A spider lives in Itaewon. Perched atop bronze legs ten meters high, it broods -- an eight-legged crack in Seoul's smog. Its egg sack dangles, bulbous and vulnerable. The net effect is a blend of menace and some other emotion I can't put quite my finger on. Loneliness? Fear? Longing? The spider's name is Maman -- Mommy in French. Ironically, Mammon is also Latin for corrupting, debased riches. The spider is a sculpture by the artist Louise Bourgeois. It has been placed here to guard the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. To me, the spider seems the personification of Samsung itself -- Korea's largest chaebol, a $173.4 billion conglomerate with arms in the electronics, auto, shipbuilding, construction, and insurance industries. Both seem ominous to me, despite their seeming benevolence as evidenced through all the beauty contained inside the museum.
The buildings which house the museum are an ultra modern amalgam of plate glass, steel, wood-simulacra, and granite. Jutting angles and evocative curves abound. Mood lighting and strategically-placed darkness robe the exhibits. There are three museums housed in the complex. The traditional section features collections of metalwork, pottery, paintings, and calligraphy. The modern art museum contains contemporary work by Koreans and foreigners. The final museum is a collection of installation and video pieces.
Spider or not, Samsung is, of course, hardly unique as an ultra-wealthy entity with an interest in supporting the arts. The Vatican commissioned Micaelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. The Hapsburgs paid Beethoeven's bills. Hitchcock's films are inseparable from the Hollywood studio system. Modern Western megacorporations support the arts just as much as their Korean counterparts. While there are striking examples of artists who somehow managed to produce without rich benefactors, the fact remains that much of the world's most fully realized art has been created, maintained, distributed, and exhibited through the efforts of entities like Samsung.
A jade-green vase swollen with dolphin-esque curves glimmers liquid inside one of the museum's Plexiglas cocoons. Another such vase has been painstakingly etched with the form of a dragon flying. Scale by scale and not a single flaw. The artisanship is overwhelming. A floor below, the faces of Gim Hong-Do's Immortals sigh with an emotion I can't put into words, but which lies somewhere between serenity, wry mirth, and absolute weariness of life. Their robes practically ripple off the page.
In the second gallery, Song Young Soo's sculpture, Standing Face to Face, looks like a welded copper lobster warped by black hole-grade gravity. Work like this reminds you of the confusion, despair, and struggle that fills 20th Century Korean history. Lonely Planet’s Korea guide quotes a Korean proverb as saying, "When the house is burnt, pick up the nails. Pieces like Lee Jeong-seoup's A Bull reflect such sentiment. Rendered with simple strokes in a style that reminds me of expressionism, the painting depicts a brindle bull, teeth bared and muscles bulging as it tosses its head in defiance.
Kang Ik Joong's piece, I Have to Learn English, is especially resonant for the ESL teachers living here. The piece consists of hundreds of three inch by three inch wood plaques, each with an English phrase carved into it. A monotone recording drones out the plaque phrases. "FISH FORKS," "FERTILE WAY, "HAPPY ESTHETIC," and "LAW SCHOOL," were a few of them. Some made more sense than others. The loneliness and alienation of life as a Korean who sweats blood to learn English, but can never really master the language seemed to have been etched into the wood along with the words.
How should we feel about the symbiosis of art and commerce that places like the Leeum represent? Decisions based upon emotions like love, passion, or revenge are frequently illogical, but for better and worse, they are also regarded as quintessentially human. Rationalized, profit-motivated corporate decision-making differs fundamentally from this. Although corporations need people to exist and operate, this disparity marks corporations as fundamentally extra-human. This begs the following question. If the purpose of art is to illuminate that which is human, then doesn't art's association with inhuman corporate entities undercut this aim?
