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Park Geun Hye Group Accused of Their Moves to Suppress Progressive Persons of Literature and Arts

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Rodong Sinmun http://www.rodong.rep.kp/en/index.php?strPageID=SF01_02_01&newsID=2016-10-22-0003

Oct. 22, Juche 105 (2016) Saturday

A spokesman for the Central Committee of the General Federation of the Unions of Literature and Arts of Korea released a statement Friday in connection with the disclosure of the fact that the Park Geun Hye group of south Korea worked out a blacklist aimed at suppressing progressive persons of literature and arts and sent it to a ministry.

According to data available, the blacklist worked out by Chongwadae at the instruction of Park Geun Hye includes those who signed the declaration on the retraction of the “enforcement ordinance of the government for ferry Sewol” and those who supported the declaration on situation for the ferry disaster and those who supported candidates from opposition parties and independent candidates in the past puppet presidential elections and the election of the mayor of Seoul, 9 473 in all.

It was reported that by sending the blacklist to the puppet Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and its affiliated bodies Park Geun Hye and her group branded progressive persons of literature and arts as “dangerous elements” and conducted “political inspection” of their literary and art activities, persecuting them by way of cutting off “governmental aid fund” at the first phase.

This is an undisguised violation of expression of free will and legitimate right and unpardonable human rights abuse against the south Korean persons of literature and arts, the statement said, and went on:
The recently disclosed indiscriminate and illegal suppression of them by Park is just a tip of iceberg as it was prompted by her sinister intention to check the south Korean people’s ever-mounting actions against the “government” and ensure the fascists’ long-term office.

The situation goes to prove that it is hard to expect the guarantee of free will of literary and art persons and their activities and achieve the long-cherished social progress as long as Park Geun Hye and her group are allowed to remain in power.

The Park group should clearly understand that they have no future, however desperate they become in suppressing justice.

A memoir: Shin Sang-ok, Choi Eun-hee and I

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http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2016/10/180_215463.html

Film director Shin Sang-ok and actress Choi Eun-hee hold a press conference upon their escape from North Korea to the United States in 1986. / Korea Times file

Film director Shin Sang-ok and actress Choi Eun-hee hold a press conference upon their escape from North Korea to the United States in 1986. / Korea Times file

By An Hong-kyoon

My phone rang. The caller was the press officer at the Korean Embassy in Washington. “Mr. Shin Sang-ok and Ms. Choe Eun-hee are scheduled to hold a press conference. Our embassy wants you to act as their interpreter. Would you do it for us?”

Elated by the surprise request, I replied to him in one breath. “Of course I will.”

“The Watergate Hotel conference room at ten in the morning of the15th [May, 1986],” the press officer continued in a relaxed voice, obviously relieved that I had accepted his request. “More than a hundred American and foreign reporters are expected to attend the press conference.”

My thoughts ran back to the January, 1978 media report that Choe Eun-hee, whom her fans dubbed the “Liz Taylor of Korea,” mysteriously disappeared in Hong Kong. In July of the same year, her estranged husband and the renowned film director, Shin Sang-ok, disappeared, also last seen in Hong Kong. Several years passed and people learned that they were in North Korea, making movies for Kim Jong-il. Kim boasted that Shin and Choe came to North Korea on their own volition. In the mid-1980’s, Shin and Choe showed up in cities like London and Belgrade, and their words and demeanor appeared to attest, beyond question, their allegiance to Kim Jong-il.

Film director Shin Sang-ok and actress Choi Eun-hee pose as they enter South Korea in May 1989.

Then there was a bombshell. On March 13, 1986, the world learned that Shin and Choe had sought refuge in the American Embassy in Vienna, Austria. For over two months thereafter, people heard nothing.

Then came the May 12 call from the Korean Embassy. I could hardly believe my fortune. I would hear their story, tell the world their story, and above all, I would meet them in person.

Then the day arrived. I sat with the Shin couple in a small ante-room adjacent to the main hall. They were charming, but their smiles were stiff and wary. The subdued air was intensified by the presence of two white bodyguards towering behind them. I wondered momentarily if their press conference was voluntary.

As we entered the conference room, cameras flashed, and a large crowd of reporters rushed about, vying for better spots. Following a brief photo session, the conference began with many questions flying all at once. Shin gestured them to calm down. Choe would tell them her story first.

The couple appears on a Japanesemedia outlet in1984

She began by narrating the scene of her abduction. A group of men grabbed and placed her on a speed boat in Repulse Bay of Hong Kong. She screamed, “Where are you taking me?”

“To Kim Il-sung’s bosom!” one abductor shot back. She used the Korean word, Pum, a word that is reminiscent of the warm heart of a mother.

“Kim Il-sung’s what?” a reporter in the front row shouted.

Alarmed by the question, I repeated, “Kim’s bosom.” Suddenly a question flit through my head. “Does bosom refer only to female breasts?”

Choe continued, in minute detail, of her life in captivity in North Korea. In turn, Shin did the same as if to convince the world that, contrary to some rumors and Pyongyang’s claims, they had been taken to North Korea against their will.

People read stories on the couple’s escape from North Korea, which appeared in the Hankook Ilbo in 1986.
/ Korea Times

As the long narrations continued, the American reporters grew impatient. They wanted to hear about Kim Jong-il and what the Shin couple had thought of the North Korean dictator. If those reporters expected slanderous and quotable words from them about Kim Jong-il, they were disappointed. Shin and Choe did not attack the person of Kim. When pressed, Choe said Kim Jong-il was a man capable of committing “stupendous” acts. No reporter asked them if they feared Kim Jong-il’s reprisal. Or if they felt they were indebted to their captor for the generous treatment the evil man had bestowed on them.

The press conference lasted three hours. Two security guards reappeared from nowhere, and director Shin and Choe were hurried to a dark van. I hardly had time to say goodbye to them.

Seven months later, I received a Christmas card from them with a pleasant greeting. Although the card was postmarked Atlanta, Georgia, I later learned that the couple had actually been living in a townhouse all this while in Reston, VA, my own neighborhood.

Then there was a call from Shin on a spring day in 1988. They had decided to move to Hollywood to pursue film production careers in America. “Would you be available for dinner tomorrow?” He suggested a Chinese restaurant in our area.

When my wife and I arrived at the restaurant, Shin and Choe were already seated at a table far inside the spacious dining room, discreetly apart from other diners. Both looked bright and carefree. Their regained freedom had done wonders for the charming couple, letting their guard down finally.

“Sorry we had to wait for so long to meet you again,” Shin began apologetically. “We had to ponder about our future, what to do, where to live, and how.” He paused for a moment. “American friends had suggested we live in seclusion ― in retirement, and I almost decided to do just that. I thought of painting.” He paused again. “But Choe yeosa thought otherwise.” Yeosa is a Korean term for “lady” or “Madame.” I got the hint: she wanted to be addressed as yeosa, signifying her independence. “Choe yeosa insisted that we stay in America and make movies, and I agreed.” Shin smiled at his lovely wife. I thought it was more on the part of Choe yeosa who had engineered their bold escape from the North.

Shin said he knew the Korean people would wonder why he and his wife would choose America for home. “Of course we love Korea and want to go home, and our fans want us to come home.” But he said, “We are not comfortable with the Korean authorities. Shortly after we had sought refuge in the American Embassy, the Seoul government said it would leniently embrace us back to Korea. Leniency for what? We were taken to North Korea by force, and the South Korean government had the nerve to treat us as if we were North Korean collaborators.” Shin spoke calmly, but his indignation was scarcely concealed.

In an even tone, Shin continued. “We are not safe in South Korea. North Korean agents roam the streets of Seoul at will. Kim Jong-il once boasted to us that he could bring anyone he requested to Pyongyang from Seoul.” With a deep sigh, he said, “And Kim Jong-il has set millions of dollars on our heads.”

There was a pause as we munched sweet-and sour pork. Shin turned his head toward his wife. “Choe yeosa, when I saw you for the first time in Pyongyang at Kim Jong-il’s party, I thought you had completely sold your soul out to the little, bushy-haired dictator. You behaved so fresh with him.”

“Are you kidding?” Choe mischievously retorted. “People don’t call me Korea’s best actress for nothing.” We all laughed together.

I turned to her. “Madame Choe, I saw you for the first time in Daegu during the Korean War. You were playing Ophelia on stage.”

“Oh, you did?. I was a green novice then, and I hardly knew what I was playing. I had a role in Death of a Salesman, and I had no idea what mortgage meant in the script.”

While travelling in Eastern Europe, Choe continued, they had come across a tiny Catholic church. “We entered it and got married…with a solemn ceremony.”

“Over my objection,” Shin quipped, “I don’t believe in such formalities.” He looked at her with a smile that betrayed his ritualistic adherence to his creed.

The conversation turned to their plan for Hollywood. Shin had a lifelong dream to produce an epic movie on Genghis Kahn. One of his proposed desert battle scenes would employ over 3,000 horses, a record in motion picture history. He had written the script based on Aaoki Okami ― The Blue Wolf ― authored by Yasushi Inoue of Japan.

“Sitting up straight in the prison cells, I went over the script hundreds of times in my head, writing and polishing it mentally. The North Korean jailers had laughed at me when I requested a pen and paper.”

Shin was inspired by a character in the story, Quryang, a maiden warrior who, risking her life, withstood Genghis Khan’s attempt to take her by force. She triumphed when the Great Khan begged her for her love.

Over dessert, Shin abruptly asked me if I was familiar with General Dean. I told him I knew who the general was. Shin said his first project in Hollywood would be General Dean’s story, the anti-hero hero commanding general of the ill-fated U.S. 24th Infantry Division, that was smashed by columns of the North Korean Army in Daejeon.

Retreating soldiers reported that General Dean was last seen at a city crossroads with a bazooka on his shoulder¸ facing an approaching enemy tank. He then disappeared for many months. President Truman awarded him a medal of honor in absentia. In December, 1951, the world learned that the general had been held as a POW in the North. He returned home to a hero’s welcome after the armistice. He denied he was a hero.

“There is little information about his captivity in North Korea,” Shin said.

Oh, yes, I replied. General Dean had written an autobiography. I would find a copy, I promised Shin. I also told him that the current commanding general of the U.S. forces in Korea was an old acquaintance of mine. I had first met him in 1958 when he served in Korea as a green platoon leader. He is now a full general. He would gladly provide us with all the resources and assistance ― foot soldiers, tanks and bazookas. Shin’s face lit up with excitement.

It appeared that the move would be Shin’s way of returning the favor to the American establishment which had embraced Shin and Choe since their dash to the American Embassy in Vienna and were now providing a refuge from Kim Jong-il.

Walking toward the parking lot, Shin told me that after settling in Hollywood, he and Choe would travel to Seoul. They had to appear before a court and settle their legal case. After all, they had been in North Korea and had helped Kim Jong-il make movies in clear violation of the South Korean National Security Law. All had been pre-arranged, Shin said, and they would be given Korean passports, signifying their complete freedom at last. Nothing would then hamper their future, nothing, he appeared to reaffirm himself.

Waving at their automobile as they drove off, I wondered what Hollywood looked like.

In the late Fall of 1988, Shin wrote me a letter. He and Choe had settled in a Los Angeles suburb. I noticed that Shin signed his name Sheen Sang-okk. I later learned that the new name spelling had been advised by certain U.S. intelligence officials as a security measure.

Several months later, I wrote Shin that I had discovered where General Dean’s son, William, Jr., a retired Army colonel, lived.

In the spring of 1989, Shin and I met Colonel Dean at a hotel restaurant in San Antonio, Texas. He was an unassuming gentleman with a ready smile. He listened carefully to my account of Shin’s captivity in North Korea. While I had no way of fathoming his thoughts, he surely would have thought of his own father’s incarceration in the North as a POW. Colonel Dean was delighted with Shin’s plan to produce his father’s story, and was happy to transfer the copyright of his father’s book. We all shook hands and parted. A contract would be drafted and signed in due time.

The following month, Korean media reported that Shin and Choe had arrived at Kimpo Airport in Seoul to a tumultuous welcome by his fans. Customs inspectors found in their possession a large amount of material on the Korean War.

“They are for General Dean’s story,” I assured myself.

Then in the late fall of the year, I learned from a newspaper account that Shin, in Korea at the time, had announced a plan to produce a new film, Mayumi, in Korea. There was no mention about General Dean’s story. I was puzzled at first. Why the change of heart? Betrayal! I thought.

