Category Archives: Art and Culture

Fun on the dark side

Posted on by
Reply

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article1279157.ece

AIDAN FOSTER-CARTER

Victor Cha
THE IMPOSSIBLE STATE
North Korea, past and future
530pp. Bodley Head. £25.
978 1 84792 235 9

John Everard
ONLY BEAUTIFUL, PLEASE
A British diplomat in North Korea
260pp. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Paperback, £12.99 (US $18.95).
978 1 931368 25 4

Blaine Harden
ESCAPE FROM CAMP 14
One man’s remarkable odyssey From North Korea to freedom in the West
242pp. Pan Macmillan. Paperback, £8.99.
978 0 330 51954 0 US: Penguin. $15.978 0 14 312291 3

Johannes Schonherr
NORTH KOREAN CINEMA
A history
215pp. McFarland. Paperback, £63.50 (US $75).
978 0 7864 6526 2

Andrei Lankov
THE REAL NORTH KOREA
Life and politics in the failed Stalinist utopia
283pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $27.95).
978 019 996429 1

A now familiar satellite image shows the Korean peninsula at night. The South is ablaze with light, as are nearby Japan and China. The North, by contrast, is plunged in darkness but for a single blob: the capital Pyongyang, its monuments more brightly lit than residents’ homes, (North Korea has other large cities, but they show up only as the faintest of pinpricks.) You can feel the metaphor coming. The government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, its official name) keeps its citizens in the dark, not just literally – electricity is in chronically short supply – but by blocking all influences from outside, including the internet. In the other direction it is a different picture. We know far more about North Korea than formerly, yet pools of dark ness remain. Politics is one such, not least the thirty something young man who now rules the DPRK, and who earlier this year was cheerfully threatening all and sundry with pre-emptive nuclear strikes.

Until a decade ago, Kim Jong Un was not even known to exist, despite years of schooling in Switzerland; were our spies asleep? Kim Jong 11, son and successor to the DPRK’s founding leader Kim II Sung, was thought to have two sons of his own. In 2003 a Japanese who calls himself Kenji Fujimoto published a memoir, claiming to have been Kim Jong Il’s sushi chef and con¬fidant for over a decade. His tales of court life in Pyongyang – nude dancing girls (no touching), dog soup on Sundays and more – included the first mention of a hitherto unknown third son, said to be hot-headed and his father’s favourite. Right on both counts, it appears.

Fujimoto feared for his life after these revelations. Yet last July he was invited back by Kim Jong Un, who seems to share his father’s view that there is no such thing as bad publicity. In 2001 Kim Jong II had told Konstantin Pulikovsky, sent by Vladimir Putin to escort him on a leisurely and luxurious journey to Moscow aboard Kim’s personal train: “I am the object of crit¬icism around the world. But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track”. Like Fujimoto, Pulikovsky spilled the beans. Live lobster was flown in daily as the caravan crossed Siberia. There were silver chopsticks, fine French wines, lusty choruses of old Soviet songs, and maidens “of the utmost beauty and intelligence” (clothed, indeed uniformed).

Pulikovsky’s account, Orient Express, remains untranslated. The same goes for Fujimoto, now with three books out, and the important memoirs of Song Hye Rang, aunt of Kim Jong IPs disinherited and off-message eldest son Kim Jong Nam: formerly of Macau, now in hiding. Even the gripping tale by South Korea’s Burton and Taylor, the film director Shin Sang Ok and his on- off spouse the actress Choi Eun Hee, of their 1978 kidnapping – or was it? – on Kim Jong Il’s orders, life in the North (from jail to pal¬ace) and escape in 1986, has never appeared in English.

This is surprising. Nowadays books on North Korea pour from the presses: written mostly by outsiders who have never lived there, and occasionally never even been there. In this inspect the light map of the peninsula is reversed. Oddly, there are far fewer non-specialist works on the South: a fascinating and dynamic land, much easier to visit and study. Daniel Tudor, the Economist’s Seoul correspondent, recently published the first general introduction to South Korea to appear for some time; calling it, somewhat unexpectedly, The Impossible Country.

