A Writer Evokes Loss on South Korea’s Path to Success

Posted on 7 September 2012 by admin

LIKE so many South Korean parents at the time, Shin Kyung-sook’s mother saw education as her daughter’s best chance of escaping poverty and backbreaking work in the rice fields. So in 1978 she took her 15-year-old daughter to Seoul, where Ms. Shin would lie about her age to get a factory job while attending high school at night to pursue her dream of becoming a novelist.

Seoul-bound trains at the time, like the one mother and daughter boarded that night, picked up many young rural South Koreans along the way — part of the migration that fueled South Korea’s industrialization but forever changed its traditional family life.

It is that social upheaval that Ms. Shin evoked in her most famous novel to date, “Please Look After Mom,” which earned her the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize and a commercial success attained by few other Korean writers. (Sales in South Korea passed two million this spring, and the book has been published in 19 other countries, including the United States.)

That book and a more recent one, “I Will Be Right There,” about friendship and love set in the country’s political turmoil of the 1980s, are part of a body of work over three decades that has set Ms. Shin apart as one of the most accomplished chroniclers of modern South Korea.

“In her novels, readers have the chance to pause and reflect upon the other side of their society’s breakneck race for economic growth, what they have lost in that pursuit and upon people who were left behind in the mad rush,” said Shin Soo-jeong, a professor of Korean literature at Myongji University in Seoul.

In “Please Look After Mom,” an elderly woman from the countryside travels to Seoul to visit her adult children and gets lost in what is quite literally a mad rush: the scramble to get on a Seoul subway. Reviewers have called her disappearance a metaphor for the profound sense of loss in a society that hurtled from an agrarian dictatorship to an industrialized democracy within a single and often tumultuous generation.

That feeling has not overwhelmed South Koreans’ pride in their country’s accomplishments, notably its rise from abject poverty to the world’s 13th-largest economy. But the sense of loss taps into a growing unease over some of the costs of that success, especially a widening gap between rich and poor and a generation of elderly people left largely to fend for themselves as their adult children work in cities.

The filial guilt that suffuses the novel is universal, but also has a particularly Korean spin.

Until a generation ago in South Korea, at least one adult child — usually the eldest son and his family — lived with aging parents until their deaths. Now, a growing number of older people live alone in their rural villages or in the nursing homes that are springing up across the country. Often, they have little money left, having invested their savings in their children’s educations with the expectation that the children would prosper and eventually care for them.

The children, meanwhile, living in a hypercompetitive society where people work some of the longest hours in the world, often lament that they are too harried to visit their elderly parents. Many also fear using too much vacation time, afraid of being seen as disloyal to their companies.

IN what Ms. Shin says is probably the most important sentence in her novel, the missing mother expresses what many guilt-ridden readers imagine as their own mothers’ sense of helplessness at having been effectively abandoned by their children. In a scene in which the old woman imagines meeting her own dead mother, she wonders: “Did Mom know? That I, too, needed her my entire life?”

Ms. Shin’s life, which tracked the trajectory of her country’s rise, prepared her well for her role as an interpreter of her generation. Born in the countryside like so many characters in her novels, Ms. Shin, 49, now lives in an expensive residential district in Seoul. Her husband is a college professor as well as a poet and literary critic. They have no children.

From an early age, she was a voracious reader, hiding herself away with books her elder brothers brought home. (She was the fourth of six children.) By the time she was 15, she was increasingly certain she wanted to write for a living.

After their arrival in Seoul on that night train in 1978, her mother left her in the care of an older brother in a crammed room in a slum. While he worked in a government office by day and attended college at night, Ms. Shin worked in an audio and television parts factory and attended high school in the evenings.

She was one of the youngest employees in the factory, where she witnessed the labor discontent that sometimes rocked South Korea as its economy galloped ahead but many workers toiled in sweatshop conditions.

“The girl sitting next to me at the night school had no fingerprints; she worked all day wrapping candies in a confectionery,” Ms. Shin said in an interview. “Most of my classmates sent part of their meager wages back home to support their little brothers’ and sisters’ education. When they came to class, they were so tired most of them dozed.”

At her own factory, a clash involving one of the country’s growing number of labor unions turned violent as managers deployed their own security guards, who joined with the police in cracking down on workers organizing for higher pay and better conditions.

Ms. Shin stayed inside, amid the idled conveyor belts, taking her mind off the mayhem by copying a new novel about the urban poor in longhand.

In the end, Ms. Shin was the only one in her high school class to win admission to college, as a creative writing major. She eventually wrote about life at the factory in “A Lone Room,” one of her most acclaimed novels. Its French translation won the Prix de l’Inaperçu in 2009.

“I wonder what would have become of me in those days if I hadn’t had the goal of becoming a writer to hang on to,” she said. “I was determined that one day I would write about what I saw and felt.”

FOR several years after college, she supported her writing with odd jobs: writing scripts for a classical music radio station and reading books to blind people. But by 1993, she was successful enough to be able to write novels and short stories full time.

She also was able to fulfill a personal promise: to repay her own mother’s sacrifices for her children. The day they went to Seoul, she remembers, her mother’s face was etched with weariness.

“I promised myself then that one day I would write a beautiful book for Mom,” she said.

That book, “Please Look After Mom,” solidified her standing as one of South Korea’s finest living novelists and won her accolades.

Her mother’s reaction was decidedly more muted, typical of a generation of women who pushed their children hard to succeed but were accustomed to restraining their own emotions, even when those children met or exceeded their family’s high expectations.

As Ms. Shin recounted, “She only said, ‘My dear, you have done well.’ ”

Posted in Choe Sang-hun, NY Times, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A North Korean Corleone

Posted on 3 March 2012 by admin

WHAT kind of deal do you make with a 20-something who just inherited not only a country, but also the mantle of one of the world’s most sophisticated crime families? When Kim Jong-un, who is thought to be 28 or 29, became North Korea’s leader in December after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, he became the de facto head of a mafia state.

How the new leader combines the roles of head of state and mafia don will influence the regime’s future behavior. Crime bosses have different incentives, and dealing with them requires different policies. And any deal — including last week’s agreement by North Korea to suspend its nuclear program in exchange for American food aid — will eventually falter if that reality is ignored.

Kim Jong-un confronts the same problem faced by every dictator: how to generate enough money to pay off the small group of elite supporters — army generals, party and family — who keep him in power. Other autocrats use oil wealth or parcel out whole industries to cronies.

But whoever rules North Korea has less to work with than most. The country defaulted in the 1970s, losing access to international credit, and Soviet subsidies ended with the cold war. In the 1990s, the founder and “eternal president,” Kim Il-sung, died just as a series of natural disasters devastated food production. The country has been an economic and humanitarian basket case ever since.

Kim Jong-il, who began training to run the country in the 1970s and inherited it after his father’s death, came up with an unconventional solution: state-sponsored organized crime. Counterfeit cigarettes and medicine, drugs, insurance fraud, fake money, trafficking people and endangered species — for decades, the Kim regime has done it all. Its operations became so extensive and well coordinated that American officials nicknamed it the “Soprano state,” after the hit HBO television series.

In the 1970s, after the default, North Korea used diplomats as drug mules to keep embassies running. When that got them kicked out of multiple countries and the economy tanked in the 1990s, Kim Jong-il began producing drugs at home, thereby avoiding a major cost plaguing drug lords elsewhere: law enforcement.

He managed these operations through Bureau 39, a mysterious office under the Central Committee of the Korean Workers’ Party. But to create plausible deniability, he outsourced distribution to Russian mafia, Japanese yakuza and Chinese triad gangs, who met North Korean military forces for drug drops at sea. The regime also manufactured the world’s best counterfeit dollars — so good that they reportedly forced the Treasury to redesign the $100 bill — and used a crime ring connected to the Official Irish Republican Army, a Marxist offshoot of the I.R.A., to launder them in Europe. They even made fake Viagra.

The Agreed Framework that froze North Korea’s nuclear program in October 1994 didn’t stop these activities; they actually increased. Despite its other benefits, the framework didn’t address the fundamental hard currency needs of the North Korean leadership.

This criminal legacy means that Kim Jong-un has even more on his plate than one might think. In addition to running a country that is an economic and humanitarian disaster and a geopolitical hot spot, he also has to manage a global criminal racket. That’s a lot for any 20-something to handle. (As “Sopranos” fans know, A. J.’s taking over for Tony might not have been good for business.)