“Mayumi” was a code name for a young North Korean female terrorist who blew up Korean airliner in midair over the Indian Ocean. Again, what prompted Shin to change his plan? I could only speculate: a certain powerful element, most likely a South Korean intelligence establishment whose wishes Shin was not in a position to resist was behind it, and with ample funds. Eventually, Mayumi was produced. It turned out to be a box-office dud in Korea and overseas.

Another year passed. In September of 1990, I received a fax from Shin. A wealthy Japanese businessman had promised to invest in the production of The Blue Wolf: the Genghis Khan Story. “Please join me,” he wrote. “I know how to make movies but I know nothing about America. And you have a passion for the arts and a knack for motion pictures. I would expect you to run the office American style.”

Without a second thought, I told my wife that I was going to Hollywood. “You are crazy,” she cried out. I packed up and headed for Dulles Airport. My wife, behind the wheel, did not say much.

Shin and Choe lived in a small but attractive house in Beverly Hills. Its front yard was full of roses. An elderly maid, whom the Shins had brought from Korea, moved around like a family matriarch. There were two adorable children playing. They seemed to be deeply attached to the maid. They were the offspring of one Oh Su-mi, once Shin’s actress lover. The maid had raised the two toddlers while their father, Shin, spent eight years in North Korea. Choe was now their surrogate mother, and the children looked at their “stepmother” bashfully.

Shin delegated to me the power to sign bank checks for the office, a sure sign that he trusted me. But when I requested an employment contract, Shin declined. “We work together with an honor-bound trust, not by a signed paper.” That was not a good sign. I suggested that we retain a law firm, a public accountant, and a PR firm. Shin objected on the grounds that we did not have legal problems, we did not have any income presently, and a PR firm would be expensive. I told him that that was the “American way” to run a business. He did not answer. I took it as his acquiescence and retained a law firm, and so on. Shin instructed me to deny health coverage for office employees, but I did arrange coverage for them. If there were signs of discord between us, I did not sense it at that time.

Shin was a reticent, secretive person. He shared little with me about himself, his intentions, and what he expected of me. I wondered if this was his personality, or the result of the trials he had suffered in North Korea. He kept me in the dark about the details of his production plans. He shared little information with me about his Japanese patron and the investment the latter had promised.

Yet at certain unguarded moments, he told me revealing things. He considered North Korea a haven for film makers. Kim Jong-il provided everything, money, cast and staff, location sites, even a cargo train to blow up, and a helicopter to fly over to create snow-storm scenes. Above all, one did not have to worry about the prospect of box-office success. An audience would be mobilized, and told when to cheer.

“You know,” he once said over lunch, “I chiseled my name on the wall of my cell just to mark that I was there.” I recalled a scene from The Count of Monte Cristo. “I hope they don’t raze the prison.”

Shin remarked with an impish smile.

“When I went overseas, my minders wanted me to bring them gifts. The souvenir items most craved were sunglasses. I wondered if those bastard comrades wanted to look like Kim Jong-il.”

In mid-November of 1990, Shin and I traveled to Calgary, Canada, to look for location sites for a cavalry battle scene for Genghis Khan. The final cavalry charge scene of Kagemusha by Akira Kurosawa of Japan was previously shot in the open field of Calgary. “Kagemusha” meant “a body double” for a warlord. Calgary, however, was dropped because, besides its cost estimates, its topography hardly resembled that of the Great Steppes of Central Asia.

Mongolia, seemingly the best location site for The Blue Wolf, was out of the question. The Mongolian government would not allow a motion picture about its greatest khan drift one inch from its official history. Quyrang, the khan’s warrior-lover did not exist in the orthodox Mongol history as The Blue Wolf script portrayed her.

In the spring of the same year, Shin flew to Tokyo to confer with his Japanese investor. He looked content when he returned. One day soon after, Shin told me with a straight face. “I chose Natasha Kinski for Quyrang’s role.” He continued, “And I want you to go to Italy and meet with Sophia Loren. Tell her we need her for the role of Genghis Khan’s mother.”

I was dumbstruck. The task Shin purported to assign me was nothing like asking a movie star for an autograph. “Is this man serious?” I thought to myself. Did this man make a hollow commitment in order to placate his Japanese patron? To my relief, Shin never brought up the subject again.

Then Shin said he wanted to explore Tajikistan for locations. It was one of such occasions when the director spelled out brilliant ideas as if in passing. Besides the cost factor, the Central Asian region provided an excellent environment. After all, Genghis Khan and his horde rampaged and conquered the desert and steppes of Central Asia. In early 1991, the mysterious and closed land was wide open, thanks to Gorbachev’s perestroika.

I called the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC and spoke with a representative of Sovexporfilm, the Russian state corporation charged with film trade. Through his good offices, his Moscow headquarters sent a letter of invitation for Shin, Choe and me. The Soviet Consulate in DC quickly issued us our visas. Russians were eager to do business with the capitalist world.

Choe, however, was not allowed to go. Her fervent desire to travel together with Shin to Russia had been quashed by the South Korean Consulate in Los Angeles. Why was anyone’s guess.

I traveled to Moscow on February 9, 1991 and met with Boris, a lawyer from Sovexportfilm, who was our contact man and escort throughout our travels in the Soviet Union.

The following day, Shin arrived at the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. He was one of the last passengers to show up at the waiting area. Wearing a pair of sunglasses and a hat tipped way down, he walked in our direction quietly. Shin and I sat down on a corner bench while Boris went outside to hail a taxi. Shin, his head bowed down, did not stir. My heart started to pound faster and faster. What could I do if North Korean agents and their KGB comrades surrounded us? There was prize money on Shin’s head, and North Korea had been in the Soviet orbit until recently.

I noticed a tall and well-built Asian man in a long and loose trench coat and wearing a hunting cap walking briskly toward us. My heart froze. Shin remained motionless. I stood up. The man handed me his business card: First Secretary J.H. Choi, Embassy, the Republic of Korea. “Welcome to Moscow. Our ambassador would be happy to meet with you tomorrow.” He walked away. He looked like a core intelligence officer.

The following day, the first South Korean ambassador to Russia, and my high school classmate, greeted us cordially, but Shin appeared distant to our host. Meeting alone with me in his office, First Secretary Choi stressed that I stay in touch with him wherever Shin and I traveled. “Nothing to worry,” he assured me. When we parted, Shin failed to bow back to Choi.

Our two-day meeting with the executives of Sovexportfilm was pleasant and productive. They appeared sincere and eager to do business with us. Their figures for all the logistic support for our film was less than one-third that of Calgary’s. One executive suggested in jest that a Red Army cavalry regiment could be mobilized for combat scenes. Shin nonchalantly answered he would study the offer.

During a tea break, Shin asked if a replica of the best actress prize for the 1985 Moscow film festival could be made. The award Choe had won for her role in the North Korean film Salt had to be left behind in Pyongyang when they fled to the West. He was told that that could not be done.

Our first stop was Alma Ata, present day Almaty, of Kazakhstan. The city had a large ethnic Korean community. Obviously pre-warned by the South Korean embassy, several leaders of the Korean community came to our hotel to pay a courtesy call to Shin. They identified themselves with South Korea and praised Shin for his heroic escape from the North.

Our next destination was Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the famed hub of the ancient tea trade along the silk road. During the flight, I struck up a conversation with an Uzbek who sat next to me. When he heard the purpose of my trip, his expression turned incredulous. “Genghis Khan of all people, why?” he asked me. “You know, he burnt down our city in 1219. His soldiers killed our noblemen by breaking their spines by bending them backward.” He grew angrier. “Do you know what that evil khan and his hordes left behind? Ashes and their semen in the wombs of our women.” He turned his back on me.

Rhaman, the director of Vatan Film Studio greeted us in the Tashkent airport. Vatan was the best-known film producer in the region. We toured his studio, huge but run down. Its warehouse was full of art work, film sets, and props, mostly of bows and armors. Shin again did not say much, and he showed little interest in what he was seeing. Strange, I thought.

In the evening, Rhaman took us to an ethnic Korean festival entitled Transit, a musical that portrayed the story of ethnic Koreans being forcibly removed from the Soviet Far East to Central Asia in the mid-1930s. When an MC announced Shin’s presence, many people flocked to greet him. Elderly women hugged him. Shin was their hero, and he personified the image of their ancestral home called Korea. He tranquilized the nostalgia of the Korean diaspora.

The following day, Rhaman drove us eastward near the Afghan border to trace the routes that Genghis Khan’s Mongol horsemen had rampaged. Suddenly, Boris shook Rhaman’s shoulder. “Hey, we are in Kyrgyzstan. We have no visas to enter here.” Rhaman did not flinch and kept on driving. He couldn’t care less about what the Kremlin said. Moscow’s grip on its citizens was apparently waning fast. Indeed, the Soviet Union would fall half a year later.

Soon, the snow-covered Tian Shan Mountain range came into view. The Mongol’s ancestral spirits dwelled on the summits. Its sheer majesty humbled me. We all got out of the car and sipped the ice-cold water from the stream at the bottom of the steep-walled valley. Shin remained in the car, his head bowed and pensive. What was he thinking? I wondered.

In Bukhara, we saw gigantic mud-brick walls. A good location site for a cavalry assault, Rhaman suggested to Shin. Shin smiled back meekly. In town, we visited a timeworn mosque mantled in a rich patina of age. “This mosque,” intoned a village elder, “was saved from the Mongol invaders. We buried it underground before they came.” We were told, ad nauseam, of the Mongol atrocities in Urgenchi, Khiwa and other towns we visited. The Great Khan certainly was not popular in this part of the world.

Back at Vatan Film Studio in Tashkent, Rhaman and Boris wanted to hear from Shin. Would there be a contract for the production of The Blue Wolf? Shin was noncommittal. I was not surprised by his reaction. Throughout the trip, Shin remained aloof to the mission he had set out for. He acted more like a bored tourist.

We flew from Moscow to Tokyo and met with the Japanese investor. Shin told his patron that the trip to Russia had been highly productive. He had found excellent location spots and had nearly reached a contract agreement with the Russians.

The Japanese investor did not seem convinced.

Back in the Hollywood office, my misgivings about Shin and his intentions deepened. A disturbing thought lingered in my mind: Was Shin genuinely serious about producing The Blue Wolf film? Yes, at least in the beginning, I concluded. He envisioned producing a Hollywood epic. He fondly talked about Elia Kazan, John Ford, and Robert Wise. He liked to be compared with Akira Kurosawa. He believed his Genghis Khan was his raison d’etre. It deserved an Oscar.

However, his dream ended as just that, a dream. The funds he was promised shrank rapidly as Japan’s economic bubble burst. He discovered that the sheer scale of his imagined production outweighed his ability.

Shin was angry and disheartened, but his ego was too big to forsake his dream. So he kept on acting, literally acting. He was in denial about pursuing a phantom objective.

I decided that there would be no The Blue Wolf, ever. One day in mid-May, 1991, I tendered my resignation to Shin. He replied that he would not stop me from leaving.

I packed and returned home to Virginia.

Taehwa Market in Ulsan is flooded after typhoon Chaba struck the region, Wednesday. The typhoon caused five deaths with one person missing, as well as property damage on Jeju Island and southern coastal areas. Yonhap

Open letter to the people of Busan supporting the work of Busan International Film Festival Director Lee Yongkwan

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THE ATTACKS ON BIFF
Tony Rayns
http://filmalert101.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/tony-rayns-writes-open-letter-to-people.html

As one of BIFF’s foreign advisors, I’ve spent the past year in London watching events in Busan with mounting disbelief. My incredulity began when Busan Metropolitan City Council demanded that a documentary essay-film about the Sewol ferry disaster should be withdrawn from the 2014 festival. When the festival very properly rejected this interference in its programme selection, the City Council stepped up its attack by demanding the resignation of the festival’s director Lee Yongkwan.

Lee Yongkwan, Director of BIFF

Lee Yongkwan, Director of BIFF

And when Mr Lee very properly refused to resign, the national government suddenly decided that it needed to rethink its subsidies to Korea’s film festivals – and it was no doubt entirely coincidental that this entailed making a drastic cut to its support for BIFF. And then, in December, the City Council launched a criminal prosecution of Mr Lee for alleged fraud, citing “irregularities” in his handling of fees paid to sponsorship brokers. It’s reported in the film-trade magazine Screen Daily that the City Council has made it known privately that it will drop the charge if Mr Lee resigns.

There’s an old English saying: “cutting off your nose to spite your face”. It means doing damage to yourself in an effort to prove yourself right. This old phrase seems remarkably relevant to Busan City Council – and, presumably, to its political friends in the presidential Blue House.

