Mark James Russell

Books, blog and other blather

Category: Korean art (Page 1 of 2)

Joining Colin Marshall’s Notebook

November 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The charming and insightful Colin Marshall, host of the website Notebook on Cities and Culture, recently traveled to Korea to turn his analytical eye here.  He wrote several articles about Korea for The Guardian, and he also conducted a whole bunch of interviews with artists, thinkers, trendsetters, and, well, me.

You can listen to me here, going on about a whole bunch of Korea-related things, like pop culture, art, win and Pringles.

Many thanks to Colin for the fun afternoon. Sorry the audio wasn’t clearer, but we were talking at Mudaeruk — a great cafe, but it can be noisy.

Dongdaemun Wandering

August 13, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The middle of August is the height of vacation season in Korea, so plenty of shops are closed at the moment — kind of like in Europe, but instead of a month off, in Korea its just a week. Or often just 2-3 days.

The weather has been quite pleasant lately, so I’ve been walking around Dongdaemun a bit. Here are a couple of shopping alleys that are usually full of shoe stores, but this week were pretty dead:

However, there are still a fair number of places open, including the book stores. Today was a good day for browsing and I ended up buying these art books:

Tiger and Sanshin!

In case you are wondering where I bought these books, here’s a map:

Wednesday Morning Links

September 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Happy Chuseok, all — a holiday so big, even the news stops happening. No complaints from me, though, as I’ll enjoy a bit of free time. Anyhow, on with the morning links:

  • Han Jae-rim’s Face Reader is definitely the big film of Chuseok. After just one week, it has already pulled in 3.2 million admissions and made nearly 23 billion won ($21 million). Great cast, great-looking movie. (KOBIS)
  • Bored over Chuseok? Many of Korea’s best museums are open. Many of them for free. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Seopyeonje was one of Im Kwon-taek’s most famous and successful movies, about a family of traveling pansori singers. Before it was a movie, it was also a book. And since then it has been made into a musical. Now, famed theater director Yun Ho-jin has turned Seopyeonje into a changgeuk, or a traditional-style opera. Even more strangely, he’s gotten rid of the idea that the father blinded the daughter to teach her han and make her a better pansori singer; now there’s incest. The mind boggles. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • A Q&A with leading liberal commentator (and art theory guy) Chin Jung-kwon (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Does Chuseok feel less crazy than it used it? That’s because it is. Holiday travel down 19 percent over last 15 years. (Korea JoongAng Daily)

Regarding the de-crazification of Chuseok … You can totally feel the difference in Seoul. Chuseok used to turn the capital into a ghost town, but now it feels more like a quiet Sunday morning. It’s still a nice holiday, but not jaw-dropping. On the other hand, my newspaper isn’t publishing for  four days, so it’s obviously still a big deal (with the time off, I’m not complaining).

Oh, here are a couple more pics from Face Reader, which stars Song Kong-ho, Lee Jung-jae, Kim Hye-soo, Baek Yoon-shik:

 

Wednesday Morning Links

September 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Well, it’s barely morning anymore — thanks in part to the always-fun combination of an Internet problem and support staff who have no idea how Apple hardware works. Nice guys, but a depressing problem to have in 2013. Anyhow…

  • Japan’s Rakuten is buying Singapore’s Viki for $200 million (AllThingsD). Viki being an online video service (like Hulu) that started off featuring Korean TV dramas. Meng over at the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator has a great essay on what the buy means for Singapore — required reading for anyone in Korea working on Park Geun-hye’s “creative economy” ideas.
  • Coincidentally (or perhaps, “ironically,” depending on your point of view), police in Korea announced yesterday they had busted up a major TV piracy group that had made nearly $9 million since 2006, mostly selling TV dramas they did not own to overseas Koreans. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Good look at Park Chan-kyung (Park Chan-wook’s brother) and his MANSHIN project, a documentary about shaman Kim Keum-hwa. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • An exhibition of works by 84-year-old Kim Tschang-yeul is going on at Gallery Hyundai (by Gyeongbok Palace) until Sept. 25 (Korea JoongAng Daily)