My favorite pieces at the museum were those by the post-modern artists. With its hyperfast internet, Korea may be even more exposed to the reactor cores of image culture than America. How are people who live in such a context changed by it? This is the question these artists wrestle with. Kim Hong-Joo's Untitled, compares stencil-made paintings of various buildings to a birds-eye-view of a lake shaped like the artist's face. Each of these approaches to rendering reality is effective by itself, but, when juxtaposed, neither one appears very real at all. This idea leads to all sorts of interesting questions about what the relationship of media to reality actually is, and what constitutes realism. Atta Kim's 110-2: Times Square, New York, is a photograph of NYC's most famous urban canyon taken with an eight-hour exposure. This technique renders passing traffic as a ghostly flicker of passing lights. In this picture, humanity itself seems to have become fleeting and insubstantial due to the speed at which it moves. Finally, Paik Nam June's My Faust-Autobiography is a cardboard cathedral stacked to the ceiling with television monitors. Each is a riot of distorted images, SMPTE bars, static, and mind-numbingly fast editing. Antennas bristle from the building's roof. Newspapers coat its walls. Sitting on the tower’s pinnacle, a TV camera peers down, its monitor carrying the same stream of electronic consciousness as the others inside the building -- the cherry on the cake of this amphetamine-driven McLuhan thesis.
Ultimately, Samsung's relationship to art – embodied through this museum – is really a work of art itself, albeit an unintentional one. We may prefer to identify emotionally-motivated behavior as human, but coldly-rational social-engineering projects are no less typical of our species. War, commerce, and many religious activities are examples of this uglier strain of humanity. Simultaneously embodying passion and reason, empathy and barbarism, the human and the supposedly-inhuman, the paradox of Samsung's support for the arts stands as a pyramid-sized metaphor for the dualism of human nature. If one purpose of art is to offer the opportunity to think/experience/feel in a manner beyond the everyday, then this museum is a work of art.
A spider lives in Itaewon. The spider is Samsung. I love this spider's treasures, even though I fear the spider.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Weird Little Worlds
Hapduk Steel High School (Hapdeok Jaychul Godonghagyo in Korean) is a weird little world nestled inside the weird little world that is Korea. A mostly-boys’ high school, the place seethes with adolescent angst barely straightjacketed by ultra-conservative, ultra-communal Korean culture. It also seems emblematic of some of the bizarre paradoxes which typify the New Asia of the 21st Century.
Situated near the edge of Hapduk, the school complex probably dates to the 60s. The high school building is squat, three stories high, and made of brick. As you approach, the shrieks, yells, and thunderous, galloping footsteps of the building's teenage Hakseng waft from the large windows. Green plastic awnings run across the courtyards between the middle school, the high school, and their shared cafeteria. These are a total godsend, because when it rains in Korea, it RAINS. Positionally-speaking, if these three buildings were a sandwich, the high school would be the meat. Facing the street, a garden is lush with flowers, evergreens, and slightly-ragged bushes trimmed into poodle-esque shapes. A jumbotron announces school news to interested motorists on their way to Dangjin. To one side of the cafeteria sits a machine shop where students learn to TIG weld or take the occasional third-year English class. Graffiti (a very rare sight in Korea) adorns one red-brick wall.
The cafeteria itself serves three meals a day, although I have only had lunch and dinner here. It's a chop-sticks and spoon operation. You couldn't get a fork if you begged and pleaded. Rice and kimchi are ubiquitous. Soup and salads are also SOP. One common salad contains cucumbers drenched in a heavy, sweet-and-spicy dressing. Another features lemon grass and shaved carrots mixed with an oil-based sauce. Small fish (usually barbequed or fried whole), quail eggs, and the hated-"mystery meat" supply protein. The food is pretty good, but palate-meltingly spicy. Spaghetti Bolognese and corn dogs are the only Western food I have ever seen served here.
Beyond the cafeteria's other side sits the new dormitory where male members of the freshmen class lives. Second and third year students (high school here is only three years long), are generally local kids (unlike the freshmen) and do not live at the school.