I first visited Busan in 1995 at the invitation of Mr Kim Dongho and his team, who were then busy trying to create Korea’s first film festival. Mr Kim asked me to meet the city’s mayor and some councillors to explain to them (from the point of view of a foreigner who works with both films and film festivals) what a film festival is and why I thought they should support the BIFF project. The then-mayor Mr Moon asked me some pointed questions and I did my best to answer them clearly and persuasively. As we know, the city council did eventually decide to support the festival, and it was launched in 1996.

I’ve been back to Busan every year since then, some years more than once, and have watched both the festival and the city grow. Obviously the city would have grown and developed anyway in the last twenty years; the whole of the country has been transformed since the end of military governments. But I don’t think it can be disputed that BIFF has been one the main engines of the city’s growth. By basing itself in Haeundae, the festival prompted major improvements to the city’s transport infrastructure: a subway-line extension, a bridge across the bay. By attracting countless foreign visitors, the festival helped turn the city from a rather dingy and parochial port into a spectacular, cosmopolitan metropolis. The name “Busan” was known to few people around the world twenty years ago, but it’s now known to many millions – and that, too, is largely due to the festival. Such changes are worth vastly more to the Korean economy than the government and city council have spent on subsidising the festival.

This is why I’m incredulous: the government and city council seem hell-bent on damaging one of Korea’s proudest and most cost-effective achievements. Is that what they were elected to do? Are voters happy about the tactics and actions of their elected officials? It seems incredible to me.

Looking at this situation from Western Europe, on the other side of the world, I’m obviously not going to comment on the legal issues. Those are matters for Korea’s own cultural bureaucrats and lawyers. But the events of the past year raise two big questions which are universal, and I’d like to modestly express my thoughts about both.

The first is the question of competence and professionalism in the running of the film festival. It’s transparently clear that the Busan Metropolitan City Council’s problem with Mr Lee Yongkwan is political. The current council is right-wing, and it sees Mr Lee as its political enemy. It takes this political opposition as a valid reason to try to force Mr Lee out of his job. The council must think that Mr Lee could easily be replaced with someone more to their liking: someone who would not protest against political interference in the programme choices. This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen bureaucrats thinking this way in many other countries, including my own. But this kind of thinking is hopelessly ignorant of the way that festivals need to be run and need to interact with their audience, both at home and abroad.

Big film festivals are complex institutions. At the most basic level, they need to find the right balance between film as a business and film as an artform – or between the interests of the film industry and the cultural specificity of the medium itself. This means being able to talk to both business people (producers, financiers, distributors) and creative people (directors, writers, actors) in terms that they understand and respect. This perhaps sounds easy enough, but it’s not: understanding the aesthetics of cinema is often not compatible with the nuts and bolts of getting films financed and shown. It’s quite rare to find a festival director and a programming team who are competent to have both kinds of conversations. BIFF has been lucky to be led by Kim Dongho and his successor Lee Yongkwan.

Festivals also need to strike the right balance between the domestic and the foreign, and between crowd-pleasing populism and specialist interests. The days when “cinema” was easy to grasp are long gone, along with Hollywood cinema’s one-time automatic dominance in the world market. “Cinema” now means many things to many audiences. Some viewers want glossy entertainments which give them emotional and experiential kicks, but others prefer more thoughtful and refined films which are more obviously artful. And some are most interested in documentaries, or animation, or experimental films, or even films which cross the boundaries between the movie-theater and the art-gallery. From the very start, BIFF has been sensitive to the differing needs of its many audiences, and has explored all areas of filmmaking with commitment and enthusiasm.

Of course, the obligation to be both generalist and specialist extends to political matters too. I never thought I would agree with film director Park Chanwook about anything, but he was absolutely correct to point out that it was the city council’s attempt to block the screening of the Sewol ferry documentary which made the issue political, not the festival’s initial decision to choose it for the programme. The documentary was one of some 300 films screened by BIFF in 2014, and screening it did not imply that the festival was promoting the film more than other documentaries, or that the festival director and staff endorsed the film’s point of view. It’s very simple: the festival’s job is to present many points of view, some of which will inevitably seem contentious or offensive to some people. That’s how democracies work.

Thinking about the city council’s concerted attacks on Lee Yongkwan, I can’t help being reminded of the last time that selfish and narrow-minded politicians interfered in the running of a Korean film festival. Does anyone else remember the disaster of the Chungmuro Film Festival in Seoul, hijacked by politicians for what they thought was their own interest? That festival died in its infancy, unable to survive the conflicting pulls of politicians who thought that they could use it to promote themselves and their political parties.

If Busan Metropolitan City Council were to succeed in forcing Lee Yongkwan to resign, what would happen next? No doubt some opportunist hack could be persuaded to take on the job of festival director, even if it entails constant grovelling to the city council, but many of the festival staff – including the specialist programmers, for sure – would resign in sympathy with Mr Lee, leaving the shiny new director to build a new team of fellow-opportunists. At the same time, BIFF’s many friends around the world would boycott the festival, probably also orchestrating a campaign of protest against the city council’s political stupidity. Many filmmakers would refuse to supply their films, journalists and critics would stop taking the film programme seriously – and BIFF would soon go the same way as the Chungmuro Festival. As I said, this is “cutting off your nose to spite your face”. Is that really what Korea’s right-wing politicians want? Do they think that these tactics will endear them to the film community at home and abroad? Do they sincerely care at all about Korea’s status as a constitutional democracy?

These considerations bring me to the second big question raised by what’s been happening in Busan. Korean politics changed profoundly in 1993 when the late Kim Youngsam was elected president, and so did Korean society and the Korean economy. Almost everything that we think of as characteristic of modern Korea has developed since 1993, from the global fame of Korean film and television to the country’s ultra-fast broadband network. At the same time, Korea has become a genuinely pluralist society. Women and minority groups have made their voices heard as never before, the lowering of trade barriers has given Korean consumers access to foreign products and culture as never before, and political differences have been debated openly. These are all hallmarks of a modern democracy. They were worth fighting for, and they are worth defending.

Here’s a brief anecdote from my own experience. One of my closest Korean friends studied film-making in London and found himself dissatisfied with the standard of teaching at the school. His graduation film was an attack on the school. It included documentary sequences in which fellow-students discussed the shortcomings of some of their teachers by name. It ended with a fantasy scene in which the protagonist dynamited the school building. The question arose: would the school include this film in its graduate screenings? Yes, it did screen the film. The school’s director told me that some members of his staff had objected, but he felt it was important to give the graduating student his voice. He didn’t run away from the criticism, as a coward would, but instead faced up to it.

I had very little first-hand knowledge of the “dark days” under military governments in Korea (my first visit to the country was in 1988, when the worst was over), but I know from Russia, China and Singapore amongst other countries how authoritarian governments work. They don’t believe in debate and don’t tolerate opposing points of view. Their first instinct is not to meet opposition with counter-arguments but to silence it. When Busan Metropolitan City Council tells BIFF not to screen a documentary that’s critical of the government, it’s a textbook example of an attack on free speech and an impulse to silence opposing voices. Apparently Korea’s right-wing politicians haven’t noticed or understood the changes since 1993. Apparently they are nostalgic for the “dark days” of censorship, of silencing dissenting voices and of strict social control. I’ve always thought that Korea has a very bright future, and I’ve said so in public many times, but the pig-headed political tactics of Busan’s city council mark a step back into the past. It makes no sense to me.

Tony Rayns

Tony Rayns is a London-based film-maker, writer, critic and festival programmer with a long held interest in the films of East Asia. He has been a program consultant to the Busan International Film Festival since its inception.

It’s Time To Stop Ignoring South Korean Abstract Art

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Korean monochrome painting, or tansaekhwa, originated in a deep ambivalence about painting.
By Barry Schwabsky
http://www.thenation.com/article/its-time-to-stop-ignoring-south-korean-abstract-art/

Globalization has been the talk of the art world for years now, but the international perspective is of a shallow sort—a smorgasbord of names shorn of any sense of culture or history. Ask someone to name a Korean artist, for instance, and the answer will likely be Nam June Paik, who was born in Seoul in 1932. But after his university years in Tokyo, Paik lived in West Germany and then the United States from 1956 until his death in 2006. Someone else might mention Lee Ufan, an artist of Paik’s generation who likewise went to Japan to study and now divides his time between there and Paris. And there’s Do-ho Suh, a prominent midcareer installation artist whose work has appeared in many biennials as well as one-person shows across the United States and Europe. But the list might stop there.

In 2009, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston attempted to offer an alternate view, presenting what was billed as “the first major museum exhibition in the United States to focus on contemporary art from South Korea.” The exhibition featured a dozen artists described as representing a generation that has “emerged since the mid-1980s” (though many of them were younger than that implies). The focus on young artists, justified on the grounds that South Korea “has opened up under the influence of globalization” (­to quote from the publisher’s description of the accompanying catalog), suggests that their work’s immediate international context outweighs their cultural background.

There is finally an opportunity to look a little deeper. This fall, New York City gallery-goers are being newly introduced to an older generation of Korean abstract painters, and it’s clear there’s a lot of catching up to do. Through December 23, Galerie Perrotin is presenting the work of Chung Chang-sup (1927–2011), while, also through December 23, Blum & Poe is featuring Yun Hyong-keun (1928–2007). The Tina Kim Gallery recently mounted the second-ever American solo exhibition of Ha Chong-hyun, an artist born in 1935 and still going strong. Chung and Yun had a few US exhibitions in the early 1990s but not since—in Yun’s case, mainly thanks to the support of Donald Judd, who’d met him and admired his work on a visit to Korea. Ha’s first US show took place just a year ago, at Blum & Poe. All three exhibitions are impressive; those of Yun and Ha are enough to convince me that they are major artists who should have been widely exhibited in museums years ago.

I don’t think I’ve seen the international art market swarm this quickly around a genre since the boom in Soviet unofficial art in the late 1980s. Except for Lee Ufan, who has been better known for his association with the Japanese Mono-ha movement, the artists here—all of them associated with the school of monochrome painting known as tansaekhwa—have until now been practically unknown outside Korea and Japan. They were not included in Barbara Rose’s otherwise comprehensive 2004 exhibition “Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present” (at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid), nor are they mentioned in the “revised and augmented” 2006 edition of Denys Riout’s 1996 book La peinture monochrome: Histoire et archéologie d’un genre.

Why are these Korean painters suddenly appearing (or reappearing) on the New York scene? To reply “It’s the market” isn’t really an answer; instead, it’s a way of avoiding the question of how and why the market abruptly became interested in artists whom it had ignored for so long. One attraction is that ready-made label: tansaekhwa (sometimes rendered dansaekhwa). The word means “monochrome painting,” but it’s usually translated as “Korean monochrome painting” to distinguish it within the genre that came into existence in Russia when Malevich painted his white-on-white canvas in 1918 and Rodchenko painted his trio of red, yellow, and blue works in 1921, and which then reemerged in Europe and the United States in the 1950s with Robert Rauschenberg, Piero Manzoni, and Yves Klein. But what exactly is Korean about tansaekhwa has been questioned right from the start. According to the art historian Joan Kee, the most prominent Anglophone scholar of tansaekhwa, the idea that the movement expresses something quintessentially Korean was first proposed by Japanese critics and only subsequently taken up—and then often contested—by Koreans themselves.

The timeline of the American discovery of tansaekhwa begins in 2013, when the University of Minnesota Press published Kee’s thoughtful and solidly documented book Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method. It’s the kind of text that would ordinarily have earned good reviews in academic journals but little wider notice. The following spring, the New York gallery Alexander Gray Associates mounted “Overcoming the Modern: Dansaekhwa—the Korean Monochrome Movement,” organized by the curatorial team of Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath; it seems not to have received much attention. The same can hardly be said of the next American group show, the much larger “From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction,” which Kee curated for Blum & Poe in Los Angeles in the fall of 2014. The Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel extolled it as “resplendent”; in Artforum, Kavior Moon noted how the works “pushed the material and conceptual limits of painting, often to visceral effect”; and in The Huffington Post, veteran critic Peter Frank proclaimed the show “truly radical.” (The invaluable selection of primary documents translated in the catalog for “From All Sides” is my source for many of the quotations in this article.)

But it wasn’t only the critics who took notice. The New Yorker recently reported that until 2014, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by Ha Chong-hyun was $13,303, and that of the eight works by the artist offered between 2007 and 2013, half didn’t sell. Since then, nine of Ha’s works have been auctioned (in Asia, but often to Western buyers) for six figures each. “To be honest, it was not possible to make a living making this kind of work in Korea,” he told The New Yorker’s Natasha Degen and Kibum Kim. “I was so tired and it’s such welcome news.” You’re going to be hearing a lot more about tansaekhwa in the near future, and hopefully the major surviving artists associated with it—along with Ha and Lee, I can mention Park Seo-bo and Chung Sang-hwa—­will reap at least some of the benefits.