Morning Links

August 15, 2013 / / 0 Comments
  • Moon So-young takes a great look at new Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art in Seoul, with architect Mihn Hyun-jun (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Beer popsicles! Beer ice cream. And plenty of craft beers. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • A look at one of the Han River rescue teams responsible for a 22km stretch of the river that contains 15 bridges. The team responds to 774 suicide attempts and drownings last year — saving 258 people and stopping another 185. Still, that’s a lot of suicides. (Hankyoreh)
  • Enjoying the hot weather? I hope so because the Korea Meteorological Administration says it is going to stick around until Chuseok — that’s Sept. 19 this year. Which I suppose means we’ll have snow by Oct. 1. (Chosun Ilbo)
  • This is the first Gwangbokjeol (Independence Day) I’ve ever spent in Korea so close to the Japanese Embassy. As of 9am, there were plenty of police everywhere, with all the side alleys and roads around the embassy closed off. Could be exciting.
And in movie news:
  • The summer may be mostly over (especially for Hollywood), but the competition at the Korean box office is ramping up, as two big films were released yesterday for Gwangbokjeol. Kim Sung-soo’s first movie in a decade, The Flu, is the new No. 1, with 306,000 admissions yesterday. Hide and Seek was second with 294,000 admissions. (All stats from KOBIS)
  • Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer fell to third with 200,000. It’s now at 7.1 million admissions and 51 billion won ($45.6 million).
  • The top four films in Korea yesterday were all Korean. Then the next six were all animated films (Japanese and Western). No live-action Hollywood movies in top 10.
  • So far this year, Korean films have had 56.3% of box office. 40.3% for Hollywood. Nearly 1% for Japan.
  • Lee Young-ae goes from JSA to the DMZ (Chosun Ilbo).

Kunsthalle One-Year Anniversary Party

April 6, 2010 / / 0 Comments

One of the more interesting artistic spaces in Seoul, imho, is Kunsthalle, the stack of shipping containers located close to the Dosan Park Intersection in Gangnam. And they are having their one-year anniversary party this weekend, April 8-10.


Each day from 5pm until 3am will feature events, music, dancing and plenty more. Saturday will also have brunch from noon to 5pm. Sounds like a lot of fun.

Kunsthalle has hosted a wide range of artistic events and other cool stuff since it opened last April (it was event host to the Korean Music Awards on March 30). Set up by the Berlin artistic group Platoon (they call themselves a “movement”), this is an attempt to blend the artistic and the political into a seamless entity. Or, I suspect, it is a cool way to meet girls. Whatever, I think it is worth checking out and supporting.


* * *
Oh, and over at my main website, I talk about Seoul Fashion Week, the recent article about it in the New York Times, and Korean design in general.

Seoul Fringe Festival Kicks Off

August 16, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Okay, this post is late, very sorry. But it is not too late to check out this year’s Seoul Fringe Festival, taking place right now in Hongdae.


This is the 11th Seoul Fringe Festival, a two-week celebration of independent, underground and sometimes just plain weird art, music, theater and other cultural goodness. Do not expect to see many of Hongdae’s biggest bands at Fringe. The whole point of the show is to give unestablished artists a chance to show off. They might be raw and unready (and they might not be any good), but I think it is good to shaking things up from time to time… especially in a place as hierarchical as Korea.

The festival takes place pretty much all over the area around Hongik University, with the bulk of events happening along the “meat street” area (the twisting road/park that runs just behind the LG Palace, KFC, and Soundholic).

You can download a map of Hongdae showing all the Fringe Festival locations from the front page of the English website (sorry, but it is a javascript link, so I cannot link directly to it).

Random Notes – Vol 3, No. 2

January 8, 2008 / / 2 Comments
  • I checked out some surprisingly good bands at Freebird the other night. It has been quite a while since I even thought about Freebird, but this time it had the best bands I have seen in Korea for ages.