In a coincidence both authors may regret, Victor Cha chose the same adjective for the other Korea, where it fits much better. An academic who served in George W. Bush’s White House, Cha has written what his publisher brashly bills as “the definitive account of North Korea”. There can be no such thing; but this is a serviceable intro¬duction, from a conventional US viewpoint, to the tangles of what an earlier age would have called “the Korean question”. It will disappoint those hoping for an inside view of the battles between hawks and doves that rent the Bush administration, undermining any coherent policy. Cha’s defensive account is less informative than works with no axe to grind, such as Mike Chinoy’s Meltdown (2008).

His virtues include a crisp chapter, “Five Bad Decisions”, on how the North’s economy lost its initial lead over the South (impossible to imagine now) and became today’s malnourished basket case. On policy, Cha rightly urges the need for the US and South Korea to coordinate their contingency planning with China. Beijing has not been keen, but this may change as it loses patience with Kim Jong Un’s antics. The final chapter, “The End Is Near”, predicts that the DPRK will collapse under the weight of its contradictions, and soon. Such forecasts have been heard for two decades, but North Korea has defied them thus far. If it survives till 2020, it will surpass the USSR as the longest-lived Communist (if that is the word) state. Its second hereditary succession looks smooth, yet in May a defence minister was replaced for the third time in a year. The armed forces thrived under Kim Jong II; his son and the Party are now reining them in. Ructions are possible, but Cha’s hopes for something akin to the Arab Spring in the DPRK seem optimistic.

Thousands of Westerners visit North Korea each year; a dozen firms compete to take them. (None pulled out during the recent tensions, though they had some cancellations.) Far fewer Westerners live there. Those who have written about the experi¬ence include two Englishmen, Andrew Hol¬loway and Michael Harrold, whose job was to correct the English in translations of works by the Leaders. Recently the Swiss Felix Abt self-published a book, available online, A Capitalist in North Korea, about his years in the country between 2002 and 2009. It would be good too to have the obser¬vations of aid workers, whom since 1995 North Korea has grudgingly let in, as it needs their help; but none so far seems to have gone into print.

John Everard wishes they would, so as “to correct the assertions of some who have writ¬ten at length and stridently … on the basis of very limited knowledge”. He himself spent two years (2006-08) in North Korea as Her Majesty’s Ambassador; previous postings had included inaugurating the Brit¬ish embassy in Belarus. UK-DPRK diplo¬matic relations date only from 2000, but already Britain has had six chefs de mission in Pyongyang. James Hoare opened the embassy, writing about this and more in North Korea in the 21st Century (2005, with Susan Pares). Now at SOAS, last year the tireless Dr Hoare produced both a historical dictionary of the DPRK and an edited three volume article collection on both Koreas.

As his evocative title suggests, Everard brings a keen ear and a fresh perspective to an often stale field. An eager cyclist, he could venture off the beaten track. Pedalling a scenic byway to the port of Nampo, “on my way back men appeared on bridges along my route telling me to take the main road”. (The plural suggests he ignored them.) He recounts some surprisingly frank conversations with North Koreans whose identity he rightly disguises, calling them all “she”, which adds a frisson; most were surely he. These were not the woman or man in the street but what he precisely pinpoints as “the outer elite”: those with “stable but not top-level jobs”.

In writers such as Abt, a laudable urge lo correct one-dimensional caricatures teeters into the trap of apologetics. This Everard avoids. With rare balance, he combines full awareness of the nuances and depth of the society with robust censure of the regime. Of course North Koreans are human beings, not robots; whoever denied it? But the DPRK is still a ghastly place nonpareil. He dedicates Only Beautiful, Please “to the people of North Korea, who deserve better”.

The heart of darkness is a vast gulag, where up to 200,000 innocents suffer unspeakably and often indefinitely. This used to be dark in another sense almost no details leaked out. Now the camps can be seen on Google Earth, and many reports have detailed their awful abuses. Some victims have written memoirs, the best-known being Kang Choi Hwan’s Aquariums of Pyongyang (2000). Kang was nine when his whole family was sent to Yodok camp after his grandfather, a Kyoto businessman who answered the fatherland’s call to build socialism – he even brought his Volvo – complained once too often. About 90,000 Koreans left Japan for North Korea, never to return; many were never heard of again. This thread in the DPRK tapestry of misery was the subject of Tessa Morris- Suzuki’s poignant Exodus to North Korea (2007).