Despite the seemingly stable transition so far, Kim Jong-un is under pressure. Elite party members who supported his father will be skeptical of his untested ability to fulfill his side of their cash-for-support bargain. And North Korea needs more money than usual this year to celebrate the anniversaries of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. (In the ’70s, one of the first things Kim Jong-il used foreign currency for was a campaign to glorify his father.) Any sign that Kim Jong-un can’t satisfy supporters could crack the facade of elite solidarity.

What’s an aspiring kingpin to do?

First, find the money. Kim Jong-un seems to have done that. One of the last photos released of Kim Jong-il shows him riding a supermarket escalator. Behind him are Kim Jong-un and Jon Il-chun, manager of the infamous Bureau 39.

Second, control the people who earn the money. Illicit activity brings the risk of freelancing, especially when you’re forced to let others do the distribution. As North Korea outsourced the drug trade, its profit margins dropped — and more and more insiders skimmed off the system to line their pockets. Today, reports indicate that methamphetamine is widely used in North Korea (partly because it dulls hunger pains), and the state is cracking down on the trade it once monopolized. Even Kim Jong-il couldn’t maintain perfect control and had to send operatives abroad to retrieve misbehaving agents. These are delicate tasks easily botched by a novice.

Finally, keep the money coming. Criminal activity was never North Korea’s ultimate objective; the aim was always hard currency. Kim Jong-un needs cash without political conditions to stay in power. But there aren’t many good options for getting it these days, which is why North Korea is likely to pursue new and expanded forms of illicit activity.

Criminal activities are attractive because other sources of money have strings attached. Remittances from defectors, which have risen recently, don’t go to leaders, and they let in information. North Korea could bank on economic reform or Chinese aid, but reform won’t necessarily provide money for the elite, and aid makes Pyongyang uneasily dependent on Chinese patronage.

The cardinal fear of national security experts — which partly motivated last week’s agreement — is that Pyongyang will make money through nuclear proliferation. After all, North Korea is alleged to have helped build the Syrian nuclear reactor that Israel destroyed in 2007. But it may be hard for North Korea to find a buyer; tests of its plutonium warheads have been a questionable technical success, and their uranium-enrichment program may not be advanced enough to make them an attractive seller.

That leaves crime. Last week’s deal does not change the probability that North Korea will engage in it. And new lines of business probably won’t look like the old ones; North Korea’s schemes are creative and highly adaptable.

When drugs and counterfeit dollars got too much exposure, the regime shifted toward cigarettes and insurance fraud. Last summer, South Korean authorities discovered North Korea’s involvement in a hacking ring that exploited online gaming sites to win points and exchange them for cash, making $6 million in two years. Given that cybercriminals across the world gross over $100 billion annually, a country with decent cyberwarfare capabilities could probably do well for itself.

Or could North Korea go legit? Publicly at least, there haven’t been major seizures of its drugs or counterfeit currency in several years, leading analysts to speculate that targeting the country’s illicit finances successfully crippled those particular earning schemes. And Kim Jong-il’s death does give North Korea an opportunity to get out of the game.

BUT legitimacy won’t solve Kim Jong-un’s problem. Right now his survival is guaranteed by hard currency, and the best source of it is illicit activity. That’s why previous American efforts sought to shut off these activities: to convince the regime it had to reform itself to survive.

That didn’t go quite far enough. Shutting down those activities works only so long as North Korea can’t find new ones. The key to survival was not any one illicit activity but the ability to adapt from one to another — an ability that, with Kim Jong-il gone, likely rests with just a few trusted people. Those people, their loyalties and their relationships are now Kim Jong-un’s biggest vulnerability. If North Korea loses its capacity to adapt, it will lose the ability to make money illicitly — and will have to choose reform.

For America to make successful deals with North Korea, we must first grasp that its leader faces not just a dictator’s problems, but those of a mafia boss. And if you make a deal with the Godfather, you must not overlook the interests of the consigliere standing behind him.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is a doctoral candidate in government at Harvard and a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and at the Miller Center, University of Virginia.

Posted in NY Times | Leave a comment

Thug for Life

Posted on 5 February 2012 by admin

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2012/02/123_104180.html
Hanwha avoids delisting, but unruly boss could be its ruin

By Kim Tong-hyung

The widening fraud and embezzlement scandal surrounding Hanwha Chairman Kim Seung-youn further disgraces the legacy of one of Korea’s richest men and touches off questions on whether his waywardness is beginning to take a toll on the company. / Korea Times file

The widening fraud and embezzlement scandal surrounding Hanwha Chairman Kim Seung-youn further disgraces the legacy of one of Korea’s richest men and touches off questions on whether his waywardness is beginning to take a toll on the company. / Korea Times file

The massive corruption scandal surrounding Hanwha Chairman Kim Seung-youn cements his status as Korea’s most loathsome business figure and underlines the fragility of the company’s future under its wayward owner.

Hanwha, one of the country’s top-10 business groups, breathed a sigh of relief Sunday after the Korea Exchange opted not to delist the group’s holding company in a much-anticipated decision, despite Kim potentially facing a lengthy prison term over widening fraud and embezzlement charges. However, the damage to the confidence in the conglomerate’s future could be irreversible.

Kim, who recently turned 60, was indicted last year for unlawfully breaching Hanwha’s corporate coffers to plug losses from a number of ill-advised business projects he had been running personally on the side. The Seoul Western District Prosecutors’ Office last week said it would demand a nine-year jail term for Kim atop of a 150 billion won (about $134 million) fine.

The murky allegations surrounding Kim come at a time when the families behind the country’s chaebol, or family-owned conglomerates, are facing increasing scrutiny for abusing corporate wealth as politicians move faster to massage voters’ egos as poll days near.

Kim has been denying the charges against him, but not many seem willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt when he has more baggage than an airport terminal. And as rich as he is, he won’t be able to pay enough goons to find and assault every critic.

“Until now, prosecutors have been politically prevented from properly punishing wrongdoings of chaebol chairmen. As in tough times, they would say we are making it worse, and in good times, they would say we are spoiling the mood,’’ a senior prosecution official told reporters.

“If we continue to make excuses to let chaebol leaders find an easy way out, this country has no future.’’

Korea certainly has developed a reputation for employing lax justice on chaebol leaders. Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee, Hyundai Automotive Chairman Chung Mong-koo and SK Chairman Chey Tae-won are among the corporate bigwigs pardoned in recent years for a broad range of crimes that include illegal wealth transfers, tax evasion, bribing and embezzlement.

However, the leash apparently isn’t long enough for some tycoons like Hanwha’s Kim and SK’s Chey, back on the grill for allegedly abusing corporate wealth to soften personal losses from futures investment, a duo leading a list of CEOs who appear to have blown their second chances or even their third.

Interestingly, Hanwha and SK both have a lot in common in terms of where they are as a business group. They both benefited from their strength in the domestic market, with Hanwha excelling in chemicals, explosives and financial services and SK dominating the telecommunications and energy sector.

Despite this, the companies have been struggling mightily to rebuild themselves on the global scale and the dual reputation of their leaders as successful businessmen and troublemakers certainly doesn’t help.

Since succeeding his late father, Kim Chong-hee, at the helm of Hanwha in 1981, Kim has developed a character that is more frequently compared to Don Corelone than Jack Welch.

In 1993, Kim became the first leader of a top-10 business group ever to be arrested after prosecutors charged him for smuggling dollars to help purchase a lavish mansion in Los Angeles.

Kim was also questioned by prosecutors during an investigation of Hanwha between 2004 and 2005 over suspicions that he created a slush fund of about 9 billion won and used the money to bribe politicians ahead of the group’s acquisition of Korea Life Insurance in 2002.

Kim’s most famous dust off with the law came in 2007 when he had his bodyguards kidnap and beat up some bar workers who had attacked his son, and at the heat of the moment, assaulting one of the victims himself with a metal pipe. He was convicted for the incident but was pardoned by President Lee Myung-bak the following year.

The current investigation on Kim is based on allegations that he spent hundreds of billions of won in company funds from 2004 to 2006 to repay hidden private business debts. Prosecutors since last year have been tracing the money flowing in and out of some borrowed-name bank accounts Kim has been controlling.

The investigation is a public relations disaster for Hanwha and could end up hurting the firm. The conglomerate has been scrambling to secure revenue sources aside from its bread-and-butter businesses in chemicals and explosives. Its attempt to acquire a controlling stake in Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering fell through in 2009.

Posted in Korea Times | Leave a comment

When opposites attract (a preview of Ahn Eun-me’s Princess Bari at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival)

Posted on 18 July 2011 by admin

Tradition and the avant-garde clash in Korean choreographer Ahn Eun-me’s gender-busting new show, hears Mark Brown

The Herald

IT’S REIGNING MEN: Androgyny and gender play are to the fore in Princess Bari, with male and female dancers wearing the same costumes and a male lead, Hee-Moon Lee. ‘He has a voice like a female,’ says Eun-Me Ahn.