* * *

Tansaekhwa deserves the attention of anyone with a genuine interest in painting, in part because it originated in a deep ambivalence about painting. In South Korea, education in painting runs on two separate tracks: “Oriental” (ink) and “Western” (oil). The tansaekhwa artists, born and partly educated in the prewar period of Japanese occupation, may not have been trained under this system, but it’s worth considering their work not so much as a synthesis of these supposedly separate Asian and Euro-American strands, but in opposition to both—as well as in opposition to the very dichotomy between them. Lee speaks of Yun’s works not as paintings but as “unpaintings.” For his part, Chung Chang-sup has explained, “Painting without painting, creating without creating, this is what I will.”

“Creating without creating” means, I take it, giving up a certain artistic control in favor of allowing impersonal processes to occur. This is what happens in a number of works titled Return, made in 1977. In them, Chung mounted hanji paper onto canvas, leaving a border of canvas around the paper (thereby demonstrating that both Korean and Western materials have been employed). Ink has been applied to the paper from its edges, soaking into it in irregular rivulets, so that the painting’s “empty” center—­which isn’t really empty, because the blank paper has a tonality of its own, while its thinness allows the weave of the underlying canvas to show through—is surrounded by a jagged black repoussoir, as if it were made of ripped paper. It looks like light tearing its way through a wall of darkness.

The later works on view are mostly from the series Meditation and dated 1996. They are more like painting without painting than creating without creating—which is to say, they are painting with other than the traditional means, Asian or Western. Neither ink nor paint is employed. Instead, Chung made these works solely using a pulp made from the inner bark of the mulberry tree, which is known as tak. Rather than transforming this substance into the delicate sheets of hanji used for calligraphy, or even the sturdier sheets used in traditional Korean architecture as well as for craft objects, Chung applied the tak pulp to canvas, working it in a quasi-sculptural fashion to create a texturally variegated “impasto” that in each piece frames a central square or squarish zone in which the paper has been pressed completely flat. The edges of the central square are in part very crisply defined, but in other passages may fade almost imperceptibly into the more roughly worked surround, suggesting that the geometrical form is as much a mental construct as a visible one. The colors of the works range from pure white to earthy browns; as Chung himself put it, these tones “are subtly faded and blurred into yellowish tint or bluish gray in the sediment of time.”

The dense matter of the paper forms a kind of wall—most prominently in a 1994 Meditation consisting of a vertical grid of 12 square panels without the impressed central zone found in the 1996 works—but it’s a wall that breathes. “Through the screen of tak paper,” Chung explained, recalling the walls of the house in which he’d grown up, “one can distinctively sense the wind, light and the flow of time outside his or her room, which allowed us to experience both feelings of being inside and outside.” It was clearly his intention to evoke such experiences in his art. The nostalgia they hold for Chung may be imperceptible to a Western viewer—or, for that matter, to a new generation of Koreans who did not grow up with traditional architecture—but the warmth and, to a certain extent, the idealization with which Chung conveys those experiences remains accessible.

* * *

Because of a certain harsh edge, a freedom from idealization, the work of Yun Hyong-keun has to my eye a greater force than Chung’s. Unlike Chung, Yun used materials exclusively from the Western tradition—oil on canvas—though in tension with the Korean history of ink painting. In his mature paintings, he worked with just two colors, ultramarine and burnt umber, though he applied them in so many overlapping washes that in most cases no particular color is discernible. Yun himself spoke of “a concentration of navy and the color of dirt…. I do not tire of this color, and although it looks black, it is a mixture of the colors of dirt and water; it is a bitter color, like that of rancid ink.”

All but two of the 12 paintings on view at Blum & Poe feature a linen ground whose beige or buff tonality gives a distinctive atmosphere. In a 2007 painting that has a whiter and finer cotton, on which the painted form shows up with a sharper edge, the black has a more graphic impact. But on the linen, Yun’s infinitely variable “rancid ink” color seems blacker than black—­deeper, more beguiling, like that immensity in which Giacomo Leopardi once imagined his thought voluptuously drowning.

Blocks of this inky darkness loom up—often just two, sometimes three or four—with unpainted intervals between them, sometimes in the larger portion of the canvas but more often in slivers, as well as above them. The effect is dramatic, at times almost minatory, and the blurring at the fringes of the dark zones makes the force behind this striking effect somehow hard to locate. Likewise, the intersection of the columns of murky paint with the lateral edges of the canvas—and always its bottom one—often has the paradoxical effect of dissolving the edge, of blurring the boundary between painting and wall. Yun once said, “I want to hang my paintings on dirt walls”—that is, walls that might be similar in color to the paintings themselves. His work feeds off a tension between marking and not-marking, between making distinctions and effacing them; but it thrives on the discomfort in this ambiguity—or, rather, this ambivalence.

The two most recent paintings by Ha Chong-hyun in the exhibition at Tina Kim—a kind of mini-retrospective that follows his work from 1972 through this year—might look, at first, to be cousins with Yun’s glowering columns of stygian blue and umber. Ha’s Conjunction 15-214 and Conjunction 15-215, both from 2015, are composed of columns of thick oil paint (white and black, respectively) on brownish hemp, like burlap. But the thickness of the paint, a stark contrast to Yun’s dense layering of evanescent veils, makes all the difference. With Yun’s paintings, it’s hard to tell whether the paint has been applied from the top and brushed down to the bottom edge or vice versa. I’d bet on the former, which would mean that the viewer’s sense of forms rising up was in contradiction to their true genesis, a sort of illusionism. In Ha’s case, no doubt is possible: We can see that the paint has been pushed upward from the bottom. What the painter has actually done and what the paint appears to do are in unison. And in place of Yun’s blurred distinctions, Ha’s paint is clearly set off from the surface (and never intersects the lateral edges, only the bottom).

However, there’s a hidden dimension to these paintings, which might be more evident in some of the others on view. Ha uses coarsely woven hemp not as a support in the traditional sense, but as a sort of membrane: He pushes the paint through it from behind, then manipulates it on the recto. The “conjunction” indicated by the title he’s given to all of his works since the mid-’70s is this meeting of paint and fabric as two separate entities. He’s written of his fascination with how these “two unique substances…came into conflict with each other.” In other paintings, Ha has left intact the evidence of the paint’s having been squeezed through the surface, even as he further worked it in a remarkable variety of ways—although usually in ways that produce, as Kee puts it, “a viewing experience made unstable by competing allegiances to pictorial composition and materiality.”

Unlike Chung’s or Yun’s work, Ha’s maintains no overt allusion to the Korean ink-painting tradition. He uses, sometimes against themselves, materials associated with the West; yet in their parsimony, their atmosphere, their material force, his paintings aren’t so distant from Chung’s or Yun’s. Still, on the evidence of this show, Ha is an artist of greater range than Yun or Chung. Like them, he has chosen for himself a strictly circumscribed paradigm—­emphasized by the fact that all three artists give the same or similar titles to their works once they’ve arrived at their fixed position: Chung’s are Meditation, Yun’s are Umber-Blue or Burnt Umber & Ultramarine or similar, and Ha’s are always Conjunction. But Ha’s paradigm seems more capacious: He allows himself more ways of working his paint and a broader range of tones, though always earthy or somewhere on the gray scale. What might be most surprising to viewers coming to these works with Western monochrome painting in mind is the artists’ determined avoidance of pure or primary colors. To Barnett Newman’s rhetorical question “Who’s afraid of red, yellow, and blue?”, the tansaekhwa painters might well have replied, “We’re not afraid; we just couldn’t care less.” In a fascinating 1977 roundtable discussion between Korean and Japanese artists, “On Color in Contemporary Painting,” the sculptor Shim Moon-seup speaks with disdain for the work he’s encountered by the French Supports/Surfaces group, whose experimental approach to painting one might have thought would be sympathetic to their tansaekhwa contemporaries. Shim understands that “their motive is to treat color like a material object” but finds that despite themselves, they are “immobilized by it,” finally dismissing them as mere “drapers.” By contrast, Lee has praised Yun for evoking “a scene that does not lead one to perceive either color or form in particular.” Park Seobo agrees that “it is not suitable for a color to bring out its distinctiveness in an imageless structural expression,” while Ha seems to choose his paint colors above all to set off that of his burlap, which he happily describes as of “a color that is extremely limited, even monotonous to the point of squelching the imagination.”

Instead of asking why tansaekhwa is suddenly “hot,” it might be better to ask why it took so long for the Western art world to notice it. The answer to that question probably lies in this quest for an area of indiscernibility: The force of this art lies in understatement. In any case, as Ha reflected in 1977, “Being unable to sell or being ignored by collectors is different from being unappreciated. There is an audience as long as someone comes to see the work.” Tansaekhwa painters have had plenty of time to cultivate the strength to persist while being ignored. I hope they’ve also developed the very different strength it takes to persist in the spotlight, because the time when they’ll need it seems to have arrived.

I need you. I want you. I seoul you

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I.SEOUL.U:
KONGLISH GOES GLOBAL AND THE CASE FOR THIS SLOGAN

Andy SalmonI need you. I want you. I seoul you….

Yep, this here is the new branded slogan to be used locally and also globally in Seoul’s promotional efforts – tourism promotion, investment promotion, export promotion.

Does it deliver a key message? Does it spark emotion? Does it compress data? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

I was offered the opportunity to play a (very small) part in this process and declined – having been disillusioned and frankly hugely pissed off when I was on the sidelines of the shambolic “Hi Seoul” campaign (if you can call it that) back in the MB mayoral days.

But seeing as everyone, his cousin and his dog is seizing the low hanging fruit; lambasting the new slogan for our fair cityl and suggesting their own (supposedly) brilliant alternatives, let me present a different perspective. Three points:

(1) With a touch of irony and with a nod to humour in usage, this could work: it is offbeat and funky enough. (Though yes, I know: The campaigns which actually use this slogan will be crass, trite, cutesy and crap, and no Seoul bureaucrat worth his salt would dare include those characteristics. But even so…there is potential).

(2) English is a world language, flexible enough to accommodate non-native usage. And the audience for this is not necessarily native speakers; For example, in tourism promotion, the main audience is Chinese and Japanese. Something this simple (subject-verb-object) might just speak to them when something cleverer and more sophisticated might not.

(3) Frankly: Who gives a flying fuck? Seoul has enough assets in place – a huge variety of assets, from taekwondo to high technology – to not need a silly, unprofessional and bureaucratic slogan. Organically, the city has already becoming one of the world’s great metropolises: IOW, the substance beats the branding.

For more on the latter thought, a previous column:
(Incidentally, my original title was “Damn These Korean Branders!” but the sub-ed toned it down. Also, the self-described “PR expert” Seo Kyung-duk, referenced below for his nationalist Times Squares “ads,” was on the latest Seoul branding committee….)

http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/phone/news/view.jsp?req_newsidx=123415

Embeddedness essay

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CONTEXTS AND TRANSFORMATIONS: KOREAN FILM AND VIDEO SINCE 1950

Actors do not behave or decide as atoms outside a social context, nor do they adhere slavishly to a script written for them by the particular intersection of social categories that they happen to occupy. Their attempts at purposive action are instead embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations. – Mark Granovetter, ‘Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness’. The American Journal of Sociology, 1985 p487

The term ‘embeddedness’ is borrowed from ocnomic historian Karl Polanyi who argues in The Great Transformation 1944 that human economy is not autonomous but subordinated to and constrained by institutions such as in politics, religion and social relations. The term is one of the core concepts of economic sociology as such it is salient to this series and our attempts to trace the history of artist moving image practices in Korea where early forms of mass media were employed as a means of social control and artists films with seemingly individual expressions were embedded within these social conditions. So much so that it is very difficult to find personal forms of expression in the medium of film until early 2000. Largely dependent upon film technologies supplied by the US and Japan, the Korean Film Industry has slowly developed from its beginnings during 1950s and the Korean War, through to the introduction of audio-visual education at Ewha Womans University with help from the US Information Service, to early 2000 when filmmaking classes opened in numerous universities and the Korean film industry established its current position as one of the central film and media industries in Asia.

