54

ART REVIEW

The Future Is Now Kwon Keun-young

60

IN LOVE WITH KOREA

A Young Turk’s Answer to the Cry of Haegeum Choi Sung-jin

‘We, Day by Day’

Poetry for Sensual Experience beyond Interpretation

‘KoreanLit’ (www.koreanlit.com)

Website Brings Modern Korean Literature to the World Charles La Shure

88

JOURNEYS IN KOREAN LITERATURE

Between the Fear and Fascination of Writing Choi Jae-bong

When the Sickle Barks Kim Deok-hee

SPECIAL FEATURE 1

The Road to Modernity: Korea in the Early 20th Century

Jeongdong

Cradle of Hope for Modern State

The throne hall of Deoksu Palace is surrounded by traditional palace halls and Western-style buildings erected in the early 20th century. In 1897, Gojong, the 26th monarch of the Joseon Dynasty, proclaimed the Korean Empire at this palace and carried out active diplomacy, but in 1910 the nation lost its sovereignty.

4 KOREANA Spring 2019

Situated in the heart of Seoul, Jeongdong (a.k.a. Jeong-dong) was the birthplace of the Korean Empire and the first home of Western legations, Christian missionaries and technical advisers. The enclave became a showcase of Western modernization that the Korean emperor sought to emulate. However, Japan’s imperialist encroachment crushed his dreams of creating a strong independent state. The empire ended in 1910 after only 13 years.

Suh Young-hee Professor of Modern History, Korea Polytechnic University

Š Deoksugung Palace Management Office

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 5

K

6 KOREANA Spring 2019

fallen into irreparable decay. The 45-year-old king named the era “Gwangmu,” literally “shining warrior,” and changed his title to Gwangmu Emperor. He hoped the new dynasty would lead to a prosperous and modernized state that would vanquish Chinese, Japanese and Russian pressure on Korea’s sovereignty.

Reshaping the State

Gojong also decided to remodel Gyeongun Palace in Jeongdong into a new imperial palace. Styling himself as an enlightened ruler, he enthusiastically promoted Western architecture to make his palace an expression of his resolve to modernize the country. The Korean-style throne hall, Junghwajeon (Hall of Central Harmony), remained a symbol of traditional authority, and newly constructed Western-style buildings represented the country’s modern transformation.

Among the new buildings was Jungmyeongjeon (Hall of Grand Light), built on the rear side of the palace grounds adjacent to the U.S. Legation. Originally a Western-style, single-story building that served as the royal library, it was rebuilt twice as a double-story brick structure because of fires, ultimately becoming the emperor’s living quarters after

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© National Palace Museum of Korea

orea opened its doors to the West in the 1880s and Jeongdong changed forever. Traditionally, the nobility and courtiers had planted themselves in the neighborhoods close to the king at Gyeongbok Palace. Likewise, envoys from Western countries gravitated to Jeongdong, eager to set up connections with the royal court.

American Lucius Harwood Foote arrived first. In 1882, Korea and the United States signed their Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce and Navigation (a.k.a. Shufeldt Treaty), and Washington dispatched Foote to establish an American legation. He did so by purchasing a newly-built home in Jeongdong from an aristocratic family in 1884. British, Russian and French counterparts soon followed. They constructed lavish Western-style buildings that projected their wealth and power, unlike Foote’s humble purchase, a traditional Korean house.

Transformed into a hive of diplomatic activity, Jeongdong became known as the “Legation Quarter” or “Legation Street.” Hotels and shops soon began to appear to cater to the diplomatic corps and their visitors. Indeed, most foreigners moving to Seoul settled in Jeongdong, reshaping its character.

The new arrivals included Christian missionaries. Next door 1. King Yeongchin (center, to the U.S. Legation, the head- front row), the last crown quarters of the U.S. Presbyteri- prince of Joseon, poses with an Church and Methodist Church high-ranking officials at Seokjojeon (Hall of Stone) in appeared, soon to be followed by this photo dated 1911. The modern hospitals and missionary neo-classical building was schools such as Pai Chai Hak- where Emperor Gojong redang, Ewha Haktang and Kyung- ceived foreign envoys. It was turned into an art museum shin School, forerunners of pres- after Japan’s annexation of tigious schools today. Especially Korea. noteworthy was the missionaries’ 2. Foreign heads of mission concerted effort to educate girls in Hanseong (old name of Seoul) pose in this photo at a time when the Korean school taken in 1903 after a meetsystem excluded them. For Kore- ing at the U.S. Legation at ans, the neighborhood represented the invitation of Minister Horace N. Allen (fourth from all that was modern and Western. right). The U.S. Legation was In 1897, King Gojong pro- the first foreign legation set claimed the founding of the Kore- up in Jeongdong. an Empire (Daehan Jeguk). The 3. A photo of Emperor declaration recast Korea as an Gojong from “Photo Album of the Yi Royal Family,” pubindependent state under inter- lished in 1920. The photo national law, thus severing the shows the emperor with his nation’s centuries-old tributary hair cut short, removing his relationship with China. It also topknot, after his forced abdication and the ascension ended the Joseon Dynasty, which of his son, Sunjong, to the had ruled Korea since 1392 and throne in 1907.

The help from world powers that Emperor Gojong counted on when he relocated the imperial palace to Jeongdong and focused on diplomacy never materialized.

1904. In September 1905, on the second floor of this building, Emperor Gojong met Alice Roosevelt, daughter of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. She and Secretary of War William Howard Taft were leading a large diplomatic entourage through Asia and the emperor sought U.S. support for the Korean Empire. He extended the greatest hospitality on the occasion and afterwards presented Alice Roosevelt with a photo of himself, taken in the hallway of this building. However, when the entourage visited Tokyo, Taft did not oppose Japan’s assertion that turning Korea into a Japanese protectorate would stabilize East Asia.

Another two-story addition was Dondeokjeon (Hall of Promoting Virtue). It was constructed in 1901 to receive foreign guests at a ceremony being planned to commemorate Emperor Gojong’s 40th jubilee. The ceremony was cancelled, but the building combining Gothic and Renaissance styles was frequently used for meetings between the emperor and foreign dignitaries and banquets attended by his high officials dressed in tailcoats.

Seokjojeon (Hall of Stone) is the biggest Western-style structure remaining at the palace. Two Britons were instrumental in its construction. John McLeavy Brown, who served as the emperor’s financial adviser, proposed the building, and J. R. Harding, an engineer who had worked in Shanghai, was commissioned to design it. He produced a grand, neo-classical building. Although the palace coffers were very low, Emperor Gojong had high hopes the building would become a symbol of the country’s modernism. After 10 years of construction, the building was completed in June 1910, two months before Japan’s annexation of Korea.

The Korean Empire also embarked on other major development projects. Intellectuals and officials had become increasingly aware of the modernization that was underway in other countries, realizing that Korea was a latecomer to the Industrial Revolution. Yi Chae-yeon, chief magistrate of Hanseong (old name for Seoul), who had served at the Korean Legation in Washington, D.C., drew up a master plan for urban development, using the U.S. capital as a model.

3 © Seoul Museum of History

Hanseong Electric Co., which was established with Emperor Gojong’s private funds, undertook basic infrastructure projects such as an electric grid, telephone lines and waterworks as well as a tram service. The first tramline, running some 8 kilometers from Seodaemun in the west to Cheongnyangni in the east, opened in 1899. It was the second tramline in Asia after that in Kyoto, Japan. Then, in 1900, street lamps were installed along Jongno, one of the main thoroughfares of the city, lighting up the night.

Diplomatic Endeavors

From the time he began pursuing enlightenment policies in the 1880s, Gojong was eager to graft elements of Western civilization and receive information from missionaries, diplomats and travelers. He introduced the telephone and electricity to the palace and took pleasure in Western habits such as drinking coffee and champagne. When he met foreign envoys, he wore his Prussian-style uniform, and he hosted

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 7

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© Korea Creative Content Agency

Western-style banquets and formal French dinner parties.

To take charge of entertaining foreign guests at the palace, Emperor Gojong hired Antoinette Sontag, the sisterin-law of Karl Waeber, the first Russian consul-general to Korea. On the land that the emperor granted her, the Russian woman of German origin built and operated the Sontag Hotel. To pursue his modernization policies, the emperor also hired some 200 foreigners to serve as advisers to the government ministries and as technicians for his infrastructure and transportation projects. The foreign consultants introduced Western systems but in a way that advanced the interests of their own countries. Many of them lived in Jeongdong as neighbors of the missionaries and diplomats, adding a new blend to the early foreign community in Seoul.

The Korean Empire mounted a determined effort to become a member of the international community, and the Jeongdong area, both officially and unofficially, became the center of diplomatic activities. After posting its first resident diplomat to Washington, D.C. in 1887, the Korean Empire dispatched ministers extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Russia, France, England and Germany, and established legations in those countries. Moreover, Emperor Gojong sent a close aide, Min Yeong-hwan, as special envoy to the corona-

8 KOREANA Spring 2019

tion ceremony of Nikolai II of Russia in 1896, as well as to the commemoration ceremony for the 60th jubilee of Britain’s Queen Victoria in 1897.

As for international conventions, the Korean Empire became a member country of the Universal Postal Union in 1899 and a signatory to the Geneva Convention in 1903.

However, it was left in the cold at the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899, a gathering of representatives of 26 member nations to seek peaceful solutions to international conflicts.

In 1902, the Korean Empire submitted a membership application to prepare to fight Japan’s infringement on its sovereignty.

Shortly before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the Korean Empire sent letters to major world powers declaring its neutrality through an envoy dispatched to Zhifu, China, in an attempt to avoid the incessant Japanese surveillance of its diplomatic activities. Two Europeans purportedly helped palace officials draft the statement of neutrality — Emile Martel, the French tutor to the royal household, and a Belgian adviser — under the direction of Yi Yong-ik, a close and devoted aide to Gojong. Vicomte de Fontenay, acting minister at the French Legation, translated the statement into French, which was then telegraphed by the French vice-consul in Zhifu. However, the effort was in vain. As Japan waged war on Russia, it sent thousands of troops into Korea, beginning its illegal military occupation of the country.

Robbed of Sovereignty

The international community turned a blind eye to Japan’s blatant violation of international law. In fact, Japan received the support of Britain and the United States through the second Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the so-called Taft-Katsura Agreement, which safeguarded the respective countries’ interests in China and Korea. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace deal between Russia and Japan, and subsequently became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The agreement did not address the Japanese presence in Korea. Thus, the United States, Britain and Russia effectively recognized Japan’s claimed rights over the Korean Empire.

In 1905, fresh from its defeat of Russia and becoming a new global power, Japan forced the Korean Empire to sign a protectorate treaty. Emperor Gojong refused to sign it to the very end, but threatened by Ito Hirobumi, five out of Korea’s eight cabinet ministers finally signed the treaty. Under international law, the treaty was invalid because it was signed under force. Nonetheless, Japan rushed to announce the treaty to the world and made the Korean Empire its protectorate.

The United States was the first country to close down its legation in Korea. When other foreign powers heard the

news, they too did not hesitate to withdraw. France, a military ally of Russia, was the last to close its doors. The help from world powers that Emperor Gojong counted on when he relocated the imperial palace to Jeongdong and focused on diplomacy never materialized. He had to face the bitter reality that the powerful, advanced nations would not always protect the independence and sovereignty of weaker nations.

Undaunted, Emperor Gojong continued his efforts to persuade the international community. With the help of Horace N. Allen, a medical doctor and missionary who had served as the U.S. minister to Korea, Gojong requested American intervention in affairs on the Korean peninsula, but there was no answer. Then, through Homer B. Hulbert, an American missionary and educator newly posted to Korea, he tried to send hand-written letters to Austria, Belgium, Britain, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia and the United States, but their heads of state did not want to become involved with Japan’s territorial ambitions. In short, his argument that the Japan–Korea Protectorate Treaty of 1905 was invalid under international law because it was signed under duress was ignored. He also attempted in vain to launch an appeal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

In a last-ditch effort, Emperor Gojong decided to dispatch three close aides — Yi Sang-seol, Yi Wi-jong and Yi Jun — to the second Hague Peace Conference, where representatives from 44 countries convened from June to October 1907. The mission was unannounced and the secret emissaries slipped into Russia to make their way to The Hague. But they were blocked from the conference and had to convey their plea for international intervention through journalists from around the world reporting on the conference. However, the world powers again ignored the Korean Empire’s plight.

To reprimand Emperor Gojong for the secret mission, Japan forced him to step down from the throne in July 1907.

His unwilling abdication in favor of the crown prince, later known as Sunjong, took place at Jungmyeongjeon. The new emperor was moved to Changdeok Palace and the abdicated emperor remained at Gyeongun Palace, where he lived in confinement until he passed away on January 21, 1919. Japanese agents were suspected of having poisoned him, and five weeks later, the March First Movement erupted, one of the earliest displays of massive public resistance in Asia against colonial occupation.

The Passing of the Emperor

Bereft of its owner, Gyeongun Palace, now renamed Deoksu Palace, underwent systematic dismantling. Japan drastically reduced the size of the palace grounds and razed many halls.

Jungmyeongjeon, where Gojong had resided, was leased to foreigners as a social club. Dondeokjeon, which had been built for the reception of foreign guests, was demolished and replaced with a children’s park. During the 1930s, Japan removed many more structures to create space for a public park. With the sovereignty and dignity of the Korean Empire ruthlessly destroyed, the Jeongdong era came to an end in 1910 when Japan formally annexed Korea.

Today, the American missionary Homer B. Hulbert, who assisted Emperor Gojong’s desperate search for international support, is remembered as a man who remained Korea’s friend to the end. He is buried at the Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery in Seoul. Jeongdong has become a cozy pocket of solitude amid the cacophony swirling around the Seoul City Hall across the street. The remaining palace structures of the short-lived empire summon history and architecture buffs. Jeongdong-gil, the area’s narrow winding cobblestone street shaded by ginkgo trees and flanked by the palace wall, beckons pedestrians to make a detour into another era.

© Getty Images

1. Jungmyeongjeon (Hall of Grand Light) was built in 1899 as the imperial library but from 1904 it served as Emperor Gojong’s office and living quarters. The Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty of 1905 was signed here. It currently stands outside the western walls of Deoksu Palace.

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2. A photo of Jungmyeongjeon from “History of Deoksu Palace,” a book written by Japanese colonial historiographer Oda Shogo and published in 1938. The hall went through major renovations after a fire in 1925.

3. The winding byway along the stone walls of Deoksu Palace has a special, quiet ambience in the middle of bustling Seoul. The left side shows the wall around the palace’s rear compound while the right side shows the U.S. ambassador’s residence.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 9

Tapgol Park: Springboard for Independence A century ago, Seoul’s first public park was a hotbed of political dissidence. It became the springboard of the March First Movement against Japanese colonial rule, a major milestone in Korea’s struggle for sovereignty and democratic republicanism.

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2 © Korea Creative Content Agency

Nestled in central Seoul, Tapgol Park became a podium for disgruntled

the turn of the century. The compact venue, surrounded by simple

citizens in the late 19th century. Indeed, social reforms had given a

homes, was called Pagoda Park, in recognition of the temple’s 10-tier

voice to everyone, even butchers, outcasts of traditional Korean soci-

marble pagoda, later designated as National Treasure No. 2, which

ety. After airing their grievances and desires, orators underscored their

still stands at the park today. In 1991, the site officially became Tapgol

fervor by marching to the nearby front gate of Gyeongun Palace to

Park; tapgol means “village with a pagoda.”

submit written appeals. All of that ended when Japan forcibly colonized and annexed Korea between 1905 and 1910.

Open Space for the Public

By 1919, pent-up resistance to Japan’s de facto military rule of

As part of the preparations to mark the 40th year of Emperor Gojong's

Korea reached boiling point. On March 1, the Korean Declaration of

reign, an octagonal pavilion was installed in the park in 1902. The park

Independence, largely the work of student activists, had its first public

accommodated the first public concert by a Western-style orchestra in

reading at Tapgol Park. Nationwide demonstrations ensued. Although

Korea, and it was also where the Korean Declaration of Independence

they were nonviolent, the Japanese military reacted with mass arrests

was first heard publicly on March 1, 1919.

and killings that quashed the dissent after two months. Nevertheless,

German composer Franz Eckert formed the orchestra at the invi-

the movement sowed seeds for a Korean provisional government and

tation of the Korean Empire, having previously performed similar tasks

inspired people’s movements in other Asian countries under colonial

in Japan. Eckert arrived in Seoul in early 1901 and formed an orchestra

occupation.

of military musicians capable of playing Western instruments. They

King Gojong envisioned a public park as part of his urban reform campaign which began in 1896. His financial adviser, Northern Irish-

regularly played Western music in the park for the foreign community that populated the Jongno district, which surrounded the park.

man John McLeavy Brown, turned the nearly two-hectare site of the

The next year, Eckert composed the national anthem of the Ko-

former Wongak Temple into Seoul’s first Western-style park around

rean Empire, or “Daehan Jeguk Aegukga.” Featuring a Western music

10 KOREANA Spring 2019

scale and rhythm with Korean lyrics, it was played for the first time on

mourners who had gathered at the front gate of Deoksu Palace joined

September 9, 1902, during the birthday celebrations for Emperor Go-

the students and together they shouted “Daehan dongnip manse,”

jong. The anthem was performed on national holidays, at events of the

which means “Long live Korea’s independence!”

imperial court, and at schools of all levels. Along with the national flag,

This marked the beginning of the March First Movement, also

named Taegeukgi, the anthem served to inspire patriotism. For his

known as the Samil (March 1) Manse Movement. It was the biggest

efforts, Eckert was awarded the Taegeuk Medal of the Korean Empire

and most formidable protest against the Japanese occupation. Origi-

and upon his death in 1916, he was buried at the Yanghwajin Foreign

nally planned and led by political refugees and students living overseas,

Missionary Cemetery in Seoul.

religious leaders and other intellectuals, the movement became a mass

The anthem featured the lyrics, “May God help our emperor to exert his authority over the world for a long time to come.” When Japan

public outpouring by student protestors and members of the general public.

annexed Korea in 1910, it was banned and replaced by the Japanese

A new page in history was hence written at Tapgol Park. Ordi-

national anthem that Eckert had arranged in 1880. But among the in-

nary people, freed from the yoke of a class society and taking their

dependence fighters who took refuge around the world in places such

first steps toward becoming modern citizens, had gathered to protest

as Hawaii, Russia and China, the Korean Empire’s anthem continued to

against Japanese rule and demand their country’s independence. In

be sung, albeit with slightly altered lyrics and tune in each place.

April 1919, as a result of this movement, the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea was established in Shanghai, China. It enacted

Prelude to Royal Funeral

a constitution for democratic republicanism, a cornerstone for the new

On January 21, 1919, Emperor Gojong suddenly passed away at the

Republic of Korea in 1948.

age of 67. In the preceding years, he had been forced to abdicate and held in confinement at Deoksu (formerly Gyeongun) Palace by the Japanese colonial government. Rumors that the Japanese colonizers poisoned him circulated widely and gained acceptance. Mourners from all over the country gathered in Seoul for the funeral, which was scheduled for March 3.

On March 1, the rehearsal day for moving the funeral bier, Han Wi-geon, a student at Gyeongseong Medical School, walked up to the platform in the octagonal pavilion at Tapgol Park and as student representative read aloud the Declaration of Independence. Thousands of college and secondary school students from public and private schools took to the streets to demonstrate against the Japanese. The crowd of

1. A scene from the funeral procession of Emperor Gojong, who passed away on January 21, 1919. As the rumor spread that he had been poisoned by Japanese agents, his death ignited the March First Movement, a nonviolent struggle to regain independence from Japanese rule.

2. A commemorative photo of the Korean Empire Military Band with Franz Eckert (center in the front row, wearing a fedora) after a performance at the octagonal pavilion of Tapgol Park in 1902.

3. The Declaration of Independence is a statement signed by 33 representatives of the Korean people proclaiming independence from Japanese rule. The statement was read at midday on March 1, 1919, at Tapgol Park, sparking nationwide protests against Japan.

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© Independence Hall of Korea

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 11

Gunsan and Colonial Modernization During the colonial period, Japan used Gunsan to ship rice produced in the Honam region, the granary of Korea. Accordingly, the port city became the victim of Japanese economic exploitation, but paradoxically a symbol of modernization as well.

Gunsan was a natural choice for outbound rice shipments. The port

With the opening of ports, commission agents and trading com-

sits on the bank of the Geum River, slightly upstream from its exit into

panies thrived in Gunsan. The government granted a special license to

the Yellow Sea, and fertile fields sprawl along the course of a beautiful

the commission agents and other merchants. They paid taxes to the

tributary. Export of Korean rice to Japan began in the Joseon Dynas-

imperial household in return for operating concessions that enabled

ty under the Ganghwa Treaty (also called the Japan-Korea Treaty) of

them to develop into modern trading companies. Thus, the agents and

1876, the first of a number of unequal treaties Korea was forced to sign. The treaty enabled unlimited, duty-free outflow of rice and other

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grains. The Joseon government, belatedly realizing the seriousness of the situation, managed to revise the treaty to ban grain exports but Japan continued to raise objections and demand compensation.

Over the 30-year period between the opening of Korean ports under the treaty and the start of the colonial period, Korea-Japan trade largely consisted of Korean rice and Japanese cotton cloth. Most of the machine-made cotton cloth manufactured in Japan’s newly industrialized regions wound up in Korea. The rice exported from Joseon was intended as cheap provisions for the laborers in Japan’s factories.

Rice Plunder Under the trade structure, Korea degenerated into a food warehouse for Japan and a market for Japanese commercial goods. It meant chronic rice shortages in Korea, which dramatically raised the price of rice.

Having sold future rice during the spring lean season at unreasonably low prices, farmers found themselves with nothing to eat even when harvest time came around. As the price of goods increased, life became harder for farmers and merchants as well as the urban poor. The Donghak Peasant Uprising of 1894 began in Honam, or the Jeolla provinces, and spread around the country, instigated in part by Japan’s plunder of Korean rice and the economic ruin of farmers after the forced port openings. The protesting farmers demanded that foreign merchants be banned from trade and stopped from coming inland at will.

The Korean Empire opened Gunsan Port in 1899 with the hope of increasing customs revenues. Gunsan had a government granary during the Joseon period and the port served as the shipping center for Honam-grown grain as the government pursued industrialization in order to achieve economic prosperity and build a strong military. © Gunsan Modern History Museum

12 KOREANA Spring 2019

2 © Gunsan Modern History Museum

merchants became sources for the government coffers.

After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, however, when Japan’s ambitions in Korea and the plunder of the country became more blatant, the Korean Empire suspended its modernization efforts. When Japan established its residency-general in Korea in 1905, Japanese people began to enter the country in large numbers. The commission agents and other merchants of Gunsan formed cooperatives or companies to defend themselves against Japanese merchants but could not match their financial strength. After Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, the Japanese government-general took over trade agencies and banned Korean trading companies in Gunsan.