ARRIVING at a beautiful traditional Korean restaurant in the centre of Seoul to meet the renowned choreographer Eun-Me Ahn is a deeply confusing experience. On the one hand, the restaurant — which is called Pulhyanggi (meaning “the scent of grass”), and decorated with delicate images of flying cranes and other pastoral scenes — is a haven of tranquillity in the midst of one of the world’s most buzzing cities. On the other, Ahn — her head shaved, resplendent in bright green and red, her fingers adorned with huge floral rings — is the living embodiment of that cliche, a force of nature.

The choreographer is a woman of extraordinary personality, colour, humour and energy; elements very pany presents at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.

The Princess Bari story is a central narrative in Korean culture, with shades of the Greek tales of Oedipus and Orpheus, and even of Alice In Wonderland and Pinocchio. Thrown to the sea by her father, the King, because she is the seventh daughter of a queen who bore no son, Bari (the word means “discarded” in Korean) is saved and raised by a fisherman. In her teens, the intrepid girl learns of her regal origins and undertakes an epic journey to the royal palace. And that is as far as Ahn’s Edinburgh production (the first of two pieces telling the entire story) takes us.

However, as Ahn is keen to emphasise as she holds court in the restaurant (seeming very much like a precocious, somewhat mischievous princess herself), the key to the show is not the tale, but the highly imaginative way in which she has recreated it for the 21st century.

The piece is an irresistible combination of the traditional (including the song of Korean pansori and the movement of Japanese butoh) and the avantgarde, the minimal and the exuberant, the anguished and the comic.

It is typical of Ahn’s sense of artistic freedom that Ban is played not by a woman, but by the multitalented and remarkably androgynous young male singer Hee-Moon Lee. “He looks like a girl,” the choreographer agrees. “He’s a small man, and he has a voice like a female. Sometimes he looks like a baby, sometimes he looks like a girl, and sometimes he looks like a man. It’s amazing. He’s a good actor.”

Androgyny and gender play have long been of interest to Ahn, in her life (she started shaving her head to make her own gender more ambiguous) and her work. It’s an attitude which infuses Princess Bari, in which male and female dancers perform in the same brightly coloured dresses and spotty underpants.

“I don’t want to divide costume between women’s and men’s,” she explains. “The dress is very convenient to dance in, and allows for very quick changes.” Her choice of costumes is also a delight for the male members of the company. “Men love dresses. It’s something they never experienced before.”

If playing with gender is part of her aesthetic, Ahn also sees a thematic justification for casting Lee in the title role. “I figured out why Princess Bari was thrown out,” she declares. “It’s because she had both female and male sex organs.”

It will, no doubt, come as something of a shock to generations of Koreans to discover that Bad — a much-loved figure from their childhood —is, in fact, a hermaphrodite. Which is not to say that Ahn’s reinterpretation is an act of disrespectful iconoclasm. Rather, like her wonderfully rich and diverse show as a whole, it speaks to the choreographer’s intelligent and fascinating combination of the traditional and the modern.

This is exemplified in her approach to traditional Korean music and song, which is used in truly astonishing ways in the show. Although Ahn’s background is in dance, she is not afraid — any more than was her late friend, the great German dance director Pina Bausch — to roll up her sleeves and mould other forms to the requirements of her choreography.

“We love this [traditional Korean] song,” Ahn says, “but we have been listening to this one song for ever. So, we are also getting sick and tired. I’m trying to achieve a different sound from the traditional vocal techniques.”

There is something fabulously Bauschian in Ahn’s combination of dancing singers and singing dancers (including, at points in the show, herself). Her means of auditioning singers, such as Lee, for the company is typically unorthodox. “We don’t do only dance and movement,” she says. “I don’t care about that. We go drinking and we go to karaoke. I want to see their natural power, which is their personality.”

Although Ahn, who began her formal training in traditional Korean dance at the age of 12, creates work which is strongly connected to the culture of her homeland, the comparison with Bausch’s choreography is one that she embraces. Ahn recalls her time at Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal (where she presented three solo works in 2001) with great affection. “Pina Bausch and I just loved each other,” she re-members. “We had the same female energy. As a person, she was quite slow, and I’m very fast, but the energy of our work is of a similar level. That’s why I think we could talk. She loved watching my kind of energy in talking. She loved drinking until 3am. We’d sit and talk about everything.”

Talking with Ahn, who is an extremely engaging, animated conversationalist, it isn’t difficult to see why Bausch would have found her such good and interesting company. The Korean choreographer is a constant performer, although the amazing control and geometry of her own dancing — even now, in her late forties — contrasts markedly with the marvellous gesticulations and ribald commentary of her off-stage persona.

One can’t help but wonder what shaped her strident self-confidence and endearing, high-energy personality. “As a child, we had no TV and no telephone,” Ahn remembers. “All my parents could afford was the house and food, that’s all. So, in the evening, we had to be performers for our parents and grandparents. If you did well, you got one cookie. That was my first job. I don’t remember it, but my mum told me,

`You were a really good dancer.’ She said I did whatever they asked me, and I would be given cookies.”

Which, as an account of creativity born of poverty, is as good an explanation of Eun-Me Ahn’s remarkable choreography, and equally remark-able character, as one could wish for. Not that she cares to dwell too much on the hardships of her up-bringing. No sooner has our inter-view ended than I’m packed off in a cab to her favourite Japanese pub (she travels ahead on her scooter). I, like a tourist, drink Korean beer. She, like any cool Korean, downs a couple of bottles of Tokyo’s finest. Then, after much talk of the Edinburgh Festival, Pina Bausch and the burgeoning culture of South Korea, Ahn is back on her scooter and zipping off into the flashing lights of downtown Seoul.

Princess Bari is at the Edinburgh Playhouse, August 19-21.

Posted in Art and Culture, Glasgow Herald, Mark Brown | Leave a comment

Hitting Below the Belt: Pyongyang Spills the Beans on Secret Summit Talks

Posted on 8 July 2011 by admin

By Aidan Foster-Carter
http://38north.org/2011/07/aidanfc070811/

Just when you thought inter-Korean relations couldn’t get any worse, they do. The North has found a fresh weapon, and on June 1, 2011 launched a sneak attack on the South—with a follow-up ambush a week later. Fortunately, we’re not talking ships sunk or islands shelled like last year. But words can do damage too, and this was a low blow.

Despite poor inter-Korean relations in the three years since Lee Myung Bak became South Korea’s president, there have been regular rumors of secret North-South talks behind the scenes. Pyongyang recently confirmed these rumors, revealing the details of these talks and destroying any basis for future trust. The North’s broadsides can be read in full at http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2011/201106/news01/20110601-29ee.html and http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2011/201106/news09/20110609-35ee.html.

It’s embarrassing hot stuff, and of course Pyongyang’s word can hardly be taken as gospel—though they do threaten to publish transcripts of the taped conversations. (Seoul says it didn’t know the meetings were being recorded.) The way the North tells it, the South had “begged” since April to have a secret meeting, which then took place in Beijing from May 9. The idea was two-fold: 1) to finally get past last year’s Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents; and 2) to hold a three-stage summit—first at Panmunjom on the border in June, followed by Pyongyang in August, with the final act in Seoul in March 2012 when the ROK will host the world’s second Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), just one month before parliamentary elections (now there’s a coincidence).

For a leader whose shtick is that he’s a practical no-nonsense business type, Lee Myung Bak’s whole North Korea policy is straight out of fairyland—and this takes the cake. Who in their wildest dreams could ever imagine Kim Jong Il venturing to Seoul, of all places (by train?), when he has steadfastly refused to do so even when friendlier folks like Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun occupied the Blue House, to deliver an abject U-turn on the North’s nuclear policy to a lame-duck ROK president in his final months in office? And all this while the North is busy gearing up for its own fairyland (or emperor’s new clothes) moment: the centenary of its founder Kim Il Sung in April 2012, when the DPRK is due to proclaim itself a “great and prosperous nation”—even while its economy is broken and many of its citizens go hungry.

Small wonder that there are calls in Seoul to sack the security troika—named by the North’s National Defense Commission (NDC) as Kim Chun Sig of the Ministry of Unification’s (MOU) Policy Office; Hong Chang Hwa, a director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS); and Kim Tae Hyo, President Lee’s security advisor—involved in this farrago. Worse yet, the North also claimed that the South offered “enveloped money”: a quaint name for a trait alas not rare in Seoul, nor indeed in inter-Korean relations. Pyongyang is being a rank hypocrite: In the past it had no qualms about trousering such well-stuffed envelopes, but this time the NDC scorned the South’s explanation that it was just offering to pay the North’s expenses.