Shin Dong Hyuk can trump Kang: he was born in the gulag. Near in age to Kim Jong Un, he recounts a Hobbesian life of constant, vicious, numbing cruelty. Shin even betrayed his own mother and brother for plotting to escape, and watched their executions. Almost as appalling is that few cared in South Korea, to which he miraculously escaped; his first book flopped. It look an American journalist, Blaine Harden, lo make Shin’s shocking story a global hit m twenty-four languages. All credit to him, though it seems strange not to credit Shin as co-author of Escape from Camp II: not even a “with”. The UN Human Rights Council recently set up a commission of inquiry into DPRK human rights abuses; it will report next March. No doubt the regime will continue brazenly to deny everything. For its interlocutors, the dilemma is what to prioritize. If the main task is to curb North Korea’s nuclear and missile activities, human rights tend to be passed over.

Most North Koreans avoid the gulag, but all go to the movies: a softer form of social control. Kim Jong 11 was a film fanatic; his works include On the Art of the Cinema (1973). Aware that quality was poor, Kim drafted in the Southern director Shin Sang Ok to improve things. Johannes Schönherr, whose North Korean Cinema is the first book in English on its subject, doubts if Shin was kidnapped. Schönherr’s own journey has been picaresque. He is a former East German grave-digger, expelled from the GDR in 1983. His Trashfilm Roadshows (2002) was a romp through the transgressive or bizarre; its index has “Woman Warrior of Koryo” between “Whoregasm” and “Zombie Hunger”. Blagging his way to a film festival in Pyongyang, he found his true metier. Still freelance, he now lives in Japan. Full of stills (all in black and while). North Korean Cinema is eye opening and a word rarely used of the DPRK — fun. Unencumbered by theory, this is a rich narrative history from the 1940s in the present. North Korea’s latest films revert to pre-Shin leadenness: no match for the slickness of South Korean soaps and other foreign fare, which circulate widely on DVD or memory stick the latter easier to hide if the police call.

Such key social changes are well documented in The Real North Korea. Andrei Lankov is a phenomenon. Born in Leningrad, he studied in Pyongyang and is now a professor in Seoul. A historian who has used Soviet archives to write two books (so far) on the DPRK’s early political history, he is also a prolific commentator. Besides writing many an op-ed, he has two long-running columns in the Korea Times, on the dawn of modern Korea and on the North, each already anthologized in book form. Some of the thirteen boxes studding the text of this new book are from such columns, though that is not mentioned. This is the best all-round account of North Korea yet. Its many virtues include apt detail, dry wit, a sure analytical touch, and refusal to preach. Lankov is insightful too on the South, such as the contortions of its leftists. Still fixated on their own long gone dictators (pussycats compared to the Kims), some find virtue in the North: at least it hosts no foreign troops. Dividing a nation also twists minds.

What can be done? Hawks and doves both err. As Lankov puts it, the sticks are not big enough and the carrots not sweet enough. Engagement is better than sanctions for weakening the regime, but North Korea can last a while yet before the inevitable crisis. That could arise in several ways, but whatever happens a soft landing is “not very probable”. Not quite Hilaire Belloc’s “They answered as they look their fees, There is no cure for this disease”; but small comfort for ideologues, certain that being either tougher or kinder to Kim Jong Un will do the trick.

Hwang Ji-hae: “I get inspirations from the gardens I saw while growing up.”

Posted on by
Reply

Hwang Ji-hae: “I get inspirations from the gardens I saw while growing up.”
http://www.koreafocus.or.kr/design2/layout/content_print.asp?group_id=104282

