Topic: Korean Culture

Daniel alerts me to this strange bit of news about why Hong Kong police see the 1,500 South Koreans in town as the major threat to the WTO negotiations there. Most of the piece is about South Korea's rice subsidies, but it begins with a recap of Korean WTO protests past:

At the 2003 WTO summit in Cancun, Mexico, activist Lee Kyung-hae stabbed himself to death after unfurling a banner that declared "WTO kills farmers." Early this year, in November, two more farmers committed suicide by drinking insecticide.

What the hell? I mean, this is not India, where farmers have committed suicide rather than face impossible debts. They may have seen suicide as the only way to get the moneylenders to back off, thus saving their families from starvation. Nor are Korean farmers facing anything like the destruction that confronted Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who immolated himself in 1963 to protest the repression of his religion and his country. It's true that Korean farmers are clinging to a declining way of life, but this has largely to do with South Korea's shift from agrarian poverty to industrialized wealth. I was startled, too, that South Korean protesters would cut off their fingers to protest Japanese claims to Dokto/Takeshima, a tiny hunk of rock in the East Sea/Sea of Japan.

So what motivates Koreans to mutilate or kill themselves for what seem like mid-level political scuffles? I honestly don't know.

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Topic: Korean Culture

The Korean Cultural Service in New York has announced two wine-tasting events that will have a Korean angle:

Wines of the World: On Wednesday, December 7, the 92nd Street Y will hold a lecture and tasting of international wines, including wines from Korea.

Taste of Korea 2005: Munbaeju, Korea's Wine Treasure: On Thursday, December 8, at the Korean Cultural Service, will be a tasting of Korea's "important intangible cultural property number 86-ga," munbaeju. Click Korea describes munbaeju as "a traditional liquor made of malted wheat, rice, and millet which originates in the Pyeongyang region of North Korea. It is famous for its fragrance[,] which is said to resemble the munbae rose, hence its name. The alcohol content is around 40%." More entertaining is this blurb from the government website of the Jung-gu district of Seoul:

This is the alcoholic emitting the perfume of fruit of Munbae tree(similar to pear). April or May is the proper time to make it and it takes approximately 4 months to mature. The characteristic of Munbaeju is to make the fragrance of fruit be emitted without using Munbae fruts at all. There are two ways of making; one is to use yeast and the other is to use white chrysanthemum. The color is light yellowish brown and it is a kind of Soju with 40 degree of alcoholic ingredient. At present, a person who possess the skill to make it is Lee, Gichun, who received the brewing skill continued to his farther from his grandmother.

Sic, which is probably how you'll feel if you get drunk on the stuff. As for "the alcoholic emitting the perfume of fruit of Munbae tree," that would've been an improvement over the alcoholics emitting the perfume of soju, kimchi and cigarettes, a heady bouquet often found on the Seoul subways early Sunday morning, as stuporous salarymen made their way home after a night spent sleeping it off at the bathhouse.

Hey, you think the Jung-gu government is hiring English editors?

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Topic: Korean Culture

WARNING: ADULT CONTENT

I don't usually post this sort of thing, but this is just so bizarre and fascinating that I have to: a couple of blog entries (1, 2), with lots of pictures, about Loveland, an erotic theme park on the Korean resort island of Jeju-do, which is a popular honeymoon spot. (Via Fleshbot. Loveland has an official site, in Korean, and their gallery is astonishing.)

Korea, unlike Japan, is not a country where pornography is ubiquitous. In fact, it's a relatively prudish society. Though one can find plenty of porn in video rental shops, and we even knew of one actual porn theater that was across the street from the E-Mart megastore, it was all rather tame: nothing much kinky, and certainly no hint of homosexuality, male or female. Korea has no equivalent to Japanese octopus smut.

On the other hand, the Koreans seemed to have a sense of humor about sexuality. Their romantic comedies often feel less like When Harry Met Sally and more like The Three Stooges, and the pornographic movies all have to have plots, presumably to get past some censorship law, so many of them are pretty funny (on purpose). (I didn't watch a lot, but I did watch a few. For cultural research, of course.) And then there was the banned ad, which is also pretty funny.

Still, I'm startled to learn of Loveland, and all those pics of statue-love may be the kinkiest thing I've ever seen out of Korea.