What rich irony for a regime as secretive as the DPRK to suddenly posture as a champion of openness: a virtue in any case much overrated. As with the Wikileaks, there is both prurient and genuine interest in becoming privy to what we weren’t meant to know. But although the Iraq imbroglio has made many in the US and UK rightly mistrustful of our mendacious leaders, it would be wrong to generalize such revulsion into a blanket call for always-open diplomacy.

On the contrary. Sometimes you do need secrecy, as well as absolute assurance that the other guy—by definition, in these situations, someone you’ve no cause to trust (and vice versa)—won’t betray you. Classic cases-in-point are Henry Kissinger’s first foray to China exactly 40 years ago in July 1971, and the hush-hush Israel-PLO dialogue in Oslo during 1992-93.

But Korea itself has plenty of examples of secret talks over the past four decades. It’s worth taking a minute to recall these—many remain little-known—and how much they achieved. Here, as always, Don Oberdorfer’s book The Two Koreas is a fascinating guide through this labyrinth.

It all started with Kissinger’s visit to China, which alarmed Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung alike. That prompted the two Koreas to start Red Cross talks at Panmunjom in August 1971, but these got bogged down in reiterating entrenched positions. So in March 1972 one ROK Red Cross delegate, Chong Hong Jin—really he worked for the KCIA—quietly slipped out the door on the other side, and was driven to Kaesong and then helicoptered to Pyongyang. Within a month, the KCIA had a direct phone line to the North’s ruling Workers’ Party (WPK).

It was swiftly agreed to upgrade the contact level. In early May, KCIA director Lee Hu Rak secretly popped across at Panmunjom. A man who terrified and terrorized many, Lee confessed to feeling “indescribable anxiety.” He was shown the sights of Pyongyang and then, during his second night, he was woken, bundled into a car, and not told where he was going. He feared the worst, but after midnight, finally came face-to-face with an affable Kim Il Sung.

Lee Hu-rak

What did they talk about? Nationalism, of course. Oberdorfer has fascinating excerpts. Lee assured Kim that Park Chung Hee “detests foreign interference most” and boasted: “In the future the big powers will yield to us [meaning a united Korea].” Kim even apologized for the 1968 commando raid which tried to kill Park—they got within a mile of the Blue House—claiming not to have known about it. Yeah right, but that’s how you get past obstacles and move on. Just as his son Kim Jong Il would assure Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi 30 years later in 2002 that he hadn’t known about DPRK abductions of young Japanese. It may stick in the craw, but diplomacy does need face-saving formulae (i.e. lies) as well as secrecy.

All this led to the first North-South joint statement on July 4 (note the date!) 1972, signed by Lee Hu Rak and Kim Il Sung’s brother Kim Yong Ju, then seen as his successor, as director of the WPK’s organization and guidance department (rather than by the two governments as such). (Incidentally, Kim Yong Ju is still with us, and Lee Hu Rak died only in October 2009.)

In autumn 1972, Red Cross delegations visited each others’ capitals for the first time. Sadly the bonhomie didn’t last, though this is not the place for a full chronicle (read Oberdorfer). The point is, even to get this far required secret talks too—and it was vital that they stayed secret.

Fast forward over a decade. Park Chung Hee is dead, shot by the head of his KCIA (Lee’s successor), and another general has seized power in Seoul. Chun Doo Hwan will forever be rightly excoriated as the butcher of Kwangju in May 1980.Yet his diplomacy showed more subtlety. In September 1984, less than a year after KPA commandos nearly blew him up in Rangoon, killing 17 elite South Koreans and four Burmese, Pyongyang offered aid after floods in the South. Presumably, it expected Seoul to refuse. Chun, imaginatively, said yes.

Thus, we had the amazing sight of hundreds of Northern trucks rolling across the DMZ in peace. The cargo revealed much about the North’s economy: wormy rice, feeble cement, and dodgy drugs (which the South quietly warehoused). But it was the gesture that counted. This ushered in a year of wider contacts, including the first ever family reunions, talks between lawmakers, five economic meetings, and more. It didn’t last, but it was a real breakthrough at the time.

All of that was public, but once again, this was accompanied by secret talks behind the scenes. Remember Park Chul Un? A bright young Blue House aide, only 42 in 1985, Park blazed an extraordinary covert trail not only with Pyongyang, but later in Seoul’s wider Nordpolitik.

His WPK counterpart, Han Si Hae, was an urbane diplomat who would later be the DPRK’s ambassador to the Unite Nations. Here I must quote Oberdorfer directly. Just imagine this, today:

Park and Han established a direct telephone connection between their desks in Seoul and Pyongyang, on which they had frequent conversations. The two met face-to-face a total of forty-two times between May 1985 and November 1991 in a wide variety of places, including Pyongyang, Seoul, Panmunjom, Paektu Mountain in North Korea, Cheju Island in South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere. Some of the meetings lasted as long as five days, but except for a few sightings, most of this diplomacy remained secret. (2001 edn., p. 150)

What followed is especially interesting and very relevant now. Like Lee Myung Bak, Chun Doo Hwan wanted an inter-Korean summit. To that end, former DPRK foreign minister Ho Dam—with Han Si Hae in tow—secretly visited Seoul and met Chun in September 1985. I recall that visit being rumored at the time, so the secrecy wasn’t watertight. But everyone thought it was a hopeful sign, so nobody made political capital of it or spilled the beans. Of course, Chun was a dictator who had the press strictly under control, which made it easier.

Ho Dam

Among much else, Ho Dam insisted that the Rangoon bomb “had nothing to do with us.” If Seoul had demanded an apology there would have be no more talks. Chun seems to have let that go, which was big of him. Lee could learn a lesson from this. The recent NDC revelations do suggest that the South was trying to find a way past the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents.

But back to 1985. A month later in October, Chang Se Dong, head of the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP, the rebranded KCIA) went North with Park Chul Un and met Kim Il Sung. Again, Oberdorfer’s account is fascinating. He quotes a US intelligence source, who saw the transcripts, as saying the two sides got bogged down in detail as well as “linguistic tangles” over how they would describe any summit: “The North was not very interested in making progress, and the South was also bringing up things that would irritate the North.”

A major irritant was the Team Spirit joint US-ROK war games, bigger each year and which Chun refused to cancel. Kim Il Sung once told the East German leader, Erich Honecker, that mobilizing reserve forces to counter these exercises cost the DPRK six weeks of GNP in lost labor time. Whether Kim genuinely feared an invasion or was just spooked and angry, at all events in January 1986 the North denounced this “nuclear war maneuver” and broke off all dialogue.

All public talks, that is. But Park Chul Un and Han Si Hae’s contacts continued, even after Chun Doo Hwan conceded democracy and the people elected his fellow ex-general Roh Tae Woo (because the two leading democrats, Kim Yong Sam and Kim Dae Jung, ran separately). It did Park no harm that he was a nephew of Roh’s wife. Under Roh, Park served as sports minister and was even seen as a potential successor—though he also made enemies: read on.

Widely reviled as mul (water; Margaret Thatcher used “wet” as a similar term of abuse), Roh deserved better. History will respect him as Korea’s Gorbachev, another man much traduced. Such rare leaders—South Africa’s F.W. de Klerk is another—who were both bold and skilled enough to see that the old order had to go, and who successfully and peacefully transformed a failing or noxious political system into a better one, surely deserve our praise, not blame. But Korea, like everywhere, is full of stubborn fools who see constancy, at all costs, as a virtue.

Park Chul Un’s six-year role as a secret conduit to the North eventually helped lead to a third round of inter-Korean dialogue: 1990-92’s eight mutual visits of prime ministers, including the epochal (if unfulfilled) general and nuclear North-South agreements of December 1991.

By then, Park had other fish to fry too. He was also Seoul’s point man on what was to prove the surer bet of Roh’s wider Nordpolitik. North Korea might blow hot and cold to this day, but communist regimes elsewhere—themselves moribund, but who knew?—were by this time, ready to face world and peninsular realities, especially if offered financial inducements. By now, a master of secret diplomacy, Park Chul Un was the obvious man for the job.

July 1988 found Park secretly in Budapest. After 10 days of hard bargaining, plus a fat loan, Hungary became the first communist state to recognize the ROK—just in time for the Seoul Olympics. The same summer saw Park also in Moscow, bearing a letter from Roh Tae Woo which praised perestroika. Gorbachev’s Krasnoyarsk speech followed, and in 1990 came the unthinkable: the USSR recognized the ROK. (Again, be it said, a large loan was involved, on which, Moscow defaulted not long after, somewhat souring the party mood.)

