Hong-Goo Kang, The Museum of Photography, Seoul
Birth
1956, Shinan
Genre
Painting, Photography
Homepage
Digital Landscapes by a Second-Rate Artist
"I wanted to make fake photographs that are extremely meaningless because I was really irritated by words and theories surrounding art. I wished my photographs to be meaningless, empty, and completely nonsensical."
- Kang Hong-Goo, "Drama set/Fragment/Disguise"
All artists wish to get out of art history and the art system and
make something new that is not tied to existing customs. Practically all
possibilities may have been explored by their predecessors, however, and at
this point when the end of art history is being debated, attempts to make a
change may seem meaningless. However desperately one tries, it is difficult to
get out of a system that has already been solidified, and any effort to make a
difference usually falls into the evil cycle of reinforcing that very system.
Nevertheless, artists keep trying because the world they live in, constantly
changing through advancements in science and technology and with evolutions of
society, encourages them to continue their journey. Now photography, a modern
invention, not only is a widely accepted artistic medium in its own right but
also occupies an important place in contemporary visual culture. Only a few
years have passed since digital photography has been introduced. In that short
span of time, it has assumed the role of the main producer of visual imagery of
our era and has practically replaced our eye. Kang Hong-Goo has been making digital
photographs by manipulating popular cultural images with a scanner. His art
evinces that digital photography provides new opportunities for those seeking a
mode of expression that fits the time outside the art system.
Kang enrolled himself in an art school as an aspiring painter after
having spent several years as an elementary school teacher. He initially
majored in painting but soon began to explore a new direction in manipulated
photography utilizing advertisement images and film stills. Kang states that
the experimentation was in protest against the art system that is based on a
standard composed by great, unique works. Kang, who calls himself a second-rate
artist, not a top-rate genius artist, has been making preposterous and bizarre
fake photographs with images appropriated from the mass media. He deems the use
of preexisting images more suitable than a handmade painting in expressing
one's inability to resolve the conflicts of everyday life. His preferred
display format-prints simply tacked up on a wall-emphasizes the easy and
instant nature of computer-generated photography. In Kang's photography, the
particular condition of the high-speed modernization of Korean society is
combined with his personal experience of it. His photographs have unfolded in a
series that explores "location, snobbery, fakery"-the title of his second
solo exhibition.
Kang's early scanner-manipulated photography manifests the dis-eases
and conflicts lodged deeply in people's minds despite the economic prosperity
that has suddenly blossomed: surreal landscapes engulfed in fire ("What
Humans Can Do for Trees"), patriarchal homes haunted by monsters
("Home Sweet Home"), and everyday scenes that reveal fears around the
condition of the country's division ("Warphobia"). In another series
of works, Kang casts himself as the protagonist in stills of fictional films.
As the main actor in movies of gratuitous violence and sex, the artist creates
dramas that mix narcissism and self-pity. Art here is no longer a serious and
sublime medium but is made into a series of stock images one would regularly
see in cheap genre movies and commercial advertisements. In these crudely
manipulated photographic representations, the artist-the
director/actor-appearing in wonky guises turns despairs and disquietudes into a
comedy ("Who Am I"). These photographs, made with a deliberate lack
of refinement in order to divert the pressure to be creative, are believable
representations of our reality, which is far from refined and polished in actuality.
When Kang started using digital cameras, his surrealistic montages gradually
converged with the impressions of Korean society the artist himself captured.
This evolution arose from his belief that the contradictions of reality are
greater than the contradictions that he creates.
When the digital camera first became available, its small memory
forced Kang to make long panoramic landscapes by suturing many individual
shots. These landscapes do not attempt to be faithful representation of the
reality through an expansive, level gaze, however. They are recombinations of
twisted impressions of a society put together piecemeal. As the artist has
stated, Korea has leapfrogged from its pre-modern era to an era of information
society in less than a generation, and consequently all kinds of contradictions
that reflect the times and spaces that have been bypassed in the process
clearly remain. Kang's digital landscapes do not limn a future society ruled by
a humankind that has evolved through advancements in science and technology.
Instead, they are landscapes that harbor remnants from a process of
modernization driven by a fascistic military culture and collective egotism. It
is not straight photographic representation but manipulated montages of
fragments that can better and more precisely capture a reality distorted and
perverted by capitalism and commercialism in the midst of a compressed growth.