As interest in new filmic languages grew during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of film groups and collectives were established. Amongst the most important of these were Cinepoem coterie (est. 1964), Film 70 (est. 1968), the Small Gauge Film Club (est. 1970), Image Research Group (est. 1972) and Kaidu (est. 1974). Many artists and filmmakers sought to find new modes of expression through utilising newly available 16mm and super 8mm cameras. At the time, only films made by government-recognised production companies could be screened in cinemas, so these collectives instead held their screenings at foreign cultural centres.
Due in part to censorship in Korea at that time, as well as the absence of established networks for presenting experimental film, many of the artists who had begun experimenting with film and had produced pioneering works in the 1960s and early 1970s such as Kim Ku-lim, Lee lk-tae and Han Ok-hi later returned to other art forms. The late Kim Jumsun, who took part in experimental filmmaking workshops at the Goethe Institute during the 1970s, stated that it was very difficult to access information on contemporary western visual art and film during this time. One of the pioneers of video art in Korea, Park Hyun-ki (1942-2000) first came across the work of Nam June Paik, who primarily worked outside of Korea, in the archives of the American Cultural Centre the in 1970s. Throughout this period the European cultural center played a key role as alternative cinema space for screenings, discussions and workshops.

Until the relaxation of censorship at the end of 1980s, the majority of the South Korean population had their access to international mass media strictly controlled. Without personal wealth, or good political connections, it was extremely difficult for Korean artists to become part of international networks, and gain access to contemporary critical theories that would nurture their practice. A figure such as Kwon Joong-woon, who studied in New York during the 1990s, is therefore critical to the development of artists’ moving image practice in Korea. Having discovered media theory during his time in the US, Kwon returned to Korea and went on to lecture at several universities and established the Korean Experimental Film Institute / 실험영화연구소. Kwon’s work examined the history of American avant-garde and looked into the possibility of filmmakers utilising new media technology, as explored in Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema 1970. In 1997 he published New Media Aesthetics and tried to create a form of continuity in the production, screening and archiving of work for artists based in the Korean Experimental Film Institute. Lim Chang-jae and Park Donghyun among others established their practice at this institute are still working in this field.

In the 1990s there were several production-based organisations such as the Underground Creative Group – Pajeok / 지하창작 집단 – 파적 and CP16R, which was connected to Culture School Seoul now Seoul Art Cinema). These groups attempted to find an alternative meaning of cinematic expression, focusing on either ‘independent film’ / 독립 영화 or ‘experimental film’ /실험영화 and issues of production, screening, distribution or funding. Emerging around the same time, they provided a sense that film was beginning to become important in the Korean cultural scene. Despite this up until the late 1990s, political and sociological interest and engagement was always deemed to be more important than personal expression in these alternative filmmaking projects.

During this period, the predominant view was that an alternative formal expression and exploration would detach independent films from the public. This led to a separation of ‘experimental film’ from the sphere of ‘independent film’ in Korea, leading to a number of film festivals no longer including video art and experimental films in their programmes.

Although there were various forms of experimental filmmaking practiced by artists / filmmakers such as Lim Chang-jae and Kim Yoon-tae, it’s a common perception that a significant proportion of experimental film began with the 1st Experimental Film Festival held in 1994 under the title ‘Ecstatic Visions: The Aesthetic of New Media Film’. The festival featured films by Hwang In-tae, Bae Ho-ryong, Lim Chang-jae, Kim Yoon-tae shown alongside work by Kenneth Anger, Robert Breer, Su Friedrich, Doug Hall and Jane Campion. This confirmed for many the suspicion that experimental films made in Korea from the 1990s onwards were ‘western’ in conception, rather than works emerging from a process of self-invention within the specific sociocultural context of Korea. Memory of Surface, Surface on Memory, Lee Jang-wook’s graduation film, became the centre of this debate along with works by Yang Min-su, Koo Donghee, and Park Donghyun. These artists had returned to Korea from prestigious art schools abroad — The Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Art Institute and Yale University.

In the 1990s various events helped to introduce moving image into the context of contemporary art. These exhibitions opened this area of practice to a new generation of artists, from the Whitney Biennial in Seoul at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, 1993 to the – Taejon EXPO (1993), from ‘The City and Moving Image / 도시와 영상’ exhibition at Seoul Museum of Arts in 1998 to the first screening of video art at the Art Sonje Center in November 1998.

By 2000 the film industry, both independent and commercial, had become fully acknowledged as a key component of Korea’s creative economy, and universities began to provide training for people to work in the burgeoning film industry. In 2004 EXiS (International Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul was launched with a survey of the history of Korean experimental film. At the same time, Spacecell, the first artist run film lab in Asia, was founded to support the film community, and has been organising handmade filmmaking workshops since 2004.

Several celebrated artists have emerged in the last decade such as Kim Kyung-man who has used the documentary film as a means of political expression, the video and installation artist Byun Jae-kyu explores the subject of memory and place in photography and Park Min-ha who focuses on the problems of materiality and space through the use of special effects borrowed from the mainstream film industry. Other artists / filmmakers such as Park Chan-kyong, Jung Yoon-suk, Im Heung-soon, to name but a few, are all primarily working within the arts yet exploring the potential of documentary film as a way to engage with contemporary politics and to reinterpret Korean history. They have looked at different social issues from Korea’s recent past, such as the Jijon Clan case of the first serial killer that shook Korean society during the mid-1990s, to the development of the Cheonggyecheon area of Seoul, which has come to symbolise the modernisation and industrialisation of post-war Korea. Many prominent Korean artists now see film as their primary artistic medium, from the recent work of Park Chan-kyong, Yeondoo Jung, Koo Donghee and Im Heung-soon to the collaborative practice of Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, who represented the Korea Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015.

Hyun Jin Cho, George Clark and Hangjun Lee, September 2015.

EMBEDDEDNESS: ARTISTS FILMS AND VIDEOS FROM KOREA 1960S TO NOW 18-19 September 2015
Organised in collaboration with the Korean Cultural Centre UK, EXiS and supported by LUX.
Booklet edited by: George Clark with Hang jun Lee and Hyun Jin Cho.

Thanks to: Scott Miller Berry, Judith Bowdler, Ben Cook, Maria Palacios Cruz, Electronic Arts Intermix, EXiS, Independent Film & Video Association in Seoul, Indiestory, Joan Kee, Kabsoo Kim, Yoonha Kim, Korean Film Archive, Sook-Kyung Lee, Lightcone, Andrea Lissoni, LUX, Samantha Manton, Je Yun Moon, Junho Oh, Sangnyang Park, Hanseung Ryu, Seulki Shim, Maria Montero Sierra, Ji Hyun Song & Unseong Yoo.

RELATED EVENT: LUX SALON WITH HANGJUN LEE Monday 21 September, 19.00

Hangjun Lee will discuss experimental film and video practices in Asia from the 1930s to now. Lee will present various key works including pioneering documentary films in 1930s by Liu Na-ou from China as well as introduce artist film lab movements such as Spacecell (South Korea, founded in 20041, Lab Laba-Laba (Indonesia, founded in 2014).

Hangjun Lee is the Program Director of EXiS, independent curator and filmmaker. He programmed Letterist Cinema, film performance and expanded cinema events and retrospective programmes of Ito Takashi, Okuyama Junichi, Michael Snow among others. He initiated Asia Forum 2009 at EXiS, an annual platform for Asian experimental moving images. He curated numerous screening programmes for international venues including Guling Avant-Garde theatre (Taipei), Green Papaya Art Project (Manila), Nanjing independent film festival (Nanjing) and OX warehouse (Macau). Recently he curated the opening commemoration screening programme Cinematic Divergence 2013, live film and improvised music festival Mujanhyang (anechoic) 2014 both for National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul. He performed with many musicians such as Jerome Noetinger (France), Hong Chulki (Korea), Dickson Dee (Hong Kong), Martin Tetreault (Canada), Sandra Tavali (Taiwan), Kracoon (Indonesia) to develop live filmic language as filmmaker. He edited Anthology of Asian Experimental Moving Image 2009 and has written for several film and art publications in Taiwan, China, South Korea.

So, what was that inter-Korean crisis about? And who won?

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http://www.nknws.org/2015/08/so-what-was-that-inter-korean-crisis-about-and-who-won/

Laydeez and gennlemen! I hereby claim the prize for the Article Most Instantly Overtaken By Events. Any other bidders? There may well be. On Planet Pundit, this goes with the territory.

On Monday August 24, with North and South Korea still huddled in seemingly interminable talks at Panmunjom, the Guardian asked me to pen a piece for their “Comment is Free” pages. I wrote at Chollima speed, submitting it at 1415 BST. Lightly edited, it went live at 1636.

Hopefully this still has uses, for background analysis and little-known details. But within an hour the inter-Korean deadlock, which I took as my starting-point, was finally broken.

Obviously I’m glad. As a firm believer in Antonio Gramsci’s watchword “Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will,” it’s nice when gloom and doom turns out to be misplaced.

But misplaced, or postponed? Already, within a few days of tensions easing – that at least is certain, and a great relief – there is little agreement on what really happened on the peninsula last weekend. In particular there are widely differing views as to which side came out on top.

Was this a win for President Park Geun-hye, who halfway through her five-year term has so far achieved precious little with the North or on any front?

If so, it was hard-won personally. Such was the strain of two successive rounds of all-night talks – an insane way to do business, albeit routine for international bankers and lawyers in today’s damaging long-hours culture – that President Park burst a capillary in her eye. She wasn’t negotiating personally, of course, but obviously she and other senior officials had to keep the same crazy hours in order to keep track, as well as brief and be briefed. A good many senior figures in both Seoul and Pyongyang must still be catching up on their shut-eye.

Was it worth it? One camp sees this as a win for Park: she held firm and hung tough. Yonhap,

South Korea’s quasi-official news agency, opined: “The deal gave a big boost to Park at a time when she deseparately (sic) needed public support to push through her reform agenda.”

UCSD’s Stephan Haggard, in a valuable series of real-time series posts from Seoul where he was attending a conference, agrees that it’s “hard to see this as anything but a North Korean stand-down.” Pacific Forum-CSIS’s Ralph Cossa concurs: “South Korea just said we are not taking this anymore. They are playing hardball with them, and I think essentially the North Koreans blinked.”

Victor Cha (CSIS, Georgetown University and formerly the George W Bush administration) is of the same mind. Also, he reckons he knows exactly why the North blinked. In an article for Foreign Policyheadlined “Kim Jong Un Versus The Loudspeaker,” he claims: “The recent Korean crisis ended because Pyongyang is terrified of Seoul’s propaganda broadcasts.”

So far, so unanimous: One-up for Seoul. No way, says Joshua Stanton of One Free Korea. In his altogether more pessimistic take, it was North Korea that came out on top of a situation it had deliberately “created with malice aforethought” by planting those mines in the DMZ:

“(The two Koreas) came, they talked, and they signed, but they solved nothing … Pyongyang didn’t apologize, and Seoul will continue to pay. The loudspeakers will be switched off. There will not be an all-out war, and probably never would have been. The limited, incremental war will resume, only at a time and place more to Pyongyang’s advantage.”

… the North reportedly hardly raised the issue of (Ulchi Freedom Guardian) at all in those 44 hours of grueling negotiations

So, experts are divided. Nothing unusual there, especially when the dust has yet to settle and the ink is barely dry. Indeed, military moves continue. Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG), the big regular annual U.S.-ROK war games that began on August 17 (they were briefly suspended when real life threatened to get hot), still have some days to run. Pyongyang always blasts this as a dress rehearsal for invasion. But one incidental puzzle of the recent crisis is that the North reportedly hardly raised the issue of UFG at all in those 44 hours of grueling negotiations.

Experts being divided is one thing. Pyongyang divided: that’s something else. North Korea’s two chief negotiators swiftly commented – but with totally different interpretations, handily posted together onXinhua. Chinese readers, and the rest of us, may well scratch our heads.

SWEET AND SOUR

Hwang Pyong So, widely seen as second only to Kim Jong Un, sounded a sour note in a TV broadcast. Seoul had been taught a “harsh lesson … it will only entail military conflicts that escalate tensions if South Korea fabricates a groundless case, makes unilateral judgment and moves to provoke the other side.” That caused dismay in Seoul, leavened by recognition that the North for domestic reasons always has to spin everything as a victory for its totally correct political line, matchless armed forces and peerless leadership. Still, it wasn’t making nice.