The school headmaster is a forty-five year old Korean named Chang Gyu Chan. He is deeply tanned and has brown eyes that by, turns, seem to laugh aloud or leave burn marks on your face. His temper is mercurial and swings rapidly from the wide-grinning, slap-you-on-the-back manner of a favorite uncle to a Marine D.I.’s level of ruthlessness. When he is happy, his laugh is raucous and friendly, with a ridiculous sign-song note to it that makes it impossible not to laugh with him. Ebullient and impulsive, he radiates life and energy and confidence to any group he commands. He loves good food, and seems to be on a first name basis with most of the restauranteurs in Dangjin-gun. Like most Korean men, he also loves to drink makgeoli and soju in huge quantities, at punishing speed. He doesn’t know a stranger, and this includes me, even though most of English syntax and grammar evade him. He insists that I call him Gyu Chan Hyung (meaning Elder Brother Gyu Chan -- a sign of friendship). More than once Gyu Chan has bought most of the teachers at Hapdeok Jaychill food or alcohol or both. Raised a farmboy, he seems to have an unconscious desire to return to his agricultural roots, and has carved out a farm-sized garden behind the school. Here, the students raise many of the vegetables we eat in the cafeteria. He also has rabbit hutches and two six month old Labrador pups that wander at will over the school's property. All in all, Gyu Chan has the vibe of a grown up jock, the kind of guy who was probably once an athlete, a hell-raiser, and very bad news with the ladies. During the week, he lives here, even though he has a wife and children in Daejon. It is his responsibility to make sure that life in this circus of steel runs smoothly, and it is obvious he takes this responsibility quite seriously.
Lee Chu Ho’s, the principal, has a personality and manner that stand in contrast with Chang Gyu Chan's. Cerebral and reserved, he has a face so patrician he seems to belong to a different species than most of the students here, and is usually clad in a gray, school-issue windbreaker. His office is the size of a classroom, and features marble floors, a menagerie of leather chairs and a conference table the size of a small boat. His English is quite good. Where Gyu Chan's manner usually makes you forget that he is above you on the school's totem pole, with the principal it is impossible to forget. His aura is one of magnanimous detachment, the benevolent lord of all he surveys. You would expect that a person with such a hegemonical vibe would be able to kick some serious ass pretty much at will. In practice, the limits of Lee Chu Ho’s power are difficult for me to understand. On the one hand, I once saw him sentence a good chunk of the freshman class to a day of toothbrushing floors over trivial lateness. On the other hand, my sociopathic co-teacher Mr. Lee (see my post “The Ballad of Mr. Lee” for a more complete description) has somehow managed to return to work from medical leave despite beating his students and repeatedly telling every teacher in school that the principal is incompetent. Back home, such behavior would get you fired. Apparently, here it is more complicated. In any event, the principal praises my work more than I’d say I deserve and my checks always clear, so, the paradox of his authority/lacktherof notwithstanding, Lee Chu Ho is a pretty cool guy in my book.
Lee In Hark is another senior teacher. In his late 60s, he stands maybe 5'5" with his shoes on -- significantly shorter than most Korean men. He wears rimless bifocals the size of a windshield. His hair is thinning, his skin wrinkled. A devout Catholic, he always crosses himself before meals. He recently became a grandfather, and will produce pictures of his newborn pride and joy without warning or provocation, even though everyone has already seen them before. He is compassionate and warm. He always smiles broadly, revealing SERIOUSLY crooked teeth and a gold mine of gleaming crowns. If the office is giving away cool stuff like lime green souvenir hand towels, squid jerky, or bottles of super-concentrated Vitamin-C drink, Lee In-Hark always makes sure that I get some.
The students themselves are an odd lot. Juniors and seniors at Hapduk Jaychul wear a white uniform shirt similar to that of an American garage uniform, do not live in the dormitory, and are not required to meet the new, much higher standards of personal conduct and academic performance to which the freshman class are held. They have grandfathered into Hapdeok Jaychul. Apparently, in the bad old days, Hapdeok was know far and wide as the school to which the worst of the worst in these parts were banished when no other school would take them. To say they are unenthusiastic about learning English is an understatement to about the degree that the town of Hapdeok is small and rural.
By and large, teachers hate the juniors and seniors, and complain endlessly about their behavior. A few have sprouted tattoos (even though this is forbidden). The most popular is a green, five-pointed star tattooed on the back of the hand -- which is reportedly the insignia of a local gang. Many smoke behind the buildings across the street (also forbidden). With a few notable exceptions, they are all slouches, jeering laughter, and gazes that never cease to peer out the classroom windows. Corporal punishment is alive and well at Hapdeok Jaychul, and most teachers carry sticks to class. My refusal to hit students places me at a decided disadvantage when it comes to maintaining order in this place.