    Most notable was ORIENTAL LUCY (sorry, I only have these crappy cell phone pics). Each song was quite different, ranging from a retro-70s-rock sound to a bizarre cover of a trot classic that sounded like something by SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES. (They have a Cyworld page here, but it is one of those annoying ones you need to sign into to use, so it is pretty much useless for most people.)


    Another very good band was FRENZY, a four-man instrumental shoe-gazing band that sounded a bit like classic Echo and the Bunnymen (my friend’s assessment).


    The other band was JERANG, perhaps not as good, but still interesting in their own way. A bit of an early-Radiohead, whiny sound, but not bad. I believe JERANG won the most recent Korea national high school talent competition. They four guys in the band are just 20 (Korean age, I would imagine, so 19 in the rest of the world), so they have some time to improve. But a good beginning.

  • I just ran across a relatively new-ish magazine and website dedicated to the Seoul art scene, called NEXART (actually, I think Nex Art has been around since 2006, but I just discovered it). At the moment it is in Korean only, but the website claims that an English section will be coming in March. If you pick up the ‘zine around town, most of the stories have a short English intro, which is limited but quite interesting.
  • Poking around on the Nex Art website then led me to the English (and Korean) website EAST BRIDGE, another site for finding out more about the Korean art scene.
  • As long as you are at East Bridge, do not forget to check out their huge list of Korean art links.
  • I just checked out the first two episodes of THE WIRE’s fifth season (through totally legitimate means, I am sure… Stealing them via Bittorrent would be wrong).

    Totally love it. Season 5 is, somehow, even more bleak than the first four seasons. But despite the depressing edge to things, it is still the best show on television, by far. Great writing, solid insights and, despite the dark cynicism, more than a few funny moments.

    In case you have not heard, THE WIRE season 5 turns an eye to the media, in particular to modern newspapers, with all the brutal insight the show has used to examine city politics, the war on drugs, schools and all the rest.

    Some early reviews have criticized the shows creator for having an exaggerated or cartoon-like perspective on the troubles facing the modern newspaper, but I think those criticisms are off-base. Sure it is not 100-percent correct, but THE WIRE is a fictional, entertainment program, not a documentary. I am guessing its view of the newsroom is as accurate as all the other institutions it has skewered over the years (which is to say quite accurate, but very much fiction).

    If you are in Korea, you can still track down season 1 of THE WIRE here and there, for just 20,000 won or so. Totally worth it. Or you can order seasons 1-4 from Amazon.com.

    • Naxos of Evil

    October 30, 2007 / / 0 Comments

    Since the possibility of the New York Philharmonic playing in North Korea is in the news again, here are a few more artistic exchanges happening with North Korea:

  • North Korea’s State Orchestra is going to play the UK for 10 days in September 2008. Interesting backstory. The Orchestra will tour thanks to an invitation by Suzannah Clarke, a soprano who has performed in North Korea since 2003. She was invited in part because she is from Middlesbrough, the city that hosted the North Korean soccer team during the World Cup of 1966. In 2002, of course, was when Daniel Gordon’s documentary THE GAME OF THEIR LIVES, about North Korea’s improbable World Cup run in 1966.
  • Guitarist Jason Carter played in Pyongyang earlier this year (thanks to Philip for the fun entry and all the other good stuff he does). Carter wrote all about his trip in a long blog entry. It is quite a Kool-Aid-drink, but still quite interesting. You can even listen to an MP3 of him playing THE SOUND OF SILENCE in Pyongyang.
  • In August there was an art exhibition of North Korean works in London’s West End. Amusingly (or interestingly, depending on your levels of cynicism and irony) the curator met a North Korean artist in Zambabwe in 2001, which is how the whole thing got started.
  • Of course, any planning with North Korea is always pretty dicey. Remember how the Rock for Peace concert in NK turned out.
  • What does it all mean? Heck if I know. But I suspect Andrei Lankov is right, that any and all exchanges mean that more people in North Korea are being exposed to the truth, and truth will inevitably chip away at the regime up there. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the saying goes.
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