Recombining fragments from the inconsistent and rough surface of the
reality, Kang's digital landscapes may be the most appropriate method of
revealing its contradictions. His "Greenbelt," which depicts an area
near Seoul designated for restricted development, appears to be less a nature's
stronghold in an urban environment than traces of aging and deterioration left in
the aftermath of a sudden development. An agrarian society centered around
villages has collapsed in the inevitable course of urbanization, and the
remnants of the process compose not a green ideal but a gray, depressing
landscape. On the other hand, his "Drama Set," a "real
fake" television film set, is situated in the impression of the Korean
society dominated by fakery. It consists of images of people cut and paste onto
a set in which the real and the fake are mixed up. Scenes temporally ranging from
the period of Japanese colonization and to the present co-exist in a single
space, highlighting the fallaciousness of the whole set-up.
"Scene of Ohsoi-ri" depicts an area that was abandoned
after its residents were relocated in compensation for the noise pollution caused
by the newly built Gimpo Airport just outside Seoul. The work suggests the
sense of powerlessness the artist felt in this suburban area that had been
sacrificed to the course of development. Even if viewers may not know the
tragic ongoing story behind this town inhabited, by garbage and deserted
kitchen gardens, they certainly sense in Kang's landscape, whose palette has
been manipulated, the gloominess one would experience in a ghost town and
creepy ghosts of the past. Like dark shadows hiding under the skyscrapers and
flying overpasses of the city, this scene suggests to us what has been cast
away in the name of development.
That our living environments haven't changed too much even in this
21st-century digital era is evident in the landscape images the artist has made
of a redevelopment area in Bulgwang-dong in the far northern corner of Seoul
where he lives. The houses in the image, congregating at the skirt of Mount
Bukhan, are no longer places of residence but have become sites of vagrancy and
speculation. Demolished for redevelopment, the site has become a surrealistic
battlefield where nature and human intrusion go to war. After the houses built
in harmony with the natural topography of the mountain valleys are all razed,
there will be apartment buildings that advertise nature-friendly environmental
living but block the sky with their soaring concrete masses ("Mickey's
House" and "Trainee").
The refracted imagery of Kang's digital photography lets shown
through its distortions the times that he experienced and the reality of Korean
society in which memories and histories are roughly entangled. Although the
fragments produced by his digital camera cannot compose perfect landscapes, as
long as we are surrounded by a reality that is unrealistic and phony, this may
be the unavoidable result. Digital photography is becoming a crucial part of
everyday life, and advancements in digital technologies are sure to control the
society of the future. Nevertheless, our minds and our surroundings still
retain images of the past and the traumas of rapid transformations, continuing
to sway us. In some sense, modernization is in the present progressive tense.
Despite the great transformation that is the 21st-century information society,
the physical realities of human beings and landscapes do not change so easily
and still make up an important part of the reality we live in. Kang's digital
landscapes are kaleidoscopic images of a society that struggles to be
real.
In order to confront a reality that is more fake than a fake, it is more effective to take a light approach to it than to assume a sincere, solemn attitude. In one work, Kang creates a scene of devastation with computer game character doll he found on a construction site near his studio, turning the doll into earth-shaking military fighter. In such manners, Kang's photography ultimately exhibits the artist's dogged journey like Don Quixote's through a changing world and rigid establishments. Continuing through the 1990s into the present, his landscape series is an autobiographical confession by a maker, who struggles under the weight of institutions and reality but never gives up hope. The present exhibition encompasses Kang's exploration of digital photography over a decade and would perhaps become an example for the popular belief that a second-rate artist in the end becomes a top-rate artist. It would be more meaningful, however, to see this effort as an opportunity to witness as is the landscapes that this second-rate artist has traveled than as an occasion in which an artist's resistance to established art gets integrated into art history and establishment.
Koo Kyunghwa(Assistant Curator, Samsung Museum of Art, Leeum)
Kang Hong-Goo's Unraveling of Digital Photography: Dreams Compressed
1. Kang Hong-Goo’s photographs resemble dreams. Deserted streets where time is lost, masses of dark shadows, and strange unidentifiable traces in his photography recall the impressions of nightmares. But to say that Kang’s photographs resemble dreams isn’t to say that his works represent the strange and familiar scenes we often experience and ruminate on. It is not surface similarities but the structure of “dream work” that his photography borrows, and furthermore, his photographic “therapy” is connected to the interpretation of dream. In the ways the narrative and imagery of a dream ingeniously utilize the techniques of condensation, substitution, and symbolization to reconstitute the codes of system and desire, capital and prophecy, Kang’s digital photography composes landscapes and imaginations and histories. Brilliantly burning trees, a row of architectural facades with no buildings behind them, a giant barracuda plopped on a street, and someone’s bizarrely elongated back lounging on a beach. These are some of the images that Kang has borrowed from the techniques of dream. And it is through such techniques that his photography suggests the entities that threaten us from all sides in the reality in which we unwarily live in, or it suggests the condition of that very threat.