The freshmen, by contrast, have worked really hard to get where they now are – squarely under the thumb of an unbelievably strict academic program. They wear a militaristic gray blouse and slacks that seems to have drawn its inspiration from Luftwaffe battle dress. Epilets, shoulder patches, a school insignia reminiscent of a black-and-blue ninja-star, and English-Korean name badges round out the look of the Meister School students. These students are required to live in the dormitory, forbidden to smoke (and pee tested to ensure their compliance), and are either exercising or in class from nine in the morning until ten at night either five or six days a week, depending. The workload is fascist. I pity them, although they are likely to get good jobs thanks to a recent agreement between the school and Hyundai.
Maybe twenty female students are enrolled in Hapduck Jaychul’s three grades. Attitude/performance-wise, they range from the lowest dregs of the second and third grade to the top of the Nazi-uniformed freshman class. Regardless of their level of achievement, they are shy towards Westerners such as me. Most will collapse into red-cheeked, face-covering fits of giggling if I so much as look one of them in the eye. The exception to this rule is the girl freshman, bright-eyed, maybe 5’4” – with bangs and horn rims that look nerdy even by Korean standards. She studies obsessively, speaks brilliant English, and is possessed of an efficient, clean-nosed approach to life that seems simultaneously childlike and uncannily adult. Her presence here is the result of her fascination with steelmaking. I wish her well, though I am also a bit creeped out by the intensity with which this fifteen-year-old girl devotes herself to study – in the process seemingly foreswearing virtually every quintessential pursuit of Korean teenage girlhood.
The hallways and corridors are decorated with paintings that look like what would happen if Matt Groening, Gary Larson, and Claude Monet all lumped their genetic material together to produce an impressionist painter indentured to IKEA. Many show a sculpture of a Classical or Enlightenment-era personality juxtaposed with some contemporary household item. A chalk white bust of Micaelangelo’s David sits next to an overflowing trash bucket. Minerva-in-profile shares the frame with a bottle of glass cleaner. Thomas Jefferson is paired with a single well-worn hiking boot. Renoir for Starbucks – decorating a school for future steelworkers.
This mishmash of aesthetics reeks of the smugly postmodern. It simultaneously seems uncannily appropriate and utterly out of place at Hapduck Steel High School. Both profound and profoundly kitschy. Because of this, I have a love/hate relationship with the pictures. They juxtapose the refined with the banal, the ancient with the brand-new, the Western with the non-Western. In some ways, this school and the town it is in are like them. Hapduck Jaychul – Schicksal of those banished from Chungnam’s more gentrified schools – now reborn as a selective haven for Hyundai’s backbone-in-training. Hapduck – remote, poor, backward, and agrarian – ugly sister in a suddenly-ultramodern country that was itself remote, poor, backward, and agrarian less than forty years ago. The artwork seems oddly microcosmic of the same contradictions which the town and the country itself embody. Symbols used to decorate that very thing they symbolize. Pictures inside the depicted.
Situated near the edge of Hapduk, the school complex probably dates to the 60s. The high school building is squat, three stories high, and made of brick. As you approach, the shrieks, yells, and thunderous, galloping footsteps of the building's teenage Hakseng waft from the large windows. Green plastic awnings run across the courtyards between the middle school, the high school, and their shared cafeteria. These are a total godsend, because when it rains in Korea, it RAINS. Positionally-speaking, if these three buildings were a sandwich, the high school would be the meat. Facing the street, a garden is lush with flowers, evergreens, and slightly-ragged bushes trimmed into poodle-esque shapes. A jumbotron announces school news to interested motorists on their way to Dangjin. To one side of the cafeteria sits a machine shop where students learn to TIG weld or take the occasional third-year English class. Graffiti (a very rare sight in Korea) adorns one red-brick wall.