Kim Yun-deok
Staff Reporter
The Chosun Ilbo

“Can you make me look attractive to investors?” Everyone laughs when Hwang Ji-hae (Jihae Hwang), 36, the “queen of the Chelsea Flower Show,” makes this odd request as she poses for the camera. But it is understandable, considering the anguish money has caused her this year. Though she has won a gold medal two years in a row at the world’s most prestigious garden show, she has fallen into debt. “Participating in the flower show twice has cost me my car and my house,” she says with a laugh.
　
“Quiet Time: DMZ Forbidden Garden,” her entry for this year won the Royal Horticultural Society President’s Award, the highest honor in the Show Garden division (for gardens covering 200m²) of the Chelsea Flower Show, held in May in London, but it almost did not come into being. Three weeks before the show was set to open, when the garden was about 40 percent complete, Hwang realized that she did not have enough money to continue. But like a miracle, two construction companies from her home province of Jeolla in Korea came forward as patrons. British visitors to the “DMZ Forbidden Garden” were duly impressed with the treasure trove of plants that have paradoxically survived thanks to the division of the country after the Korean War. Some of the more famous visitors to the garden were Prince Phillip, Princess Anne, and fashion designer Paul Smith.

We met Hwang when she returned to Korea to participate in the Gwangju Biennale. Tanned and wearing leather boots, she looked as if she had just been planting a couple of trees. “It’s not the sun’s fault,” she says. “I’ve always been dark skinned. I must have been born with a spade in my hands.” (laughs)

The Queen of Chelsea in Debt

Q. So you mean the star of the Chelsea Flower Show has fallen into debt.

A. My family home was already mortgaged when I won a gold medal in the 2011 show with “Hae-woo-so: Emptying One’s Mind” in the Artisan Garden division (small garden of 20m²). My younger brother, who looks after the family books, is very upset with me. (laughs) I poured more than 200 million won into this year’s garden, “DMZ.” The remaining 500 million won came from two construction companies in the Honam region, Hoban Construction and Namkwang Engineering & Construction, which gave 300 million and 200 million won, respectively. The economy’s not good right now, so I was just very grateful. As I am a Honam native, the city of Gwangju also helped me. When I came home a month ago I was busy going around visiting all the people I am indebted to.

Q. Is the Chelsea Flower Show so important that it’s worth going into debt?

A. The Chelsea Flower Show began in 1827 and is the biggest show of its kind in the world. A royal event organized by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), it is the dream of all garden designers. I learned about the show 10 years ago. I had been active as an environmental artist and always had a thirst for nature. When I saw the Chelsea show, I was convinced that a garden was the perfect medium for fusing nature and art. Vaguely I believed I would do well, and it seems it was fate. How can I put it? It was like meeting a long forgotten first love again.

Q. You received gold medals for both your first and second entries in the flower show, even though you were a newcomer.

A. To prepare for the show I first went to stay in London in 2007. At first, I didn’t even dream about entering. I wanted to build my skills first and set out to apply to the faculty of garden design at the Inchbald School of Design. But one day the vision of a traditional Korean toilet, haewooso, came to me. Not because I’m particularly patriotic. But I was lonely and tired in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language, and I kept looking back on myself, wondering who I was. I realized we didn’t need to envy the formal gardens of Europe, and found myself remembering the natural gardens that I saw while I was growing up. I recalled the night stars I saw on my way to the outhouse at night, the breezes at dawn, and the smell of the earth. It was now or never, I thought, so I gave up the idea of going to school and sent my design plans to the Chelsea Flower Show.

Q. What are the judging procedures?

A. First you have to submit to the RHS your landscaping blueprints, gardening plans, drawings, and 3D images that show what the garden will look like. If you make it to the second round, you are judged on the rarity of the plants chosen, and the artistry of the design. Receiving a notification on site allocation means you’ve made it to the third and final round.

A. For the DMZ garden you were allotted the site in front of the Queen’s Garden, which is the highlight of the Chelsea Flower Show.

A. It was a difficult site, triangular in shape and open on all three sides. It was a little daunting to be under the spotlight next to the Queen’s Garden, but I took the site allocation as recognition of the quality of my design, which gave me confidence. The DMZ garden aroused a lot of interest in the first two rounds of judging.

Q. The work must have been difficult considering the great size of the site.

A. The garden required native plants from home to be brought to London, so freight costs were three times higher than usual, and getting them through customs was also an ordeal. There are no specialist garden construction companies in Korea so our team did all the work ourselves. We had to make all the flowers bloom at the same time for the opening of the show on May 20, and we ran our feet off taking care of 10,000 plants at the same time. And our funds had run dry.