But contrast Kim Yang Gon, North Korea’s longtime point man on the South and the North’s number two at the recent talks. Kim was all smiles. No talk from him of harsh lessons or groundless provocations. As quoted by Xinhua, Kim told the North’s KCNA news agency:

“It was very fortunate that the recent contact helped to defuse the danger of the touch-and-go situation … and offered an opportunity of a dramatic change in achieving peace, stability, reconciliation and cooperation … We are pleased … that the North and the South sat face to face (and) had an exhaustive discussion to reach an agreement on issues of common concern, thus opening up an epochal phase for turning misfortune into blessings in the North-South relations.”

That’s more like it. I did wonder if this sweetness and light was for outside consumption only, but no. KCNA’s own full account is all in similar vein, positive and forward-looking.

So whom do we believe: Sour Hwang, or sweet Kim? Maybe the boss can shed some light. Kim Jong Un has now weighed in personally. On August 28, exactly a week after the party Central Military Commission (CMC) last met in emergency session, Kim convened it again.

I say “it,” but in both cases this was a much enlarged meeting; including the full Cabinet, the party Central Committee, provincial party bosses as well as shedloads of military personnel. As KCNA’sphotos show, there were hundreds of people in the room – uniforms to the front, suits firmly in the rear – all being lectured by the Young Marshal. A round-table this was not.

An enlarged meeting, but also somewhat reduced. Some CMC members were sacked, but we don’t yet know who or why. Kim’s comments were interesting, if not exactly encouraging. The main lesson to be drawn from the recent crisis, in his view, is the need “to bolster up the national defense capability as firm as iron wall.” That’s because “peace restored under the situation that reached the brink of a war was by no means something achieved on the negotiating table but thanks to the tremendous military muscle with the nuclear deterrent for self-defense built by the great party.” So all those 43 hours of talks didn’t count for anything?

Or again: “the DPRK proposed the north-south high-level urgent contact on its own initiative and put under control the situation which inched close to an armed conflict, thereby clearing the dark clouds of war that hung over the Korean nation and defended peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and in the region.”

Well, that’s one way of putting it. Another way, if one accepts the South’s version of events regarding the mines, is that the North merely dug itself out of a big hole of its own making.

Kim also struck a rare note of self-pity: “We protected the dignity and sovereignty of the country, the gains of the revolution and the happiness of the people by our own efforts amid the tempest of the history without anybody’s support and sympathy.” (Did anyone, perish the thought, say ronery?)

All this will doubtless be pored over and parsed endlessly. Sniffing for subtexts, it’s highly plausible that Kim’s advisers were divided over the wisdom of the mine provocation. So you can just imagine the postmortems raging now in Pyongyang – where, crucially, mortem (it’s Latin for death, remember) is not a metaphor if you end up on the wrong side of the argument.

We can parse away, but actually for once this will be decided empirically. The inter-Korean talks produced a brief but quite concrete agreement, committing to do specific things fairly soon. Family reunions, further high-level talks, and NGO contacts are all envisaged.

Encouragingly, Kim Jong Un directly endorsed this accord: “The joint press release published at the contact provided a crucial landmark occasion of defusing the acute military tension and putting the catastrophic inter-Korean relations on the track of reconciliation and trust.”

The same day the CMC met, South Korea’s Red Cross started the ball rolling by proposing an initial contact on September 7 to discuss family reunions. So let’s see. Will all go smoothly? Or will it be like after last year’s dramatic but short-lived troika visit to the Incheon Asiad, when the promised follow-up talks never happened and the Koreas reverted to bickering?

Only time will tell. So it’s back to Gransci. I’m cautiously hopeful, yet also depressed. Even if we get family reunions and the rest, it only takes us a small step back towards the much better ties the two Koreas had achieved in the sunshine decade before 2007. It’s snakes and ladders.

And why on earth does the North feel it has to arrange a crisis and go to the brink of war, in order to get a dialogue which could have been its for the asking anyway? Seoul had long been offering unconditional talks. There was no need to mobilize troops, launch submarines and declare a state of semi-war. Kim Jong Un could have just picked up the goddam phone.

Unethical Conductor and the fate of Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra

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http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum/general-discussion/unethical-conductor-and-the-fate-of-seoul-philharmonic-orchestra

I am Sang Soo Kim, a playwright, a producer, and culture critic living in Korea. I won the Dae Jong Award (the equivalent of a Korean Oscar) for the best screenplay in 1996.   As an artists, I pursue social justice.

Recently, Korean society has experienced some turbulent times with the alleged embezzlement perpetrated by Myung Whun Chung, the chief conductor and the artistic director of Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra (SPO).  Mayor Myung Bak Lee (who became the 10th President of South Korea, whose policy turned into a total failure and also is suspected for his possible involvement in Korean CIA’s illegal intervention in the 2012 Korean presidential election) appointed Chung as the chief conductor and the artistic director at SPO in 2005 and gave him near autocratic power over the SPO management. Upon arrival at SPO, Chung disbanded the union and fired 75 orchestra members without any proper procedure.  As the result of those illegal lay-offs, lives of many families were totally ruined.  As Chung’s illegal and unethical acts have been brought to light, the majority of the Korean public started asking Mayor Won Soon Park, the current mayor of Seoul, to fire Chung from SPO.  There is even a rising voice that Chung should be indicted for embezzlement which he has been involved in for the past 10 years.

As public opinion went against him, Chung’s side released an article written by a fictitious author, named Arnold Nielsen, who claimed to work in the classical music business, but the article did not provide the exact identification of its author. This article was linked to the Slipped Disc, a website on classical music, run by Norman Lebrecht. The purpose of this article is to refute the result of the special audit for Chung and SPO, done by the city of Seoul. The article suggested the accusation against Chung is not true and it was caused by either trivial mistakes or misunderstanding.

In this article, I will uncover all the wrongdoings and embezzlement which Chung Myung Whun has been perpetrating since he joined SPO as the chief conductor. The facts and evidences used in this writing to refute the Arnold Nielsen’s article are all true.

Chung says he knows only music.

“I know only music.”

When the public raised these issues, Myung Whun Chung, the chief conductor/music director of Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra (SPO) since 2006, responded with the same remark. This remark can be interpreted to mean that he is just a music artist who is not involved in any money or business matters.

In several Korean media, I disclosed many illegal and unethical acts of Conductor Chung and insisted that Mayor Park Won Soon should not continue the contract with him.  Although the special audit by the city of Seoul on Conductor Chung and SPO revealed most of my arguments were true, in January 2015, Mayor Park announced a one year extension of Chung’s contract saying there is no alternative to replacing Chung.

In this column, I want to discuss the reasons why the city of Seoul should not continue the contract with Chung.

Does Chung’s salary fit his worldwide reputation?

Chung’s reputation as a conductor is overestimated in Korea compared to his worldwide reputation. Currently in addition to SPO, Chung assumes Chief Conductor positions at two other orchestras, Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra (RFPO) (Paris, France) and Asia Philharmonic Orchestra (Incheon, Korea).  According to Ms. Mok Soo Jung’s investigation which was checked with an official who has been working at RFPO for over 20 years, RFPO rated Chung’s reputation as a conductor at the middle level of the second group (B Group) and thus his salary at RFPO was determined by such a position.

Considering the fact that Chung is under contract with RFPO with 20 annual performances, Chung’s salary at RFPO is between $674,000 and $719,000. At SPO, in addition to the base salary of $198,000, Chung’s conducting fee has reached at $44,000 this year, with a 5% increase every year and this fee is paid for each performance. Both his base salary and conducting fee paid by SPO are higher than his current level rated by RFPO.  Chung’s total pay of $1,811,000 at SPO is 3 times higher than the pay he receives from RFPO. Chung has been working at RFPO for 14 years and if he really was underpaid there, he could have moved to other places.

Although Chung’s name was not in the list of guest conductors at any of the top 3 orchestra (Berlin Phil, New York Phil, Vienna Phil), his pay at SPO corresponds to the second place among the top ten highest paid orchestra conductors in USA. The average conductor pay of orchestras in USA is much higher than the one of orchestras in Europe.

Is Chung’s extra pay reasonable?

Chung’s extra pay at SPO is even much higher than his salary. According to the contract between Chung and SPO (Dec 30th, 2008) and the financial statement of SPO for the year 2010, the city of Seoul paid Chung $1,811,000 for salary and conducting fees. In addition to this, Chung was paid $188,853 in 2010 and $94,000 for the unlimited first class airline flights (2 persons).  He was also paid $27,000 for his personal expense account, $40,000 for his foreign assistant (The existence of this assistant was claimed by Chung, but its authenticity has never checked yet.), and $54,000 for his oversee activities. These expenses were exchanged to Euro and transferred into Chung’s private account, but Chung has never provided the evidence of these costs. Considering these costs are paid by tax payers of the city of Seoul, Chung is in violation of Korean law by the failure of submitting required expense proofs. Furthermore, there were other incidents of expense claims, such as $36,000 for limousine rentals and $36,000 for hotel stays, which were not listed in his contract. There is no other chief conductor who is provided unlimited first class flights (including his/her spouse) by the orchestra. Also, SPO paid for the round trip airfares to Chung, who work back and forth between Seoul and Paris and RFPO has not paid any part of these airfares.

Chung has not responded to the request for special audit

Since there has been many questions raised about Chung’s possible embezzlement, in 2014, the city council initiated a special audit for Chung and SPO. The city council asked Chung to attend the business report, but Chung did not respond and the special audit had to be done without questioning Chung.

Chung did false claims for airfares

The special audit performed by the city council (presented in January 2015) revealed that Chung let his family (his son and daughter-in-laws) use the flight tickets which were paid by SPO for the use of Chung’s personal manager.  In this matter, the city of Seoul asked Chung to return $11,000. The Korean investigation TV program, “PD Note”, reported that Chung once claimed $40,000 for the round trip first class airfare, when in fact the actual price of the ticket at the time turned out to be only $10,000. In another incident, Chung received the amount of $37,000 with the copy of an electronic flight ticket. However, the investigation of PD Note revealed that the corresponding electronic ticket was never used for boarding. In the phone interview with PD Note, the former CEO of SPO, Park Hyun Jung, said Chung asked SPO to pay cash specifically for the airfares, although all other expenses were paid using his business credit card.

Chung asked the contract kept in private.

On the contract Chung made with SPO on December 30th in 2008, contrary to the list of only a few obligations that Chung needs to do for SPO, the rest of the contract is filled with the list of the requirements that SPO needs to do for Chung.  A careful study of the contract reveals that it is an unfair one sided contract not in conformity with international practices. According to the contract, in addition to the base salary of $198,000, Chung receives a conducting fee of $38,400 for each performance (in 2011), and the conducting fee increased 5% each year since 2010. Customarily, in the contract the chief conductor makes with the orchestra, the general practice is to specify the number of performances which the conductor must conduct in order to get the salary. Chief conductors of major orchestras are usually paid an annual salary and they do not receive additional conducting fees. However, Chung’s contract with SPO consists of both the annual salary and the conducting fee for each performance.

Also in this contract, when SPO induces a sponsor using Chung’s image SPO is obligated to give Chung the amount agreed upon in advance up to 30% of the sponsor donation, depending on the proportion that his image is used in the whole PR and marketing.  In addition, SPO has changed its performance schedules if there was a change in Chung’s personal schedule, whereas and this kind of performance schedule change was not possible in the contract with RFPO, unless for health reasons.  The contract also specifies Chung can work as the chief conductor in up to two orchestras including SPO and RFPO in which he has been working for 14 years. But he also works as the chief conductor at Asia Philharmonic Orchestras which he is running with his older brother and by doing so, he apparently is in violation of his contract.

Chung asked SPO to keep the contract private. Considering the one-sided nature of the contract it can be understood why Chung would not wanted it to be publicly revealed. However, it is not proper to keep the contract private, since most of SPO budget is supported from tax payers’ money.

SPO Operates as a One Man Chung Myung Whun Dictatorship.

Has the current SPO attained the status of one of “the most competitive orchestras” worldwide, as Chung had promised?  Chung possesses the absolute power over almost every aspect of SPO management, such as the selection, the dismissal, the evaluation and the request for the sanction of orchestra members, the appointment of vice conductors, the invitation of guest conductors and soloists, the selection of repertoires, and even the rejection right for any matter which was not agreed upon with the city of Seoul. He has determined by himself the selection and the dismissal of orchestra members and he set up the system in which 5% of the total members were fired each year. Under this system, over the past 10 years 75 SPO members have been fired by Chung. Among the five members who were fired last year, four filed a law suit for unfair dismissals and they have already won in the labor arbitration board.  Having 5% of orchestra members fired each year means the members need to remain in the good graces of Chung even aside from enhancing their musical skills.  Under such a system, orchestra members have to sacrifice their teammates in order to survive and it could be harmful to the harmony and the cooperation which is important for orchestras. This system has been working for the past 10 years without major discontents exposed to the outside partly because Chung has removed the union after his arrival at SPO.