The rest is history. For Park Chul Un things went less well. The flair he showed in diplomacy deserted him on home turf. He made the error of strongly opposing Kim Young Sam, when the latter changed sides in a blatant and successful bid to succeed Roh Tae Woo as president in 1992. Kim was not the forgiving sort; few in Seoul are. Park was indicted for receiving a bribe from a businessman who sold slot machines and spent 16 months in jail.

Park protested his innocence and claimed persecution—which now seems to be the general view—but this finished his political career, even though he was barely 50. (For that matter, Han Si Hae, his erstwhile Northern counterparty, hasn’t been heard of since 1998 either.)

That’s a pity, because Park had skills that Seoul still sorely needs. I could go on, and secret diplomacy did; especially in the sunshine decade (1998-2007), which is a whole other story.

For present purposes, suffice it to have shown that Lee Myung Bak is by no means the first right-wing South Korean president to have had trouble with North Korea. Yet in their different ways, Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo Hwan, and Roh Tae Woo were all ready to take more risks and to be more flexible in pursuing North-South dialogue. Compared to any of them, Lee’s rigid approach to the North appears both fatally flawed in theory—with its totally unrealistic insistence on denuclearization as a first step—and amateurishly bungling in practice.

Even so, shame on North Korea for stooping so low as to spill the beans on secret talks. That was a stupid as well as nasty move. Eighteen months from now, Lee’s successor—whoever that may be—will surely put out fresh feelers to the North. That will involve secret talks; it always does. But after this, how can any leader in Seoul trust a perpetually perfidious Pyongyang?

The answer is: You have to keep trying. And if existing policy fails, try something different. Deplorable though the North’s latest conduct is, it might just jolt the Lee administration into a belated realization that its approach hitherto simply hasn’t worked. Lame duck or not, Lee still has a year and a half left in office. Influential voices in the ruling Grand National Party (GNP), which fears a hammering at parliamentary elections (just 10 months away) if things don’t look up, are already calling for a new approach to North Korea. Lee is not exactly known for listening, but with so much at stake and time running out, he just might give it a try.

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Pak Kyung-ni’s epic novel of Korean history

Posted on 22 June 2011 by admin

June 22, 2011
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7176556.ece
Land is a remarkable and important work in which Eastern and Western traditions fruitfully meet
Margaret Drabble

Pak Kyung-ni’s novel, Land, opens colourfully in 1897 at the traditional feast of the harvest moon, still one of the most important dates in the Korean calendar, where we are introduced to some of the hundreds of characters who people the vast canvas of this five-part national epic. Pak (1926–2008), one of the most celebrated twentieth-century Korean authors, centres her best-known work in a rural community which, through the generations, suffers the natural disasters of famine and cholera – both described in painful detail. The characters also feel the reverberations of distant armed conflicts in a rapidly changing world order, as centuries of rule by the Chosun dynasty stagger to a violent end. Agrarian uprisings, aggressive nationalism, modernization, modern weaponry and the invading Japanese threaten a stoic way of life that had endured, if not always prosperously, for hundreds of years. This is a work of immense ambition, covering nearly fifty years of history, and closing with the Japanese surrender in 1945. It appeared in serial instalments between 1969 and 1993, and the total text consists of more than 7,000 pages.

Land’s translation into English by Agnita Tennant is a landmark, and her undertaking is heroic. Hers is the first publication in English, although I am told that sections have appeared in authorized and unauthorized versions in French, German, and Japanese, and that a translation by a team of Chinese scholars is in progress. Tennant’s three-volume edition represents only Part One of the entire oeuvre, but, although seeded with intriguing premonitions of future events, it reads as a self-contained narrative. Over these volumes, we come to know the tenant farmers, the embattled landowners, their servants, and the children of the rising generation, all poised at a watershed in history. We enter their world, we follow its seasons, we learn its topography, and we see through them the tragic history of twentieth-century Korea unfold. The realities of the political backdrop are obscured from the villagers by ignorance and isolation, and news of revolution, assassination and capitulation filters towards them slowly, indirectly and not always in sequence, from Seoul and beyond; there are some strange loops of chronology that remind one of Joseph Conrad’s narrative techniques. But change is slowly if uncertainly approaching and an immemorial way of country life, rooted in Confucianism and Buddhism and ancestor-worship, is about to disappear forever.

Pak was brought up under Japanese rule, but she studied Western literature in Japanese translation (she never learned English) and was familiar with the works of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Balzac, Maupassant, Dickens, Hardy, and William Faulkner. For an English reader, Hardy is the most obvious point of reference, and his poem “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” comes frequently to mind – a poem that defiantly celebrates the continuity and timeless rhythms of rural life even as they violently disintegrate. We find in Pak a similar deep-grained dark cosmic pessimism and stoicism, a sense of a natural world more often hostile than benign, and an awareness of casual human brutality (the beating of servants, the caning of children, mob hangings) embodied in many a grim country proverb. The harshness is alleviated by moments of tenderness (even towards insects) and by the beauty of the landscape; by passages of lyric delicacy evoking the fields of grain, the flowing river, the flowering trees, the sunlight in the forest, the vines of wild grapes, the lily pond. But Pak’s realism exceeds Hardy’s: her characters blow their noses a lot; they suffer from diarrhoea and other physical ailments that he might have shrunk from describing; and their many visits to the privy are not veiled in literary decency. I am not sure that Hardy ever mentions a privy.

Pak has a powerful gift for strong but subtle characterization. Her people are not the types of earlier Korean fiction, nor are they the simple heroes and villains of folklore (although there are some villains), but vividly imagined individuals, each playing a linking part in what could easily be imagined as a television series. (There have been several adaptations.) Korean readers have their favourites: the doomed love affair of the handsome, unhappily married young farmer Yongi with the shaman’s daughter Wólsón is a popular storyline. She is a social outcast (there is a strong class system at work in village society), but she is an independent, intelligent, resourceful woman, and we watch her passionate relationship with Yongi wax and wane over the years until the affair settles into a sort of marriage by default. The descriptions of Yongi’s barren and angry wife Kangch’óng-taek, whom he has never loved, are also moving: for years consumed by violent jealousy, she has been forced to live in a cold and sterile home at the mercy of her husband’s public rejection and alienated affections. He has never felt anything for her but “pity and guilt”, yet after her death (more shades of Hardy) he remembers her when she was a child bride, standing before him in the fields “with a handful of pasque flowers, her skirt billowing”.

The gossip and malice and mutual support of the village women, at work among the crops, at home, round the well, stealing one another’s vegetables over the garden fence, sharing often sparse but sometimes festive meals, are beautifully portrayed, and their relationships, like those of Yongi and Wólsón and Kangch’óng-taek, shift over time as new alliances are forged, old friendships betrayed, new spites engendered. The workings of a whole neighbourhood and its many households are brought to life.

Pak, living in what was still a patriarchal society, writes well and easily of the male world, of the tediously opinionated schoolteacher with his strongly anti-Japanese but naive political views, of the kindly sweet-dispensing old doctor, of the scholarly, vengeful, sexually ambiguous and impotent heir to the estate. Pak is good (as were the Brontës) on the boredom and repetitions of a small community where so few have even a basic education. But she is also good with the artisans and eccentrics – the skilled and enterprising pock-marked carpenter, the dissident freethinking fisherman, the solitary hunter. The hunter is a fine portrait of a loner who prides himself on his skill in the mountains, tracking deer and bear and the elusive legendary tiger, earning his living by selling animal skins. He is tamed and brought down by sexual frustration and an obsessive passion for a self-serving and ambitious servant in the landlord’s household, who seduces him and leads him into murder and treachery. He, despising her, cannot free himself from her thrall.

Sex and violence and political unrest are here in plenty, as the landlord of the estate struggles to ward off impoverished but pretentious “modernizing” relatives from Seoul, with their Western clothes and their hair cut short – fine comic villains – who have a greedy eye on his land. Servants plot against their master and against one another. The beautiful young daughter of the waning house, Sohui, a child abandoned by her runaway mother, is growing into a proud, rebellious spirit who will one day have her revenge, just as her attendant, the seamstress’s daughter, may one day become a singer. This is a man’s world, but the younger women are beginning to see beyond the walls of their confinement.