Kang’s photographs, therefore, are not mere
copies or scans of dreams as they may seem at first glance. And here’s the reason why the children’s story of the
photo studio of dreams cannot apply to his work. Kang’s
photographs are dreams—or more precisely, the screens
upon which dreams are projected. As we enter the theater, we are confronted
with bizarre, preposterous, and fearful situations that unfold in front of our
eyes in real time. His digital photography is not premised on past tense, on
which photography is ontologically dependent, and a sorrow for things past, or
its future-tense form, i.e., death. In that his work is a present-tense
experience of dreams, it perhaps resembles cinema. But Kang’s photography is closer to a rear-screen projection made with light
shone in front of the viewer’s eye than to the
cinematic projection, in which light is thrown from behind the viewer’s head. On the horizontal widescreen of his photography, the viewer’s head-on confrontation with the camera blurs the consistent focus
of the image, and the overlapping screens and obvious seams twist the retinal
contemporaneity. Kang obliquely comments that just as a dreamer does not make his
dreams, the photographer is not the agent of his photography. According to the
artist’s “set-up,” we the viewers build up spatially these present experiences, in
which reality and unreality, and guilt and desire crisscross. Kang’s photography creates, just as our dreams do, architectural
labyrinths in which our bodies can spontaneously respond to crude, abrupt, and
absurd situations.
2. In the present exhibition, viewers find lures that tempt them into a site of super-fast demolition and super-sized construction where one may have an experience of surrealistic sublime, a maze-like place that one cannot tell if it is a dream or a reality. They are toys that the artist must have found on construction sites in the periphery of a city. A toy house—called "Mickey’s House" because Mickey Mouse is painted on it—sticks out among enormous excavators and piles of scrap metals. Mickey’s house appears in front of a row of houses on the brink of being reduced to powders, on some precarious garden fence in a shantytown, on snow, or on a green lawn. Even within a single scene, this toy house can function as a metaphor in the sense of “Home Sweet Home” or as a metonym in the sense that it is meant to belong to a household. In another vein, it is an icon if the formal similarities were to be focused upon, and an index when the generative relationship between the toy and the photograph is considered. The toy house, which is especially outstanding against an achromatic site of ruination and construction and the monochromatic nature because of its brilliant palette, also operates as a kind of hypertext that connects different individual photographs. Does this mean, then, that the artist intends to play games of signs with this toy?
If we were to make a distinction, the focus here should be on not
sign but play. In other words, the focus of this photographic series should be
on the artist’s process—i.e.,
roaming around to find the “found object” and creating some witty simulations with it when he spots
appropriate scenes. This aspect of execution in the series is once more
emphasized with the second toy, which the artist has named the “trainee.” According to the artist’s research, this toy takes its form from the fictional character
Kazuya Mishima, a martial arts warrior in a Japanese computer fighting game.
Kazuya jumps on dangerous electric wires, hops over shattered glass, and climbs
over precipitous walls. Kang titles his photographs, in which this trainee’s posture and size freely change, according to a lexicon of Chinese martial
arts novels. Following the trainee’s role-playings,
viewers see him in an encounter with Mickey’s house in
one scene, and while engrossed in such a visual pun, our eye often loses the
contexts that the toys are situated in and get comforted by the indexes, i.e.,
the toys.