Q. I can imagine the RHS would have been disappointed if you had given up on your garden due to lack of funds.

A. That’s not the case. The RHS has held successful shows for 185 years. It makes thorough preparations, and if I had given up another team would have been ready to replace me right away. Lots of artists were probably waiting for me to give up. Three weeks before the opening, when the notice came asking me to sign forfeiture papers, I exhausted myself with anxiety until I felt blank. When I emptied my mind and resigned myself to the situation, a miracle happened. (laughs)

Changing Trends in Garden Design

“Quiet Time: DMZ Forbidden Garden,” comprised of 10,000 plants of 300 species, is not a neat, pretty garden. The grass and trees seem to grow haphazardly and are not trimmed to any particular size. “Instead of prestige trees and flowers, I planted wildflowers. Sixty percent are indigenous Korean plants,” says Hwang. “I planted mugwort, which our soldiers used to stop bleeding; plantain, which was squeezed for juice to treat stomachache; and plants that could be used for food such as wild grapes, hardy kiwi, shepherd’s purse, and dandelions.” The high watchtower and barbed wire that runs around the garden are reminders of the war. Bottles containing letters from separated families, a path paved with thousands of uniform buttons, and a bench made with the ID tags of 8,000 British veterans of the Korean War… A stream runs through the middle of the garden.

Elizabeth Banks, president of the RHS, praised the garden, saying it was the most profoundly moving garden she had seen in her life. The Times introduced it as a garden featuring a watchtower and barbed wire and the most original that the queen would see this year, while the Guardian said the weeds had become jewels. In addition, a British gardening magazine said that the messages of reconciliation and healing in the DMZ garden made all the other gardens pale into pretty insignificance.

Q. Both the Hae-woo-so and DMZ gardens are filled with nameless wild grasses and wildflowers.

A. I was born in the countryside, so I’m not used to roses and lilies. The only ones I saw were in the school flowerbeds. The fields where I played were covered with wildflowers like river bulrushes, touch-me-nots, burnets, and the smartweeds called myeoneuri mitsitgae [daughter-in-law’s toilet paper]. Nobody cares about the wildflowers, but when they are planted together in clumps they are really beautiful. I love their lines and shapes, their clear colors.

Q. What is it about the DMZ garden that moves people?

A. As everyone knows, Europe is having a hard time right now. It’s not only the economy; the people are also exhausted. In Europe gardening is an upper class pastime. In the way they change their brand name clothes every season, the rich newly decorate their gardens every season with expensive plants and flowers. At the Chelsea Flower Show also there has been a preference for gardens featuring rare plants, newly developed species, and beautiful luxurious flowers and trees. But Korean gardens like “Hae-woo-so” and “DMZ” shook them up. They were astonished by the simplicity and roughness of the Korean garden, which was nevertheless overflowing with life and energy. The Europeans, who cringe at the word “toilet,” discovered in it truthful stories about real life.

Q. So you’ve changed the trend of European gardens?

A. The garden that won the gold medal for best show garden this year in the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, one of the three top flower shows in the world, was titled “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” It’s hard to say they were not influenced by the Hae-woo-so and DMZ gardens. When I submitted my blueprints to the Chelsea show, people scoffed at first. Bets were placed before the show and it was predicted that a pyramid garden for parties by British star designer Diramuid Gavin would be the favorite. But against expectations DMZ was the winner. People were moved by the simple spirit of the garden.

Q. Members of the royal family including Prince Phillip, Princess Anne and Prince Edward have visited the garden.

A. Prince Phillip thanked me and said it was an honor to see such a garden before he died. Paul Smith said it was fortunate both for himself and for England to have discovered Hwang Ji-hae. He was a very sexy and witty person. One other visitor said that standing in the garden made him feel a sense of peace. When one of the volunteers who helped make the garden said “I’m eating food for the soul,” I almost burst into tears.

Q. I hear that some Korean War vets also played a part in completing the DMZ garden.

A. When the garden was in danger of being discontinued, they wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth and to our presidential office, Cheong Wa Dae. They hoped to see the garden completed to ensure that the Korean War did not end up being a forgotten war. Many of them wept when they came to visit the garden at the show.