The land around Gunsan and the Geum, Mangyeong and Dongjin river basins was then turned over to Japanese landowners. The rice they cultivated converged on Gunsan for shipment to Japan. In 1914, the port accounted for 40.2 percent of Korea’s rice exports, followed

by Busan with 33.5 percent and Incheon with 14.7 percent, according to statistics of the Japanese government-general.

At one point in time, 80 percent of all land in the Gunsan area was owned by Japanese people. The many Japanese-owned farms were funded by big capital from companies such as Fujimoto, Okura and Mitsubishi. Their objective was to make profits, while Korean share-

3 © yeomirang

1. A tower of 800 sacks of rice marks the start of construction of the third port at Gunsan harbor in 1926. The project continued through 1933, resulting in three granaries capable of holding 250,000 sacks of rice.

2. Workers carry rice at Gunsan harbor in this photo from the 1910s. Japan exploited Korean workers and plundered rice through the sharecropping system. Gunsan Port, opened in 1899, served as the main shipping port of rice grown in the fertile Honam region.

3. In the old city center of Gunsan, where some 10,000 Japanese lived during the colonial period, more than 100 Japanese-style houses from that time remain. Many of those houses have been turned into cafés or tourist accommodations. They are popular as movie locations.

croppers did the work.

to accommodate the high tides of the Korean western coast. Near the port, mills polished the rice to satisfy Japanese palates, and breweries also appeared.

Traces of Modernization Gunsan still retains many traces of its development under Japanese rule, rendering the entire city a kind of modern history museum. Among the remaining structures are the luxurious houses once owned by Japanese people, the Japanese Dongguk Temple, and the buildings that housed the Bank of Chosen (Korea) and the Eighteenth Bank operated

by Japan. During the colonial period, a film theater with tatami mats opened, and plays were also staged there. The famous Lee Sung Dang Bakery, where customers form

On the other hand, Gunsan became a symbol of modernization. In

long queues every day these days,

the early years, a modern transportation network was constructed to

opened shortly after liberation in 1945 by purchasing the building and

speed up rice shipments to Japan. Korea’s first asphalt road appeared

machines left behind by the Japanese family who had operated a bak-

in 1908 between Jeonju and Gunsan, and in 1912, a railroad linked

ery named Izumoya since the early 1910s. The bakery’s signature red

Iksan and Gunsan Port. This railway line had stations at every major

bean paste bun is said to have been influenced by a similar Japanese

Japanese-owned farm before reaching Gunsan, which had a floating pier

sweet roll.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 13

SPECIAL FEATURE 2

The Road to Modernity: Korea in the Early 20th Century

Legacy of Modern Literary Geniuses Modernity in Korea largely overlapped with colonial occupation. The modern era was an especially difficult time for writers and artists of this country, who often found themselves at the forefront of sociocultural change. Putting up with the hardships of poverty and illness, they struggled to bear witness to the harsh time in their own ways.

Song Sok-ze Novelist 1

1. Kim Yu-jeong made his literary debut in 1933 with the short story “Wanderer Among the Hills.” His stories set in rural villages are rich in humor and satire.

2. Park Nok-ju (1906–1979) released her first pansori album in 1924 through Columbia Records, which was followed by scores of other albums with diverse labels. She was famously courted by novelist Kim Yu-jeong.

3. Yi Sang started his career as an architect upon graduating from Gyeongseong Technical High School in 1929, and in the following year published his first novel “The 12th of December.” His poems and stories are characterized by self-conscious reflections.

4. Park Tae-won debuted in 1926 with his poem “Elder Sister.” Though he started as a poet, from the 1930s he focused on fiction. In the photo, Park has a short pageboy haircut, which was fashionable in Tokyo in his time.

14 KOREANA Spring 2019

2

3

4

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 15

K

orean tradition and culture have always contained the gold vein of laughter and satire.

Kim Yu-jeong (1908–1937) was a brilliant novelist who mined that gold and deftly inlaid it into his work. His novels are often full of humor and naïve slyness hidden behind searing wisdom and satire. They are replete with delightful idioms, unexpected turns and dramatic reversals in plot, with an amusing touch of obscenity and vulgarity. Most of all, they are interesting although they essentially depict the wretched social conditions and miserable lives of his time.

In fact, Kim wrote many of his works while waging a heartrending struggle amid poverty and illness. A consumptive patient with no hope of cure, he wrote his novels as if spitting blood out of his deteriorating body. When he was seriously ill in the spring of 1936, the doctor predicted he would hardly survive through the coming summer.

Around that time, when asked in a magazine interview what he would like to leave behind in this world, Kim replied, “Well, I’d love to leave something behind, but for the

life of me I can’t think of anything but tuberculosis germs.”

But then, he also expressed his wish to “rise up to the sky like the full moon and spend the rest of my life growing old there.”

Just as he wished, the name Kim Yu-jeong shines bright on the horizon of modern Korean literature. His stories are naturalist miniature paintings, with their microscopic description of the dismal reality of Korean farming villages under Japanese occupation in the 1930s. At the heart of the farcical, rustic narrations is the grim picture of rural communities in a colonized Korea and the people who had to abandon even the least degree of morality to survive.

For instance, “Spring, Spring,” one of Kim’s most important works, is not a simple love story. It rather focuses on the exploitive relationship between tenant farmers and their supervisors. “The Golden Bean Patch” is outwardly a comic story, but it zooms in on the gloomy reality of a life with no prospect of improvement, in which friends and couples endlessly quarrel, fight and hit each other. In “A Rainy Spell,” the husband has no qualms about sending his wife to a wealthy neighbor to raise money for gambling, coaxing her to practice prostitution and theft. All these stories were published in 1935.

1

Young Artists of Gyeongseong

© Kim Yu-jeong Literature Village

16 KOREANA Spring 2019

As most of his novels are set in farming villages, Kim Yu-jeong is often pictured as a writer with rustic sensibilities. He was indeed born in a mountain village in Gangwon Province, but moved to Seoul (then called Gyeongseong) as a child and spent more time in the capital than in his hometown. He was no different from other urban writers of his time with their tempestuous passions, romantic dispositions and love affairs, and despair. As a literature major at college, he liked James Joyce and his novel “Ulysses.” Once he confessed that he experienced “romance inside a moving car.”

Kim’s family belonged to the yangban class and lived in two places, traveling back and forth between their hometown and Seoul, where they owned a grand house in a neighborhood not far from the royal palace. Having lost his mother at eight, and then his father at nine, Kim attended elementary and secondary schools in Seoul. His school register says that he had a “guileless character” and a height of 5 cheok [about 166 cm], and his family had 11 members, including two brothers, and assets worth 50,000 won. But the family fortune was whittled away by his elder brother who had inherited most of it.

For a better understanding of this era, it is worthwhile to compare Kim with a contemporary, the poet Yi Sang (1910– 1937). Yi spent his childhood and early adulthood in the heart of Seoul, on the other side of Gyeongbok Palace from

1. After graduating from high school in 1929, Kim Yu-jeong lived with his second eldest sister, Kim Yu-hyeong. In the photo, Kim is shown on the left, his sister in the middle, and his nephew Kim Yeong-su on the right.

2. “Portrait of a Friend” (1935) Gu Bon-ung Oil on canvas, 62 × 50 cm Painted by Gu Bon-ung, his close friend, this is a vivid portrayal of Yi Sang's rebellious character and personality.

© National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

2

where Kim lived.

Yi Sang was born in Seochon, at the foot of Mt. Inwang, to the west of the royal palace, in the same year that the Korean Empire lost its sovereignty. In the 1920s and 1930s, when modernism held sway over Gyeongseong, Yi lived as a typical “Gyeongseong modernist.” He even wrote, “I’ve never seen actual rice plants,” in a short story written sometime before his death. Furthermore, as an architect who had once worked for the Japanese government-general, he often took the urban space and architecture of the capital as subject matter.

Yi had a strong sense of identity as a Korean and resisted colonial rule, as shown by his preference for hanbok as

everyday wear. His wife recollected that the first time they met he was dressed in a brown durumagi, or Korean traditional-style overcoat. She said that in their early years of marriage, he would get extremely irritated whenever the police stopped him for questioning simply because he was wearing Korean attire. This recollection obviously contradicts the snapshot of Yi looking decadent with disheveled hair and a pipe between his lips, or to his known eccentricity and propensity to deviate from social norms.

Unbridled Passion

Kim Yu-jeong said he also wore “Joseon clothes” as his daily attire. Both men are known for their respective love affairs:

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 17

Kim famously courted Park Nok-ju, who would later become a virtuoso pansori singer, and Yi maintained his relationship with a gisaeng, or professional entertainer, named Geumhong and ran a teahouse with her.

As a high school student, Kim fell in love at first sight with Park, who was already a pansori star and popular gisaeng. He wooed her passionately, sending her numerous love letters. Park declined, however, pointing out the difference in their social positions. Saying that she no longer trusted men, she told him to leave without nurturing pointless hopes. It is said that Kim was seen weeping bitterly the next day in front of Park’s house.

Kim attended Yonhi College (today’s Yonsei University) to study literature but was expelled for truancy. He then attended Bosung College (today’s Korea University) until the pain of his broken heart, as well as chronic pleurisy and hemorrhoids, sent him back to his hometown. Soon, he began associating with gamblers, bums and liquor vendors.

His health further deteriorated, and his pleurisy worsened into tuberculosis. While recuperating, he established a night school to teach the villagers and tried to improve the dilapi-

dated rural community. This is when he began to write in earnest. In 1933, he began his career as a short story writer by publishing “Wanderer Among the Hills.”

In the meantime, Yi Sang maintained his lifelong friendship with artist Gu Bon-ung and novelist Park Tae-won.

Yi and Gu grew up in adjacent neighborhoods and made a famous duo of “the eccentric tubercular poet and the hunchback artist.” Thanks to Gu, Yi met Geumhong and opened his teahouse, Sparrow (Jebi). Gu painted “Portrait of a Friend,” featuring the poet smoking a pipe. Yi’s wife, Byeon Donglim, was the younger sister of Gu’s stepmother. After Yi’s death, Byeon married artist Kim Whanki and renamed herself Kim Hyang-an.

Yi illustrated Park Tae-won’s novelette, “A Day in the Life of Novelist Gubo,” when it was serialized in the Joseon Jungang Ilbo for a month in August 1934. He manifested his friendship with Park through a famous line he wrote in the guest book at Park’s wedding reception, which went, “Never, ever refuse an offer to meet!” He was worried it might be difficult to see his friend as often as before.

Yi and Park were also active in the Nine Writers’ Society

© Kim Yu-jeong Literature Village

18 KOREANA Spring 2019

Kim Yu-jeong’s short story “Spring, Spring” (left), published in the magazine “Jogwang” (Morning Light) in December 1935, is a comic tale of conflict between a young man who lives with his wife’s family and his father-in-law, who treats him like a servant. Published in the same magazine in May 1936, “Camellias” (right) is a humorous portrayal of an adolescent love affair.

Exploring the inner instability of intellectuals living in a colonized land, Yi Sang’s literary style clearly differed from that of Kim Yu-jeong, who focused on the impoverished conditions of rural communities. But the two writers understood each other’s artistic vision.

(Guinhoe), a Seoul-based literary association formed in 1933.

True to its name, the society consisted of nine members, although the members changed a few times. Advocating pure literature with no ideological leaning amid the wave of proletarian literature, the group was highly regarded in the literary circle, attracting both established writers and promising new ones. Although the society was disbanded after a few years, all its members continued their creative activities, enriching the soil of modern and contemporary Korean literature.

Fetters of Poverty and Tuberculosis

Meanwhile, Kim Yu-jeong’s circumstances grew worse as the Japanese colonial government forcibly broke up his night school, depriving him of a sense of purpose. His illness was deepening, and as his family fortune had been almost completely squandered, he had no choice but to live off his uncles and sisters. In spite of his health conditions, he was more seriously committed to writing in order to earn money and become economically self-sufficient.

In January 1935, two years after his debut, Kim emerged as a rising star on the literary scene when his stories “A Rainy Spell” and “Bonanza” won awards in the annual literary contests sponsored by two dailies, Chosun Ilbo and Joseon Jungang Ilbo, respectively. Shortly afterwards, he joined the Nine Writers’ Society and made friends with Yi Sang, who was already a member. The two men had a lot in common. Tuberculosis tormented Yi almost all his life, and Kim also suffered from the same disease. Kim was orphaned as a child and Yi was separated from his real parents to be adopted by his father’s older brother. Both lived in extreme poverty.

Yi Sang’s major works include “Crow’s Eye View” (1934) and “The Wings” (1936). The former is a set of poems whose serial publication in the Joseon Jungang Ilbo was discontinued as readers criticized them as too abstruse; the latter is a short story about the contradictory sense of identity of a modern intellectual, portrayed by a man who idles away his days with nothing to do. Exploring the inner instability of intellectuals living in a colonized land,

Yi Sang’s literary style clearly differed from that of Kim Yu-jeong, who focused on the impoverished conditions of rural communities. But the two writers understood each other’s artistic vision.

With his days numbered, Kim’s binge drinking and allnight writing continued until the summer of 1936, when he was sent to recuperate at a Buddhist temple. Abstinence from drinking and smoking as well as a regular daily routine helped briefly to improve his health. It is said that Yi Sang visited him and proposed that they commit suicide together. Kim, though opening his shirt to reveal his emaciated chest to show his misery, refused by saying, “I’m burning with hopes for the future.” For a while, Yi gazed at his friend laboring to breathe and said goodbye, telling him he was leaving for Japan. Kim was left to cry over the news.

Though stricken by a fatal disease, Kim devoted the last three or so years of his life to writing. As a result, he left about 30 short stories, 20 essays, a novel and a translation.

In a letter sent to his lifelong friend and supporter, Ahn Hoenam, on March 18, 1937, Kim explained his condition: “My body is weakening day by day. I find it difficult even to sit up from lying down. At night, I’m afflicted by sleeplessness, which makes me lie awake resenting the agonizing time.”

Premature Deaths

Still, he expressed a strong attachment to life when he wrote, “I really want to recover. I’m now holding final negotiations with death. I’m in desperate need of money, which I don’t have. I’m going to raise a hundred won. Out of affection for a friend, I hope you can help me.” He unveiled a keen desire to live, going on to say that he would use the money to buy chickens and snakes, boil them down, and eat them to regain his vigor. But he passed away on March 29, at daybreak, even before he received a reply.

Some 20 days later, on April 17, Yi Sang also died of tuberculosis at a hospital in Tokyo. The Japanese doctor who examined his lungs said, “In this man’s chest, there is nothing left to refer to as lungs.” Thus, the two literary geniuses perished in their twenties, one right after the other.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 19

Korean in the colonized city. The proprietor, who was an artist, used the second floor as his atelier. The haunt of artists, the tearoom played new releases by Victor Records every Friday, and held artists’ solo exhibitions and poets’ publication parties. It was also the gathering place for the Nine Writers’ Society (Guinhoe), a small group of writers advocating pure literature, of which Park Tae-won was a member.

1

Money Chasers

Seoul in the 1930s: A Stroll with Novelist Gubo

her 26-year-old son — unmarried,

Gate) and then back to the Bank of

jobless despite his college degree

Chosen (Korea), where he gets off. He

obtained in Tokyo, and wasting his

goes into a tearoom filled with people

time scribbling. Ignoring his mother’s

drinking tea, smoking, talking, or lis-

concerned looks, he steps out of his

tening to music — people just like him,

house. He has nowhere to go, but

with nothing much to do at 2 o’clock

he crosses the streetcar tracks any-

in the afternoon. Most of them are

way, and looks up at Hwasin Store

young and seem to be “complaining of

(Korea’s first department store). He

melancholy and weariness in the dim,

looks wistfully at a young couple with

uneven light.” Looking at a painting

a child waiting inside for the elevator

hung overhead, Gubo thinks he would

to come, and wonders where his own

be happy if he had the money to

happiness can be found.

travel to some Western city, or even

a friend from elementary school, greets him coldly and walks away, he

2

The tearoom where the protago-

At Jongno (one of Seoul’s major

nist orders his coffee and cigarettes is

east–west thoroughfares), he takes

Nangnang Parlour. Opened in 1931, it

whichever streetcar that comes first.

was the first tearoom to be run by a

20 KOREANA Spring 2019

the road, thinking that “the poor old palace is such a depressing sight.”

but when his shabbily-clothed friend

Tokyo at the least.

Youth in the Colonized City

main gate of Deoksu Palace across

3

© Korea Creative Content Agency

It carries him to Dongdaemun (East

walks toward City Hall and looks at the

He is pleased when he comes across

Though he has nowhere particular to go, Gubo leaves home at noon every day, with a notebook and a cane in his hands, to roam around the city. It is one such day that is described in “A Day in the Life of Novelist Gubo,” an autobiographical and metafictional novelette by Park Tae-won (1909–1986). The story is reviewed here to give a glimpse of the modern landscape of Seoul.

Gubo’s mother can hardly understand

Gubo comes out of the tearoom,

feels hurt and lonely.

for his friend to come back, his mem-

Thinking that he might feel better

ory drifts back to a fellow student he

when surrounded by people, Gubo

fell in love with while studying in To-

goes into the waiting room of Gyeong-

kyo.

seong (Seoul) Station. In the midst of

When his friend finally comes,

the crowd, however, he finds “no trace

they go out for a bowl of seolleong-

of human warmth from any of them,”

tang, or ox bone soup. After dinner,

and the sick old women, merchants

they go their separate ways, and

from the provinces and the suspicious

Gubo walks alone again down the

men spying on people in the throng

main street of Gwanghwamun.

give him a sense of alienation, further

In the street, he comes across

aggravating his sadness and solitude.

a friend’s two nephews, sends them

He reminds himself that this is the

home with a watermelon each he buys

gold rush age, when even literary crit-

for the family, and heads again for

ics and poets are hoping for a bonan-

Nangnang Parlour, where his friend

za. Here again, he has a chance meet-

promised to meet him again. When he

ing with an old friend from middle

passes by a telegram messenger on

school. Seeing that the uncouth son of

his bicycle, he feels a sudden desire

a pawnshop owner is accompanied by

to hold in his hands a telegram that

a beautiful woman, he tries to dispar-

will move him. For a moment, he feels

age their relationship as the barter of

happy imagining himself buying thou-

sex and money.

sands of postcards and writing to his

Soon after, he calls a friend who is a poet and society reporter for a

friends sitting at a corner table of the tearoom.

newspaper, and goes back to the tearoom to meet him. His friend grum-

Jongno in the Wee Hours

bles about having to write everyday

Gubo goes to the tearoom and calmly

about murders and arson for money,

listens to Tchaikovsky’s “Valse Senti-

and then goes on to offer his criticism

mentale,” played by Mischa Elman. Af-

4

1. One of Yi Sang’s illustrations for Park Tae-won’s novelette “A Day in the Life of Novelist Gubo,” serialized in the Joseon Jungang Ilbo in August 1934.

2. Hwasin Store was built in 1931 as Korea’s first modern department store. It was located at today’s Jongno junction but was demolished in 1987 when the roads were widened.

3. Gyeongseong Station, first built in 1900 as a 33-square-meter wooden structure, was rebuilt in 1925 as a two-story building with one basement floor. It was one of the largest railway stations in Asia along with Tokyo Station.

4. Nangnang Parlour was opened in 1931 by Yi Sun-seok, an artist who had graduated from Ueno Art School in Tokyo. Located near the current Westin Chosun Seoul, it was a popular hangout for the “modern boys.”

of Gubo’s novels. They discuss James

ter a while, he is greeted by a man he

Joyce for a while, but as soon as they

knows, a life insurance salesman who

saying that it is a form of mental ill-

leave the tearoom his friend hurries

is with a party drinking expensive beer

ness, muses that perhaps everyone

home for dinner.

across the room. Hesitantly, he joins

is mentally ill but with different symp-

their table, but is annoyed as they

toms.

Solitude at Dusk

judge literary works only on the basis

discern the taste of his drinks. Gubo,

Out in the street, Gubo finds

Wandering around the Jongno junc-

of their commercial value. Just in time,

Jongno at 2 o’clock in the morning still

tion, feeling lonely, Gubo walks past

his friend arrives and together they

crowded with people, even in the rain.

the Jongno Police Station. He goes

leave the place.

All of a sudden, he thinks of the “small,

into yet another tearoom, a small

The two men, one a poor poet

sad and lonely face” of his mother,

one whose owner is his friend (This is

and the other a poor novelist, drink

who must be tossing and turning in

Sparrow [Jebi], the tearoom that poet

gloomily at a café in Jongno (pre-

bed, waiting for him to come home.

Yi Sang and his lover Geumhong ran

sumably Café Angel, a hotspot for

When his friend proposes they meet

in 1933–1935). He asks for the owner

socializing at the time). Gubo’s friend

again the next day, Gubo tells him that

and is told that he is out for the mo-

has a symptom called “insensitivity to

from now on he will stay home writ-

ment but will be back soon. Waiting

alcohol,” which makes him unable to

ing. He heads home in a hurry.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 21

SPECIAL FEATURE 3

The Road to Modernity: Korea in the Early 20th Century

The Awakening of Women Light and Shadow “New women� received a Western-style education and strove to break free from the Confucian taboos and shackles of mores that discriminated against them. Dreaming of a new world where they would enjoy equal status with men and the freedom to choose their own marital partners, these women pioneered new trends in hairstyles and dress. But their ventures often ended in tragedy.

Kim Chi-young Professor, Department of Korean Education, Daegu Catholic University

22 KOREANA Spring 2019

For Joseon women who were not even allowed to go out on their own, the modern era brought opportunities for education and the right to make their own choices. But such liberty did not come easy. As a consequence of seeking new ideas to turn their lives around, they often met with harsh criticism and frustration.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 23

A

writer most noted for his satirical novels, Chae Man-sik (1902–1950) debuted in 1924 with a short story depicting an encounter with a young woman on a train. No particular events occur in the story, titled “Toward the Three Paths,” except for the male protagonist meeting eyes with “a creamy white female student with an unreserved air.” Nothing dramatic by today’s standards. But in those days, it was quite unheard of for a young man and a young woman who are complete strangers to sit in close proximity of each other for a long period of time. This is why trains, often the setting of such chance encounters, made for a good story. Moreover, the young woman in this story was of the small coterie of “new women,” whom one rarely ran into in everyday life.

The protagonist describes the woman: “Her jacket was white, her skirt was white, her underclothes were white, her knee-high socks were white, her powdered face was white. Everything about her was white except for her black high-heeled shoes and raven hair plaited in haphazard yet stylish fashion.” The portrayal of the young man’s agitation at being so close to a female student belonging to a small minority of women in Korean society and the fluttering of his heart whenever his eyes meet hers earned the writer recognition in literary circles. Until the early 1920s, when the novel was published, men and women coming in such close contact was so uncommon that it was tantamount to a “scandal.”

Schools for Girls

In “Mr. Sunshine,” a recent hit TV series set in Joseon from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, the female protagonist is a nobleman’s daughter who discards her fancy overcoat and goes to a school for commoners to learn English from a Western teacher. But up until the 1910s, educational opportunities for women were quite few and far between.