In this way, in Kang’s work is a mixture of
ideological signs, political landscapes, and the willfulness of execution all
mixed in different ratios. One of the most distinguishing characteristics of
his work is that it keeps pushing viewers outside its frame. That is, objects
like Mickey’s house and the trainee in his digital
pictures are read more productively alongside images, such as “squatter pics” or “required
elements” on the DCinside website, a ground zero in
popular contemporary Korean visual culture.1) Seeing Kang’s photographs one is naturally reminded of the current social
phenomenon of “digital invalids” abusing such images, and this is how the significance of Kang’s photography may be understood from a different angle.2) Now that
the digital camera, the scanner, and the Photoshop have become cultural
necessities, and blogs and homepages constitute a standard of one’s social education, the drive that places his work in museums is not
the inertia within the art system that has made photography a viable artistic
medium but may be found in the power of cultural popularism that renders art’s courtship of photography powerless. And perhaps in an inverse
reaction, Kang, an artist especially sensitive to the speed of change in mass
media and technology, has fallen for the attraction of board games rather than
digital games; instead of creating manipulated images out of “required elements” with computer programs,
Kang has been capturing landscapes with actual toys. This capturing also
includes evidence of living in this era, in which distinction between actual
things and hybridized things itself has grown meaningless.
3. Kang Hong-Goo is not only an artist but also an author of books on visual cultures and has previously worked as a TV personality and a lecturer. In other words, he has taken on multiple roles over the years. Fittingly for someone who has mastered a variety of cultural texts including sci-fi movies, detective novels, horror comics, and martial arts pulp fictions, Kang’s photography contains in it the artist’s history of cultural education. His cultural literacy, however, does not manifests itself in his photography simply in terms of broadening the range of references and selections but becomes more obvious in the ways in which he practices intertextuality. While his work exhibits, for instance, a range and diversity in its parodies and pastiches of Quentin Tarantino’s films, Manet’s nudes, Meindert Hobbema’s landscape of village roads, and Kim Jeong-Hee’s traditional Korean landscape, what is more notable is the ways and processes in which these sources are quoted.
In his earlier work, Kang often made photomontages, for instance,
cutting and pasting his own portraits within appropriated film stills,
advertisements, and other commercial images. This method of editing, which was
limited to juxtapositions and partial combinations of images evolved into a
more complex recombination of whole picture frames through overlappings and
repetitions. Consequently, he began to make his own photographs more
frequently, and effects such as exaggeration, distortion, shock, and
alienation, rather than mere collision began to characterize his work.
Furthermore, as he started to apply the more complex montage techniques which
surpass typical genre films and narrative conventions to horizontally expansive
individual works and a series of works produced around the same time, the
series even earns certain monumentality.
If we consider Kang’s photomontages with his
own writings, the data he has collected, sketches, drawings, and still
photographs, his photographic theory seems to be more akin to John Heartfield’s rather than El Lissitzky’s. As art
historian and critic Benjamin Buchloh has argued, in the wake of Lissitzky,
photography, now as “factography,” has established a cultural literacy, with which it educates the
public. If the Russian avant-gardists aspired to supercede the material
limitations of constructivist sculpture by circulating thousands of
mass-produced photographs, in our era, digital photography has made possible a
single picture to self-replicate into thousands and distribute them in the same
resolution. Of course, Kang’s factography conjures a
far more dystopic vision than the utopian one of the Russian avant-gardes.
Kang’s panoramic photographs not only
mobilize all kinds of texts before and after themselves but also encompass
sounds and smells. In that light, they are quite multimedia. Especially notable
from his body of work is the series of images made from a town called Ohsoi-ri
near the Gimpo Airport in Seoul. The repetitive placement of an image of an
airplane flying low through the series of the landscapes of the town, which are
all 280-centimeter long, effectively conjures the effect of the oppressive loud
noise an airplane would produce in proximity. The pool of water in which a dump
truck has crashed is rendered with an exaggerated perspectival technique, again
making viewers effectively imagine its rancid stench. While optically traveling
through this landscape strewn with piles of trash, fields of green onions,
airplanes in the air, and discarded shoes, all appearing in the same
resolution, viewers feel with all senses the fact that Ohsoi-ri has lost its
placeness and has been absorbed into a temporal zone of development.
This naturally formed village, which is marked on the map only with
the designation of “Ohsoi Crossroads,” is plainly edited into a space of future holocaust in Kang’s photomontage. The vanishing point in the photograph replaces the
town hall, from where one allegedly could have surveyed the whole village
visually, and becomes a symbol of the massive conspiracy of development. The
vanishing point of the perspective that organizes this image is emphasized like
the conspiracy theory that explains the whole world. It lucidly visualizes the
power behind the rumors that the townspeople were driven out by arson and that
even children were murdered. Just like all conspiracy theories, the vanishing
point in Kang’s photograph is indescribably seductive and
fatal.