The cafeteria itself serves three meals a day, although I have only had lunch and dinner here. It's a chop-sticks and spoon operation. You couldn't get a fork if you begged and pleaded. Rice and kimchi are ubiquitous. Soup and salads are also SOP. One common salad contains cucumbers drenched in a heavy, sweet-and-spicy dressing. Another features lemon grass and shaved carrots mixed with an oil-based sauce. Small fish (usually barbequed or fried whole), quail eggs, and the hated-"mystery meat" supply protein. The food is pretty good, but palate-meltingly spicy. Spaghetti Bolognese and corn dogs are the only Western food I have ever seen served here.
Beyond the cafeteria's other side sits the new dormitory where male members of the freshmen class lives. Second and third year students (high school here is only three years long), are generally local kids (unlike the freshmen) and do not live at the school.
The school headmaster is a forty-five year old Korean named Chang Gyu Chan. He is deeply tanned and has brown eyes that by, turns, seem to laugh aloud or leave burn marks on your face. His temper is mercurial and swings rapidly from the wide-grinning, slap-you-on-the-back manner of a favorite uncle to a Marine D.I.’s level of ruthlessness. When he is happy, his laugh is raucous and friendly, with a ridiculous sign-song note to it that makes it impossible not to laugh with him. Ebullient and impulsive, he radiates life and energy and confidence to any group he commands. He loves good food, and seems to be on a first name basis with most of the restauranteurs in Dangjin-gun. Like most Korean men, he also loves to drink makgeoli and soju in huge quantities, at punishing speed. He doesn’t know a stranger, and this includes me, even though most of English syntax and grammar evade him. He insists that I call him Gyu Chan Hyung (meaning Elder Brother Gyu Chan -- a sign of friendship). More than once Gyu Chan has bought most of the teachers at Hapdeok Jaychill food or alcohol or both. Raised a farmboy, he seems to have an unconscious desire to return to his agricultural roots, and has carved out a farm-sized garden behind the school. Here, the students raise many of the vegetables we eat in the cafeteria. He also has rabbit hutches and two six month old Labrador pups that wander at will over the school's property. All in all, Gyu Chan has the vibe of a grown up jock, the kind of guy who was probably once an athlete, a hell-raiser, and very bad news with the ladies. During the week, he lives here, even though he has a wife and children in Daejon. It is his responsibility to make sure that life in this circus of steel runs smoothly, and it is obvious he takes this responsibility quite seriously.
Lee Chu Ho’s, the principal, has a personality and manner that stand in contrast with Chang Gyu Chan's. Cerebral and reserved, he has a face so patrician he seems to belong to a different species than most of the students here, and is usually clad in a gray, school-issue windbreaker. His office is the size of a classroom, and features marble floors, a menagerie of leather chairs and a conference table the size of a small boat. His English is quite good. Where Gyu Chan's manner usually makes you forget that he is above you on the school's totem pole, with the principal it is impossible to forget. His aura is one of magnanimous detachment, the benevolent lord of all he surveys. You would expect that a person with such a hegemonical vibe would be able to kick some serious ass pretty much at will. In practice, the limits of Lee Chu Ho’s power are difficult for me to understand. On the one hand, I once saw him sentence a good chunk of the freshman class to a day of toothbrushing floors over trivial lateness. On the other hand, my sociopathic co-teacher Mr. Lee (see my post “The Ballad of Mr. Lee” for a more complete description) has somehow managed to return to work from medical leave despite beating his students and repeatedly telling every teacher in school that the principal is incompetent. Back home, such behavior would get you fired. Apparently, here it is more complicated. In any event, the principal praises my work more than I’d say I deserve and my checks always clear, so, the paradox of his authority/lacktherof notwithstanding, Lee Chu Ho is a pretty cool guy in my book.
Lee In Hark is another senior teacher. In his late 60s, he stands maybe 5'5" with his shoes on -- significantly shorter than most Korean men. He wears rimless bifocals the size of a windshield. His hair is thinning, his skin wrinkled. A devout Catholic, he always crosses himself before meals. He recently became a grandfather, and will produce pictures of his newborn pride and joy without warning or provocation, even though everyone has already seen them before. He is compassionate and warm. He always smiles broadly, revealing SERIOUSLY crooked teeth and a gold mine of gleaming crowns. If the office is giving away cool stuff like lime green souvenir hand towels, squid jerky, or bottles of super-concentrated Vitamin-C drink, Lee In-Hark always makes sure that I get some.