The special audit conducted by the city council also revealed some unfair cases in the evaluation process for members. It also revealed that 66 SPO members were asked to perform as guest members of Asia Philharmonic Orchestras where Chung works as the chief conductor and considering the above dismissal system, they could not have refused such a request.

According to Mok Soo Jung, who investigated the case of RFPO, Chung was not given such power at RFPO. At RFPO the chief conductor is just one of the 12 jurors who decide the audition for selecting new members of RFPO and it is not the chief conductor who makes the decision regarding the dismissal of members. The chief conductor is supposed to discuss with the official of RFPO regarding matters relating to the general management of the orchestra. Although the chief conductor is mainly responsible for the selection of repertoires, soloists, guest conductors and guest members, the orchestra members also can provide their opinions through the representative they have selected.

As 5% of members are constantly being fired each year, 15% of the total members were brought from abroad and have played as guest members only at the performances in which Chung appeared. The cost of having such guest members such as airfare and hotel were also paid by SPO.  Some people said the sound of SPO has improved since Chung joined and such improvement was offered as evidence of the achievement of Chung. However, other people have expressed doubts as to whether such temporary input of guest members can be really considered the true sound of SPO.

Is SPO Chung’s private organization?

The former CEO of SPO, Hyun Jung Park, exposed that SPO was being operated as if it is Chung’s private organization. The CEO of SPO is supposed to be appointed by the Mayor of the city of Seoul. But the actual selection process was one in which Chung selected the CEO among candidates that the city of Seoul had listed from recommendation from various sources. The former CEO Park was selected after she was interviewed by Chung. After her arrival at SPO, she pointed out several problems where Chung had ignored the procedures or had violated the contract. She continuously raised issues about Chung’s wrong doing and eventually lost the power struggle by being dismissed from the CEO positon in January 2015.

The symptom which tends to prove that Chung has operated SPO as his private organization appeared in several. For example, two names were listed as the chief conductor in the list of the 2010 SPO Europe tour, one was Chung and the other was his wife. It means tax payers of the city of Seoul had to pay for the tour expense of his wife. There was a case where SPO paid the business class flight to USA for Chung’s son.

Chung also violated the contract by holding 5 piano recitals, which the former CEO Park did not approve since the recitals were for making his own profits. Also Chung participated in the fundraising of the non-profit organization he founded. This act itself was not illegal, but it was not proper for him to receive tax deduction as the business owner by donating his performance fee to his own organization.

Chung also asked SPO to rent out its musical instruments to the orchestra where Chung’s son is the chief conductor and sometimes asked SPO members to appear in the concert in which his son conducted. With respect to questions asked about such illegal rentals of SPO instruments, the SPO official said “The rental fee was paid.” However, since SPO is not supposed engage in rental services for profit, such response was not a proper one.

Is Chung’s achievements at SPO worthy of his pay?

Chung’s achievement at SPO claimed by Chung’s supporters are the following: 1. Increase in audience, 2. Europe tour, 3 Record release at Deutsche Grammophon (DGG). Chung’s supporters suggest that Chung deserves to get paid $1,811,000 a year because SPO audience has increased three times since Chung joined SPO. Although their logic is based upon the market theory, they talk about only the income, not the cost. The SPO budget has increased from $270,000 to $1,183,000 (in 2011), 4.3 times increase since Chung joined SPO. Out of the SPO budget in year 2014 ($1,536,000), $1,001,000 (65% of the SPO budget) comes from tax payers and the ticket income comprises only $171,000 (11% of the SPO budget).

Chung’s supporters also point to the Europe tour in 2010 as Chung’s major achievement. In most invited tours, it is the convention that the inviting sponsor pay most of the tour expense for the orchestra, such as airfares, hotel fee, and performance fees, etc. However, in the SPO Europe tour in 2010, the tour expense, $117,000, was paid by tax payers of the city of Seoul. The ticket income from this tour was only $29,000. Chung said, in the interview Chung did with the Korean Economy, a Korean newspaper on September 20th in 2011, Korean Economy, “I have a lesson from this Europe tour that certain income can be sure when there is substantial investment for SPO.” (September 20th, 2011) In fact, the only one who received such certain income was Chung himself. He earned a total of $153,000 from the four tour performances ($38,400 for each performance) and the amount which 105 SPO members earned from this tour was only $2,277. Chung’s conducting fee ($38,400) is 700 times higher than the amount a SPO member receives from the performance ($54).

Chung and SPO officials also claimed that the 5 records of SPO released from DGG are evidence that Chung is entitled to get such huge pay from SPO. “No other Asian orchestra even Japanese orchestras have had such accomplishment which a major record company like DGG has released their records.” (January 13th, 2011, Chosun Ilbo) Is the alleged claim “SPO is the first Asian orchestra which has received recognition from the major record company like DGG” true? If that claim is true, DGG should have paid the expense of the record production and release, such as performance and conducting fees, recording expense, PR and marketing etc. The reality is that SPO paid that total expense, which was over $243,000, not DGG.

From the above reasoning, I suggest the claim that Chung deserves such to get such big pay from SPO needs to be reconsidered.

What did the former SPO members fired by Chung have to say?

Former member A: “I had a high expectation when I heard Chung was coming to SPO. But upon his arrival I realized my hope was just an illusion. He did not talk with us, the members of SPO. The only time he talk to us is when he delivered his instruction. With the name of “the visiting concerts”, we performed at big churches. There are many members who are not Christian, but we had to pray before we perform at those churches. Since when has Chung become a world top class conductor? I think Korean media exaggerated Chung’s legacy.”

Former member B: “My experience of the concert when Lorin Maazel performed as the guest conductor with SPO is unforgettable. He showed me what a great conductor could do for the orchestra and its audience and what the performance was like with such a world-famed top class conductor. I had never felt the similar emotion when I performed with Chung. The audition for firing 5% of members each year scared us. We always felt uncomfortable. We had no opportunity to talk with Chung about music or our concerns. He seldom stayed in Seoul. He came to Seoul accompanying with foreign guest members, performed at concerts and left. This happened only when there was a concert. After the concert, we rarely see him again.”

Former member C: “I always felt anxious. I had to try my best to impress him and not to do anything which could offend him. There was no time when I play music at ease. After SPO became an independent company, we were not able to say NO. The atmosphere was that we could not give him any constructive suggestion. I suspected that there were some members who were monitoring us. After I got fired by Chung, my wife said I looked more comfortable than when I was working at SPO, even though our family had to find other ways to make a living. Since then I stopped playing the instrument.”

Former member D: “We, the SPO members, were only accessories to Chung. I am concerned about the new young members who have recently joined SPO, because they might be getting wrong ideas about how the orchestra should be like. The most important thing in the orchestra is the harmony and cooperation between the conductor and the orchestra members. However, Chung treated the members like parts of the machine. OK, I can admit I got fired because my musical ability was not good enough. However, after the 10 years of my devotion to SPO, when I heard a young office worker tell me “You cannot be part of next concert.”, I was devastated. It is hard to express my feeling when I saw my position filled with a foreign guest member who Chung brought from abroad… that was awful.”

What is the responsibility of an artist as a member of our society?

When Korean public asked Chung not to abuse his power or to justify his use of tax payers’ money, he said “I know only music.” People may feel genuine if this remark is uttered by an artist in poverty who cannot earn enough to provide for his/her family. However, when Chung says the same remark, people may be doubtful since he earns $1,811,000 a year and his family members (wife, son and daughter-in-law) are also paid for first class and business class flights and especially the substantial portion of these pays was supported by tax payers’ money.

Chung’s supporters say that social justice is not the area a great artist like Chung should pay attention to. Really? There are great music artists such as Daniel Barenboim who advocates human rights and Gustavo Dudamel who supports the music education of underprivileged children and the impact of these artists to our society is priceless.

Music is an expression of free spirit of mankind and a great orchestra performance can enrich our lives. An artist should respect other artists and share fellowship with them. As a member of our society, an artist should fill his/her responsibility and should not abuse the art as only means of moneymaking or being famous.

Therefore, I ask Mayor Park not to make an extension of Chung’s contract. For the past 10 years in the hands of Chung, SPO has been operating without proper regulations or procedures. SPO has been just a private organization which was misused by Chung as means for building his own personal wealth and fame. It is time to give SPO back to citizens of Seoul. I also ask Mayor Park to gather public opinions and ideas so that SPO can really serve citizens of Seoul as a sound public art institution.

Thank you very much for spending your precious time in reading my article.

Your interest and support will help Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra come back to normal and eventually will be able to better serve citizens of Seoul.

Sang Soo Kim

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Tue 3rd March 2015

Music Insider
Unethical Diatribe Reveals Total Ignorance

Mr. Sang Soo Kim’s diatribe reveals him to be an embittered man without a clue as to the nature of the classical music world and what the norms are governing conductors and their roles, responsibilities and perks.  One can only assume that he is driven by jealousy of Maestro Chung’s incredible success and major standing in the international arts scene, and his own irrelevance.  With the numbers he bandies about, one wonders who is the source of his “information”?  Could he possibly be the mouthpiece for the inept but incredibly cruel former CEO of Seoul Philharmonic, who has now been dismissed in shame from two consecutive positions, and who has a reputation well known in Korea for her dogged pursuit of anyone she feels has bested her?

Had he done all this research himself, surely Mr. Kim also would have learned that it is quite common – indeed, almost a requirement – for Chief Conductors (in some cultures known as Music Directors) to make decisions regarding musical personnel within the orchestra, hiring and firing (which is an agonizing process for the conductor as well as the musicians), repertoire, approving soloists and guest conductors, etc – in short, they are responsible for every artistic aspect, even to the selection of instruments the orchestra purchases.  Some try to shirk these time-consuming and often emotionally-wrenching duties, and those who fulfill these ungrateful tasks do so at great personal cost.  Maestro Chung has accepted his responsibilities and carried them out with humility and humanity – in the cases where musicians have had to be removed from the orchestra because they were holding the rest back artistically, he strove to find them other responsibilities within the organization (such as working in the educational activities of SPO).  Mr. Kim’s reference to this without including the full picture leads me to believe two things:  That his attack is politically motivated (and this impression reinforced by his reference to the former Seoul mayor and later Korean president who brought Maestro Chung to the SPO) , and that he has been directed by an SPO insider to a particular inadequate musician who rejected offers of other ways to serve SPO and its public.  A question for you, Mr. Kim – if you had an actor in one of your productions who couldn’t learn their lines properly, who refused to or was unable to accept your direction and perform to the level of the rest of the company,  what would YOU do?  Jeopardize the success of the play or film and watch the other, competent actors descend into depression and despair? Or would you – after giving that actor instruction and opportunities to improve – finally replace him, for the good of the rest of the company?

I have to laugh at the reference to first class airfares.  On such long trips as the flight to Asia, this is standard for conductors even of a lower standing than Maestro Chung.  I know of another conductor who is in the same league as Chung, who was routinely given not only first class air for himself and his wife, but also for his infant and the nanny.  Indeed, certain top conductors frequently demand private jet.

Regarding Maestro Chung’s “sin” of performing piano recitals without the former CEO’s approval – it is absolutely ludicrous that this situation of Maestro Chung NEEDING her approval exists.  It reveals both her overpowering need to control and micro-manage those she saw as “beneath her” as well as her total ignorance of the field into which she fell after her previous failure with Samsung.  One would hope a person who was given this job as a political favor to her powerful family (as rumor has it) after her complete failure in another position, would at least take the trouble to study the field and learn what is normal, what is acceptable, and what isn’t.  She, apparently, couldn’t be troubled, or perhaps felt it was up to her to rewrite the profession.  In any case, she quickly became the butt of jokes in classical music circles, with her inflated sense of importance and ridiculous comments and demands which revealed her ignorance and sense of grandiose entitlement.

If there was to be any examination of the workings of SPO, it should have been into the dictatorial way in which the most recent CEO ran her ship.  The turnover of staff – many of them having been with the orchestra for many years – is a clear indication of something wrong.  People were ridiculed and harangued in front of their colleagues, sometimes for hours on end, in the most abusive terms by her.  At least one member of staff ended up in hospital as a result of her abuse.  And yet, the socially-conscious Mr. Kim doesn’t mention or isn’t concerned by THAT?  I have observed Maestro Chung’s work with the SPO in rehearsal on several occasions, and never have I seen him be abusive or even raise his voice.  He is known throughout the musical world for his respectful approach to his musicians.  Indeed, he is revered.  Despite Mr. Kim’s claims to the contrary, he conducts both the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics (and not as frequently as THEY would wish, he often declines their invitations, at times because of conflicts with his commitment to Seoul Philharmonic), and the New York Philharmonic would desperately love to have him conduct, if only he would.