4. Kang’s landscape photographs, as seen in the Ohsoi-ri series, at first glance seem composed around single viewpoints. But on closer inspection of their operations, it becomes clear that their internal and external texts cross with one another, imploding the perspectival spaces. The photographic perspectives Kang realizes in his work often interfere with themselves, as exemplified by “Furgitive 8” (1999), a photographic recreation of Hobbema’s painting, “The Alley at Middelharnis” (1689); Kang obstructs the vanishing point on the horizon line with a self-portrait. This kind of “disruption operation” is also evident in the artist’s trademark method of manipulated composition. In his “Who Am I” series, the artist replicates his self-portrait into multitudes, dispersing the viewer’s gaze throughout the picture. After graduating from handmade processes to digital cameras and computers, Kang has been employing picture-suturing as the main method of disrupting the viewer’s gaze. He states that his main objective there was to make large-scale landscapes out of digital pictures. Although he has not been able to accomplish the objective due to technical and financial reasons, he was able to create, after quite a few trials and errors, stitched, horizontally expansive landscapes that are panoramic in effect.
In terms of the way of seeing that is required, panorama pictures
share similarities with handscroll paintings. While most of Kang’s photographs are shown in full lengths, viewers can rarely see the
whole pictures in a single viewing. Consequently, they can view only sections
and must put them together in continuum like the frames of a moving picture. In
Kang’s panoramas, the viewer’s
gaze encounters each one of different camera gazes that are sutured in
individual frames, which are slightly overlaid upon one another or distorted.
The eye scans these long pictures from left to right—or
in the opposite direction—in “temporal” manners. There is the obvious distinction, of course, in that one
views a handscroll painting by rolling and unrolling, while a panoramic
photograph is seen by the viewer’s body moving along
the length of it.
The most representative handscroll-style photographs in Kang’s work can be found in the “The Han River
Public Park” series. Presenting group portraits of
people enjoying walks in the park with distant sights of skyscrapers and
massive bridges in the backdrops, these photographs may be considered a kind of
typical genre pictures on the subject of a lazy holiday. Strewn with people
bearing comic facial expressions, pairs of lovers and groups of friends,
homeless and drunkards, and periodical appearances of Ronald McDonalds and
flying kites, all of which are unfailingly captured by a relaxed camera’s eye, these pictures provide much to read for viewers.
Here, what grabs our gazes and guides the temporality of visual
appreciation in this over-five-meter-long panoramic picture is not the several
vanishing points marking the picture but the horizon where the river and the
park meet. The method of viewing required by this beautiful landscape—one follows the picture horizontally following the flow of the river—places “The Han River Public Park” less close to Impressionist paintings of parks than to traditional
scroll paintings like Jang Taik-Dan’s “Chungmyung sangha-do,”3) which the viewer
unrolls into a section of a manageable length at a time to see unfolding scenes
of transportation of cargos, changing lifestyles and households, and streets
tightly surrounded by buildings. Admittedly, to make this comparison only based
on similar viewing experiences while ignoring the obvious differences in terms
of time, location, and medium might be a risky set-up for understanding broadly
the work in question. In that sense, perhaps better comparisons may be found in
a tourist village that recently opened in China or the film set for a recent
Korean movie with a storyline set in the Song Dynasty, both of which are based
on Jang’s handscroll painting. At the same time, Kang’s photographic series, in ways that are highly distinct from such
realizations or physicalizations, creates a kaleidoscopic world that can
broadly address traditional genre painting, its epistemes and structures of
sensibilities, and even the self-referentiality of mass media.
5. Is the film set, said to be based on the streets depicted in the handscroll painting, a fiction? If people can enter to enjoy the view of the set, does it become a reality? Is the “fantasy-action-melodrama” said to be being shot in the set a fiction? If the movie is actually made and widely released, is the theater showing the movie real? Or, is the handscroll painting, which creates this endless linkage of representation of representation, an original? Or is it a copy of something else? Pressing “pause” on this dizzying series of questions and playing the landscapes we are looking at frame by frame in a slow motion—this is how Kang’s series of drama sets operates. Kang made the series by taking pictures of sets “in actuality.” As seen in the images per se, these sets, which were created for historical or martial arts dramas, do not look anything like what we encounter when watching the films and TV dramas. Aided by the intervention of high-definition cameras, editing techniques, and cutting-edge computer graphics, films and dramas these days reveal very few detectible fissures or seams.