Pak’s own life was hard; she was widowed young at the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 and had to write to support herself and her family. Her early work is full of war widows and grieving women. But in Land, which in time brought her international recognition and wealth (and enabled her to endow the T’oji Cultural Centre), she reached beyond this personal material to a larger historical vision. She believed in the land, lived simply, wore homespun clothes, smoked heavily, and encouraged the growth of organic vegetables. Culture and vegetables, it is said, vied for her attention at the T’oji Centre. Throughout her magnum opus the theme of land and seed, of womb and semen, or sowing and growing, is deployed with a challenging intelligence and a questioning of genetic and national destiny – the imagery is used very differently from the way it is used in the Western tradition; it manifests a different cosmic view, but is not incomprehensibly alien. Agnita Tennant, like Constance Garnett before her with the great Russians, has done English readers a service by opening up new territory.

It was not easy. The confusing publishing and editorial history of the many volumes, the transliteration of names (even Pak’s name has accepted variant spellings, as Pak or Park Kyongni), the length of the text, and the difficulty of translating colloquial Korean conversation presented her with obstacles. The proverbs must have proved particularly challenging. Some have an instant resonance: we know what is meant by “sometimes the sun shines in a rat hole”, or “if it’s your fate to die you’ll drown in a saucer of water”. But others retain a suitable mystery. The recurring phrase “it’s less than the blood in a bird’s leg” is strangely suggestive. In spoken Korean it has an epigrammatic concision impossible to convey in written English. And yet it is a phrase that figuratively conjures up a whole physical and mental landscape, another culture. Tennant has made this culture accessible to us, in a remarkable and important work in which Eastern and Western traditions fruitfully meet.

Pak Kyung-ni
LAND
Translated by Agnita Tennant Three volumes 1,171pp. Brill. 145euros.
978 1 906876 04 3

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Through a Filmmaker’s Lens, a View of Korea

Posted on 13 June 2011 by admin

By JANINE ARMIN
Published: June 13, 2011

This spring, the art establishment in South Korea made headlines worldwide by selecting the Chinese artist, activist and now political prisoner Ai Weiwei to co-direct the coming 2011 Gwangju Design Biennial.

The country’s homegrown contemporary art scene may be less likely to make international news. But artists like Chan-kyong Park — known for his haunting films and photography — are making an impact both at home and abroad. His short and feature-length films as well as his photography address the storied relationship of North and South Korea without losing the levity required to captivate an audience — a careful balance in a country ready to break away from rule-book behavior.

“Korean contemporary art has the most vital scene in Asia,” said Mr. Park, who says his belief is based on the growing prominence of Korean artists and, increasingly, women filmmakers like Jae-en Jung, Chan-ok Park and Sun-rae Im. But overturning the rigid infrastructure of South Korean museums and galleries is an uphill battle, he said. “Institutions are too conservative, too vulnerable to government change, and there is no good journalism and critique.”

Mr. Park’s own work reflects the various structures born of Korea’s politically fraught history. The resulting religious mix of Buddhism, Christianity and shamanism offer Mr. Park a rich palette of imagery.

His film “Sindoan” (2008), for example, portrays individuals practicing the many anomalous religions generated in the country during the mid-20th century. His photo series “Three Cemeteries” (2009) consists of images of the final resting places for displaced peoples in South Korea.

Late last year, Mr. Park completed the film “Anyang, Paradise City” for a local festival in the city of the same name. The film, which was shown earlier this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and at the Jeonju International Festival in South Korea, is a blend of documentary and fiction that centers on the search for survivors of a 1988 sweatshop fire that killed 20 women. “From my college years, I remember Anyang as a city full of female factory workers,” Mr. Park said. “Koreans all know that the Korean ‘economic miracle’ is based on their toil, but they never want to remember.”

In the opening scene a group of women dance on a verdant plateau and appear to sing a traditional song about their troubles with men. The dance was declared a cultural asset by Unesco, and by using it Mr. Park is commenting on how he feels institutions exploit tradition to increase tourism. “It was a traditional folk dance,” he said. But now it has “gained a certain marketability.”

His criticism of bureaucracy, as well as of South Korea’s neglect of heritage sites, is evident in other documentary aspects of the film. “Anyang” includes footage of an archeological dig for an ancient temple from the Silla dynasty that was covered with another temple during the Goryeo dynasty. “Tradition is dead in Korea, but no one knows how many antiques are buried under the soil,” Mr. Park said. “There are too many big apartments on top of them.”

Recently, the artist collaborated with his brother, the filmmaker Chan-wook Park, who is best known for his psychological thrillers that make up “The Vengeance Trilogy.” The brothers wrote, produced and directed the short film “Night Fishing,” which was shot exclusively with video from four iPhones in a partnership with Korean Telecom.

Chan-kyong Park said he enjoyed the odd angles he could capture with the phones. The first shots demonstrate the benefits of this technique: an initial pan across a dirt road where a band performs is punctuated with powerful close-ups. Their song is carried over to an elderly man in a nearby wood, who, after a fishing accident, is able to speak with his family one last time through a female shaman.

Paradise, and the struggle to get there, pervades both “Anyang” and “Night Fishing.” Mr. Park’s ambivalent search is an apt filter through which to consider present-day Korea. “Paradise became either a bad dream or a big joke,” Mr. Park said. “There is a Stalinists’ paradise in the North, and aggressive capitalists’ paradise in the South. While Koreans are bound to the ideological utopian images, Koreans lost great richness of their traditional imagination of the good world, because Korean modern history is really built upon blind futuristic will.”

Mr. Park’s sensitivity to the vices and virtues of a divided Korea is what separates him from his peers, said Yun Cheagab, the commissioner for the Korea Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year. “His work is very conceptual,” said Mr. Cheagab, who has known the artist for many years. “He’s willing to figure out what is between North and South Korea. Not South Korea, not North Korea, middle Korea.”

For Mr. Park, the “blind will” that colors Korea’s political history is inextricable from the current state of contemporary art. “1987 and 1988 was the high time of the labor movement,” he said. “Like the artist group introduced in ‘Anyang,’ there were strong small groups who created propaganda works and were involved in grass-roots community arts. They have left a heritage. It’s called ‘Min-jung art’ meaning ‘people art.”’ Mr. Park says a generation of “post Min-jung art” has arisen that is influenced by Western conceptualism and sensitive to media politics and art institutions. He positions himself between the present and past iterations.

Operating in this temporal limbo is clearly fruitful for the artist, who has several shows this autumn, including “Second Worlds” in Austria at the integrated contemporary art gathering Steirischer Herbst Festival 2011 (Sept. 23 to Oct. 16) and “Image Clash: Contemporary Korean Video Art” at the CU Art Museum in Colorado (Sept. 9 to Oct. 22).

He’s also enthusiastically pursuing a new project, despite the fact that he does not yet have funding. It’s “a horror film scenario, a narrative with a lot of female ghosts,” he said. “Other than that, I practice every day in art, drawings, paintings and installation. The artworks focus on what I call ‘Asian Gothic.”’

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Park Seo-bo: ‘Role of Art Is To Make People Worry’

Posted on 19 May 2011 by admin
Park Seo-bo

Park Seo-bo

Korean artist Park Seo-bo takes off his jaunty bowler hat. A ring on his hand with a purple gemstone the size of a small chicken egg catches the light of a late winter afternoon.

At 80 years old, Mr. Park is widely regarded as the father of South Korean contemporary art. Among Asian art followers, he is also known for his distinct sartorial style and his unapologetic, outspoken nature.

“These days Korean society is full of energy and the art market is lively. It is like America after World War II. There is madness. In general, artists in Korea are trying to be different, to stand out. Chinese artists are similar. This could be dangerous because art should be about expression, not just standing out,” he says.

He throws out this criticism of Korean art in the company of two of Seoul’s most prominent dealers. Mr. Park was in Hong Kong to support the Asian Hotel Art Fair, which the two dealers and other Seoul galleries are organizing. The event, which started in Seoul in 2008, sees art galleries take over hotel rooms instead of exhibition centers. Since 2010, the fair has been held twice a year, in Hong Kong in February and in Seoul in August. The 2010 Hong Kong event was at the Grand Hyatt and this year it was at the Mandarin Oriental.

For a retrospective of Mr. Park’s work at the Busan Museum of Art last year, chief curator Lim Chang-sup wrote that the painter is “the most influential artist and a major figure in Korean modern art in terms of his leadership and pioneering spirit.”

Joan Kee, an Asian contemprorary art scholar at the University of Michigan, says Mr. Park’s influence is broader than Korean or Asian art history. “We have to remember that Park was enormously ambitious, not just career-wise, but also in wanting to contribute to a global history of postwar painting. He jumped quickly from style to style, because he wanted to digest quickly what was happening internationally.”