It seems to me that Mr. Sang Soo Kim has joined the dark forces who would wish to reduce Korea’s most important artist ever to their own level.  Success sadly often provokes jealousy.  I’m sorry to see Mr Kim using this as an opportunity to sink in his poison daggers, trying to slander a man who is not only a great artist but also a great humanitarian (and the great ones, like Maestro Chung, do not publicize and flaunt their acts of charity, but do them quietly).  This is clearly a politically-motivated attack, and one can only hope that Mr. Kim isn’t being financially rewarded for being someone else’s mouthpiece.

——————–

Tue 3rd March 2015

justamusician
rubbish

Dear Sir,  You clearly have a non-musical agenda as you reference the former Mayor and President Lee Myung Bak.  Whatever you think of his politics, Maestro Chung’s music has nothing to do with this.  He was – and remains – the right man at the right time – for the future of orchestral music in Korea.  You quote the former CEO of the Seoul Philharmonic – a person of no credibility in the music field who harrassed and humiliated staff in a clear violation of human rights, not unlike the former KAL Vice President – but betrayed her ignorance when criticising a staffer who programmed Stravinsky’s ‘Le Sacre de Printemps’ in the fall.  Her personal vendetta against Maestro and other staff members has lead to chaos within the organisation and a loss of confidence with the orchestra’s partners in the business abroad.

My understanding – though I cannot confirm this – is that because she comes from a wealthy and powerful family – she was hired as Chief Executive to give her a second chance after she was fired for complete ineptitude by the Samsung Insurance group.  Rather than leaving the debacle she created at the SPO and going quietly, she has decided to continue a vendetta against the Maestro who created a musical miracle, an orchestra now invited to top festivals and venues, whose appearance at the BBC Proms was critically lauded, whose DGG recordings rank with the best in the world.

Maestro Chung only came to the SPO because of his desire to build a great Korean orchestra. What other major conductor would have done this?  The orchestra was in poor musical condition with no reputation even in Korea.  Under Maestro Chung’s leadership, it is viewed as an international success story (at least till the former CEO came along.)  Maestro Chung spent more time working and building this orchestra than most conductors spend with their more famous ensembles.  He has turned down engagements with famous ensembles to devote his time to the SPO project.  Because of the extraordinary work Maestro has done with the SPO, the orchestra is now able to attract a superb group of guest conductors who, ten years ago, would not have considered coming to this orchestra.

Unlike other famous Korean artists who charge a premium for playing in their home country, Maestro Chung’s per concert fee in Korea is similar to his fees abroad.  Unlike other important conductors, he does not travel by or demand a private jet.  The KBS Orchestra – not nearly on the same level as the SPO – was in negotiation with another top conductor for a much higher fee than Maestro Chung was paid.

You and the former CEO may be responsible for changing the history of orchestral music in Korea for the worse.  I know many conductors – most are not saints.  Myung Whun Chung, with his quiet, unsung charitable work round the world and his financial generosity – comes closer than any other conductor I know.  In Seoul, he always fought for the musicians – wanted a pension plan, for example.  When a musiciann had to leave for musical reasons and the good of the orchestra, he always wanted to make sure it was done in the kindest way possible and tried to help them find alternate employment.  You don’t know what you are talking about, Sir, and I suggest you limit your comments to your field of expertise, if indeed you have one.

—————————

Tue 3rd March 2015

(Reply to #3)

kimsangsoo

To Music Insider & justamusician

I do not know who you are, but both of you might have inside information about Chung and SPO. All the information, especially the numbers (such as pay) are public information, which was either provided by the city of Seoul or published in Korean media.

Also, my remark that Chung was not invited in the 3 major orchestras as a huest conductor was based upon the list of guest conductors presented in the orchestra homepages. If Chung has turned down any of their offers and if you have any proof of such invitation (such as email conversations between SPO and the inviting orchestra), you may provide here.

I clearly say that I have no connection with any other party, like the former SPO CEO.  In my article, I speak using specific public information. If you have OTHER information to refute my arguments, please present what you have, instead of the irrelevant personal attacks.

The information on Chung’s pay at Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra is based upon the article written by Ms. Mok Soo Jung, which was published in the Lemonde Diplomatique:

http://www.ilemonde.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=2956 

I watched The Interview with a North Korean defector

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http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/23066/1/i-watched-the-interview-with-a-north-korean-defector
Lucy Edwards, Dazed, 5 January 2015.

Joo Il Kim and Lucy Edwards after watching The Interview

Joo Il Kim and Lucy Edwards after watching The Interview (photo: Lucy Edwards)

By the end of 2014, everybody in the world had said their piece on the controversial James Franco and Seth Rogen film The Interview. Is it offensive? Should it be banned? Is America committing an “act of war” just by making a movie that about assassinating North Korean leader Kim Jong-un? Typically, the only people left out of the conversation were actual North Koreans.

I teach English to North Korean defectors living in New Malden, a suburb of southwest London. Two of them were planning to watch the film anyway, so I asked if I could join them. We meet at the offices of Free NK newspaper, described on its English website as “a newspaper of hope and democracy with the goal of liberating the people of North Korea suffering in distress”. My student Kim Joo-il founded the newspaper after escaping from North Korea in 2005.

Joo-il joined the army as a teenager. As the famine of the 1990s and 2000s took its toll, soldiers deserted their units to try and escape starvation. Joo-il’s job as captain was to track them down. Most North Koreans are not allowed to travel. This, combined with a lifetime of government propaganda, means that they are unaware of the situation outside their hometowns. While Joo-il was travelling around North Korea in search of deserters, he realised that people were starving everywhere. Every train station had piles of bodies lying around.

He knew something was wrong. But what really triggered his decision to escape was a trip home. To welcome him back, his sister gave him a meal of rice, meaning that her own family had to go without. A few days later, Joo Il’s starving niece stumbled across some raw corn and ate it. It swelled up in her stomach and killed her. She was four years old.

In 2005 Joo-il was sent to Hamgyong province, near the Chinese border. He knew this was his one opportunity to escape. He waited for a cloudy night and crept past border guards to swim across the Yalu river, arriving in China four hours later. Joo-il went to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand before being granted asylum in the UK, and finally settling in New Malden. His family in North Korea are constantly watched by the government.

Joo-il tells me through Seonju, our South Korean translator: “I don’t really want to watch this film. But after all the media attention and the hacking incident, I wondered what the controversy was about.” His friend, another defector who works at the Korean supermarket next door, doesn’t turn up at the last minute.

This was probably a wise decision.

Joo-il, Seonju and I proceed to sit through all 112 minutes of The Interview in awkward silence. As the only Westerner in the room, I am painfully aware of the lazy Asian jokes, stereotypes and cardboard North Korean characters. Constant crude sex jokes, combined with the high-ranking female Korean official’s inexplicable horniness for Seth Rogen made for a distinct “watching Masters of Sex with your grandparents” vibe.

The only laugh comes from Seonju, when Seth Rogen falls out a window. Though that might have been a cough. When Kim Jong-un is finally blown up in a much-discussed helicoptor scene, I look over and see Joo-il yawning. I’m pretty sure that two women and a 41-year-old North Korean defector were not the target audience for this film.

“By making a film about the assassination of Kim Jong Un, I think Sony Pictures deliberately set out to create a media storm,” Joo-il says afterwards. “With this subject matter, it could be an effective film, but I’m disappointed. Maybe Sony paid the North Korean government to create a scandal.”

Joo-il is also unconcerned by Sony Pictures Entertainment’s decision to cancel the release in cinemas. “Sony Pictures Entertainment is a private company,” he explains. “They can do what they want. Whether they choose to release it or not, it’s OK it’s not an important point.”

So does he see The Interview having any positive impact for the people of North Korea? “It cannot help us to understand North Korean people,” he tells me. “Not in a serious way. And it will not have any impact on spurring western governments or the UN to take action either against the North Korean government or for the North Korean people.”

Thrown in with the smutty one-liners and “Frosty Nixon” (Frost/Nixon, geddit?) gags, there’s a running joke that Kim Jong-un is scared people will think he’s gay because he likes Katy Perry and cocktails. According to Joo-il, nothing about the film would chime with ordinary people in North Korea.

“North Korea is a closed society,” Joo-il explains. “Our culture is influenced by Confucian values of reverence and respect. The crude sexual content would get an adverse reaction. Most North Korean people wouldn’t even understand the concept of homosexuality.”

In a recent Good Morning America interview, Seth Rogen said: “In the movie we go to great lengths to separate the regime that rules North Korea with the North Korean people themselves. And they are not bad; they are the victims of a horrible situation. Part of me thinks that they themselves would really enjoy the movie. Maybe. Who knows? I wonder if we’ll ever find out.”

“I myself am a defector,” Joo-ill says. “But when I watched this film, I felt insulted. I understand it’s a comedy, it’s not serious. But even though they are laughing, it demeans North Korean people.”

He adds that he has read reports that defectors in South Korea have sent copies of the movies to their relatives in North Korea via instant messaging – but after seeing the movie himself, Joo-il believes these reports are untrue. “I heard Americans know little about North Korea,” he says. “North Koreans are always portrayed as obedient robots. So with all the vulgar words, it’s like there is a subtext which demeans Korean people. In this movie it looks like we are too stupid to realise our government is bad.”

As for those plans to airdrop copies of the film over North Korea? “This idea would just be for show, there would be no positive effect.” And no, cultural differences aren’t what’s stopping Joo-il from enjoying The Interview. “Actually,” he says, “I have seen many American movies but this is the first time I’ve seen this kind of shit.”

Joo-il specifically singles out the moment where Franco’s character tells his new puppy, “We’re going to America, where they don’t eat dogs”. Here there is a moment of confusion as Seonju, our interpretor, had fallen asleep and missed this obviously riveting part of the movie. But were she awake, she tells me, she would also find this offensive. (She loves dogs.)

Punchlines about dog-eating Koreans isn’t satire – and it’s definitely not the kind of comedy that disarms a feared dictator. I ask Joo-il if North Korea could flip the tables on Sony and make a comedy about assassinating Obama could work in North Korea. He muses: “In North Korea all visual media; art, theatre and cinema comes from the central government. There is no cultural code whereby people could enjoy the assassination of Obama in the form of comedy. Maybe there could be a serious film, designed to arouse North Korean people’s rage.”

But maybe this won’t be necessary. As Joo-il puts it: “If they spread The Interview in North Korea, it will make people hate America much much more.”

New Stunningly Elaborate Scenes Created Without Photoshop by Jee Young Lee

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http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/jee-young-lee-update
Jenny Zhang

jeeyounglee1LoveSeek

Seoul-based artist Jee Young Lee devotes weeks and months to building incredibly elaborate scenes by hand for the sake of taking a single photograph—all without the use of digital manipulation. Confined to the small space of her 360 x 410 x 240 cm studio, she painstakingly constructs every last detail of the set, from painted backgrounds to handmade props to objects suspended from the ceiling. The results are surreal, dreamlike images made all the more extraordinary by knowledge of how much grueling labor and patience went into creating each scene.

At the focal point of nearly every photo is the artist herself, her gaze never quite meeting the viewer’s directly. Inspired by Korean fables or personal experiences, these imaginative self-portraits explore “her quest for an identity, her desires and her frame of mind,” according to OPIOM Gallery. “Her creations act as a catharsis which allows her to accept social repression and frustrations. The moment required to set the stage gives her time to meditate about the causes of her interior conflicts and hence exorcise them; once experienced, they in turn become portents of hope.”

Lee, whose work we first shared in 2013, unveiled two new images—LoveSeek and The Moment—in 2014, included here with a selection of works never before seen on My Modern Met.

Above: LoveSeek

jeeyounglee2TheMoment
The Moment

jeeyounglee3MonsoonSeason
Monsoon Season

jeeyounglee4Childhood
Childhood

jeeyounglee5ReachingfortheStars
Reaching for the Stars

jeeyounglee6SweetAppetite
Sweet Appetite

jeeyounglee7NeverendingRace
Neverending Race

jeeyounglee8Flu
Flu

jeeyounglee9Raw
Raw

JuxtapozJeeYoungLee22
The Gamer

http://www.opiomgallery.com/fr/artistes/oeuvresphotographe/17/jeeyoung-lee