In 1886, American missionaries opened Ewha Haktang, Korea’s first modern school for women, in Jeongdong, central Seoul, but until the 1910s, it failed to attract many students. Teachers went from house to © All That Book

1. “Sweet Sixteen” (1926) was an immensely popular romance novel written

by Kang Eun-hyeong, editor and publisher of Daeseong Bookstore. The concept of free love quickly caught on during the early modern period and love and romance became prevalent themes in novels.

2. “The Melody of Spring” (1942) Kim In-seung Oil on canvas, 147.2 × 207 cm

1

24 KOREANA Spring 2019

Kim In-seung’s representative work, painted on two large canvases, features a group of women enjoying a cello performance. It was displayed at the 21st Chosen (Korean) Art Exhibition in 1942.

house imploring parents to send their daughters to the school where they could receive a free education. Things began to turn around in 1919, when word spread that Ewha students had actively participated in the March First Movement for independence from Japanese rule.

Thereafter, the school saw a surge in enrollment and found it hard to accommodate the rise in number.

That is not to say, though, that the overall number of female students across the country significantly increased. According to statistics by the Japanese government-general, the number of students at the seven public and private secondary schools for girls reached 1,370 in 1923, representing only 0.6 percent of the total female population. Female enrollment in tertiary education was even lower at 0.03 percent.

The small number of female students attracted immense public attention. Gradually they fostered a new collective identity as “new women.” They stood out, first and foremost, for their appearance. These women liked to wear short skirts and high heels, carry black parasols and sport trendy hairstyles to express their sense of self. The traditional-style white jacket and black skirt, shortened to mid-calf for hygienic purposes and greater freedom of movement, were adopted as uniform by most schools, including Ewha Haktang and Chungshin Girls’ School, becoming a symbol of the female student. The black parasol that was used to cover the head and face in lieu of the traditional skirt-shaped cloak, or sseugae chima, gradually evolved into a fashion accessory with more vivid colors. Aside from parasols, new women enjoyed various fashion items in the latest styles, such as shoes, socks, belts, scarves, handkerchiefs and glasses, which marked their social status.

The hairdo, in particular, became the defining characteristic of the new woman. Coiffures underwent changes from the Japanese hisashigami, where the hair is swept upwards and piled high on top of the head in a bun with the hair on the front and sides puffed out, and its variation, the chignon, to the traditional long braid that made a comeback in the mid-1920s, and braided hairpieces. Some women opted for a bold-

2 © Bank of Korea

er look with a bob cut, which they took as an emblem of female emancipation. The bob was widely loved by new women for its convenience in terms of hygiene, time and money. But many men loathed it, claiming that long tresses were an essential feature of female beauty.

By looking different and living differently, the new woman sought to establish herself as “new,” distinguished from the “old.” The shortened skirts and high heels were not just a fashion statement but a cultural manifestation of the new woman’s wish to engage in romantic relationships at free will, start a family in a modern house with a piano, enjoy equal rights with her husband, and educate the next generation with new ideas.

However, new women found little acceptance or acknowledgement in Korean society.

As the number of female students increased

markedly and their style garnered increasing attention, criticism also grew.

Newspapers and magazines censured their “extravagance and vanity.”

Since a pair of shoes cost roughly the same as two large sacks of rice at that time, the cost of decking out was indeed quite hefty.

Object of Envy and Criticism

From the mid-1920s, the female sphere of activity expanded from schools to public spaces, such as concerts, lectures and theaters. As such, school authorities sought to impose stricter rules on their students. They were forbidden from going to the movies or concerts without permission and had to be accompanied by a family member or fellow student when going out. Any magazines or books other than textbooks in possession had to be reported to the school. Strict restrictions were placed on exchanging letters, and for students who had to live away from home, the school dormitory was often the only choice as it was considered promiscuous for a young woman to live by herself in a rented room.

Around this time, the somewhat nebulous term “corruption of public morals” began to gain currency. It was sometimes applied to odd situations, for instance, dressing extravagantly or going to cafés or restau-

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 25

By looking different and living differently, the new woman sought to establish herself as “new,” distinguished from the “old.” rants, or ditching class and going to the movies. The gravest “offense” was dating. Going out with a male student without parental permission was considered an “evil act” that was punished with expulsion. Underlying this perceived need for strict discipline was the widespread belief that girls were mentally vulnerable and immature and had to be protected from temptation and their own impulsive behavior — a notion rooted in the male-centric view that preserving sexual purity was of utmost importance for women.

The modern age represented by the new woman was perceived as a period characterized by flamboyance and ostentation. Korean male intellectuals of the 1920s to the 1930s had failed in their struggles to transform their country into a modern state and suffered the disgrace of living in a modernized Korea under colonial rule. Under such circumstances, the ideals and lives the new women aspired to seemed far removed from the grim reality. These men looked upon female students with both envy and disdain as they grappled with their failure to spearhead the nation’s modernization. In their eyes, the female students embodied both the spirit of modernity and its frivolous and immodest underside.

In pre-modern Korean society, parents were the sole decision-makers in marriage and individuals had no say in their choice of marital partner.

When the neologism “yeonae” (love or romance) was first introduced to Korea from Japan, it was met with an explosive response as a word signifying, as opposed to arranged marriages, the freedom to choose one’s spouse as in the West. It quickly caught on and became a social phenomenon. Love was regarded as a noble emotion that transcended social, financial and educational status, and served as an ideological mechanism for

asserting that individuals are in control of their own lives. Oddly, it led people to equate love with living an enlightened life.

However, when this new concept of love spread, many young intellectuals were already married to women chosen by their parents. They wanted to bail out and live with the woman of their choice. Some went so far as to form “divorce clubs” and organize annulment campaigns. When divorce was not possible, many chose to cohabit. The belief that love and free marriage was a way of living an enlightened life justified abandoning one’s wife to live with another woman, who was called the “second wife.” This caused great emotional distress for both the “new” and the “old” women.

Love Suicides

When faced with the stark disparity between reality and ideals, young people tried to assert the pureness of their emotions through acts of intense passion. At times, impassioned expectations and heated emotions led to the extreme act of suicide. From the mid-1920s, the so-called “love suicides” began spreading like an epidemic. In 1923, the story of Kang Myeong-hwa, a 23-year-old woman who took rat poison and died lying on the knees of her lover, was splashed all over the newspapers.

Kang was a gisaeng (traditional-style female entertainer) who fell in love with a man from a wealthy family named Jang Byeong-cheon. Unable to bear the strong opposition of his parents, she took her own life. After Jang ended his life in the same way, the name Kang Myeonghwa came to epitomize pure love. For decades, their love story continued to be made into novels, songs and movies.

The story of Yun Sim-deok and Kim U-jin, who committed double suicide in 1926 by jumping off a ship en route to Busan from Shimonoseki, Japan, was 1 an even bigger sensation. Both 29 at the

© Gwangju Speer Girls’ High School

26 KOREANA Spring 2019

1. Students of Jennie Speer Memorial School for Girls, who were imprisoned for participating in the March First Movement, pose for a photo after their release. The school was established in 1908 in Gwangju, South Jeolla Province, by American missionary Eugene Bell.

2. Kim U-jin began writing and directing plays as an English literature student at Waseda University in Tokyo. “The Wreck,” Kim's autobiographical play written in 1926, portrays the unraveling of a young poet as his Western ideas clash with his family’s Confucian values.

3. Yun Sim-deok was a star singer and actress. The first Korean woman to have studied Western classical music, she allegedly wrote the lyrics to her hit song, “In Praise of Death” (Sa-ui chanmi), after deciding to take her own life out of despair over a hopeless love.

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3 © The JoongAng Ilbo

time, Kim was a pioneer of modern Korean drama who helped form the Theater Arts Association organized by Korean students studying in Tokyo, while Yun had made a name for herself as Korea’s first professional soprano.

The love suicide of a star singer who had been embroiled in several love affairs and a famous dramatist who was married with children drew strong condemnation. The public response was not as sympathetic towards Yun as it had been with Kang.

Whether an object of sympathy and admiration or criticism and condemnation, the suicides of star-crossed lovers loomed as a serious social problem. In the mid to late 1920s, there were days when reports of several love suicides filled the newspapers. It was a tragic consequence of the clash between the yearning for emotional freedom and an unreceptive society. Early modern Korean novels that gained popularity for their themes of romance and love portrayed the deaths of young men and women from diverse angles. The short story “Yun Gwang-ho” (1918)

by Yi Kwang-su depicts death due to unrequited love; in “That Night” (1921) by Bang Jeonghwan, a lover’s betrayal leads to death; and in

“A Young Man’s Life, Delight” (1923) by Na Do-hyang, the female protagonist dies to atone for her ill-fated choice.

Unfulfilled Dreams

In “Mother’s Stake” (1979), an autobiographical novel by Park Wan-suh, the young daughter who is the narrator feels pressured by her mother’s ardent wish for her to succeed and become a new woman. “What is a new woman?” the daughter asks. The mother first talks about appearance: a new woman “arranges her hair in the hisashigami style rather than a traditional bun, wears heels and a black skirt that reveals her calves, and carries a purse.” It wasn’t to the young daughter’s liking. She wanted to wear a braid with a red ribbon, a long yellow skirt and flower-embroidered shoes.

The daughter asks again, “What does a new woman do?”

This time, the mother, looking somewhat perplexed, hesitates before she replies, “A new woman knows the ways of the world as she is well educated and can achieve anything she sets her mind to.”

This was the future of her daughter envisioned by the mother, who had relocated her family from a rural village to Seoul with the sole purpose of giving her children a decent education, while eking out a living by sewing.

Perhaps it was the kind of future dreamed of and hoped for by the women who challenged the traditional notions of gender roles when modern Western culture was first introduced into Korean society.

After its liberation from colonial rule and miraculous recovery from the ravages of war, Korea achieved remarkable economic growth and social progress. But how close have women in the country come to achieving the dreams that their mothers harbored?

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 27

SPECIAL FEATURE 4

The Road to Modernity: Korea in the Early 20th Century

Pop Music Blooms in the Depths of Despair © Museum of Old Roads in Mungyeong

In Korea, popular music started to thrive in the early 20th century, when overseas record labels produced commercial albums here and an increasing number of households enjoyed the luxury of a phonograph. Divided into the four genres of jazz, comic, new folk and popular songs, local pop music in the early days reflected the social ambience and public mentality of the era.

Chang Yu-jeong Professor, College of Liberal Arts, Dankook University

I

n 2018, the hottest issue in the local music scene was BTS, who have rewritten both Korean and world music history by breaking a series of industry records. Their most notable achievement was having two albums top the Billboard 200 chart in the same year, a first for Korean artists and for foreign-language albums.

It is simply amazing that in recent years BTS and other Korean pop artists have gained impressive popularity worldwide. About a century ago, when a native form of pop music was germinating among people living amid sorrow and self-deprecation under colonial oppression, who could have predicted such a thing?

Commercial Albums

Popular music, and indeed the concept of a mass audience, emerged at the start of modern times in Korea. That is not to say there were no songs that enjoyed wide popularity in pre-modern Korea.

For instance, Homer B. Hulbert, the American

28 KOREANA Spring 2019

missionary and educator whose love for Korea is well-known, introduced the lyrics and score of the folk song “Arirang” in an essay titled “Korean Vocal Music,” carried in the February 1896 issue of The Korean Repository, the country’s first English-language magazine. In his article, Hulbert wrote, “For the average Korean, this one song holds the same place in music that rice does in food.” Although the “Old Arirang” mentioned in this article is one of numerous variations of the folk song and different from the better-known “Bonjo Arirang” (“Standard Arirang”), it is clear how popular the song was at the time.

So, while there were songs that enjoyed widespread popularity even before the advent of popular music in today’s sense, the fact that modern pop music was disseminated through the mass media and the record industry clearly distinguishes it from the music that came before. Since the pursuit of profit is the ultimate purpose of producing commercial records, pop music is a com-

The score of the folk song “Arirang” published with the essay “Korean Vocal Music” by Homer B. Hulbert in the February 1896 issue of The Korean Repository, the first Englishlanguage magazine in Korea.

mercial product as well as a form of art. For this reason, “Arirang” is not classified as pop music in Hulbert’s article.

Korea’s music industry was launched in 1907 when the American music label Columbia Records released the country’s first commercial record. It was an album by Han In-o, a renowned singer of traditional songs from the Gyeonggi region, and Choe Hong-mae, a gisaeng, or traditional-style female entertainer. Soon after, Victor Records also entered the market and records by famous artists and singers of the time were quickly released one after another. Naturally, phonographs played a critical role in the spread of popular music. Before radio broadcasting began in Korea in the late 1920s, phonographs had made their way into the daily lives of the upper class, contributing to the development and popularization of music.

and formed the Korean Jazz Band. In the 1920s, jazz songs with lyrics advocating the pursuit of pleasure were hugely popular among the young urbanites of Gyeongseong (today’s Seoul), who were called the “modern girls” and “modern boys.” The jazz boom, largely influenced by films and records, was not received all that favorably, though. One intellectual derided the phenomenon, saying, “The modern girls and boys are just swinging their buttocks, lost in a frivolous fantasy.” However, among the musicians affiliated with record companies, quite a few were seriously committed to learning authentic jazz music by

“Quiet Listening” (1934) Kim Ki-chang Ink and color on silk 159 × 134.5 cm Depicting a modernized family of the 1930s, the painting was allegedly set in the well-decorated drawing room of a doctor who lived in the same neighborhood as the artist.

Jazz Boom

As is true of most new cultural phenomena, modern Korean pop music resulted from the encounter of native and foreign culture and their competition and coexistence. It was largely a byproduct of three major influences: traditional Korean music, Western music and Japanese music. Although identifying the interaction between these elements is not easy, the prevalence of one of these influences helped shape a genre in this early phase.

In this era, four genres of pop music developed: so-called jazz songs, comic songs (manyo), new folk songs (sinminyo) and popular songs (yuhaengga). The distinctions were not clear to start with, but for some time from the 1930s, when a true pop music market began to form, every song was labeled as one of those genres.

Jazz songs of that time differed from today’s concept of jazz. It was a term encompassing almost all Western pop music, including Latin pop, as well as regular jazz. Koreans were first exposed to Western music and instruments through Christian hymns and Western band music.

In the mid-1920s, Western music had an everincreasing influence, giving rise to a jazz boom.

In 1926, Baek Myeong-gon, the son of a wealthy family in the Jeolla region, led a Korean football team to play an away game in Shanghai.

He came home with jazz instruments and scores © Woonbo Cultural Foundation

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 29

emulating Western jazz musicians.

The jazz boom of the late 1920s paved the way for a rush of jazz songs in the 1930s. At first, they were mostly adaptations of Western or Japanese songs, one such case being “Dinah” (originally by Bing Crosby). Original songs, such as “Young Dreams in the Coffee House” (Dabangui pureun kkum) were created later, from the mid1930s and onwards.

Sympathy vs. Sarcasm

Manyo, or comic songs, was a genre classified not by musical style but by the humorous nature of the lyrics. The term comes from mandam, a form of standup comedy generally performed by a duo.

Similarly, manyo had witty lyrics that induced two different types of laughter — humorous and satirical. The former contained empathy, and the latter criticism; the former was warm and the latter cold.

“Sightseeing in Seoul” (Seoul gugyeong) was wildly popular from the 1950s until the 1970s. A remake of the “The Jolly Old Countryman” (Yukwaehan sigol yeonggam) sung by Kang Hongsik in 1936, it is the farcical portrayal of an old countryman who takes the train to Seoul for the first time and runs into a string of troubles. People would have a good laugh while listening to the song, feeling compassion for the old man who

Life went on and culture flourished even in the depths of despair, giving rise to songs that laid the foundation for today’s musical affluence.

makes so many mistakes. Perhaps he reminded them of themselves, adrift in the sea of modernity. On the contrary, “The Sham College Boy” (Gajja daehaksaeng) mocks the young man next door who skips school and spends all day playing billiards or chasing girls. The sarcasm is aimed not only at the man in the song but all the spoiled college students of the time. The satire in the song both amused and awakened the listeners to social problems. Given that satire thrives when political oppression and censorship prevail, the song reflects the hard reality of Koreans in those days when they were oppressed and exploited by the Japanese colonizers.

Sinminyo, or new folk songs, were a form of indigenous pop music in which traditional elements were preserved through the adoption of certain aspects of native Korean music

The Korean Jazz Band photographed after their first performance at Gyeongseong Broadcasting Station (JODK) in the summer of 1929.

30 KOREANA Spring 2019

Also appearing in this period were the so-called “trot” songs, the name originating from the English term “fox trot,” a style of ballroom dance which supposedly influenced the rhythm. Called yuhaengga, meaning “popular songs,” they were influenced by Japanese pop music, and thus had the same formal characteristics of the two-beat rhythm, minor keys and pentatonic scale. The Japanese music that influenced these songs, however, was not actually of Japanese origin. Earlier on, Japan had been proactive in adopting Western culture and the encounter of Western and Japanese music produced enka, or ballads. At first, this genre was also called ryukoka, meaning “popular songs,” in Japanese, but it was renamed enka and treated as traditional pop music in the 1960s.

In the sense that they were exalted to the status of

© Korea Creative Content Agency

Solace in Troubled Times

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© Korea Record Archive at Dongguk University

and folk songs. Borrowing refrains from traditional songs, using the accompaniment of native instruments, or employing old singing styles, the songs embraced local musical traditions in various ways.

An early example is the title track for the 1926 film “Arirang,” directed by Na Woon-gyu, which was extremely popular.

In the mid-1930s, a large number of gisaeng debuted as singers. These female entertainers who had been formally trained to sing and dance at vocational schools and agencies were “ready-made” performers. Proficient in traditional vocal styles, they distinguished themselves in singing the new folk songs. The audiences of the time were especially fond of these songs that appealed more readily to their inherent sensibilities. This probably explains why Wang Su-bok, a gisaeng who sang in a 1933 album, won the first place among all the recorded singers in a popularity contest held in 1935

by Samcheolli Co., which published the culture magazine “Samcheolli” (a name that refers to the whole land of Korea).

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traditional music as part of the country’s endeavor to redefine national identity, Japanese enka could be called an invented tradition.

Although long stigmatized as a product of Japanese culture, trot has been generally enjoyed in Korea and is very much alive even today. Created in the colonial period, trot has continued to be loved over the years because it relates to the lives and emotions of people in troubled times. It is presumed that the name trot began to be used as the title of the pop music genre in the 1950s.

The most popular songs from the heyday of trot include “Living Far Away from Home” (Tahyang sari) about the sorrow of living as a stranger in a faraway place, and “Tears in Mokpo” (Mokpo-ui nunmul) expressing passive resistance against Japanese occupation. These songs spoke for dejected and sorrowful lives, offering great solace to the public.

Modernity in Korea was another name for despair, since it was not achieved voluntarily and autonomously. However, life went on and culture flourished even in the depths of despair, giving rise to songs that laid the foundation for today’s musical affluence. In this sense, Korean pop music is like a flower that bloomed in the darkness of modernity, offering comfort to troubled souls.

1. Released by Columbia Records in 1907, “Corean Song” is a single-sided record containing traditional folk songs of Gyeonggi Province sung by Han In-o.

2. “Tears in Mokpo” by Yi Nan-yeong, released in 1935 by Okeh Record Co., consoled Koreans living in a colonized land.

The song still remains popular today.

3. “The First Ensemble,” released in 1940, is a compilation of singers under exclusive contract with Okeh Record Co. The first record company established by a Korean, Okeh Record Co. was launched in 1932.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 31

SPECIAL FEATURE 5

The Road to Modernity: Korea in the Early 20th Century

Cultural Globalization Then and Now Korea was forced to open its ports under the Korea-Japan Treaty of 1876 (a.k.a. Treaty of Ganghwa), which resulted in rapid cultural changes. A century later, the wave of cultural globalization is ushering in the “second enlightenment� era. Today, unlike their forebears a century ago, Koreans are proactively utilizing digital media to globally promote their cultural potential.

Jung Duk-hyun Popular Culture Critic

32 KOREANA Spring 2019

T

he acme of Korean pop culture content in 2018 was arguably the hit TV series “Mr. Sunshine.” Set in Joseon at the turn of the 20th century when American, French and Japanese ships frequented its waters seeking to open up the isolationist kingdom, the drama deeply resonated with viewers for bringing to light the unsung heroes of the “righteous armies,” or uibyeong, who sacrificed their lives to defend their country against foreign aggression. Along with the struggles of the freedom fighters, the drama’s significance also lies in its depiction of the social cleavages emanating from the introduction of new cultural imports from the West and the ensuing shift in consciousness across all social strata.

Whereas previous movies and TV dramas set in the late Joseon period were largely centered on anti-Japan narratives, “Mr. Sunshine” represents a marked departure. It recreates the streets of Hanyang, Joseon’s capital and today’s Seoul, lined with Western-style hotels, French bakeries and Japanese pubs and dressmakers, portraying the daily lives of the common people.

At the center of the story is a strong, spirited female protagonist who chooses a path that goes against her noble heritage. She is betrothed to a man chosen for her by her family but falls in love with a man named Eugene Choi; he was born into a slave family and escaped to America at a young age, returning a couple of decades later as a U.S. Marine Corps officer to serve at the American legation. Learning secretly how to shoot a rifle from a lowly hunter, she becomes a sniper going after pro-Japanese collaborators. The heroine embodies the independent, proactive women of the enlightenment period who chose to take charge of their own lives.

Content with Global Appeal

“Mr. Sunshine” also has symbolic significance in that it serves as a new paradigm of cultural content required in today’s world of cultural globalization, interconnected via digital networks. The shooting of the entire

© The Chosun Ilbo

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1. RM on behalf of BTS delivers a speech at the 73rd U.N. General Assembly on September 24, 2018 to mark the launch of “Generation Unlimited,” a new global youth initiative by UNICEF. Their message “Find your voice” resonated deeply with youth around the world.

2. A scene from “BTS World Tour: Love Yourself in Seoul,” released at 3,800 theaters in 95 countries on January 26, 2019. It is the second concert film by BTS, following “Burn the Stage: The Movie.”

2 © Big Hit Entertainment

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 33

A photo studio in Sangyeok-dong, Daegu, is a hotspot among youth for its retro-style photos that recreate the look and mood of the late Joseon era at the turn of the 20th century. Thanks to its explosive popularity, the studio has opened branches in Seoul and Busan.

series, with a production budget of a whopping 43 billion won (approximately US$39 million), was completed prior to the airing of the first episode. Almost unthinkable under Korea’s current TV series production system, it was made possible by Netflix, which invested 70 percent of the total production costs.

The global media services provider also aired the drama simultaneously around the world.

Thus it completely transformed the production landscape and consumption of Korean TV series.

Korea’s content industry is at a turning point. Viewers are increasingly sharing and

34 KOREANA Spring 2019

consuming content from around the world real-time through global platforms such as Netflix and YouTube. Today, the country’s domestic media and entertainment industry stands on the threshold of the new globalization era. It must determine whether to expand further into global markets or remain content with the domestic market.