Mr. Park was born in Korea and studied in France. In the 1970s he returned and introduced expressionist art to his homeland. A political activist in his youth, he became known for making large, seemingly angry paintings that used color to communicate emotions. In the ’60s and ’70s, he used his fame and panache to his advantage.

“Warhol had nothing on Park when it came to self-presentation,” says Ms. Kee. “Park, more than almost any other Korean artist in the postwar period, realized that art-making wasn’t just about the physical artwork, but was also about image management.”

She notes that there are photos from those times “in which the pattern on Park’s shirts and sweaters appears to mimic the composition of his paintings.”

Ecriture no 071204

Ecriture no 071204 130 x 195 cm

Mr. Park’s career rose in tandem with South Korea’s economic success. He signs books with one of his limited-edition fountain pens (a solid-gold dragon design) and says: “People are impressed with South Korean society. What the West achieved in a thousand years, Korea did in 40 years. But now Seoul has lots of murders and crimes. Society is moving very fast and not everyone can keep up. The role of art is to make people worry.”

In the past few years, Mr. Park’s work has taken on a meditative quality. In a high-tech world, he says that in his art he is “trying to find the meaning of the hand again.” His newer works appear to connect to his boyhood training in inkbrush painting. Recent pieces are Zen-like in their simplicity and monochromatic palette. In one series, he made lines with a pen on painted mulberry paper.

“Now I am heading towards death. I am more mature, so I seek emptiness,” Mr. Park, who is in good health, says. “Art without spirit is not art. Art has to have soul.”

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Pyongyang Goes Pop

Posted on 29 March 2011 by admin

Alex Hogan in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/series/pyongyang-goes-pop

29 March 2011: Despite there being no internet access in North Korea outside the offices of the few western companies (you can count them on one hand), Pyongyang’s embassy enclosure and a couple of very high-up officials, digital materials still have ways of spreading.

The state runs a nationwide intranet for the exchange of sanctioned material, while USB drives and CD-Rs are becoming more and more common among college and middle school students. It is through these means that the trade in illicit and anti-state media such as the sexy Wangjaesan girls in hot pants is exchanged and passed on, while the ever-growing traffic between North Korea and China has increased opportunities for the cross-border smuggling of pirated films and music from Hollywood and Seoul.

Although these outside cultural influences can be spotted in small doses here and there, North Koreans are understandably loth to admit it. The high-end Japanese-built tourist tour buses shuttling foreigners around Pyongyang are aeons more advanced than the rusting hulks North Korea has been using for average citizens since the 1970s. But ask most Koreans and you’ll find that they are not Japanese. Until they break down, that is, when they become “shitty imperial Japanese technology”.

Given this push/pull attitude to things from the outside, it’s perhaps no surprise that western pop songs penned in a more “communist” vein can ease the North Korean listener into a new state of openness and ease inter-cultural tension. By pop in a communist vein I do, of course mean, Jarvis Cocker.

North Koreans find Pulp’s Common People very, very funny. When one 24-year-old of wealthy descent living in Pyongyang heard the song, he creased up in hysterics as he tried to understand why rich people would pretend to be poor because they thought it was cool. He did concede, however, that he was happy such a song could be so popular, as it suggested people in the west could appreciate the revolutionary spirit of communism after all. You can kind of see what he was getting at.

On hearing about the Rage Against the Machine Christmas No 1 story, the same North Korean said he felt “proud and overjoyed that a socialist band could be the greatest force for good in the British nation,” despite him not quite grasping the concept of record sales or The X Factor or the fact the band is American. He didn’t particularly like Killing in the Name, either.

At times throughout my travels in North Korea, I’m sure I’ve been misunderstood by the locals. Likewise, I have no doubt misunderstood the motivations and explanations that locals brought to the table when I confronted them with pop as the world gives it to us. But the process itself of discussing pop has always eased the initial standoff that North Koreans are trained to have set as their autopilot, and reminded me of the humanity of the people held in the grip of the government’s ongoing tyranny. So, if you find yourself caught up in the regime any time soon, for your sake and theirs, find out what their verdict on the new Kanye record is, won’t you?

10 march 2011: All pop music in North Korea is sanctioned by the state, so if you don’t like songs about The Importance of Fertiliser or Uniting Happily Under the Powerful Juche Idea, then tough – go and listen to the frogs croaking down on the river bank instead. Of the bands permitted, two of North Korea’s most famous are the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble and Wangjaesan Light Music Band, who have been churning out pro-socialist revolutionary singles for decades.

Wangjaesan were reportedly conceived by the ever-talented Kim Jong-il, who handpicked the group’s members. He’s not just a despotic dictator, you know – he has a reputation in his homeland as being quite the artisan. As well as his taste for fine light music, he’s also a cultured film producer, as this monster movie he made in the 80s tastefully proves.

Pochonbo, meanwhile, have kept themselves busy as Wangjaesan’s main contenders by clocking up 140 albums, some of them with specially created English-language cover art so they can be sold to tourists in the many gift shops Koreans insist on taking you to at every opportunity (only hard currency, Euros or fine imported cigars accepted).

There was mild controversy last year when a secret video featuring Wangjaesan’s female dance troupe entered the public domain. The video was being privately circulated among the elite, but reached the North Korean public before making it over the border to China – and therefore the world. Normally seen in traditional, body-cloaking hangbok dresses as they perform polite folk numbers, this little clip revealed unprecedented levels of sexiness in Pyongyang, as the girls popped up in sparkly hot pants and did the splits. Western displays of decadence like this are illegal but, given Kim Jong-il’s alleged love of pornography, perhaps he turned a blind eye to this one.

22 February 2011:

I’ve written before about Pyongyang’s only nightclub, the Taedong Diplo. Despite it only having one CD to its name, it’s still your best bet for catching Koreans co-mingling with Western music. Unfortunately, this Western music normally involves little more than playing the aforementioned CD (the incessant call of Trance Hits 1993 on loop) or someone sticking on the karaoke edition of the Titanic soundtrack, which North Korean students dig big-time thanks to its frequent showing in Pyongyang’s universities as an example of western culture (according to Korean ideology, industrial revolution: good. Leonardo DiCaprio drowning: better).

This grim legacy of disco downers was all to change, however, on the night DJ Ian Steadman turned up last year, coming fully prepared to man the mic long past the 10pm electricity curfew with a bag of indie hits.

Just prior to Ian’s debut on the decks, visitors to the club were treated to the airing of a new CD held in the North Korean pop vaults – Madonna’s Die Another Day from the soundtrack to the James Bond movie in which James Bond is, er, held captive in North Korea (it’s veiled threats like this that make doing things in the country so much fun).

After this, it was Steadman’s time to step up. What was quite probably North Korea’s first ever indie disco saw a handful of drunken local guides and a large group of foreign tourists dancing to a playlist that included Buraka Som Sistema, Hot Chip and Talking Heads. According to current trends, it seems indie couldn’t be hitting North Korea at a better time. The ever-reliable North Korean Economy Watch recently reported that skinny jeans are all the rage in Pyongyang these days. We’re not sure if this was entirely down to fashion reasons, though, and those holding their breath for a full-scale hipster revolution will have to wait a little longer for the fixie bikes and lens-free glasses to roll through. After all, the other top consumer products listed alongside trouserwear were reportedly pig-intestine rolls and, er, human manure.

According to Steadman, it was TV on The Radio’s Dancing Choose that elicited the biggest response, with one North Korean vigorously grabbing his arm and demanding to know where he could get a copy of this “very, very, very good band”.

If only all nights out in North Korea were so successful. My last visit to the same club culminated in an angered security guard unexpectedly pulling the plug on the music, grabbing the karaoke microphone and bellowing, “Look, you fucking drunk bastards! Get the fuck out of here! Get on the fucking bus! Go! Or I’ll take your fucking passports from you and you’ll stay in fucking North Korea forever. FUCK OFF!” – a more high-stakes ending than a punch-up and a battered sausage outside the Sheffield Leadmill on a Friday night, that’s for sure.

9 February 2011:

On my first trip to North Korea in 2009 I asked my state-sanctioned guide (and very likely government spy) what the most popular song on the North Korea airwaves was at that moment. Mr Lee – a lithe, boyish gentleman with a clean-split centre-parting – sighed and told me it was a heroic ballad about being a diligent farmer. In the North they can’t get enough radio – every kitchen is fitted with one that can’t be switched off. It’s a government order, so from morning to night citizens must enjoy revolutionary hits and paeans celebrating the multifarious talents of Kim Jong Il (lest anyone forget). So even though Mr Lee may have secretly be craving South Korea’s Girl’s Generation, he and millions of others are forced to stick with what their leader gives them: boring revolutionary anthems about being a good socialist. But as more outside materials sneak under the radar, the tension between Kim’s socialist utopia and the real world is increasing.