Strength from Deficiency

In the garden design and landscaping world, Hwang Ji-hae belongs to the minority. A graduate of Mokpo University where she studied Western painting, Hwang was active for a long time in the Gwangju area as an environmental artist. Her artistic inspiration comes from her childhood in the country town of Gokseong and her mother, who was a typical country woman. “When I design gardens I always think of my mother,” she says.

Q. Did you show artistic talent as a child?

A. Drawing was the only thing I did well as a child. In our poor country neighborhood my mother was the only one with a real passion to see her children educated, so I often used the whole art room in my school by myself. (laughs)

Q. What kind of person was your mother?

A. She was a tough person who had to raise three children on her own and made a living by running a restaurant and a hair salon. But she was also a woman who on windy days would take a chair out into the yard and close her eyes to enjoy the wind. She had great sensitivity to such things, unlike most country women. She knew how to use nature to deal with the fire in her heart. She gave me my name Ji-hae, which means “wise sea.”

Q. You majored in painting, so how is that you’ve found success as a garden designer?

A. The kitchen garden that my mother cultivated was my first garden and my treasure trove. The garden had all kinds of fruits and vegetables growing in it, so many that there are few fruits that I have not tasted. I would play in the garden and fall asleep there, and was constantly bitten by insects. My childhood of playing in the fields is my source of inspiration and energy. Once I decide on the theme, it’s easy for me to see which plants will look most natural in the garden.

Q. A lot of people are surprised that the star of the Chelsea Flower Show is from a provincial university.

A. I wanted to attend an art college in Seoul but I didn’t get in. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to take any steps backward, even drive in reverse, so instead of repeating I decided to attend a university close to home. But there were a lot of excellent professors there who gave us experience in a lot of different genres. My experience with gardens in university, which called for a variety of skills and even made me want to get a driver’s license for heavy equipment, laid the ground for my current work.

Q. Can you tell us about Muum, the environmental art group that you formed?

A. My eyes were opened to environmental art thanks to a professor who had studied the subject in Paris. When I was a student teacher, I once painted a mural at a country school. When I saw the children clapping and jumping with joy, I decided to form a group of volunteers and we went around painting murals at country schools and medical centers. That was the start of Muum.

Q. Why the name Muum?

A. The look of the name [뮴 in Korean] is artistic! (laughs) There is no special meaning. If you look at the word, it looks like a person sitting with knees bent. From childhood I liked to see my mother praying on bended knee. Although it’s a local artists’ group we have worked not only in the whole Honam region but also in Seoul. We’ve also done a whole lot of apartment complex landscaping work, though we were only subcontractors.

Q. Do you think you would have found sponsors more easily if you had come from an elite university?

A. I don’t know. But I do know that my drive for life comes from deficiency, from my complexes. (laughs)

Q. I hear you are planning to enter the Gardening World Cup at Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki, Japan this September.

A. I have been getting a lot of calls since I won an award at the Chelsea show. The world’s top 10 garden designers are invited to the World Cup, so it is a great honor, but to tell the truth, I’m very tired.

Q. Are you planning to enter the Chelsea Flower Show again next year?

A. No. The experience this year was so hellish I don’t think I’ll be returning next year. (laughs) If no corporate or government sponsor appears and offers to help first, then definitely not. Ha-ha!
[September 8, 2012]

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

The Herald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Through a Filmmaker’s Lens, a View of Korea

Posted on by
Reply

By JANINE ARMIN
Published: June 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/arts/14iht-rartpark14.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by
Reply
Park Seo-bo

Park Seo-bo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecriture no 071204

Ecriture no 071204 130 x 195 cm

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

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

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

Sun, Moon and Five Peak Screens

Posted on by
Reply

In an earlier issue of the Hong Kong Medical Journal1, I highlighted and explored the art, philosophy, and iconography of Korean screens in the Neo-Confucian Choson dynasty court. This issue’s cover illustration is an example of a six-fold screen and has a highly stylised scene of five craggy peaks, a full moon, a burning red sun, and two fast-flowing streams crashing down into foaming water, all of which are flanked by a pair of pine trees. The palette is arrestingly bright— a strong lapis blue, jade green, and iron red—and cannot fail to catch the onlooker’s eye. Recent research by Dr Yi Song-mi, Professor of Art History at the Academy of Korean Studies in Seoul, has explored the significance of such screens; however, many facts about them remain blurred and uncertain.2