When looking at “Mr. Sunshine” from this perspective, its historical background reveals greater importance. A significant period in the nation’s history, the turn of the 20th century in Korea also contains elements that global viewers can relate to. The romanticized desire for freedom, peace and love conceived during this time is a theme that transcends nationality and ethnicity. Thus the drama was able to garner a broader viewership.

Characterized by the clash of tradition and an influx of foreign culture, this unique period in Korean history makes an interesting backdrop that allows directors to unleash their imagination. For instance, take the film “The Good, the Bad, the Weird,” directed

by Kim Jee-woon and set in the same era. A take on the Western film genre, the imaginative devices employed in the film, inspired by © Studio Sankyeok the period’s confluence of disparate cultures, hightened its entertainment value and cinematic quality.

New Standards

A prominent example and important icon of the “new enlightenment” period is the pop phenomenon BTS, also known as Bangtan Boys, who have soared to global stardom. By actively utilizing social media platforms such as YouTube, the boy band communicates with fans around the world, accumulating a powerful fan base called BTS ARMY that transcends nationality and language. The key driver of their global success is their music and dance, the universal language of humankind.

Interestingly, the BTS craze was met with an anachronistic form of antagonism in Japan. Jimin, one of the members, became the target of criticism by Japanese right-wing groups who took issue with a T-shirt he wore with an image of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan alongside a

If they look back 100 years to late Joseon and reflect on the experiences of their forebears, the choices for content creators of our days become evident.

The poster of “Mr. Sunshine,” one of the biggest hit TV shows of 2018. The drama illuminated the struggles of the nameless fighters of the “righteous armies” during the Korean Empire and depicted proactive, independent female characters. Also portrayed in the drama are the first modern commercial establishments in Seoul, such as Western-style hotels, bakeries and dressmakers.

design of letters commemorating Korea’s independence. A photo image of Jimin wearing the T-shirt circulated on social media, touching off instant controversy and eventually leading to an apology by the band’s management agency. Apart from the young star’s lack of consideration in his choice of attire, the incident attested to the changing paradigm of cultural consumption in the age of global interconnection: The Japanese right-wingers’ demand that all Korean idol groups be banned from popular TV shows in Japan proved outdated at a time when fans around the world react real-time via digital media.

The incident also shows that the age of new enlightenment calls for a new global standard in cultural content that goes beyond outdated concepts, such as national and regional boundaries. This age of global cultural interchange requires values that people across the world share and relate to — values such as freedom, peace and coexistence that trump confrontation and competition.

New Challenges

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Oscar-winnig biopic about the British rock band Queen and its lead singer, Freddie Mercury, provides another outstanding instance of the shifting cultural landscape and patterns of cultural consumption in this new media age. The film was a huge sensation in Korea, breaking box office records for music films and making an even bigger splash than in the band’s homeland, England. Box office sales were driven by sing-along screenings, a collective movie-watching experience where audiences danced and sang along to Queen’s hit songs featured in the movie.

The nature of content is changing so that, although creators produce the content, it is the consumers who complete it. Just as BTS performances would not be complete without the ARMY singing and dancing along with them, the passionate audience response to “Bohemian Rhapsody” is what perfected the movie-watching experience.

The engagement of consumers gives new meaning to cultural consumption regardless of language or country.

With the rise of new media platforms, an increasing number of TV celebrities are enjoying side careers as one-person media creators. Meanwhile, top YouTube creators, such as Buzzbean, Banzz and Ssin, command even greater popularity and influence than famous TV personalities. Content creators who rose to YouTube stardom have ventured into television, appearing in variety shows and commercials, whereas TV celebrities are increasingly trying their hand at personal broadcasting, indicating a power shift from old to new media.

Digital networks created by new media technologies have ushered in the era of new enlightenment characterized by cultural globalization. If they look back 100 years to late Joseon and reflect on the experiences of their forebears, the choices for content creators of our days become evident. The doors are wide open and the path is clearly laid out. They will have to explore ways to safeguard their own culture while pursuing universal values shared by humanity. © Studio Dragon

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 35

FOCUS

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Time Travel in Dictionaries Dictionaries mirror cultural and social changes through the words they list and their definitions. “Dictionaries of Korea, A New Perspective,� a special exhibition at the National Hangeul Museum, provided a unique opportunity to look back on the modern era.

Hong Sung-ho Editor, The Korea Economic Daily

36 KOREANA Spring 2019

1. “Dictionaries of Korea, A New Perspective” was a special exhibition held at the National Hangeul Museum from September 20, 2018 to March 3, 2019. A visitor examines the dictionaries and the changes in sociocultural trends reflected in them.

2. The manuscript of the first Korean dictionary that Ju Si-gyeong (1876–1914) began writing with his students in 1911. Only parts of the original manuscript still exist.

3. The final draft of the “Dictionary of the Korean Language,” which was compiled over a period of 13 years starting from 1929 by the Korean Language Society, founded in 1921. The manuscript was seized by the Japanese police in 1942 and recovered in a warehouse at Seoul Station in 1945 after the nation’s liberation.

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2 useum l Hangeul M © Nationa

n 2010, Oxford University Press announced that it would no longer print its “Oxford English Dictionary” (OED), the most authoritative dictionary of the English language. Faced with a huge decline in annual sales of its print dictionaries, the company said its third edition of OED would only be available online.

The first part of the OED’s first edition appeared in 1884 and its first complete edition was released in 1928. The latest edition contains 10 Korean words, including taekwondo, kimchi, makkoli (unrefined rice wine, also spelled makgeolli) and ondol (floor heating system), as well as chaebol (large family-owned business conglomerate, also spelled jaebeol) and won, the Korean monetary unit.

Korea bid farewell to print dictionaries four years earlier.

On Hangeul Day, October 9, in 2006, the National Institute

© Hange ul Society

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of Korean Language said the revised edition of the “Standard Korean Language Dictionary” would be restricted to online viewing. Since then, the institute has beefed up the services of its online dictionary, introducing “Urimalsaem,” literally “spring of our language,” an open interactive dictionary that accepts new words and definitions from users.

The transition from print to online has paralleled technological advances. The omnipresence of computers and smartphones means their owners are literally walking around with small dictionaries. The internet has made finding a definition or word in digital and online dictionaries simple and easy.

Gone are the days of riffling through the pages of a paper dictionary looking for a word. Curiously, however, more than a few people recently queued up simply to look at dictionaries.

The special exhibition, “Dictionaries of Korea, A New

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 37

Perspective,” began on September 20, 2018, at the National Hangeul Museum, located on the compound of the National Museum of Korea in Yongsan District, central Seoul.

Although originally scheduled to close at the end of the year, public reception was so favorable that it persuaded the museum to grant an extension until early March.

Historic Manuscripts

Dictionaries are not only a treasure trove of words. They also provide insights into the evolution of nations and societies.

Pause and reflect on the etymology of words and you realize that dictionaries provide more than just definitions. They also track social, cultural and historical developments. In this respect, the exhibition offered the delightful experience of being transported 100 years into the past to explore how dictionaries have changed with the times.

King Sejong (r. 1418–1450), the fourth monarch of the Joseon Dynasty, created Hangeul in 1443 and promulgated it three years later, but the Korean alphabet was not officially recognized until 1894 under the royal edict of the Joseon government. Thereafter, the compilation of Korean language dictionaries became undertakings of national significance in a dark, turbulent period of the nation’s modern history. No doubt the upheaval slowed the projects considerably.

The first Korean language dictionary written by a Korean

did not appear until the 1930s. But far earlier than that, foreign Christian missionaries produced bilingual Korean dictionaries — the first being “Dictionnaire Coréen-Français,” published in 1880. A Korean-English dictionary followed in 1890 and an English-Korean dictionary the next year.

The handwritten draft of “Dictionnaire Coréen-Français,” dated 1878, was among the highlights of the exhibition. Held by the Research Foundation for Korean Church History, the draft manuscript was shown to the general public for the first time alongside its print version. Bishop Félix-Clair Ridel (1830–1884) from La Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (Paris Foreign Missions Society) published the dictionary in Yokohama, Japan, in 1880. It is of immense historical value because it is not only the first Korean-French dictionary but the first-ever Korean bilingual dictionary in a modern sense.

Also displayed to the public for the first time were unfinished dictionaries written by independence activists during the closing years of the Joseon Dynasty, when foreign powers were encroaching on Korean territory.

Among these dictionaries was one that shed light on a lesser known fact about Syngman Rhee (1875–1965), the first president of the Republic of Korea. In 1903–1904, toward the end of the Joseon Dynasty, while he was jailed on charges of attempting to overthrow the monarchy, Rhee

1. Photograph of members of the Hangeul Society taken on October 9, 1957, commemorating the publication of the “Dictionary of the Korean Language.” The compilation of the dictionary that began in 1929 had to be discontinued due to the imprisonment of the society’s lexicographers, and was completed after the nation's liberation from Japanese rule.

1 © Hangeul Society

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2. “Dictionnaire CoréenFrançais,” published by Bishop Félix-Clair Ridel (1830–1884) from La Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (Paris Foreign Missions Society) in 1880. The first bilingual Korean dictionary contains some 27,000 Korean entries in alphabetical order.

wrote the draft of the “New English-Korean Dictionary.”

Unfortunately, the dictionary never reached printing presses. Rhee, an independence activist who advocated republican rule, only completed the words from A to F because he was also devoting his time to writing “The Spirit of Independence.” Today, Rhee’s handwritten draft is owned by the Syngman Rhee Institute at Yonsei University.

Another unfinished dictionary stemmed from independence activist and journalist Soh Jaipil (a.k.a. Philip Jaisohn; 1864–1951). In 1896, Soh founded The Independent, the first Korean-English bilingual newspaper published in Korea.

Around that time, Soh embarked on the first draft of an English-Korean dictionary, but he only managed to complete A to P. His handwritten manuscript, dated 1898, was loaned from the Independence Hall of Korea.

Modern Words

The exhibition also provided telltale evidence of the changes in the spelling and meaning of words over time. They reflected Korea’s sociocultural transition since the enlightenment period, as well as how Korean people’s perceptions have evolved.

© National Hangeul Museum

2

For example, the 1925 short story “Telephone” (Jeonhwa) by Yeom Sang-seop (1897–1963), an outstanding writer and journalist known for his seminal work, “Tree Frog in the Specimen Room,” depicted how the purchase of the modern invention exposed ostentatious human desires and led to the unwanted consequences of giving up one’s privacy.

The telephone was first introduced to Korea in 1898.

At first, it was called deongnyulpung (delufeng), a Chinese transliteration of the pronunciation of the English word telephone. The three Chinese characters consisting the name literally mean “the wind that spreads virtue.” Referring to its purpose, telephone was also called jeoneogi, meaning “a machine that conveys words.”

No proper word for telephone existed in Korean up until the 1920s when it was given the name jeonhwa, comprised of the same Chinese characters as denwa, the Japanese word for telephone, which is still used today. The word was socially recognized and added to the Korean vocabulary in 1938 when it was included in the “Korean Language Dictionary,” a compilation of some 100,000 words, written and published

by Korean language scholar Mun Se-yeong (1888–?).

Mun’s dictionary was the first Korean language dictio-

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 39

1

©I nde pen den ce

In today’s digital age, when information overload augmented by convenience and speed is the norm, it is easy to overlook the role of dictionaries in society. nary to be written by a Korean. It resulted from his strenuous efforts over many years to publish a Korean dictionary as a means of restoring a sense of national pride among Koreans deeply wounded by colonial rule. In spite of their historical significance, the bilingual dictionaries written by foreign missionaries in the late 19th century could not satisfy such an aspiration. Moreover, a Korean language dictionary published by the Japanese Government-General of Korea in 1920 was part of a cultural initiative to tighten its colonial grip.

The exhibition thus brought to light when words like automobile, television or electricity were introduced into Korean society in tandem with modern technological progress, and how neologisms reflective of social trends, such as “modern boy,” “modern girl” and “free woman,” emerged.

The publication of the “Standard Korean Language Dictionary” by the National Institute of Korean Language in 1999 was a significant milestone in the history of Korean lexicography. It resulted from an eight-year government project that cost 12 billion won (approximately US$11 million). The

40 KOREANA Spring 2019

Ha ll o f

Ko rea

dictionary in three volumes has more than 7,000 pages and contains some 500,000 entries, including the standard Korean as spoken in South Korea, the Korean language spoken in North Korea, regional dialects and archaic words. Over the years, it has been the standard reference work for a number of dictionaries produced by commercial publishers.

Driver of Korea’s IT Prowess

In today’s digital age, when information overload augmented by convenience and speed is the norm, it is easy to overlook the role of dictionaries in society. In that sense, the National Hangeul Museum’s exhibition offered a rare opportunity to reflect on the value of dictionaries that have served as guides to the world as well as nourishment for minds. It also helped recall the nation’s tumultuous modern history and ponder the excellence of Hangeul.

Overcoming many difficulties and stalwart opposition by conservative courtiers, King Sejong created the Korean alphabet for the convenience of the majority of people who had no access to classical Chinese education. The original

seum geul Mu nal Han © Natio

© Syngman Rhee Institute, Yonsei University

3

2

1. Independence activist Soh Jaipil’s first draft of an English-Korean dictionary written in 1898. He only managed to complete the letters A to P. 2. The inside cover and first page of the “Korean Language Dictionary” written and published by Mun Se-yeong in 1938. Containing around 100,000 entries, it was the first Korean dictionary to use the Unified Hangeul Orthography. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1940 with 10,000 additional entries and amended annotations.

3. The unfinished draft of the “New English-Korean Dictionary” written by Syngman Rhee, the first president of the Republic of Korea, in 1903–1904, while he was in jail.

name of the alphabet, Hunmin Jeongeum (Proper Sounds to Instruct the People), testifies to the sage king’s pragmatism and benevolent desire for universal literacy. The indigenous Korean alphabet has been globally recognized as being one of the most scientific writing systems, which is easy to learn and use. It is also the only writing system in the world that can identify its creator, creation date and purpose. Therefore, “Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye,” the manuscript that contains the proclamation of the new alphabet and explanations and examples of its usage, was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 1997.

The annual UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize commends institutions and individuals who have fought against illiteracy. The recipients are announced on International Literacy Day, September 8.

A crucial reason for Korea’s rise to a global IT powerhouse boasting coveted internet connection speed and mobile communications is attributed to the simple and scientific structure of the Korean alphabet, which, as Sejong himself wished, “everyone can learn with ease and use with comfort.”

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 41

INTERVIEW

Dalparan

Thriving on Different Notes As a musician, Dalparan has been in the vanguard of every new genre; he is now revolutionizing the Korean film music scene. Since his first score for “Bad Movie” drew him into film music in 1997, he has built up an impressive oeuvre with relentless originality in his sound design, but he remains full of ambition, saying that he is “not yet completely satisfied.”

Lim Hee-yun Culture Reporter, The Dong-a Ilbo Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

42 KOREANA Spring 2019

D

alparan (“Moonblue”; birth name Kang Ki-young) brings revolution wherever he goes. First, he was a member of a few great heavy metal and alternative rock bands. Then, he became an electronic music DJ. Now, he belongs to a tiny group of composers deemed essential to a Korean film’s chance of success.

Alone or with his fellow composer, Jang Young-gyu, Dalparan has crafted a mosaic of unique cinematic scores for the 21st century. “A Bittersweet Life” (2005), “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” (2008), “The Yellow Sea” (2010), “Assassination” (2015), “The Wailing” (2016), “Believer” (2018) — the list of films with his compositions is long and full of hits.

The other side of this popular musician with a peculiar stage name can be found at his studio, located in Paju, north of Seoul. The studio where he toils resembles a bunker fortified with an array of instruments. On the main wall there is a huge wall-mounted flat panel display. A computer and a large keyboard occupy the center spot that looks up to the display.

Spreading out like wings from there are analog and modular synthesizers and a parade of electric guitars and bass guitars, which include a Fender Jaguar. Dalparan’s musical history began with the bass.

“I’ve been close friends with the legendary singer-songwriter Shin Joong-hyun’s son, Dae-chul, since we were in high school,” Dalparan recalls. “Back then, we recognized each other’s abilities and had a go at playing together. You could say we found a mutual understanding.”

A Rock Legend

The rock band Sinawe that they led in the 1980s launched the careers of other musical greats, like Kim Jong-seo, Yim Jaebeom and Seo Taiji, leaving a lasting legacy in Korean popular music.

Dalparan describes himself as someone “who easily gets sick of things.” After Sinawe, he joined H2O, the band that pioneered modern rock in Korea, and in the mid-1990s, he was in Pippi Band whose avant-garde rock sent shockwaves through the Korean music industry. Not long afterwards, after playing for a while in the band Pippi Longstocking, he

Dalparan works at his studio in Paju, Gyeonggi Province. He says, “The music must never overtake the film, you have to design it naturally from within the film itself.”

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 43

became a DJ and stood at the vanguard of Korean techno and trance. All things considered, his self-description seems true.

“There was a song called ‘Bad Movie’ in the second album with Pippi Band,” he says. “Director Jang Sun-woo came to see me, saying he’d heard it. He said he was making a film with the same title and asked if I would do the music for it. I agreed to do it without much thought. I’m pretty sure I just did it because I could earn some money. I never thought I’d become a film composer.”

That was how Dalparan made his debut as a film composer and music director. But even two years later, in 1999, when he was working on “Lies,” he would sit at his keyboard feeling completely lost. He had been impressed by “The Wall,” Alan Parker’s film based on Pink Floyd’s concept album, and the sound in “Blade Runner,” crafted by Vangelis, and as part of the MTV generation, he had seen his fair share of music videos. However, when it came to film music, he lacked a touchstone or compass.

“I wasn’t particularly interested in conversations about Ennio Morricone being such and such or Hans Zimmer being whatever,” he says. “On top of that, at that time, there was no particular structure in Korean film music for how things should be done. With nothing to go by, it was just like roaming around in the wilderness.”

Camaraderie in the Wilds

But travelers in the wilds never roam alone. Fortunately, around that time, Dalparan crossed paths with other “wanderers” sharing similar predicaments. Bang Jun-seok, Jang Young-gyu and Lee Byung-hoon had been active in bands like U&Me Blue, Uhuhboo Project and Lizard, and each had contributed to Korean avant-garde indie music. In the late 1990s, they all formed the Peach Present collective. “Peach” was a word chosen for no particular reason, but this “relaxed oath of the peach garden” became fertile ground for 21st century Korean film music to bloom anew.

“Back then, the internet was still really basic, so we’d share information with each other about different things that were stifling us, and that’s how we became friends,” he recalls. “We shared a similar partiality to all things peculiar, but more than that, what we all had in common was a sort of dissatisfaction with the Korean film music scene of the time, with all that unsubtle music. Looking back, I think we were able to be so critical because none of us was really invested in the film world then. Anyway, I think that attitude ultimately turned into a driving force for our work.”

Dalparan’s score for “A Bittersweet Life” became his turning point, earning him the award for best original soundtrack at the International Fantastic Film Festival of Cat-

44 KOREANA Spring 2019

alonia in Sitges, Spain.

“Director Kim (Jee-woon) called me up and said that I’d won the award. I remember my first thought being: he must be kidding. That’s how unexpected it was.”

Among the members of Peach Present, Jang Young-gyu became Dalparan’s partner. They collaborated on the music for the “kimchi western” action film “The Good, the Bad, the Weird,” set in Manchuria. Director Kim Jee-woon had both of them go to the Uighur region of Central Asia.

“We bought cassette tapes from the local market to get a proper sense of Uighur music,” Dalparan says. “It’s similar to Middle Eastern music but it uses a slightly different scale. We used the string and percussion instruments that we bought at that market in the recording. We tried mixing an Eastern scale into a Spaghetti Western style score like those of Ennio Morricone.”

After that, “The Yellow Sea,” “The Silenced” and “Assassination” presented more challenges to work with the familiar but distant context of modern Korean and East Asian history.

“There are times when you absolutely have to use music of the period as a cinematic device. But I don’t let that restrain me. Because you can interpret the era by other means while still maintaining the atmosphere the film creates,” he says. “After all, films aren’t real life. There are no fixed rules.”

Blazing a huge zigzag from heavy metal to rock and techno, Dalparan’s career from his teens to his thirties has become a deep well to tap for his film endeavors. “With films you end up using a lot of different styles depending on the circumstances,” he says.

A scene from “Six Mannequins” performed at the LIG Art Hall, Gangnam, Seoul, in July 2011. The concert was created by Dalparan (far right) and Kwon Byung-jun, his bandmate from Pippi Longstocking, which popularized punk and modern rock music in Korea.

Courtesy of Dalparan

“After all, films aren’t real life.

There are no fixed rules.”

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 45

© CJ ENM

On the right-hand wall of his studio there is a digital wall clock, the kind often mounted in public buildings. Time is displayed down to the second. The bold red digits seem to scream for attention like a micro-managing boss.

Each Project is a Battle

1. A 2008 Korean Western set on the plains of Manchuria during Japanese imperial rule, “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” arrested audiences with powerful music. Reworked with a fast Latin dance beat and Western-style feel, the song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” originally written for Nina Simone in 1964, perfectly set the scene as the film’s title song.

2. “Believer” was the most talked-about blockbuster in the first half of 2018, lauded for its exceptional articulation of the protagonist’s inner world through music. The film earned Dalparan accolades for best music at the Korean Film Producers Association Awards and the Blue Dragon Film Awards.

46 KOREANA Spring 2019

“Every single film I do is difficult. If it was my own independent work, I could just sit and wait until something really good comes to mind,” he says. “With films, there’s the deadline and the release date, so whether or not I can think of anything, I still have to deliver, even if it means forcing it. In the end, though, something always 1 comes out one way or another.

2 “The actual process itself is a huge task, too. So much work goes into it. I’ve seen plenty of friends who find that part tedious and not right for them and so end up quitting. I’ve also seen a friend passing out from overwork while scoring a film. For me, It seems the fun of it outweighs the suffering. I also really love that feeling of having accomplished something each time I have finished one. It gets more and more fun the more I do.”

Behind the three-tiered analog synthesizer stands an upright piano. At a glance, it looks more like an anatomical chart than an instrument. With the cover removed, the hammers and strings © Next Entertainment World are completely on display and look like a ribcage. It is an appropriate piece of equipment for a film composer; all kinds of sounds can be produced and manipulated.

Three trophies stand atop the piano. He won them at the Grand Bell Awards, presented annually by the Motion Pictures Association of Korea, and at Sport Chosun’s Blue Dragon Film Awards. On one of them is engraved “The Wailing.” For that film, Dalparan and Jang Young-gyu exquisitely integrated an artistic sound track. The result is

a peculiar mix of horror and thriller, reality and surreality, shamanism and bloodthirstiness.

Dalparan explains, “Well, film is two-dimensional.