The students themselves are an odd lot. Juniors and seniors at Hapduk Jaychul wear a white uniform shirt similar to that of an American garage uniform, do not live in the dormitory, and are not required to meet the new, much higher standards of personal conduct and academic performance to which the freshman class are held. They have grandfathered into Hapdeok Jaychul. Apparently, in the bad old days, Hapdeok was know far and wide as the school to which the worst of the worst in these parts were banished when no other school would take them. To say they are unenthusiastic about learning English is an understatement to about the degree that the town of Hapdeok is small and rural.
By and large, teachers hate the juniors and seniors, and complain endlessly about their behavior. A few have sprouted tattoos (even though this is forbidden). The most popular is a green, five-pointed star tattooed on the back of the hand -- which is reportedly the insignia of a local gang. Many smoke behind the buildings across the street (also forbidden). With a few notable exceptions, they are all slouches, jeering laughter, and gazes that never cease to peer out the classroom windows. Corporal punishment is alive and well at Hapdeok Jaychul, and most teachers carry sticks to class. My refusal to hit students places me at a decided disadvantage when it comes to maintaining order in this place.
The freshmen, by contrast, have worked really hard to get where they now are – squarely under the thumb of an unbelievably strict academic program. They wear a militaristic gray blouse and slacks that seems to have drawn its inspiration from Luftwaffe battle dress. Epilets, shoulder patches, a school insignia reminiscent of a black-and-blue ninja-star, and English-Korean name badges round out the look of the Meister School students. These students are required to live in the dormitory, forbidden to smoke (and pee tested to ensure their compliance), and are either exercising or in class from nine in the morning until ten at night either five or six days a week, depending. The workload is fascist. I pity them, although they are likely to get good jobs thanks to a recent agreement between the school and Hyundai.
Maybe twenty female students are enrolled in Hapduck Jaychul’s three grades. Attitude/performance-wise, they range from the lowest dregs of the second and third grade to the top of the Nazi-uniformed freshman class. Regardless of their level of achievement, they are shy towards Westerners such as me. Most will collapse into red-cheeked, face-covering fits of giggling if I so much as look one of them in the eye. The exception to this rule is the girl freshman, bright-eyed, maybe 5’4” – with bangs and horn rims that look nerdy even by Korean standards. She studies obsessively, speaks brilliant English, and is possessed of an efficient, clean-nosed approach to life that seems simultaneously childlike and uncannily adult. Her presence here is the result of her fascination with steelmaking. I wish her well, though I am also a bit creeped out by the intensity with which this fifteen-year-old girl devotes herself to study – in the process seemingly foreswearing virtually every quintessential pursuit of Korean teenage girlhood.
The hallways and corridors are decorated with paintings that look like what would happen if Matt Groening, Gary Larson, and Claude Monet all lumped their genetic material together to produce an impressionist painter indentured to IKEA. Many show a sculpture of a Classical or Enlightenment-era personality juxtaposed with some contemporary household item. A chalk white bust of Micaelangelo’s David sits next to an overflowing trash bucket. Minerva-in-profile shares the frame with a bottle of glass cleaner. Thomas Jefferson is paired with a single well-worn hiking boot. Renoir for Starbucks – decorating a school for future steelworkers.
This mishmash of aesthetics reeks of the smugly postmodern. It simultaneously seems uncannily appropriate and utterly out of place at Hapduck Steel High School. Both profound and profoundly kitschy. Because of this, I have a love/hate relationship with the pictures. They juxtapose the refined with the banal, the ancient with the brand-new, the Western with the non-Western. In some ways, this school and the town it is in are like them. Hapduck Jaychul – Schicksal of those banished from Chungnam’s more gentrified schools – now reborn as a selective haven for Hyundai’s backbone-in-training. Hapduck – remote, poor, backward, and agrarian – ugly sister in a suddenly-ultramodern country that was itself remote, poor, backward, and agrarian less than forty years ago. The artwork seems oddly microcosmic of the same contradictions which the town and the country itself embody. Symbols used to decorate that very thing they symbolize. Pictures inside the depicted.
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