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Topic: Korean Culture

The historian Ki-baik Lee describes the late-Joseon-era Korean genre painter Sin Yun-bok as depicting "scenes from the ordinary events of everyday life ... mainly the mores of the townspeople of his time, with a focus on the activities of women.

That's one way of putting it. Upon googling the artist's name, I was startled to discover a cache of erotic paintings that, though they resemble Japanese shunga prints, are distinctly Korean in style and content. I hadn't known that any such images existed. The depiction of homosexuality between two women in the uppermost left image is also noteworthy considering the complete absence of any homoerotocism, male or female, in contemporary Korean pornography, in sharp contrast to the freewheeling weirdness that is Japanese erotica.

The images come from a book by Seo Jeong-geol called Korean Erotic Paintings (info and images here; available for purchase from Seoul Selection).

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Topic: Korean Culture

How many times have you heard someone say, "I could listen to them play Penderecki all night"? Probably not very many. But that's what Jenny had to say at the end of a performance by the International Sejong Soloists on Friday night at Zankel Hall, the elegant new mid-sized adjunct to Carnegie Hall.

Our presence at the performance was a bit of a fluke. The International Sejong Soloists are a conductorless string orchestra whose 22 members (15 of whom were on stage Friday, including eight women and seven men) manage to be from eight different countries. They were founded in New York, but their artistic director, Ho Kyang, is Korean-born Julliard professor, and the group takes its name from King Sejong, renowned as Korea's finest ruler, as the inventor of the Korean phonetic alphabet, and as a patron of the arts and humanities. This tenuous connection to Korea earned them the sponsorship of the Korean Cultural Service, an adjunct of the Korean Consulate General in New York. One way they promoted the concert was to send silly quantities of free tickets to various people at the Korean Mission to the UN, so at about 4:30 on Friday, Counsellor Hwang called me to offer me four tickets to the show. Of course, I jumped at the chance to go to Carnegie.

We expected a pleasant evening of classical music. What we did not expect was the astonishing brilliance of the performance. The Sejong Soloists' first piece was also the most challenging work of the evening, Penderecki's Sinfonietta for Strings, which opens with a furious "chug! chug! chug! chug!" as everyone saws away at once ? an especially impressive way to start out when there's no conductor. The piece then begins to build itself up slowly, like a construction project, with a delicate descending-triplet motif being passed from musician to musician, down the rows. This is one of those exquisite elements that can't quite be reproduced in stereo recordings, and it was beautiful each time it happened. The piece also offered opportunities for several members of the group to perform complex solos, and they were all technically precise but rich in soul and passion. Still, what was most amazing was the cohesiveness of the group throughout this rhythmically challenging piece. It was a bravura opening, and we were hooked. "I think this may be the best chamber performance I've ever seen," I told Jenny, "but I haven't seen that many."

"I have," she said, "and yeah, I agree."

Next came a couple of Stockowski orchestrations of Bach ? very pretty, but not interesting enough to get the voice of Mickey Mouse crying, "Mr. Stockowski! Mr. Stockowski!" out of my head. Then the group was joined by the Taiwanese violinist Cho-liang Lin for two Vivaldi concertos ? you know, the ones with the fast movement, the slow movement, and then another fast movement, where the violinist plays a bunch of arpeggios? Right, those two. They were, well, Vivaldi, which means they were pleasant enough and that I'd heard them before, even if I hadn't. The soloist did some impressive finger-dancing, but he tended to rush and seemed inelegant against the backdrop of the extraordinary group of young musicians supporting him.

After an intermission, the Soloists (but not the soloist) returned for their final piece, Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48. This is something of a warhorse ? though not as much as his concurrent composition, which he hated, the 1812 Overture ? but there was nothing tired or trite about the Sejong Soloists' performance. The Valse danced deliciously, and the Finale: Tema russo was simply gorgeous. They managed to give Tchaikovsky the lushness he deserves, but without sacrificing depth or meaning.

There was, strangely, no encore. But the performance was enough. If the International Sejong Soloists come to your town, go see them. They are an extraordinary group of musicians, and pretty much the only classical ensemble (including the New York Philharmonic) whose performances I would specifically seek out. I encourage you to do likewise.

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