Everything happens on the screen. But sound effects play a part in getting the audience to perceive it as three-dimensional experience, as though it were really happening. In a piece written about ‘The Wailing,’ a foreign film critic mentioned the illusion of space created by the sound. It’s true. If not to the level of installation art, but compromising down to the extent that could be handled by a film audience, I tried adding in artistic sound elements. I had always wanted to experiment with that kind of thing, and lucky for me I met with a film brimming with such energy.”

In “The Wailing,” Dalparan carefully introduced the tone cluster technique used by contemporary music composers such as György Ligeti.

“There’s a wavelength that comes out of distortion. It’s basically like wringing two tones together to create a new acoustic element,” he says. “For that kind of effect, I use analog and modular synthesizers.”

In this regard, Dalparan has been focusing on the work of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who passed away last year at the age of 48. Dalparan never met Jóhannsson but regards him as a colleague and a friend. Not only are they similar in age, but Jóhannsson was the one leading the way in the direction that Dalparan desired, boldly using the kind of experimental work he always wanted to try and applying it in blockbusters. Thus, Jóhannsson’s death felt like a terrible loss and Dalparan is still mourning him.

Jóhannsson’s music for “Sicario,” a 2015 U.S. film about drug trafficking, initiated Dalparan’s attention to the Nordic composer. “Jóhannsson used tonal distortion to express the violent elements of the film. He managed to express it in a way that even viewers with no knowledge of contemporary music can instinctively feel it. That’s the reason his experimentation is so incredible.”

Dalparan elaborates, “His other work, ‘Arrival,’ is like that, too. It was amazing how he could use that kind of experimentation in a way that went beyond just creating a simple sound effect to actually becoming musical. There has been this kind of experimentation outside of Korea for a while now. Even in the Marvel superhero films, such effects feature here and there, but of course they don’t come close to the level of Jóhannsson’s work. There are no Korean films yet that fully utilize three-dimensional sound systems, from surround sound to Dolby Atmos.”

Dalparan’s most recent works are “Believer” and “Door Lock.” “Believer” won the Blue Dragon Film Award for

Best Music, and following exceptional demand from filmgoers, the score was released for sale as a CD. In the horror thriller “Door Lock,” he tried to inject more sound elements than melody. But his creative drive still feels unfulfilled. If that’s the case, will his next projects satisfy his desires?

“Our Country’s Language,” which tells the story of King Sejong and the invention of Hangeul, starring Song Kangho, and “Call,” a thriller that depicts what happens when two women living in different times are connected by a phone call, are both awaiting release. Dalparan hinted that “Call” would contain a new kind of experimentation. There is yet another new challenge coming his way. Season 2 of the Netflix production “Kingdom,” a zombie series set in the Joseon Dynasty, will mark his debut on a TV series.

“I took a look at the first season and it was really interesting,” Dalparan says. “There isn’t that pressure to get people out to see a movie, so working with Netflix is a good opportunity for a director to really put new ideas into practice. I think it’ll be an opportunity for me to try out things I’ve wanted to for a long time.”

He confesses that he’s the type of person who completely loses his appetite once he begins a project. When he’s low on energy, he takes a walk rather than rely on vitamins. “There are lots of times when I’ll be mindlessly walking and then an idea pops into my head,” he says. He further notes that as a film composer “you have to keep track of the current flow of popular and contemporary music.” As such, he devotes much of his time to perusing the internet and magazines to stay in touch with various kinds of music. The reason he gladly helped remix music by indie band Silica Gel in 2017 was that he already knew the young musicians. Eventually, he would like to release an album under his own name, but there’s no clear plan yet. For the time being, he is dedicating his attention to films.

The Other Side of the Moon

I wanted to save this question to the very end; it lingered so delectably in my mouth. Where did the unusual name, Dalparan, come from?

“It happened back when I was with Pippi Band. One night, I looked up at the sky and there was a full moon that just looked great. The moon always only ever shows one side of itself but it has another side we never get to see. It kind of looks fake, too, a trick of the light or something…

It occurred to me that I want to become someone who can make people think unexpected thoughts the same way the moon does. But it’d be no fun if I just called myself dal for ‘moon.’ So I tried sticking paran on the end for ‘blue.’ It feels and sounds a bit strange to say,” he laughs.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 47

GUARDIAN OF HERITAGE

Producing Premium Spineless Brushes Before pens and pencils were introduced from the West, brushes were the most common tools for writing and painting in East Asia. Thus, brush making was an important occupation that required a great deal of skill and experience. Adhering to the painstaking old ways of brush making instead of enjoying the ease and efficiency of modern processes, the master brush maker Yu Pil-mu says he pours his life into his work.

Kang Shin-jae Freelance Writer Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

W

henever a novice calligrapher came to him for a brush and he sold one with some hesitation, he always ended up regretting it.

Before long, the buyer would call him and tell him in a grave voice that all his colleagues, even his teacher, had commented that it was a “poorly bound” brush. This is the main reason the master brush maker Yu Pil-mu has decided to turn away most of the people who ask to buy his brushes.

Yu makes a clear distinction between his handcrafted brushes and those sold at shops for calligraphy supplies. “I can assure you that 99 percent of the brushes on the market have nylon bristles mixed with animal hair. Those brushes usually have a core, or a spine, made of stiff synthetic hairs, which makes it easy for anyone to quickly learn to control them,” Yu said, adding, “Anyone used to those brushes would be perplexed by mine.”

Brush with No Spine

A brush with the core strengthened by stiff hairs, either synthetic or natural, has firm bristles. Such a brush is easy to control but tends to make uncharacteristic, monotonous strokes. Strong, stiff animal hairs are not an inferior material in themselves. Some brushes are made of stiff hairs from the tail of a weasel or a horse, others with soft goat hair or chicken feathers, and still others have a core of stiff hairs surrounded by an outer layer of soft ones.

In some cases, as many as 15 different kinds of hair are

48 KOREANA Spring 2019

combined to make a single brush. It is just a matter of choice that depends on the user’s purpose and preferences. That said, the master brush maker raised the issue of the degradation of standards for calligraphy brushes and the flagging efforts to preserve the craft of traditional brush making in its original form and hand it down to future generations. The essential part of his work, Yu noted, is to produce “brushes with no spine,” or musimpil, the epitome of traditional Korean calligraphy brushes. These spineless brushes are made of high-quality natural hair of the same kind from the outside to the core.

“From old times, the spineless brush has been most highly regarded by calligraphers,” he explained. “With this brush, even the most proficient calligraphers would have difficulties making simple lines unless they had used it for a while to get fully acquainted with it. With no stiff core to support the bristles, it is hard to control. On the other hand, being delicate, soft and supple, the brush often produces unintended expressions, creating a boundless variety of effects. The softest is the strongest, as the old saying goes.”

During the 40 years devoted to his craft, Yu has developed uncommon insight into brush hairs. He pointed out The master brush maker Yu Pil-mu checks a white goat hair brush to see if it has a fine point tip. He considers that the essential part of his work is to produce brushes with no spines, made of high-quality natural hair of the same kind from the outside to the core.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 49

that all animal hairs could be used for making brushes. Back when brushes were the only writing tool, they were made of any natural hairs available — the hair of weasels, rabbits, pigs, roe deer, chickens, and even newborn babies. However, human hair can’t be used after the first haircut, which blunts the ends, since the pointy ends need to be intact for brushes.

Currently, one of the most popular materials for brushes is white goat hair. The goat provides hairs of varied length and texture, suitable for a wide range of brushes. The hairs from the goat’s back and heels and even whiskers can all be used separately to make different kinds of brushes.

Yu likes to use the hair from the inner hind legs. “See how the hair grows brighter and more transparent toward the end, tapering to a delicate tip?” he said, holding up a patch of goat hide with the hair still attached.

He went on to explain, “The coloring indicates a dense internal structure. Then, what does it look like at the root, closer to the hide? It grows opaque and white, doesn’t it?

That means the structure is less dense. The hair gets weaker and more apt to break toward the root. But most brush makers use this part as well so they can make bigger brushes and charge more for them. But I usually cut away a large portion of the root part, and sometimes push the clipped end almost three centimeters deep into the ferrule that connects the bristles and the handle. I do this simply to extend the life of the brushes.”

“Other artisans might call me crazy,” Yu said, with a smile. “I doubt that my efforts are appreciated. But I just can’t stop, because I believe I’m doing a worthwhile thing.”

Adhering to Traditional Techniques

1

“If I didn’t have to worry about making a living, I wouldn’t want to sell any of them.”

50 KOREANA Spring 2019

Dealing with animal hairs is hard work. It usually takes more than five years just to master the skills for collecting raw hairs from animal hides, Yu said. Yu does not grudge the long time spent preparing the hairs, a time that seems to vanish at his fingertips. The next step is removing oil from the hairs before they are tied in bunches, which is also very time-consuming. Oil left on the hairs forms a barrier that prevents the ink from fully soaking in. For this important procedure to help control the flow of ink, he follows the old ways: sprinkling the hairs with ashes from burnt rice husks, covering them with mulberry paper, and pressing them with stone fulling blocks for a year to remove the oil. Hairs with higher oil content, such as weasel hair, horse tail hair and cow’s ear hair, are buried near the front gate of the house so that they will be trodden on frequently by people coming and going.

“For the last 20 years, I’ve doggedly stuck to the old method, handed down orally from at least four generations ago,” Yu said. “But most other artisans use heat treatment for

oil removal, pressing a thick, heated steel plate on piles of hairs. This removes oil in less than 10 minutes, but the hairs are so damaged that they tend to crumble and fall out of the brush head. Yet, no one has called this method into question.”

Having committed himself to reviving the disappearing tradition of brush making, Yu started to recreate brushes using plant fibers instead of animal hairs. In the distant past, plant fiber brushes were a substitute for those made with more expensive animal hair. An example is the brush made with kudzu roots, which have some of the softness of sheep’s wool but are better at expressing the shredded lines of the “flying white” (baekbi, or feibai in Chinese) style of calligraphy. After successfully recreating the kudzu root brush in the early 1990s, he began to use dozens of other plants, such as silver grass, blood grass and palm tree bark. In brush making, while the process of preparing animal hairs can be summed up as discarding and sorting out, preparing plant fibers is all about pounding, which requires a great deal of time and effort.

“The fibers have to be split into fine threads. In my experience, the only way to do this is to keep on pounding, around 5,000 to 50,000 times, to remove all starch and sap and leave only the fibers,” Yu explained. “But it has to be done lightly, because striking them too hard would ruin the fibers. As for kudzu roots, it takes about three months just to process them into threads.”

With no books or written sources to refer to, Yu sought out all the oral tradition available about the techniques and studied them on his own, asking himself what he would have

done if he had lived 300 or 500 years ago.

“Our ancestors must have been very wise; everyone was an engineer and a scientist,” he observed. “Without today’s advanced scientific equipment, they knew everything they had to know. I feel that retracing their footsteps is my calling in this world.”

Staying Faithful to the Basics

After losing his father at age 10, Yu left his hometown, Chungju, at 13 to go to Seoul, where he worked at a number of restaurants and factories. In 1976, when he was working at a wig factory, taking stimulants to stay awake at night to work longer, a relative recommended him for a job at a brush-making workshop. He now laughs away the hard times, describing his life back then as being “haunted by hairy ghosts.” But as a young man he was happy to leave the wig factory for a “dignified job” of making art tools. On average, he worked 15 hours a day, devoting almost all his waking hours to making a living. At times he almost gave up, but he managed to stay at the workshop for 12 years mastering his skills, and then set up his own workshop to make his 1. The brush combined with the Buddhist monk’s wooden block is the outcome of 10 years of research. From making brush heads, Yu expanded his specialty to brush handles as well in order to take charge of the entire brush making process.

2. Yu’s workshop in Jeungpyeong County, North Chungcheong Province, has been provided by a patron free of charge since 2010. After securing a stable place to work, he was able to fully dedicate himself to studying traditional brushes.

2

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 51

own brushes.

In the early 1990s, just when he thought he could manage to get by with his craft, Korea established diplomatic relations with China, opening the doors for cheap and inferior Chinese products which would soon engulf calligraphy supplies stores nationwide. To compete with the Chinese brushes, the quality standards of domestic products were lowered. The situation has not changed for almost 30 years.

A determination to hold on to the basics was what helped Yu persevere through the tough times. To stay faithful to the basics, he has been strict on himself and his work. Last year, his brush-making craftsmanship was named an important intangible cultural property of his home province, North Chungcheong, the first official recognition of his lifelong endeavor.

“A good brush has four virtues: bristles firm and flexible in the middle; the brush head packed tight and round at the ferrule; hairs that spread out evenly on the paper; the tapering tip that holds a fine point,” Yu explained. “Most artisans agree that a good brush, however large, can also be used for the finest lines. In the old days, the level of refinement in calligraphy was shown in whether one could use the same brush for both the big characters of a text as well as the small ones

in the signature section. Virtuous scholars, or seonbi, felt that it was undignified to change brushes in a single work. From this we can deduce that when a brush can no longer be used for the small letters it should be replaced.”

Yu is merciless in criticizing brushes that fall short of the basic requirements. He simply does not consider it a brush if the head splays with the slightest wear to the tip, making it useless in just a couple of months. He is especially unforgiving of the brushes that are praised by beginners of calligraphy for their ease of control. He places the blame on the brush, however, not the person who uses it.

“People these days can do anything with the computer after just a few months of training,” Yu said. Then he went on to ask, “If you hope for quick recognition as a calligrapher and to perform better than others at contests, how could you like a brush that you have to work with for 10 years just to draw lines properly?”

Putting His Heart into His Work

Yu certainly realizes that few would bother with calligraphy if all brushes were so difficult to use. Aware of this, he has not made any effort to sell his brushes for the last 20 years or so. Having no house or property of his own, he lives at a

1

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place provided by a patron free of charge, living and working like a temporary settler. But he has no regrets, for his life is his own choice. He maintains that a brush maker should focus on making brushes and worrying about sales can ruin his work. Whenever he found himself brooding on the matter, he delved deeper into his craft. His commitment growing ever stronger, he ended up expanding his specialty into brush handles as well.

Yu makes handles from scratch, processing the bamboo, engraving rows of characters on the tube, or decorating the length of the body with mother-of-pearl. He also experiments with unprecedented designs, such as a row of peach pits or lotus pips glued together to form a rod. These days, he applies lacquer to the handles to improve durability and even makes racks for his brushes. When asked to choose the brush that he has cherished most over the 40 years of his career, he replied it was impossible because all the brushes he made were so precious to him.

“Each one of my brushes has a story. Some brushes can be explained in half a day, but it can take days to tell the story of others,” he said. “If I didn’t have to worry about making a living, I wouldn’t want to sell any of them. It might be a futile obsession, but over ten years ago, I pledged to sell my brushes only to those who would know their worth.

This has also been a motto that has spurred me to persist in the path that I’m on. I tell myself, if it’s not special, it’s not Yu Pil-mu’s brush. That’s why I dare to say that I pour my life into my brushes. I’ve persevered believing that I’ll create something valuable if I put my heart into it, and that people will appreciate it.”

For instance, his brush combined with the Buddhist monk’s wooden block, or moktak, is the outcome of ten years of research. He remembers the time this idea gradually materialized, and how his thoughts kept changing all the while. In creating this unusual writing tool, he was preoccupied with the idea of making “a brush that feels like a part of yourself.”

Besides, his rice straw brush with coarse bristles, resembling a broom, also reflects his idea of a brush capable of dynamic expressions.

“With any project, I always focus on the essential role of each brush. It is up to the user to decide how to use it and for what purposes. It’s absurd and meaningless for me to decide that myself,” said Yu. Then, what does his craft mean to him? As if he had been anticipating the question, he answered immediately: For the first 30 years, he had relied on the brush, but now he often feels that the brush relies on him. It became clear why, despite all his hardships and solitary struggles over decades, his face still showed glimpses of satisfaction and accomplishment.

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1. Yu believes that the best brush is versatile for both big and small characters.

2. To extend the life of the brushes, Yu uses only the dense, strong part of the hair, cutting away a large portion of the root part with less density.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 53

ART REVIEW

“The Sealed Paradigm” series (walls) by Kim Hong-jin.

2017. Mixed media injection, 3D printer, 187 x 147 x 12 cm.

“Objects on the Operating Table” (left) by Kim Hong-jin.

2018. Mixed media injection, casting, 180 x 150 x 180 cm.

“A Spectator” (right) by Kim Hong-jin. 2018. Mixed media injection, casting, 130 x 130 x 180 cm.

“A Process of Extinction” (floor) by Kim Hong-jin. 2018.

Mixed media injection, casting, 300 x 300 x 50 cm.

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The Future Is Now Clayarch Gimhae Museum’s special exhibition “Post-human: Humans after Humans” inquires what impact technological development has on humans, especially artists, and how art and technology can coexist. AI (artificial intelligence) robots, 3D printers and digital drawings, symbolic of future society, paradoxically emphasize human beings’ primordial power to think, create and experience.

Kwon Keun-young Culture Reporter, JTBC

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“A “An Evolving GAIA”

by Roh Jin-ah. 2017.

Resin, wood, interactive system, variable installation, approximately 4.5 m long.

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re you human?” I whisper into the ear of the robot hanging in midair in supine position.

“I don’t think I’m human. But I could become one soon. I’m trying this hard, as you see,” the robot answers with its lips moving.

“What is it about being human that makes the robot work so hard?” I wonder to myself. Pity, rather than fear, of the robot’s grotesque exterior overwhelms me.

“Look at me,” I say to the robot.

The robot rolls its big eyes in my direction and shoots me a question of its own: “Why are you here alone?”

I was told the android in GAIA’s brain accesses the artist’s webpage server when a visitor makes small talk, finds a proper response and emits it in the form of voice. The combinations of questions and answers are frequently updated and thereby diversified. In her seeming-

ly bizarre work, entitled “An Evolving GAIA,” Roh Jin-ah asks how humans and machines will relate to one another and what kind of future they will share together further down the road of evolution when the two might be hardly distinguishable from each other.

The special exhibition, entitled “Post-human: Humans after Humans,” runs through March 24 this year at the Clayarch Gimhae Museum in South Gyeongsang Province. Focusing on the future, artists share their concerns about the potential replacement of human labor

by AI in the age of the fourth industrial revolution. The exhibition shows the results of long and hard thinking about the sustainability of art; for example, how the convergence of art and science will manifest itself, and how art can maintain its unique voice amidst rapid technological advances. The exhibition has multilayered flavors — a sense of pessimism forecasting

the end of civilization, a note of optimism about how science and technology have made our lives more convenient, and a dash of imagination going beyond planet earth.

Multilayered Flavors

Dozens of white and gold robots from an identical mold are lined up on a conveyor belt. Next to it, a large Taekwon V robot stands on top of a pedestal resembling a transmission tower, though failing to conceal its protruding belly.

This is Shin Yi-chul’s “Robot Taekwon Boy.” The hero robots from our childhood memories have crossed over from dreams and imagination to the real world, showing up as friends one can talk to, like pet animals, or even as chefs or guides.

“The Sealed Paradigm” series by Kim Hong-jin features cookie-cutter ants made from 3D printers lining the floor and walls of the exhibition hall. The artist seems to be asking how different we humans are from the 3D-printed ants since it has become difficult in this modern society to claim our individual identity. The large rectangular frames on the walls each have seeds, rice, barley, wheat and twigs on the bottom, with model ants covering them up — a mixture of materials that seems to symbolize the paradigm of survival.

In the adjoining room is Sim Jun-seub’s installation, entitled “Circulation of Organ.”

Twisted pipes attached to the wall resemble the insides of a human body. When visitors walk into the darkened room, the pipes light up in fluorescent colors and make sounds from different holes according to their movement. Only with the participation of the viewers is this work complete. With this work of art that is the visualization of sound, the artist raises the idea that invisible sound can distort space.

Mother Nature, Still Relevant

The second floor of the exhibition space is devoted to collaborative works. The shelves at the entrance are lined with plants, and abstract paintings resembling submarine creatures are placed in the middle. These paintings of gouache blurred on the canvas have been installed separate from the walls to show both

the front and back sides.

Their beauty is found in the shadows they cast on the walls. Indefinite forms resembling hands, hair and flowers are projected onto the walls, drawn in line and color only. This “Bio Drawing” series was done by Kim Jee-soo, who wanted viewers to be in awe of the life of plants by using different senses.

In the center of the exhibition hall is a white dome anyone can enter and lie down in. It is the last piece in this space for collaborative works created by artists, chemists and installation engineers. A joint work

by Kim Jee-soo and Kim Seon-myong, it is titled “Petrichor,” which means “the pleasant smell of oil excreted from plants sprouting when it rains.” It challenges the common perception that plants neither move nor react by stating that plants that communicate through smell can change and move as actively as any other organism. The bottom of the dome is covered with moss, and visitors can lie comfortably on the hammock hung above the ground and look up at the ceiling, appreciating the drawings on it. Scents collected by the artists from many different plants are sprayed in reaction to the movements of people inside the dome.

Another installation that enables visitors to experience space with their own bodies is “Human & Space and Passage.” A three-way collaboration by Lee Jung-yoon, Oh Sin-wook and Ahn Jae-cheol, it is a long tunnel in which

1

2

1. “Larchiveum” by Shin Yi-chul. 2017.

White porcelain, gold leaf, slip casting, variable installation, 48 × 30 × 11 cm. (each robot, total 80 robots).

2. “Robot Taekwon Boy” by Shin Yi-chul.

2016. Aluminum, aluminum casting, urethane paint, 220 × 100 × 50 cm.

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1. “Outside of BORA: See or Purple” by Kim Jee-soo. 2014. Gouache, collage on fabric, 216 × 118 cm (each panel).

2. “Human & Space and Passage” by Lee Jungyoon, Oh Sin-wook and Ahn Jae-cheol. 2018.

Air molding, real-time camera, LED lighting, 20 × 10 × 20 m (variable installation in an area of this size).

3. “Bucket List” by Kang Ji-ho. 2018. Acrylic paint on wood, 200 × 200 × 250 cm.

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1 2

winds blow through. Visitors are supposed to walk through the tunnel, higher than the height of an average adult, which is made of translucent white cloth so the people walking inside can feel the light and wind from within, while those outside can see their moving shadows.

The Future in Art

Kim Joon used to draw tattoos in analog fashion on the smooth surface of ceramics resembling human skin. With 3ds Max software that he learned to use at a game company, he now creates diverse variations. His digital drawings, with the texture of very delicate, brittle ceramics, portray the human body as an outer shell with no inner organs. They feature signature scenes from such classic movies as “Gone with the Wind” and “Rebel Without a Cause” to etch in the hearts of viewers a sense of nostalgia in this technology-dominated era.

A wooden fixture standing at the entrance of the museum is the work of Kang Ji-ho. It is made of scrap wood left over from installing the exhibition. The artist named the figure “Jack” and wrote up a bucket list for him. Faithfully following what is on the list, Jack is back from a belated vacation at Dadaepo Beach in Busan and is performing his duties at the museum.

Entitled “Bucket List,” it looks at the possibility of regenerating art in the bigger context of sustainability; it is a heart-warming epilogue to the exhibition.

Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie “Blade Runner” is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles in the year 2019. In the movie, humans are hardly distinguishable from their replicants, or bioengineered androids, which go on living thinking that they are human. Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated post-apocalyptic cyberpunk film, “Akira,” based on his manga series of the same name, is set in Neo Tokyo 31 years after a devastating nuclear war, again in 2019. Back in 1988, people imagined that everyone would still be listening to music on CD players and making calls from pay phones in 2019. But it is interesting how the battle scenes take place in a stadium that is being built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Tokyo actually won the bid for the 2020 Olympic Games in 2013, so that part of the

forecast was correct.

As such, the future that was depicted in movies of the past has now become the present. Some of the predictions were right, and some wrong. However, what holds true is that humans are mortal, but art is immortal. The artistic imagination that outlives humans retains its uniqueness and connects itself to post-human art and to the future of art.

Art after Humans

It is a personal choice whether one’s future outlook is optimistic or pessimistic. However, as mechanization accelerates, the value of creativity and handcraft that is contained in the archetype will rather be enhanced.

Technological development surely has an impact on the arts ecosystem. The future where human labor disappears is already present in the exhibition. Not only the installation methodology but also the new concepts of the fourth industrial revolution and hyper-connected society, such as AI, the Internet of Things and big data, are embedded in the exhibits. It is a personal choice whether one’s future outlook is optimistic or pessimistic. However, as mechanization accelerates, the value of creativity and handcraft that is contained in the archetype will rather be enhanced.

The artists who are participating in this exhibition are in their 40s and 50s, on their way to becoming the “old generation.” Some works are fresh and inspiring, but the imagination in some of the works point to a future that is already past. As I make my way out of the museum, which is bustling with children from Gimhae and the local area, I am more intrigued by what kind of future those children will create.

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IN LOVE WITH KOREA

A Young Turk’s Answer to the Cry of Haegeum Radical changes are never easy, but Cevzet Tam made two within a short time. First he left Turkey to study computer science and IT in faraway Korea, then switched his major to traditional Korean music. These changes would not have been possible without his perseverance and love for his host country.

Choi Sung-jin Executive Editor, Korea Biomedical Review Ha Ji-kwon Photographer

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or some people, a transformative moment in life occurs through sheer coincidence — a beckoning from Dame Fortune.

For Cevzet Tam, it happened one day during a walk in Seoul. Feeling forlorn, he heard the melancholy sound of a haegeum being played by a busker. “I was only 19 then, feeling sad and lonely and missing my family in Turkey,” Cevzet said. “It was as if the traditional Korean fiddle was weeping for me.”

The chance encounter with a foreign musical instrument reset his direction in life.

From Math to Music

Back home in Turkey, Cevzet attended a class for gifted math students. Fittingly, he set out to be an engineer and decided to study computer science and information technology in Korea. But after arriving in 2012 and completing a oneyear Korean language course, Cevzet was nowhere near IT. Instead, he entered Seoul National University’s Department of Traditional Korean Music and majored in the haegeum.

Exactly what was so mesmerizing about the ancient foreign musical instrument? How did a 19-year-old who couldn’t even read music become so captivated by it?

“I myself don’t know exactly why,” Cevzet admitted.

“Maybe I had some liking for music in me without realizing it. When I saw the haegeum for the first time, it reminded me of a similar Turkish string instrument, called saz. Anyway, the more I listened to its sound, the more I came to like it. It produces sounds that words cannot describe — sad and sorrowful but sometimes humorous.”

The haegeum is a simple instrument; it has two silk strings, a wooden sound box and a rod-like neck. Placed upright on the player’s knee, it has been a timeless fixture of Korean traditional music, played in royal palaces as well as rural backyards. Eight materials are used to build this instrument: wood, metal, silk, stone, bamboo, gourd, clay and hide. Thus, the instrument is also called pareum, meaning “eight sounds.” Another name is kkaengkkaeng-i, an onomatopoeia of its high-pitched sound.

Nobody was more surprised by Cevzet’s abrupt switch than his family. Everyone had expected Cevzet, the youngest of six siblings, to become a handsomely paid engineer after Noting that Koreans reveal little cultural identity in their popular music, Cevzet Tam wishes K-pop composers would inject more elements of traditional Korean music just as Turkish musicians use their native instruments to play modern music.

studying in Korea. His sudden announcement that he would study music and take up an unfamiliar musical instrument especially upset his father.

“At first, my father refused to talk with me for over a month. It took me nearly three years to persuade him to fully accept my decision,” Cevzet said. “My father slowly began to change his mind as he saw me studying hard and receiving a scholarship from the school.”

After Cevzet appeared on Korean TV, the misgivings melted. “My father said he was proud of me for introducing our country Turkey to Koreans,” Cevzet said. Not only his father but other family members now also warmly support him. However, Cevzet said, Turkey is too far away from Korea for him to get more than moral support from his family. Filling the void are Korean acquaintances. Some are like surrogate parents to him.

Korean Patrons

One of them is Professor Yang Young-sook at Seoul National University, who is also Cevzet’s academic adviser. “Professor Yang helped me endure my undergraduate years, taking care of me in many ways, even feeding me,” Cevzet said.

“Three students were majoring in the haegeum each year in my department. Although I lagged behind the other students, both of them Korean, professors gave me a handicap. That’s how I could get 3.2 out of 4 points. Professor Yang was like my mother, without whom I could hardly have finished my studies.”

Cevzet also has a “Korean father,” an executive at a night club where he used to work as a part-time DJ. When Cevzet is sick, he visits his home, bringing with him grain porridge and fruit. He also calls occasionally to make sure that Cevzet has paid his rent and check whether he needs any financial help.

What makes these Koreans want to assist this young man from a faraway country? Yes, Cevzet is a likable guy with a pleasant smile. But above all, perhaps they are moved by his positive and enthusiastic attitude toward learning and working, always doing everything that he can to reach his goals.

No time is wasted. During the daytime, Cevzet practices the haegeum and studies composition, and at night, he works part-time at clubs, either as a DJ or a server.

On how he would advise young people aspiring to study traditional music of other countries — for example, a young Korean who wants to learn a traditional Turkish instrument — he said the first and foremost thing to do was to study, and preferably love, the country’s culture. “You should first understand people’s way of thinking, their minds and thoughts,” he said.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 61

That explains why Cevzet joined a band called “Hangeul,” a polyglot of 11 foreigners working in Korea. The band, whose members include musicians hailing from Britain, Spain, Turkey and Japan, performs at various events, first in their native tongues and then in Korean. While Hangeul is the name of the Korean alphabet, Cevzet explained that the band’s name is a composite of “Han” (from “Hanguk” meaning Korea) and “geul” (the Korean pronunciation of the first syllable of “global”), hence standing for “global artists introducing Korea to the world.”

Cevzet currently belongs to FMG (Foreign Manpower Group), an entertainment agency that manages about 50 foreigners in Korea. He occasionally appears on Korean TV and radio programs, but not as a regular cast member. He hopes to appear on “Welcome, First Time in Korea?” The popular TV show has expatriates in Korea invite friends from their home countries, allowing audiences to rediscover Korea through tourists’ eyes.

“I have to study by day and work by night. There are many obstacles I have to surmount.

However, I have never once regretted my decision.”

Brother Countries

Despite their geographic distance and cultural differences, Korea and Turkey have long regarded each other as “brother countries,” largely due to Turkish troops who came to fight under the United Nations flag in the Korean War (1950– 1953).

Cevzet believes the two countries have several things in common. He said: “For example, our languages have the same word order, which may mean that Koreans and Turks have a similar way of logical reasoning. Moreover, unlike Westerners, both Koreans and Turks take off their shoes when entering into homes. Also, Turkish people, particularly men, easily lose their temper, like Korean men, but let off steam in less than 10 minutes, again like Koreans.”

“More than anything else, the traditional music of the two countries has a similar atmosphere,” Cevzet said. “Just like Korean songs, many Turkish songs are sad and mournful, lamenting unrealized love, such as those sung by wives missing their men who are away at war. Of course, Turkey has less frequently been occupied by foreigners than Korea, but there have been many wars in our history, too.”

The musical scales and notes are different. Nevertheless, Cevzet said his ultimate goal is to create compositions that combine Korean and Turkish music.

When asked whether he was in love with Korea and, if so, why, Cevzet seemed a little embarrassed. Then he gave a rather curt reply: “If I didn’t love Korea, why would I try so hard to make Korea and its culture better understood by other foreigners?”

Cevzet said he had not experienced many difficulties

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Cevzet Tam believes the haegeum unlocked his passion for music and his potential as a musician.

while living in Korea because most Koreans he has met were kind to him. The glaring exception was a club owner who refused to pay him about one million won (approximately US$8,900) in back salary. “Most Koreans are kind to expats, but I think they tend to be somewhat afraid, or wary, of foreigners, especially in the early stage of getting acquainted,” he said, pointing to the lingering xenophobia.

Cevzet admitted he was getting along well with his Korean friends and colleagues, but some newly arrived foreigners seem to have considerable difficulties, particularly before they get used to the Korean way of living. “I advise foreigners wanting to study or work in Korea to learn the language first,” he said. “Like in most other countries, there is a big difference in landing jobs here between people who know some Korean and those who do not.”

In this regard, Cevzet suggested the Korean government provide Korean language lessons for free or at a discount.

He lauded the Korean government’s multicultural policies, but hoped its programs would be more practical to help newcomers adjust to Korean culture and lifestyle more easily and quickly. “As always,” he said, “the biggest problem is the economic problem — getting a job and extending one’s visa period.”

“It’s not easy to live as a musician in Korea. Most students majoring in music here appear to have wealthy parents,” he said. “I have to study by day and work by night.

There are many obstacles I have to surmount. However, I have never once regretted my decision.”

Living as a Musician in Korea

Cevzet likes Korean pop music but says he sometimes cannot help but think Koreans tend to lack identity in their cultural activities. He quoted Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who said that if people do not know their history and culture, their future is dark. Cevzet also cited the example of Turkish musicians using the sound of their traditional instrument, saz, in modern music. “Likewise,” he said, “I would like to see K-pop composers use more elements of traditional Korean music in their works through the fusion of old and new.”

Despite working part-time at a club, Cevzet does not like liquor much. “Turkey is an Islamic country, you know, so we don’t drink much and are quite careful in choosing food, and eating pork is a taboo,” he said. “Except for that, I have few problems with Korean food.”

Asked where he sees himself in five years, Cevzet said it would be nice if he was a better musician by then. If he stays on course, by around 2025, Koreans will likely be listening to the first haegeum sonata composed by a foreigner.

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ON THE ROAD

Following King Jeong jo to his ‘Brilliant Fortress’

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Hwaseong Fortress, the epitome of late Joseon Dynasty architecture, surrounds the traditional city center of Suwon. Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997, the fortress was carefully thought out and meticulously designed to reflect the thoughts and ideals of King Jeongjo, the 22nd ruler of Joseon, who also had the entire construction process precisely documented.

Lee Chang-guy Poet and Literary Critic Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 65

I

n the spring of 1795, Hanyang, the capital of the Joseon Dynasty and today’s Seoul, overflowed with visitors from all over the country. Suspension of the night curfew and temporary tents could not resolve the overwhelming demand for accommodations. But shopkeepers celebrated the unexpected surge of customers.

The visitors had all come for one reason: to catch a sight of the king’s procession. Posters put up throughout the country announced the king’s impending travel, informing commoners when they could see him at close range. In those days, the king was likened to a sun god. Seeing the king was compared to being awash in a celestial light. Those who traveled from afar to catch a glimpse were called gwangwang minin, meaning “the people who came to see the light.”

Today the word gwangwang means “tourism.”

The King’s Filial Piety

At around seven in the morning on the ninth day of the second month of 1795, King Jeongjo formally greeted his mother, Lady Hyegyeong, at the front gate of Changdeok Palace, mounted his horse and departed with her for Hwaseong Fortress, where they would stay for four days. The primary reasons for the trip were to celebrate Lady Hyegyeong’s 60th birthday at the fortress and to visit the tomb of Crown Prince Sado, the king’s father, located in its vicinity.

Nothing was spared in the preparations. For starters, the royal procession itself stretched for one kilometer. Thus, it covered five percent of the 20-kilometer trip simply by lining up. Still, it took two days for the lumbering procession to

66 KOREANA Spring 2019

reach Suwon, home of the fortress. The Joseon Dynasty had never seen such a sight. It still resonates with many Koreans today as an exemplary display of the 18th century monarch’s filial piety.

Jeongjo became the next in line for the throne at the tender age of 11, when Crown Prince Sado died after spending eight days crammed into a wooden rice chest. Sado’s own father, King Yeongjo, ordered the lockup on charges of blasphemy and treason. History suggests that the crown prince was mentally ill and terrorized the palace. There also were rumors that he was victimized by factional strife and a palace plot.

The young Jeongjo, now named the son of his dead uncle, spent the next 14 years constantly fearing that palace officials would try to assassinate him. “I am so fearful that it’s like sitting on pins and needles, and my situation is as perilous as eggs piled on top of each other,” he said. Those who raised his suspicions “walk with pounding footsteps, showing no signs of caution or reverence,” he explained. In 1776, following the death of his grandfather, he stood before those people and proclaimed himself to be the son of Crown Prince Sado.

The ill-fated crown prince’s tomb lies on Mt. Hwa, some 10 kilometers south of Mt. Paldal, the highest point of Hwaseong Fortress. Befitting the name of Mt. Hwa, which means “flower mountain,” the tomb is lavishly decorated, surrounded by 12 exquisite stones, carved in the shape of lotus buds, and retaining panels. The site, once the location of the Suwon county office, had for hundreds of years been

regarded as an auspicious site for royal burials.

In 1789, King Jeongjo moved the county office to where it stands today, and moved his father’s tomb from Yangju, north of Hanyang, to Mt. Hwa. He then renamed the tomb Hyeollyungwon, meaning the “garden of prominent rise,” and built a temple nearby to pray for his father’s happiness in the afterlife. And so, 33 years after his death, Lady Hyegyeong was finally able to properly pay her respects to her deceased husband.

Recalling Memories of 200 Years Past

A grand royal procession was a ceremonial and political event often undertaken by the pre-modern dynasties of Northeast Asia. But King Jeongjo’s procession to Hwaseong Fortress broke the mold. The scale was the biggest since the founding of the Joseon Dynasty in 1392, as was the budget.

For the eight-day trip, the palace mobilized 6,000 people and 1,400 horses and allocated 100,000 nyang, equivalent to around seven billion won today (approximately US$ 6.2 million). Some 120 craftsmen gathered to construct the palanquin that carried Lady Hyegyeong in the procession. It cost 2,785 nyang (200 million won), worth two of Korea’s most expensive luxury sedans today.

These figures can be quoted nowadays thanks to the meticulous records of the procession kept at the time. One of them is “Record of King Jeongjo’s Procession to the Tomb of Crown Prince Sado in Eulmyo Year” (Wonhaeng eulmyo jeongni uigwe), an eight-volume record of the entire event, including all of the preparatory stages. Sixty-three bancha-

do, illustrations showing all of the participants and their positions in the procession, greatly enrich the record. Kim Hongdo (1745–c. 1806), a famed genre painter and court artist, assembled the most talented artists to produce the artworks.

The illustrations, therefore, have supreme documentary and artistic value.

Another important record is “Painting of King Jeongjo’s Procession to His Father’s Tomb at Hwaseong” (Hwaseong neunghaeng do), an eight-panel folding screen. It depicts highlights of the procession as well as a detailed picture of the completed fortress, which indicates it was painted a year after the procession. There are some lively, delightful details here and there, such as pictures of soldiers trying to control crowds, groups of young scholars enjoying the scenery, men trying to stop others from fighting, and taffy and rice cake sellers weaving through the crowds.

Many people began to think back 200 years to this time when the novel “Eternal Empire” (Yeongwon-han jeguk) by Lee In-hwa was published in 1993. Based on the assumption

“Procession to the Tomb of Crown Prince Sado at Hwaseong Fortress”

by Kim Deuk-sin et al. c. 1795. Ink and color on silk, each panel 151.5 × 66.4 cm.

The folding screen records King Jeongjo’s trip to Hwaseong Fortress in 1795 to pay his respects at the grave of his father, Crown Prince Sado, and host a 60th birthday banquet for his mother, Lady Hyegyeong.

The eight-panel screen depicts scenes from the eight-day journey. Presumably produced by several artists of the Royal Bureau of Painting, it is the epitome of court painting with its refined tone and beautiful coloring, as well as a splendid example of documentary painting. © National Palace Museum of Korea

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 67

A grand royal procession was a ceremonial and political event often undertaken by the pre-modern dynasties of Northeast Asia. King Jeongjo’s procession to Hwaseong Fortress broke the mold. The scale was the biggest since the founding of the Joseon Dynasty in 1392, as was the budget. that the monarch was poisoned to death, the novel was a bestseller and a movie of the same title soon followed. When the Hwaseong Fortress was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, an annotated compilation of the records the king left behind was published and the illustrations of the procession, originally black and white woodblock print pictures, were colored and republished, thus becoming highend cultural products. These moves all helped reinstate King Jeongjo to his reputation as the reformer monarch who led the Joseon Renaissance. It reawakened Koreans’ long forgotten memories of an admirable king.

The procession was not King Jeongjo’s first to pay respects to his father. After relocating his father’s tomb, he visited it every year, so the procession of 1795 was his sixth.

The processions served the king’s ulterior motives. Since many soldiers were mobilized for these visits, they became

an opportunity to check their state of training and inspect the defense system of the capital. Moreover, the deployment of so many soldiers meant that new roads and bridges would be needed, thus expanding the kingdom’s transportation network. Consequently, the processions reaffirmed the king’s authority and power.

Pontoon Bridge for the King

One of the most complex issues regarding the processions was crossing the Han River. The king could ride across in a boat or walk across on a bridge of boats that he would have ordered to be made. He chose the latter for which hundreds of boats were needed. Due to the long construction time, boat owners would lose a tremendous amount of time otherwise spent making a living.

Jeongjo’s goal, therefore, was to build the safest and 1

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most beautiful pontoon bridge possible in the shortest possible time, while minimizing costs. He demanded a systematic design and approach to the project. With the experience gained from relocating his father’s tomb, the king laid out instructions for building a pontoon bridge in 15 categories.

They included the height of boats and the method of joining them together.

After a long and thorough preparation period, a book titled “Directions on Building the Pontoon Bridge” (Jugyo jeolmok) was completed in 1793. Thanks to these precise and scrupulous directions, a functional and beautiful pontoon bridge was built in just 11 days. At the site of this pontoon bridge, Korea’s first modern pedestrian bridge, the Han River Bridge, was opened in 1917. In the hundred years since then, 31 bridges have been built to span the river.

After crossing the Han River in style, King Jeongjo rejected the old route of crossing Namtaeryeong, a mountain pass, and heading toward Gwacheon. Instead, he opted for a new route, passing Noryang and proceeding to Siheung. The distance was roughly the same. But as the procession moved in five, or sometimes as many as 11 rows, the road had to be wide. Rather than broadening the path through the mountains, it was easier to build a new road on flat land. The large number of streams big and small along the Siheung route, however, meant that many bridges had to be laid.

The royal procession that departed from the front gate of the palace stopped at Siheung to rest for the night. It was not until evening the next day that they all passed through the north gate of Hwaseong Fortress and reached the Suwon county office. Construction of the fortress walls had started one year before and work was still underway.

Jeongjo changed the name of Suwon to Hwaseong, meaning “brilliant fortress,” and upgraded it to a higher administrative unit. He also established an external camp for his own royal guards, Jangyongyeong, manned with 5,000 soldiers. Suwon today is still an important stop on the road from Seoul to southern regions. Strengthening the defense system for the area just outside the royal capital provided justification for the king’s moves.

Purpose of the Fortress

Hwaseong Fortress was an invincible stronghold built with the latest technology. It constituted a new multipurpose town designed by Jeong Yak-yong (1762–1836), a scholar advocating the new “practical learning” (Silhak), who had also designed the king’s pontoon bridge. But examination of the design suggests that a military fortification was not all that the king had in mind.

Streams were channeled through the town and a new

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cross-shaped road network was built to facilitate the movement of people and goods. During his four-day stay, the king paid his respects at his father’s tomb, held a special state civil service exam for the selection of regional officials, observed the soldiers’ training day and night, held his mother’s 60th birthday banquet and then another banquet for the elderly people in the local area. In the new fortified town that he had created, he tested everything that he conceived and tried to implement after much agony and deliberation. It was a year since he had started preparations for the royal procession, six years since he had relocated his father’s tomb, and 20 years since he had ascended the throne.

With its walls stretching 5.7 kilometers in circumference and standing 4.9 to 6.2 meters high, Hwaseong Fortress was completed in 1796, the year after King Jeongjo’s grand procession to his father’s tomb. Construction of the whole fortification took just two years and six months to finish, its 40-some defense facilities including four beautiful main gates 1. Yungneung, located in in the north, south, east and Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, is the joint tomb of King Jeongwest. The western command jo’s parents: Crown Prince Sado post stands on the highest (1735–1762) and Lady Hyegyeong part of the fortress at the top (1735–1816). of Mt. Paldal; Banghwasuryu 2. The tomb of Crown Prince Sado Pavilion (whose name means and Lady Hyegyeong is carefully decorated with flower bud-shaped “pavilion for courting flowstones and retaining panels feaers and seeking willows”) turing a carved peony and lotus and Hwahong Gate, one of blossom design. It reflects King Jeongjo’s wishes to make the tomb the smaller gates which surof his father, who died prematuremounts arched sluices, are ly in tragic circumstances, resemble lovely at any time of the the tomb of a king as much as year; and the three observapossible.

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tion towers called Gongsimdon, representing a new type of structure made of brick and stones and hollow on the inside, could only be seen here.

The temporary palace at Hwaseong was damaged during the Japanese colonial period and used at various times as a hospital, school or police station. But the palace was restored to its original state in 2003, and that is what visitors see today. The accurate restoration was possible as King Jeongjo had the entire construction process documented in “Record of the Construction of Hwaseong Fortress” (Hwaseong seongyeok uigwe).

Modernity for the Reformer King

I started to follow King Jeongjo’s trail armed with a few simple questions: Why did he build Hwaseong and, as the ruler of Joseon, what kind of state did he want to build? What I discovered was a ruler who embraced filial piety and virtuous governance based on his solid neo-Confucian knowledge and values — the story of a king who reinforced the authority of the throne and received the praise of his people.

In King Jeongjo’s era, Catholicism and the neo-Confucian philosophy of Wang Yangming had entered the country, as did Western science and technology in the name of “practical learning.” Neo-Confucianism based on the ideas of Zhu Xi was no longer considered progressive in terms of learning or values. For King Jeongjo, modernity was full of anxiety and uncertainty. He tried to compromise with the changing times, guided by the ideal of “love for the people.”

Whenever he went on processions, the king met directly with the common people to listen to their complaints, as many were illiterate and unable to compose formal appeals.