These screens were the most critical regalia in the throne hall. In the words of another researcher: “This highly formalized landscape manifests the Choson political cosmology based on the Theory of Yin and Yang and the Five Elements; it may also represent the land of Korea blessed by Heaven, symbolized by the sun and moon portrayed in absolute balance. When the king sat in front of this screen, he literally became the central point of the composition and thus the pivotal point from which all force emanated and to which all returned. Thus, imbued with sacred power, the screen manifests a politico-cosmology as evidence of Heaven’s favor, mandate, and continued protection of the ruler.”3 There is no documentary evidence for this theory, however. Screens were also used behind portraits of past kings in the ancestral halls. In paintings depicting court scenes, it was taboo to portray the king himself; instead, he was represented by the screen and his courtiers were shown paying homage to this focal point.

Screen production was overseen by the office of superintendency which was set up for special events such as weddings, funerals, and birthday celebrations. Although the office was only temporary, handwritten records were kept, and they provide an invaluable insight into court proceedings. Screens have also been cross-referenced to the records of the Bureau of Painting. The first reference to a screen being used in the palace portrait hall is in 1688; thereafter, there are numerous citations. Whereas most of the screens referred to in the records had either eight or four panels, the 1900 record mentions one six-panel screen in addition to seven four-panel screens. Screens were crucial to court ceremonial rites and even royal portraits included them. The only portrait featuring a screen that is on display today is an 1872 copy of an earlier portrait of King T’aejo in the Kyonggi-jon Hall in Chonju, North Cholla province, from where the King’s family originated.

Dr Yi has attempted to trace the origin and iconography of the screens, and to establish whether they were in use from the very beginning of the Choson dynasty, during the reign of King T’aejo (1392-1398). We know from palace records that screens were constantly being produced. However, only two dozen or so still exist today. Not one extant one has been signed by an artist and there is not one document alluding to the iconography of the Five Peaks. It has been suggested that the practice of using the Five Peaks screen was established by Chong To-jon, the scholarofficial who was instrumental in adopting Neo- Confucianism as the state creed. He used the screen as part of the overall iconographical scheme for the design of the Choson palace architecture and its interior decoration at the beginning of the dynasty in 1392. However, a 16th century painting entitled “The martial arts performance at Soch’ong-dae in the reign of King Myongjong” (Myongjong reigned from 1545 through to 1567) has no screen behind the throne. A 19th century copy does. Dr Yi proposes a hypothesis that perhaps the practice was established after the Hideyoshi invasion of 1592 as a reaffirmation of the dynasty’s power. The Kyonggi-jon Hall was completely burned down during the invasion and was not rebuilt until 1614. King T’aejo’s portrait is recorded as having been rescued and reinstalled in the new building.

A 1748 album leaf shows a Screen of Five Peaks behind the throne but in appreciably more muted colours than the cover example. Dr Yi explains this by the introduction of aniline dye pigments which were referred to as ‘western’ colours. An 1874 record forbids their use and indicates that they reached Korea soon after their production in Britain. Records dating to 1900 reveal that they were nevertheless in full use at court. There is also a reference to a “model for painting the Screen of the Five Peaks”, which would account for the high degree of stylisation in the extant copies. Apparently, the screens were also copied on a much smaller scale and used for private decoration in homes towards the end of the dynasty (1910), indicating a thematic exchange between palace and folk art.

While the true iconography of the screens has not been emphatically solved, the study of these highly decorative works of art has added a little to the knowledge of the social history of Choson Korea. The screens are evidence of the firm belief in the central royal power and a reverence for the royal ancestors. Perhaps the lack of any explanation of the significance of the Five Peaks is because it was already well understood by the onlookers. We, today, are ignorant of their true meaning, but this by no means diminishes their powerful radiance.

  1. Chadwick A. Sun, moon, and immortal peaches. HKMJ 1996;2: 234-5. [↩]
  2. Yi SM. The screen of the Five Peaks of the Choson dynasty. Oriental Art 1996/1997;XLII/4:13-23. [↩]
  3. Kim HN. Exploring eighteenth century courts arts. In: Korean arts of the eighteenth century: splendor and simplicity. New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1993:40-1. [↩]