Earlier in the morning Mr Lee had been sitting on the tour bus ferrying us around Pyongyang, avidly reading a copy of the New Yorker that a tourist had given him the week before. The issue featured a story about an author’s drunken homosexual awakening that had taken place on board a night train. Mr Lee read it with much curiosity. Clearly he wanted to know more about the world than just diligent farmers.

Pop music in North Korea hasn’t always been this boring – during the economic glory days of the 1970s and 80s, when the socialist North were well ahead of their southern neighbours, Kim Il Sung loosened the rules on what kind of entertainment could fly with the people. That all changed after the song Whistle caused so much popular frenzy that the state reclassified it as dangerous material and repressed it, returning airplay rights exclusively to the diligent farmers and their ilk. All this despite the song in question being about as provocative to western minds as a kitten doing a cute sneeze.

To indulge Mr Lee’s urge for outside culture and indeed my own curiosity as to his response, I showed him how to use my iPod. He embraced the challenge with enthusiasm. His first choice was unexpected – UK thrash urchins Gallows. Yet my surprise probably did not outweigh his as he went through what was evidently his first guitar thrash experience. The pained look on his face belied his polite disapproval of the sounds in his ears and he moved on swiftly. After a few more minutes of wheel-click browsing, he told me quite assertively that “Lethal Bizzle would not suit the Korean people” as it “has no proper melody”. Yet he warmed right up to Coldplay and listened to one of their albums from start to finish, further widening the sample that proves Chris Martin’s gang produce music so damningly average and inoffensive it can even pacify citizens living under a fear-inducing totalitarian regime.

1 Feb 2011:

During North Korea’s “arduous march” of the 90s, brought about by the collapse of the USSR and a series of natural disasters, illegal markets of smuggled goods sprang up across the country. It marked the beginning of a slow influx of outside culture still enjoyed by North Koreans today.

Charles Jenkins, a Korean war veteran who was captured and detained for 40 years, has witnessed this cultural transition. As a propaganda tool he was kept close to the elite and – weirdly – forced to become a film star. He escaped in 2004 and now lives in Japan. When I met him in 2008, he told me the only non-Korean music he came across before the 90s would be nationalist tomes imported from Soviet Russia. As a result, it wasn’t until the mid-90s that he discovered who Michael Jackson was, when a smuggled Jacko cassette tape found its way into Jenkins’s hands.

Although most North Koreans are still oblivious to MJ today – leaving them ill-equipped to offer an opinion on the authenticity of his posthumous releases – those who are allowed to interact with foreigners consume pop music enthusiastically. These days most students on the foreign relations course at Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung University will at some point encounter MJ, while the penetration of South Korean pop music (and TV dramas) in North Korean cities is widely reported, with both enjoying a wide following despite the act of consuming them being an imprisonable offence.

On a recent trip to Pyongyang, a guide by the name of Mr Oh took great relish in his regular party trick of “accidentally” confusing North Korean revolutionary songs for flashy South Korean pop. “Whoops! It’s North Korean after all … what a shame, I mean South Korean is much better, just don’t tell any one,” he would say. We later discovered he was not a tour guide at all, but a government spy keeping an eye on the “evil” Americans in our entourage. He’d done tae kwon do at the Mass Games and is pictured in the official Pyongyang guide book. The guy was an absolute gun. The North Korean Arnold Schwarzenegger. No wonder the government let him listen to South Korean pop and wear a Paul Smith shirt.

27 January 2011:

If someone had fulfilled Pyongyang’s request to pack Eric Clapton off to North Korea, perhaps all that bother on the divided peninsula would never have started. That is what the hermit government of the north reckons, at least, as one of the less pressing Wikileak cables recently revealed that Kim Jong-il’s second son, Kim Jong-chol, was “a great fan” of the rock legend and that a Clapton performance in the capital “could be an opportunity to build goodwill”.

Using pop to build bridges is perhaps naive, especially in the context of a potential nuclear face-off, but maybe we shouldn’t rule out the idea. If you ask a North Korean their true feelings about pretty much anything they’ll stick to whatever the party line tells them they should think (which is why so many tourists get frustrated after probing about General Kim’s next move). But ask the right questions and the facade that greets most outsiders will occasionally be broached with genuine warmth. During trips I’ve made in and around the hermit kingdom over the past year, I’ve used one uncontroversial topic of conversation to do just that. It seems talking about music is one way for North Koreans to relate their perspectives on the world without being politically controversial. Pop diplomacy will not solve territorial disputes or prevent governments going head-to-head, but it does offer another perspective on North Koreans.

Pop weaves its way into North Korea in unexpected ways. Last September, I was held under 24-hour house arrest in the outpost of Raijin after refusing to pay a bribe. The most perturbing part of the experience was not the fact there was no guarantee of release, but that the hotel foyer we were held in had the EastEnders theme tune playing on loop for the duration of the internment through a croaky speaker. Perhaps the aim was mental attrition; to irritate us into paying bribes by reminding us of the east London we’d left behind and may never see again. It didn’t work – I’m from Putney.

Eccentric glimpses of the world North Korea left behind are not so few and far between – in this series I’ll be revealing more from inside the secret state: the truth about Michael Jackson’s North Korean debut; introducing the best of North Korean pop and revealing the Communist cadre’s opinion of Jarvis Cocker. Come join me for the ride.

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Interview: London based Korean artist, Francesca Cho

Posted on 12 March 2011 by admin
Francesca Cho in her studio

Francesca Cho in her studio

London based artist Francesca Cho has studied and worked in London for the past seventeen years. I was curious at how an artist who has lived in London for such a long time would think about her self-identity and how her works would deal with Korean identity in London.

Why did you use Korean letters in your works?

Francesca Cho: Hangul #5

Francesca Cho: Hangul #5

In the beginning, it was purely an expression of my emotional feeling without any involvement or motivation of the political situation in Korea. As a student far away from home I have had to cope with great loneliness and isolation although I came to the UK to fulfill my dreams and ambitions. I therefore needed a lot of support from ‘home’; it was the meaning of the Korean epic poem ‘Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven’ (The deep-rooted tree is not swayed by the wind. The deep-sprung well is not dried by the drought.) The poem was the first work written in Korean after King Sejong the Great invented the Korean written language in the fifteenth century.

A few years ago I thought about what my country meant to me and also about the division of Korea after painful experiences of emotional turmoil because of a couple of national art events where political issues were involved.

I am Korean and Korea includes both the north and the south. However, a Korean born in the south cannot see the north or meet North Koreans so the image of people in North Korea is vague. After thinking about my identity as a Korean in London the realization that the war between South and North Korea had not yet ended was a complete shock to me. It was a painful moment for me and I started creating the painting ‘The tragedy of fratricidal war’ in Korea with ash.

Francesca Cho: North and South #5

Francesca Cho: North and South #5

But, you were born after the Korean War so you never experienced it.

Of course, the ceasefire was 58 years ago, but we Koreans are influenced directly or indirectly by the unfinished war between the two Koreas.

Francesca Cho: Work in progress

Francesca Cho: Work in progress

After living in England for seventeen years, do you feel you have a little bit English?

Even though I have lived here for seventeen years, I am still a foreigner to English people. Sometimes, I surprise myself because I think I react like an English person but many people do not see me in the same way. I do not mind where I belong; I may not be either English or Korean. Now I can see what represents Korean identity more clearly from the outside and speak up about what I want to say.

In my work, I use the ash of my burnt belongings; for example to create the white in the silhouettes of Great Britain and Korea (see above). The paintings are ongoing. Now I am Korean and maybe a little English as well. I want to create my own identity with these images.

Francesca Cho: Untitled

Francesca Cho: Untitled

The meaning of war in Francesca’s works is expanded to include the ‘invisible war’ between people.

War is everywhere. Almost everyday we hear on the news that a soldier or a civilian has died in a conflict. When a soldier sacrifices his life for his country, he cannot come back to life. Even though people mourn him and put beautiful roses on his coffin, the death of one person cannot be compensated. The rose petals in my works represent the mortality of life and the pain of ‘invisible war’. If there were no longer any wars neither lives nor roses would be sacrificed.

Not only guns can kill, words too, spoken without thought, can become an ‘invisible gun’.The ash from my burnt belongings contain my memories in this ‘invisible war’. I add ash to most of my paintings. This will fertilize the dying heart after the war and help it to recover.

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