On each occasion, he dealt with around 85 complaints while on the road. For those working on the construction of Hwaseong, he prepared warm winter clothing and medicinal herbs to help beat the summer heat. His record of the construction includes detailed information on each worker, including name and address, number of days worked, and total wages paid. When private homes had to be demolished to make way for new roads and the king’s temporary palace, sufficient compensation was provided, and in times of bad harvests construction was suspended.

Although he tried to move the people with his great compassion for them and the absolute values of neo-Confucianism, King Jeongjo failed to read the spirit of modern times which brought the “discovery of the individual” and conflicts rooted in class differences. Over and over he stressed the purpose of Hwaseong was to protect a royal graveyard and his temporary palace. Moreover, Manangyo (Bridge of Complete Safety), built on the Siheung road, was not so much a span for common people as a walkway to his father’s tomb.

The king’s thinking did not even live up to the ideals expressed by the scholar Shin Gyeong-jun (1712–1781), who wrote the following in the preface of his 1770 book, “Survey of Routes and Roads” (Dorogo): “The roads have no owners.

Only those who use the roads own them.” This is a point that

Sites to Visit in Suwon 46km

Seoul Suwon

1 Jangan Gate

2 Hwahong Gate

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3 Western Command Post

4 Yungneung

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5 Yongju Temple

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© Topic

Banghwasuryu Pavilion, recognized as the most beautiful structure of Hwaseong Fortress, is surrounded by exquisite scenery produced by the four seasons of the year. With a name meaning “pavilion for courting flowers and seeking willows,” it is a wonderful work of architecture made of wood and stone that was built as a military observation post and a place to enjoy the landscape.

always plagues historians when they try to link Jeongjo with modernism in response to popular sentiment.

In 1800, four years after the completion of Hwaseong, King Jeongjo suddenly died. His legacy did not last long.

Jangyongyeong, the garrison of royal guards, was disbanded, and Hwaseong reverted to being just another small town.

People preferred to use the name Suwon over Hwaseong.

One hundred years later, Suwon became a major stop on the railway running between Seoul and Busan. A new downtown formed along the road between the Suwon railway station, on the southern outskirts of the city, and Paldal Gate, the south gate of Hwaseong. The government office of Gyeonggi Province was also installed in Suwon.

Suwon’s geographic advantages made it one of the bloodiest battlegrounds during the Korean War of 1950– 1953. Much of the city and the fortress were destroyed by fires and bombings. But after the war, the city grew into a hub of the textiles industry, one of the early drivers of Korea’s rapid industrialization. Today, Suwon’s geographic advantages are why it is the production center of Sam-

sung Electronics, a major player in the global semiconductor industry.

Reborn as a World Heritage Site

When the UNESCO team visited Suwon in April 1997, a photocopied version of “Record of the Construction of Hwaseong Fortress” found its way into the hands of Nimal de Silva, who was leading the field inspection of the fortress. Already impressed by the architectural diversity of the defense structures of the fortress, he marveled at the vast and exhaustively detailed document.

The book is said to have played a decisive role in the decision to bestow World Heritage status to Hwaseong, which had suffered repeated damage and restoration over a period of just two centuries. The UNESCO team’s reaction to the book is in line with the way Koreans today like to think of King Jeongjo. In the records he left behind, his sincerity shines through and sheds light on his thoughts about monarchy and republic, the transition from pre-modern to modern, and the individual and the state.

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TALES OF TWO KOREAS

A Well-Knit Unification Plan

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very winter Rev. Pang In-sung leaves for the frigid northernmost edge of North Korea. Subzero temperatures are the norm in the border region, where they say “winds are powerful enough to lift cows.”

The philanthropic pastor’s destination is the Rason Special Economic Zone, a slice of North Hamgyong Province, which is wedged between China, Russia and the East Sea. The purpose of his annual visit is to deliver humanitarian aid, a product of his roles as senior pastor of the Open Together Church in Seoul and president of Hananuri, an aid organization affiliated with his church. The recipients are those who are most vulnerable to the threat of frostbite from a brutal winter.

Mufflers and Microfinance

“In the biting winds, we make a round of kindergartens, daycare centers and orphanages, delivering a truckload of about 3,000 mufflers. The children’s faces brighten up when they receive the mufflers,” Pang says. “North Korean children are exposed to winter chill with little warm clothing to protect them, when heating fuel is in very short supply. Mufflers are the best gifts for them in winter. I think those 1-meter-long mufflers connect people in the two Koreas.”

Hananuri (literally, “one world”) also provides financial support in Ryongpyong, a farming village in the Rason area. It runs a communal fund to help the villagers buy farm equipment and supplies to promote self-reliance. It is modeled after the microcredit program of the Grameen Bank

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Rev. Pang In-sung tries to advance unification through humanitarian assistance, defying ups and downs in inter-Korean relations. He urges South Korean churches to take an interest in giving North Koreans substantial help to improve their livelihood before regarding them as evangelization targets.

Kim Hak-soon Journalist and Visiting Professor, School of Media and Communication, Korea University Ahn Hong-beom Photographer

founded by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, economist and civil society leader, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

Hananuri was launched in 2007 with the goal of making preparations for national reunification based on three aspects of support programs: practical activities, research and education for building peace on the Korean peninsula. Its newly opened think tank, the Northeast Asia Research Institute, is tasked with creating a win-win development model for Northeast Asia. Currently, it is studying Ryongpyong as a possible prototype.

Through Hananuri as well as his Open Together Church, a small church with only some 100 members, Rev. Pang hopes to convince South Korea’s megachurches to reconsider their post-unification plans. “South Korean churches are mostly thinking of opening churches in the North, once the nation becomes reunified. But they should pay attention first to how to provide real help to North Koreans.”

Volunteer Knitters

In 2011, a Hananuri staffer suggested giving mufflers as gifts to North Koreans. Inter-Korean relations were deadlocked at the time, with exchange programs almost completely stalled.

Pang felt that private sector exchanges should be maintained, regardless of the state of relations between the governments.

The idea of knitting mufflers struck him as fresh and original. “It was a great idea. Even North Korean officials marveled at how we conceived of such an idea,” Pang says.

1. Children at a daycare center in the Rason Special Economic Zone, North Korea, wear mufflers knitted by volunteers in South Korea. Mufflers are timely gifts during the icy winter weather in North Korea, where heating fuel is in short supply..

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Most of the mufflers distributed through his “Mufflers Connect Both Koreas” campaign are knitted by South Korean middle and high school students. By participating in the campaign, the students earn school credits for volunteer community service. On the fourth Saturday of every month, they gather at the Hananuri office in Seoul’s Jung District to knit together. Those who cannot come receive knitting materials at their homes and send the finished mufflers to the office.

The knitting materials are funded by donations.

Children and teachers at North Korean kindergartens and daycare centers are particularly touched when they hear that the mufflers were knitted by South Korean students, probably because they feel they have received truly warm gifts. This is why Pang adheres to having mufflers voluntarily hand-knitted one by one, although he knows it would be far simpler to buy and send them to the North.

2. Young volunteers knit mufflers at the office of Hananuri, a nongovernmental aid organization, in Jung District, Seoul.

They come every fourth Saturday of the month.

Those who cannot come receive knitting materials at their homes and send the finished mufflers to the office.

Employees of Samsung Display and other Korean companies have also become involved in the campaign, and proposals to participate come from the United States and Canada, among other countries. “Some 2,000 to 3,000 people at home and abroad participate every year,” Pang says.

Communal Fund for Self-Reliance

Hananuri’s activity in Ryongpyong began in 2009, when it provided assistance to daycare centers in Chongjin, also in North Hamgyong Province, and orphanages in nearby Ryanggang Province.

In 2017, Hananuri began a 10-year project to help Ryongpyong become more self-sufficient in food supply, childcare, housing, education, medical service, energy and self-administration. The village fund, part of the project, extended a loan equivalent to some 33 million South Korean

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 73

“North Korean children are exposed to winter chill with little warm clothing to protect them, when heating fuel is in very short supply.

Mufflers are the best gifts for them in winter. I think those 1-meter-long mufflers connect people in the two Koreas.”

1

won (approximately US$30,000) to the village’s 48 households. With the money they purchased seeds, fertilizer and farm equipment for the 615,000 square meters (152 acres) of land that they tend.

The success or failure of such self-reliance projects depends on whether the villagers can repay their loan. The village’s 2017 performance report helped mollify any concerns. Rice and corn output increased by about 60 tons each, compared to 2016, and each household’s consumption of rice and noodles increased by about 10 kilograms year-on-year.

The first repayment was made on July 17, 2018.

“Ryongpyong is a diffusion model that can be applied to any other place in the North,” Pang says. He plans to reinvest the repayment in another village in Rason.

Preparing for Post-Unification Era

Hananuri intends to open a representative office in Rason for on-site management of its aid projects. The office will also reinvest profits and serve as a communication channel for South Korean corporations. Over the mid- and long-term, the office will conduct research on tourism, foreign language education, transportation, fish farming, underground resources development and smart city programs as well as urban planning and land development.

While undertaking the Ryongpyong project, Rev. Pang learned that most villagers had heavy debt loads. He also

74 KOREANA Spring 2019

came to know that loans with an interest rate of 10 to 30 percent are commonplace in the North. Many North Koreans do not trust banks, because they suffered substantial losses in the 2009 currency reform, which forced everyone to obtain new banknotes while limiting the swappable amount of the suddenly obsolete old currency.

Loan sharks have filled the void created by the distrust of banks and the amount of household loans is raising alarm.

To help relieve the pressure, Pang is preparing to let the communal fund offer an interest-free loan of up to an equivalent of 85,000 South Korean won to individual households. The average monthly cost of living per household amounts to some 50,000 South Korean won.

Hananuri has another think tank devoted to the study of land use, namely the Institute of Land and Liberty. Research at the institute is focused on a jubilee cycle of economy, referring to an early biblical tradition in which land, property and slaves would be returned to their owners in the 50th year.

The research concerns how land and property should be handled in the North after unification and what alternative economy could apply to both Koreas.

“I believe that we need a new alternative economic structure for the unified peninsula, transcending the current systems of both Koreas,” Pang says. “The new alternative structure will have to envision genuine peace, following the biblical tradition of the Jubilee.”

During the liberal administration of President Roh Moohyun (2003–2008), Hananuri sponsored joint exhibitions of South and North Korean artists and provided youths from both Koreas with an opportunity to plant trees together. In 2007, it envisioned 500 youths from both sides crossing the Demilitarized Zone on bicycles. But after the conservative Lee Myung-bak administration took over the following year, the cross-border bike ride had to be abruptly cancelled.

“The Unification Ministry and potential sponsors, as well as the North Korean authorities, took a great interest in the event,” Pang says. “But we couldn’t go ahead because inter-Korean relations chilled. We had already reached an agreement with the North’s National Economic Cooperation Federation and we were just about to start it. I want to push

for the event again if another chance comes sometime in the future.”

The hostile political environment is not the only obstacle to Pang’s aid projects. Hananuri’s activities are not properly understood even by South Korean churches. Some compare his projects to “shoveling sand against the tide.” But Pang’s stress on grassroots support is unwavering.

“More chaos will result in the North if South Korea’s megachurches and various Christian denominations and organizations compete only to open churches and expand their influence there,” he says. “I hope South Korean churches won’t regard North Koreans merely as targets of evangelization, but will love them first and then think seriously of ways for people of both Koreas to live together peacefully.”

Efforts for Church Reform

Pang is a third-generation pastor in his family. His grandfather, Rev. Pang Gye-sung, aroused his interest in North Korea and the unification of the divided peninsula. “I was more and more interested in unification and peace, as I believed that loving North Koreans is the essence of the gospel, transcending the tragedy of my own family,” he says.

Rev. Pang Gye-sung was a pastor from Cholsan, North Pyongan Province. He was imprisoned for refusing to pay respects at Shinto shrines during the Japanese occupation of Korea. After the national liberation in 1945, communists killed him for refusing to put up a North Korean national flag at his church and join the North’s Christian federation.

Pang In-sung studied theology at King’s College London and the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Theology. He was ordained as a minister at the International Presbyterian Church in the United Kingdom and worked as a curate at a Korean church in Kings Cross, London, and as senior pastor at another Korean church in Oxford.

After returning to South Korea in 1996, he took charge of the Seongteo Church, which was built in Seoul by Protestants who were incarcerated for refusing to pay respects at Shinto shrines during the colonial period. He has only one kidney because he donated the other to a sick member of the church.

It was a decision based on his conviction of “practicing what you preach.” In 2014, Pang staged a 40-day hunger protest at Gwanghwamun Square in downtown Seoul, seeking justice for the victims of the Sewol Ferry disaster that year, most of them high school students.

Pang also is known for his advocacy for small church. In cooperation with the Solidarity for Church Reform in Korea, he is conducting a Protestant reform movement that seeks an end to hereditary succession of church administration and leadership.

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1. A chicken farm in Ryongpyong Village in the Rason Special Economic Zone, North Korea, in 2018. Hananuri is helping the village’s 48 households become self-reliant through a funding project.

2. Rev. Pang In-sung is shaping a win-win development model for post-unification Korea in addition to providing substantial assistance to North Koreans through Hananuri, a nongovernmental aid organization founded in 2007.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 75

BOOKS

& MORE Charles La Shure

Professor, Department of Korean Language and Literature, Seoul National University

76 KOREANA Spring 2019

Novel about the First Korean Woman in Paris ‘The Court Dancer’

By Kyung-Sook Shin, Translated by Anton Hur, 336 pages, $25.95, New York: Pegasus Books [2018]

“The Court Dancer,” the latest of Shin Kyung-sook’s novels to appear in English translation (she is probably best known to English-language readers for “Please Look After Mom”), tells the story of Yi Jin, a court dancer at the end of the 19th century who steals the heart of the French legate in Korea, Victor Collin de Plancy. She travels back to France with him in 1891, becoming the first Korean woman to visit the country. The novel is, according to the dust jacket, “based on a remarkable true story,” but what is truly remarkable is how Shin has managed to weave such a compelling tale from a single, brief mention of a Korean court dancer in a turn-of-the-century French text.

The end of the 19th century was a tumultuous time in Korean history, as the newly opened nation found itself caught between world powers vying for dominance in East Asia. The king and especially the queen attempted to play these powers off each other in order to preserve the nation’s sovereignty, but their plans ultimately came to naught when Japan annexed the country in 1910, leading to 35 years of colonial rule. Shin’s novel both brings to life the desperation of Korea and dissects the optimism of Belle Époque Paris, but history here is not just background scenery for Jin’s story; Jin is shaped as a person by the role she plays in that history. In a way, Shin tells the story of Korea at that time through the story of Jin. Shin employs various stylistic techniques to give the story a classic yet timeless feel, such as bits of ageless wisdom that are sprinkled throughout in the authorial voice. In this regard, the aphorisms that deal with the characteristics of water have a particular resonance. When the woman who raised Jin draws water from a well, the author notes: “Its basic nature is immutable, which is what gives water its power.” Later, as the French legate Victor passes by a stream in the royal palace, we are told: “Water flows when it is free, and pools when it is stopped.”

These words may at first seem banal, but they foreshadow how Jin will adapt to her new world in France. Always a quick learner, she soon becomes fluent in French, and she does not hesitate to discard her Korean court attire for the latest French fashions. Like water, she adopts the shape of her surroundings. Yet she is still a spectacle to those around her. Even those who accept her into their lives still treat her as some exotic thing, like one of the celadon vases collected by Victor and brought back to France.

On the other hand, Hong, the only other Korean in Paris at the time, scorns and mocks her for abandoning her culture. Jin finds herself questioning her identity, something to which she never gave a second thought while living in the royal palace in Seoul. Any reader who has lived for a significant amount of time in a foreign land will be able to relate; moving to a different culture can be incredibly freeing, but at the same time one can also feel incredibly lost and unmoored.

This is only one thread of many that Shin weaves to tell the story of Jin and the story of a Korea on the brink of oblivion. The tapestry that results is rich and variegated, and it will reward the reader who lingers over it.

Poetry for Sensual Experience beyond Interpretation ‘We, Day by Day’

By Jin Eun-young, Translated by Daniel Parker and Ji Young-shil, 108 pages, $16.00, New York: White Pine Press [2018]

It seems futile, perhaps even absurd, to attempt to write a typical review of “We, Day by Day,” a collection of poetry by Jin Eun-young. Just as one might be at a loss to describe the feeling one has when looking at a beautiful sunset, so it seems a hopeless task to say something about this collection by setting down calm, reasonable words in well-ordered fashion.

The translators’ introduction does provide the reader with some inkling of what lies ahead, noting that Jin’s poems are “always challenging for the reader seeking complete comprehension.” After all, the goal of her poetry is not to give the reader something that may be easily unpacked and understood, but instead “to present new sensual experiences.” This may be frustrating for some.

If you have ever stood in front of a Jackson Pollock paint-

ing (and I mean the actual painting, not an image on the internet) and wondered what all the fuss was about, this collection may not be for you. If you can see beauty in incongruity, though, it just might be.

The introduction notes that Jin has published three books of philosophy in addition to three books of poetry, but I would argue that the line between the two is not so distinct — that, in fact, “We, Day by Day” is both poetry and philosophy. What Jin attempts here is in the spirit of Duchamp when he decided to attach a bicycle wheel to a stool, or indeed Pollock when he dripped and poured paint on the floor. But I hesitate to apply labels to her work, as that would in its own way be an attempt to impose meaning on it. Jin’s poetry isn’t interpreted, and it isn’t even really read. It is, in the end, simply experienced.

Website Brings Modern Korean Literature to the World KoreanLit (www.koreanlit.com)

Run by the Korean Cultural Service of Massachusetts

Some would say that translating poetry is the most difficult task a translator can face. Others have argued that true translation of poetry isn’t even possible, that the art is so deeply rooted in the language in which it is written that any attempt to express it in a different language is doomed to failure. This has not stopped the people behind the KoreanLit website, a project under the direction of the Korean Cultural Service of Massachusetts, from striving to bring translations of modern Korean literature to English-speaking readers.

In what is currently the only critical essay on the site, Professor Yu Jin Ko notes that poetry is not only about what is lost in translation, but also about what is found. That is, while there are certainly elements of Korean poetry that cannot be replicated in English, a translation can find and reveal new aspects of a work. Such a broader view of poetry trans-

lation is one way to overcome the paralyzing idea that poetry is in fact untranslatable.

In addition to some 100 works of poetry, both for adults and children, the website also looks at poetry as it intersects with other forms of art, such as painting or popular music. Although these works are relatively few in comparison to translations of pure poetry, hopefully there will be more such efforts in the future, further broadening the understanding of the role that poetry plays in the Korean arts. More essays on poetry and the art of poetry translation would also be welcome, considering that the essay mentioned above by Professor Ko is quite interesting and insightful. This is a website worth watching to see what this remarkable team might continue to bring to the world of Korean poetry — and Korean literature — in translation.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 77

AN ORDINARY DAY

Mending Soles in Seoul Once upon a time there were small cobbler’s shops in every street and alley of Seoul, but they gradually began to disappear. Now they are hard to find. Kim Seong-bok’s shop is a small metal container in a parking lot. For over 30 years, he has repaired and polished countless shoes in a repetitive, peaceful rhythm that he loves.

Kim Heung-sook Poet Ha Ji-kwon Photographer

78 KOREANA Spring 2019

E Kim Seong-bok (left) hasn’t missed a single day of work since he opened his shoe repair shop in an apartment complex’s car park in Oksu-dong, Seoul, in 1986.

a c h p e r s o n ’s d e s t i ny begins with their parents.

As Roberto Benigni’s film “Life Is Beautiful” (1997) showed, good parents can mold miracles, making even war feel like a game for their child. But at the other end of the spectrum, there are also parents who turn their children’s lives into an agonizing ordeal.

Cobbler Kim Seong-bok’s childhood was the latter. His father, a farmer, gambled instead of taking care of his family. His mother sold fish and salt, barely earning enough money to feed her children. In addition, Kim permanently injured his legs.

“From a young age I was obsessed with fixing cars. One day I saw some people repairing a big GMC truck loaded with bundles of newly harvested rice,” Kim recalls. “The truck must have broken down. I stood there watching, and the driver’s assistant came over to me and said that if I did some small errands for them they’d give me a ride. So I helped, carrying this and that, and even gave a hand with starting the engine. But then when the engine was running, they didn’t keep their promise and were going to leave without me. I hung on to the back of the truck, and in the end I fell off while it was speeding along.”

The fall changed his destiny. One leg never healed properly and that pointed Kim in an entirely unexpected direction. Farming or other heavy manual labor was out of the question and, lacking family financial support, attending college and getting a sedentary office job was not an option, either. But now, decades later, Kim says with a smile, “I’ve found peace of mind polishing and mending countless shoes.”

After his accident, his neighborhood elders encouraged Kim to move to Seoul, telling him, “You won’t be

able to do farm work with that leg but if you go to Seoul, one way or another you’ll be able to make a living.” Heeding their advice, Kim left his hometown of Haenam, on the southern tip of Korea, and made the 400-kilometer trip to the capital alone. He was only 12 years old.

Alone in Seoul

Arriving at Seoul Station with no particular plan, Kim hovered about wondering where to go when he caught the eye of a ringmaster of vagrants. Kim became a jjiksae, a boy who would collect shoes from office workers around Seoul Station and deliver them to the cobbler’s shop for polishing. That was the beginning of his working relationship with shoes.

The jjiksae stint lasted about three years. Then Kim sold newspapers and chewing gum. Limping here and there in Seoul without a family, his life was like an endless scavenger hunt, a relentless search for food and shelter in unfamiliar places. He had to move more times than the number of districts in Seoul. Among the 25 districts, there are only one or two that Kim hasn’t lived in at some point.

Kim ended up with friends who constantly jeopardized his desire for an honest life. Fortunately, someone from his hometown, Lee Yu-sook, appeared to pull him back. She was his neighbor in Haenam, literally the girl next door.

She too had moved alone to Seoul, and she too had to struggle to survive, taking on a myriad of jobs to make ends meet. Understanding each other’s plight and background better than anyone else could, the childhood neighbors became a couple and married after a two-year courtship. Kim was 23 and Lee was 20.

“There’s no one else like her in this world,” Kim says. “We never even got to have a proper wedding, but even

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 79

if I were to die and be born again, I’d want to live with her just the same.

She’s worked just as hard as I have all these years. She’s done wallpapering, worked as a seamstress, and been a visiting housekeeper…she was working all the time, and even now she’s got a job doing needlework.”

After marrying, Kim focused all his attention on shining and mending shoes, and in 1986, he opened his own shop in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Oksu-dong in Seoul’s Seongdong District. His workplace is essentially a 3.3-square-meter metal-framed box, with sliding doors comprising one side. There he appears every day except Sunday. Unlike his gambling father, Kim fulfilled his role as a responsible husband and father.

Unfazed by high education costs, the

couple sent their two daughters to college. They are married now and gave them three grandchildren.

Although Kim’s battle to survive ended long ago, his day is as regimented as that of a soldier. He awakens at 6:30 a.m., drives 30 minutes to his shop and opens it at 9 a.m. Through all four seasons his day remains practically the same. The only noticeable difference is closing time — 7:30 p.m. in the summer and 6 p.m. in the winter. In the past, he began working earlier. But that was before his workload declined dramatically, a loss suffered by all of his cohorts.

A Trade in Disrepair

“When I first opened my shop, shoe shining was 1,500 won per pair, and now it is 4,000 won. Compared to the 1

1. Back when everyone wore smart shoes to work, most of Kim’s income came from shining shoes. Today, far fewer customers have their shoes shined and he must rely more on repair work.

2. After applying shoe polish, Kim rubs it with a cloth dampened with water. This polishing method is called a “water shine” and it is how he achieves a rich glossy sheen.

rise in cost of living in the past 30 years, it isn’t a good price. Moreover, in the old days there were so many shoes to shine that I went around collecting them on a moped with a big basket attached. Even just 20 years ago, I had so much work to do that I would come in at seven in the morning and work flat out all day,” Kim recalls.

“There would be 20 pairs of shoes lined up outside the door waiting to be polished! That was how I was able to send my two daughters to university and make a reasonable living, but these days, people hardly ever wear smart shoes anymore, and I’ve gotten older, so going around on the moped is too much for me now.”

Clothing regulations for civil servants were relaxed in 2005, and soon business suits and dress shoes became less and less required in offices. As the trend gained momentum, Kim’s shop became quieter.

“These days both kids and adults, they all just wear comfortable sports shoes. So there’s no need to polish them,” Kim says. “I still have a handful of regular customers who have their shoes shined each week, but they aren’t many. And on top of that, people don’t walk everywhere like they used to. They drive around and so their shoes don’t get dirty, and the roads are all properly paved so even when they do walk there’s less dirt and dust. In the old days most of my income came from shining shoes, but now about half of what I earn comes from repairs.”

When he has no customers, Kim strolls around his workplace neighbor-

“I’ve lived with this disabled body since I was a boy, but I was able to make really good use of it doing this work.”

80 KOREANA Spring 2019

hood. After being a local fixture for decades, he naturally recognizes many people. He does not worry about missing customers. If he is away, they simply telephone him; his phone number is on his shop door.

Kim fears cobbler’s shops could soon disappear completely, just like the jipsin straw sandals that once protected the hardworking feet of Koreans for generations. Before the onset of modernity, most people living on the Korean peninsula wore jipsin, made of twisted and woven straw, and only very influential people wore leather shoes. The first shoe repairers set up shop around the end of the 19th century, making the polishing and mending of leather shoes and gomusin rubber pumps a profession.

In the 1950s, when Kim was born and growing up, there would have been shoe repairers at every rural marketplace and around the outskirts of the city. Armed with glue and a heated metal skewer, they would restore cracked or split rubber pumps. Western-style shoes came into Korea along with the country’s modernization at the start of the 20th century and spread widely, so gomusin gradually became the preserve of Buddhist monks, prisoners and elderly people in the countryside, and most of cobblers’ work was repairing leather dress shoes.

Simplistic Satisfaction

Looking back on his life journey, Kim says, “I’ve tried doing all kinds of work, selling newspapers, selling chewing gum, cleaning a café’s kitchen, sticking labels on clothing in a store at Dongdaemun Market. I even learned hairdressing for five years and worked making ready-made women’s shoes in a small factory on the hillside in Changsin-dong, but sitting down for too long made my leg painful so I had to give it up. Among all the different

2

things I tried, I think settling on shining shoes was a good choice in the end.

“I’ve lived with this disabled body since I was a boy, but I was able to make really good use of it doing this work. I couldn’t steal, I’m even worse at anything that involves picking up a pen, and I don’t like loafing about.

I’ve got the kind of personality where I always have to be doing work of some kind, so this line of work has suited me well.”

Even the spring breeze and blooming cherry trees that entice people out to the countryside can’t drag Kim from his box shop. It seems as though holi-

days are meaningless to him.

Kim says, “At work I feel good when there are lots of customers and when there aren’t any I rest. At home I drowse watching television and have meals with my family. That’s enough for me. On Sundays I go to church with my wife, but I don’t obsess over it. I live cheerfully. Even if unpleasant things happen, I don’t take them to heart. I have nothing to give other people, but nothing to receive either, so there’s no need for me to worry what other people think. Maybe that’s why everyone says I look young for my age.”

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 81

ENTERTAINMENT

Korean movie and TV series producers are increasingly drawn to zombie scripts. It is too early to categorize zombie flicks as a standalone genre in Korean film. But foreign producers are noticing the unconventional manner zombies are depicted on Korean screens.

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Š Netflix

Korean Twist on Zombies 2

Jung Duk-hyun Popular Culture Critic

Š Next Entertainment World

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U

ntil recently, Korean movie buffs rated zombie films as B-grade entertainment. A case in point is “I Am Legend,” a 2007 U.S. post-apocalyptic horror film; it only sold 2.64 million tickets in Korea, far fewer than in most other countries. With 5.3 million viewers, the 2013 zombie blockbuster “World War Z” fared much better, but it was still a far cry from a box office hit. Neither the movies’ themes nor their respective lead actors, Hollywood A-list stars Will Smith and Brad Pitt, were enough to attract large audiences.

Then, in 2016, “Train to Busan” arrived, and within a few hours, it transformed Koreans’ attitude toward zombie movies. The film eventually sold 11.6 million tickets, making it the 15th most popular film in Korean history, and blazed across Asian theaters. The movie, now regarded as the genesis of Korean zombies, also became popular on Netflix, the worldwide video streaming service, and following a bidding war among Hollywood studios for the film rights, an American remake is in the pipeline.

Different Interpretation

In “Train to Busan,” an infected passenger spreads a zombie virus, turning the train into a scene of gory mayhem. The survivors are trapped until they reach Busan, Korea’s second most populous city and the only place not infected by the virus. The movie evoked memories of “The Host,” a 2006 sci-fi monster thriller which briefly held the all-time box office crown, and two movies about runaway epidemics, “Deranged” (2012) and “The Flu” (2013). In all three films, authorities are slow to react competently and ordinary people must take control themselves.

What made “Train to Busan” a smash hit was the way it presents zombies, portraying them somewhat as pitiful beings. In the beginning, they appear to be mindless cannibals, but the movie attempts to elicit empathy for the passengers-turned-zombies as innocent victims of incompetent leaders. Among some viewers, the zombies might even arouse sympathy. This is what makes those zombies special and uniquely Korean.

The movie contains abundant references to Korea’s modern history. The setting is a high-speed train rushing through the countryside and stopping at stations between Seoul and Busan where people are already infected, a metaphor for the nation’s reckless race toward industrialization. The passengers are a microcosm of Korean society and a 1. “Kingdom,” a South Korean TV series that premiered on Netflix in reminder of group actions, or crowd culJanuary 2019, garnered more popture, represented by civilian protestors ularity abroad than in the domestic massing against military dictators and market. Overseas fans seem to have been intrigued by the scenic beauty their storm troopers. of Joseon, its palaces and fortresses in Foreign movie studios have also tried the background. to put a new wrinkle on zombie scripts.

2. “Rampant,” which opened in For example, R, the zombie protagoKorean theaters in October 2018, nist in “Warm Bodies” (2013), tries his ushered in a new genre of Korean zombie films by adding layers of a best to protect a beautiful girl from other historical period drama. However, it zombies. This new perspective represents was far from a box office hit and did a departure from the standard narrative of not receive any credit for its groundbreaking storyline. zombie films that has largely remained

unchanged since George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968).

Another reinterpretation, the 2018 Korean period action movie “Rampant,” followed a few seasons after the spectacular summer blockbuster run of “Train to Busan.” In “Rampant,” set in the Joseon Dynasty, zombies deboard a docked foreign ship and find their way into the royal palace. Before long, zombies wearing hanbok, the traditional Korean attire, appear everywhere. The ineffective king fails to respond to their invasion but his youngest son uses his fantastic martial art skills to repel the zombies and defeat officials plotting to overthrow the king.

What is eye-catching here is the contrast between the people-turned-zombies and the ruling class. The movie delivers the message that what threatens the dynasty is not the chaos caused by the hungry intruders, but the greed of its own ruling elite.

Zombies in Historic Setting

Another period offering, “Kingdom,” written by Kim Eun-hee and released on Netflix in January 2019, also depicts zombies as hungry people. Last November, the first two episodes of the TV series were shown at Netflix’s content showcase, “See What’s Next: Asia,” in Singapore. Pre-release screenings elicited favorable reviews from the media, and Netflix announced a second season even before releasing the first one.

The reason Netflix decided to invest in “Kingdom” is probably because its fusion melds well with the company’s strategy.

Netflix approaches the audience with universal themes spiced up with a regional or national touch. That is why the streaming giant is keen on “Kingdom”; it belongs to the zombie genre that people around the world can relate to and at the same time offers Korea’s unique interpretation and sentiments regarding its undead heroes.

This approach may present a viable solution to Korean writers and producers wondering how they can enter the global content market.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 83

ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS

Taste and Nutrition Meld in Laver Laver has long been an important part of the Korean diet. Not only is it tasty and nutritious, it is also one of the country’s few exported sea products competing with canned tuna for first place. In the West, laver was once called “black paper” and was not relished as a food item but today, it enjoys growing popularity as a food full of micronutrients but low in calories.

Jeong Jae-hoon Pharmacist and Food Writer

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© Topic

84 KOREANA Spring 2019

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veryone recognizes a food that tastes good. This is certainly true for laver. Called gim in Korean, laver belongs to the genus Porphyra, which includes some 70 kinds of coldwater seaweed that are consumed as food ingredients wherever they grow because of their excellent taste.

On the shores of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, rocks covered in laver are a common sight. Laverbread, a delicacy nicknamed “Welsh caviar,” is enjoyed at breakfast by Welsh people. Made of stone laver, chopped and boiled long enough to make a puree, then rolled in oatmeal to fry in bacon fat, laverbread is nothing like usual bread but was likely given its name because it was a staple for the people along the Welsh shoreline.

In Korea, laver is most commonly eaten in the form of thin, dried paperlike sheets rolled up with rice inside. Dried laver sheets can also be lightly toasted over a fire, plain or brushed with sesame oil and sprinkled with salt.

Biting into the thin laver sheet makes a crispy sound that stimulates the appetite. Toasted laver can be crumbled over noodles with stir-fried vegetables as 2

a garnish or mixed with crushed sesame seeds to coat rice balls. Gimjaban, dried and crushed laver pieces seasoned with sauce, is a popular side dish, and gimbugak, laver brushed with rice starch and deep-fried, is eaten as a snack.

In Japan, too, laver is enjoyed in thin dried sheets. It is a particularly important ingredient for sushi, and when the Japanese eat ramen, they often add a thick piece of laver on top. In China, laver is dried in the shape of flattened balls, from which pieces are torn off to cook in soups or stir-fried dishes.

Trio of Tastiness

As a Korean joke goes, “Adding laver flakes to soup is cheating,” so great is the power of laver in making food taste good. In fact, there is a reason for the tastiness. The typical elements of the pleasant, savory taste known as gamchilmat in Korean (umami in Japanese) are glutamic acid, inosinic acid (IMP) and guanylic acid (GMP), flavor enhancers at the level of nucleic acids. Green onion and kelp, often used in East Asia to add flavor, as well as onions, carrots and tomatoes, often used in Western dishes, contain a lot of glutamic acid. Inosinic acid is abundant in beef, chicken meat, chicken bones and anchovies, whereas mushrooms such as shiitake, porcini and morel are rich in guanylic acid.

Laver contains all the three flavor enhancers. The taste produced by this trio is the result not of addition of the three but their multiplication. Moreover, laver contains various free sugars, which produce a pleasant, sweet flavor.

1. Laver is the most produced and consumed seaweed in Korea. Initially dark black and glossy, laver turns green when toasted. The paper-like dried laver is usually sold by tot, a unit of 100 sheets.

2. Toasted laver is a favorite side dish of Koreans.

Sheets of dried laver are brushed with sesame or perilla oil and sprinkled with a pinch of salt, lightly toasted and cut into rectangular pieces to wrap around rice. These days, olive oil is often used in place of sesame oil.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 85

“Though the roots are attached to the rocks, the plant has no stems and spreads wide over the rocks. It is dark purple and sweet and tasty.” This description of jachae (“purple vegetable”) comes from the “Register of Heuksan Fish” (Jasan eobo) by Jeong Yak-jeon (1758–1816), the first encyclopedia of sea organisms in Korea. A kind of red algae, jachae grows attached to rocks at the root-like end of its long, broad leaf; it is indeed an accurate description of laver in shape, color and taste. The surface of the fast-growing laver is lustrous, and its dark reddish color results from the absorption of sunlight by pigments such as chlorophyll, carotenoid and phycobilin.

When this seaweed is roasted, carotenoid and phycobilin are destroyed by the heat and only chlorophyll remains, revealing the green color.

Laver’s nutritional composition makes it a good food ingredient. Though containing 42 percent protein and 36 percent carbohydrates, dried laver does not provide

1

86 KOREANA Spring 2019

enough protein overall. Consuming one sheet of dried laver (3g) a day provides only 2 percent of the daily protein requirement. However, laver is rich in micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals, containing 10 times more minerals than plants growing on land.

Rich in Micronutrients

Laver is not only rich in beta-carotene and Vitamins C and E, but also in Vitamin B12, iron and omega-3 fatty acid, which can be lacking in a vegetarian diet. It also contains enough iodine to make up for such deficiency, though the amount is less than in other kinds of seaweed. That is why laver was regarded as a medicinal plant in England in the past. It is said that Welsh mothers told their children, “Eat your laverbread or you’ll get Derbyshire neck.” Many people of inland Derbyshire suffered a swollen neck condition called “Derbyshire neck,” caused by a lack of iodine.

Recently, much research has been conducted on the functional effect of porphyran, a polysaccharide component that is plentiful in laver. Found between cells in laver, porphyran plays an important role in laver’s survival in harsh marine environments. When porphyran enters the human intestines, it functions as fiber, reducing the occurrence of cancer and helping immunoregulation. It is also considered that the various antioxidants produced in laver to protect it from the stress of oxidation when exposed to ultraviolet light will prove beneficial to the human body.

Though an excellent food item in terms of taste and nutrition, laver has only relatively recently been artificially grown and made easily available.

2

Laver contains all three flavor enhancers: glutamic acid, inosinic acid and guanylic acid. The taste produced by this trio is the result not of addition of the three but their multiplication.

Laver farming imitates the natural way in principle. That is, following the way laver grows attached to the rocks and shells, laver spores are attached to shells or to mats made of twigs, which are stuck into mud flats using poles.

The laver is submerged when the tide comes in and exposed to the air when the water goes out, just like laver naturally growing on the rocks.

© Topic

Artificial Growing

By the 17th century, residents of coastal areas of Korea, Japan and China had begun to grow laver but had difficulties in getting the plant to reproduce.

Without knowing why laver shows up again at the end of the fall after disappearing in the summer, they had to wait till fall to collect the natural conchospores to use in seeding. Then in 1949, Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker (1901– 1957), a British botanist, discovered, while doing research on laver, that the Conchocelis rosea she had considered to be a different kind of seaweed was actually a stage in laver development. This was a breakthrough in artificial seedling collection.

Thanks to Drew-Baker’s research, the productivity of artificial laver growing improved rapidly, and seedling collection, previously possible only in the sea, could be conducted on land. The city of Uto in Kyushu, Japan, celebrated this achievement by calling Drew-Baker the “mother of the sea.”

Afterwards, the development of the frozen net method, in which spores are stuck onto nets and kept frozen and later placed in the sea when needed, led to more stable, mass production of laver. While the pole method of growing could only be done in coastal waters with a high tidal range, deepsea farming began with the development of the floating method using laver mats strung together and hung onto buoys, further increasing productivity.

Korea, one of the three major laver producing countries in the world, along with Japan and China, is first when it comes to laver exports. Korean laver is exported to about 100 countries in Europe, the Americas and Africa. Furthermore, with the recent development of diverse kinds of laver snacks, laver has become Korea’s top seafood export product.

A Food for Four Seasons

Laver rolls, or gimbap, are among Koreans’ lunch and snack time favorites.

The laver rolls are made by spreading steamed white rice on a sheet of dried laver, laying a colorful assortment of stir-fried vegetables, pickled radish, ham and egg garnish on top, then rolling the sheet up. The glossy black laver sheet harmonizes with the rice and different ingredients inside to produce a wonderful flavor. It is fascinating to think that this food Koreans enjoy so much today is the product of collaboration of people around the world over a long period of time through the exchange of knowledge and information.

Thinking of laver in this way makes it even tastier.

3 4

© Court Cuisine Research Institute

1. The floating method with laver mats strung together and hung onto buoys made deep-sea farming possible, greatly increasing productivity.

2. Cultivated laver is harvested several times from late November to February the following year. It is then dried by machine in factories. Due to the intensive labor required, the traditional way of drying laver in the sun is disappearing.

3. Laver rolls are made by spreading steamed white rice on a sheet of dried laver, laying colorful fillings on top, and rolling the sheet up. Various types of gimbap with different ingredients are made these days, reflecting the changing tastes and preferences.

4. Old laver loses its freshness by springtime. It is made into gimbugak, a snack made of laver brushed with rice starch, then dried and deep-fried.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 87

JOURNEYS IN KOREAN LITERATURE

CRITIQUE

Between the Fear and Fascination of Writing The literary career of Kim Deok-hee (born 1979) may have just begun taking off, but in “Pressure Point,” his first collection of nine stories published in 2017, he has already demonstrated his ability to craft the quintessence of the short story with robust sentences and dramatic reversals. In the book’s title story, readers can sense the grand ambitions of an emerging writer vowing to strike at the core of fiction — and literature — with one hit.

Choi Jae-bong Reporter, The Hankyoreh

T

he works in “Pressure Point” (Moonji Publishing), Kim Deokhee’s first collection of short stories, are diverse in subject matter and theme. This makes it difficult to find any consistent feature that could be identified as the writer’s trademark or signature. Of course, consistency in theme has the inherent danger of repetitiveness, but even so, in general, one particularly important question or worldview that a writer chips away at would allow readers to distinguish that writer from others.

Kim’s short stories are varied not only in their subject matter and theme but also in form. Works that can be considered historical fiction sit alongside others with a Sci-Fi feel, and stories with a cold, hard-boiled realism coexist with stories that use fantasy devices. The writer evidently has a wide-ranging talent, but at the same time, it appears he has not yet been able to find his own unique voice and is still feeling his way forward.

Overall, the collection emphasizes the “how” rather than the “what.” Rather than the message itself, the writer focuses more on the method of getting it across.

To put it another way, one might call Kim Deok-hee an aestheticist. Despite their diverse themes and forms, his stories share a unifying feature: an intense spirit of craftsmanship. His stories aspire to create complete microcosms of their own.

Whatever subject matter he works with, Kim aims for verisimilitude with thorough research and a prose style that fits the subject matter and theme. For example, “Pressure Point,” the title work of his collection, which depicts a world of men where raw violence is rampant, is written in a style as tough as the theme.

“Every time I read the stories gathered in this book, my feelings were com-

88 KOREANA Spring 2019

plicated. It was like looking at photois forbidden by his father, as if it were a graphs or videos of myself from long matter of life and death. Due to fateful ago. Just as I couldn’t go back to that events in the past, his father considers time and change my pose or expression, the ability to write as a direct road to the or straighten my outfit, it felt as though ruin of oneself and one’s family.

I had to leave all the sentences as they Having given up on learning to read were. I thought it would be good to add and write because of his father’s opposiless and make an effort to delete more. tion, Su-bok instead focuses on drawing While I was doing that, I ruminated on what he sees in the world around him. what it was that made me write such His drawing skills are such that “When I things in the first place,” Kim says in the drew a sickle, it looked as though it could author’s note at the end of the collection. cut tough stalks, and when I drew a dog, Kim’s tireless pursuit of a sense of it looked as though it could bark at any completeness in literary form and aesmoment.” When he draws a copy of the thetic consciousness is evident in all his writing he finds on a scrap of paper, his stories, and his interest in the “how” that master recognizes his talent and makes © Park Jae-hong prevails over the “what” can be readily him a scribe, tasking him with the work detected in a number of them. Passages of transcribing his writings. The master such as that in the title story, “Pressure tells his many writing students, “This boy “I thought it would Point,” describing the posture and methdoesn’t know how to read so, unlike you, be good to add less od of catching and hitting a wild pig with he won’t put any personal feeling into the a golf club; the meticulous explanation of things I write.” These remarks contain a and make an effort to writing with a brush in “When the Sickkind of ironic insight into the practice of le Barks”; the depiction of the knack of writing. Is personal feeling something that delete more.” pulling the oars to make the boat move in must be included in writing, or something “Gill Net”; and the passage in “Meridithat must be left out? ans” that emphasizes the importance of communion between One could argue that writing should be like a mirror and the acupuncturist and his patient, allowing them to be in tune reflect objects exactly as they are. But it is also reasonable to with each other when inserting the needles: each contains the say that no matter how transparent and clean a mirror, whatknowhow acquired by someone with mastery in the particular ever is reflected in it cannot be the object itself and will inevact. In the end, all of these things can serve as intriguing metitably be a distorted and blurred shadow. In “When the Sickle aphors for writing and be seen as a literary exposition of the Barks,” the relationship between the master who knows how writer’s self-awareness of his craft. to write and the slave who cannot read but can transcribe as Among the stories, “When the Sickle Barks” is an outthough drawing pictures brings up many questions regardstanding piece that illustrates to great effect Kim Deoking the personal feeling that goes into writing. But it does not hee’s talent, ability and literary orientation. It has a mirrored, provide any clear answers. It is only the desperate plea of the circular form, beginning and ending with the line “I don’t protagonist’s father, warning of the danger of writing, that know how to read.” Being a story about writing, it also has a leaves a resounding echo: metafictional aspect. In this story, readers encounter interest“The yangban can use that sickle to cut a man’s throat ing ideas that spring from the questions of what it means to and send that dog out as a hunting hound. And that’s not all. read and write words, and what is implied by the peculiar sitThere will also come a time when that sickle begins to bark uation of being able to write but not read. and that dog runs into the paddies to cut rice stalks. The The narrator-protagonist, Su-bok, is a man born into the world could be thrown into such chaos at any time.” slave class who cannot read but learned as a boy to perfectly It’s clear that the title of the story, which seems odd at copy texts as though drawing pictures. His desire to learn the first, is derived from this statement. Not only that, the attiwriting that can “copy down all the things in the world, and tude of the protagonist, wavering between guardedness when capture all of the words spoken that disperse into thin air, and it comes to writing and his untamable fascination with it, pack up and stow away all the thoughts that fall and gather may serve as evidence of the author’s ongoing search for his like snowflakes in the mind before they melt away to nothing” literary voice.

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS 89

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