In Kang’s photographs, it is the “dross in gold” one would seldom see in
movies and dramas that takes the center stage. Soaring apartment buildings are
visible in the far background of the TV drama “Age of
Outsiders,”4) and people dressed in current fashions
along with cars appear in a scene supposedly set in Japanese colonial period.
Even worse, one of the photographs zooms in on the backside of the façade of a
mock Dongdaemun5) and a pile of trash thrown in front of it. Kang even leaves
the seams and traces of the suturing of these pictures. These anachronistic
indexes dispel the usual effects of black-and-white photographs—taste for things past, symptoms of art photography, and evocation of
nostalgia. In such ways, Kang’s photographs of drama
sets distort the future tense of digital photography, which seems to
exponentially self-replicate, and the past tense of slowly discoloring
black-and-white photography.
All of Kang’s landscape photographs are
captured by the artist busy on his feet on a variety of contemporary sites from
nearby towns to distant tourist spots. As if a documentary photographer, he
deals with the “existence” of
contemporary sites and specific incidents or people. Paradoxically, however,
these landscapes all appear as if they have been just excavated after having
been submerged under water for a long time. One sees deserted, desolate
streets, garbage stuck here and there like waterweeds and mosses, collapsed
buildings, and mere traces of urban structures, and the survivors roaming these
scenes of devastation seem like mummies that are just awakened. In the
submerged landscapes, Ohsoi-ri and Apgujong6) become sites for pillaging, and
Sehando and Gosagwansudo turn into plunders.7)
Through its era of development in Korea, the monstrous forces of the
desire for super-modernity, imagination of civil engineering, and economic
fascism have razed or sunk peopled towns and storied villages. As if nothing
had happened, then, high-rise buildings and massive apartment complexes are
built up, or highways and dams are laid down. In recent years, the former sets
of popular TV dramas and movies have become tourist spots, bringing
considerable profits to local governments. In a similar way, those places that
have been sunk in sacrifices may one day emerge like ghosts and start
attracting people to them. Finally, our dreams and unconscious have turned into
currencies—no paper money but those that circulate
invisibly via the magnetic strip of the credit card and the bytes of the
Internet banking. Are all these waking dreams, or precognitive dreams, or
deja-vus? That’s what Kang Hong-Goo’s photograph keeps asking us.
1)DCinside (http://www.dcinside.com) is a highly popular Korean
website that vends and provides information on digital cameras. It has become
one of the most visited site and has also emerged as a leading voice in
contemporary Korean Internet culture. One of the site’s
features is its galleries—a kind of discussion boards
where users can upload their digital pictures. The “squatter
pics” and “required elements” are keywords in the galleries: the former referring to a kind of
place holders that users can upload in order to prevent their entries from
being deleted; the latter refers to images provided by the site on regular
bases as challenges to the users to incorporate and produce their own witty
entries. The Korean neologism, Chalbang, rendered here as “squatter pics” is a contracted word of “Challim bangji,” which literally means “Prevention of cutting.” (Translator)
2) The term “digital invalid” refers to someone who is addicted to the Internet to the detriment
of his/her mental and physical health.
3) Jang Taik-Dan is the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese name Zhang
Zeduan, a court painter who lived during the transition period from the
Northern Song to the Southern Song Dynasty in China. “Chungmyung
sangha-do” (Qingming Shanghe Tu, in Chinese, translated
alternately as “Going Upriver on the Qingming Festival” or “Peace Reigns over the River”) is his best known surviving work. A handscroll about 10-meters
long, the painting has been traditionally believed to depict the city of
Kaifeng and surrounding natural landscapes, an interpretation which has been
recently challenged. The painting is currently in the collection of the Palace
Museum, Beijing.
4)“Age of Outsiders”(Ya’in shidae) was a wildly popular Korean TV drama
series. Its storyline revolves around Kim Doo-Han (1918-1972), who was
abandoned at an early age and grew to be a Robin Hood-like figure during
Japanese colonial period. After Korea’s liberation in
1945, he became a politician.
5)Dongdaemun—literally, “East Gate”—is one of the four major gates
and accesses into the town of Seoul during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910).
Currently it stands close to modern Seoul’s downtown.
6)Apgujong is one of the wealthiest and trendiest neighborhoods in
Seoul.
7)Sehando and Gosagwansudo are two of the most famous and celebrated surviving traditional Korean paintings. The former, a spare landscape of pine trees with an accompanying calligraphy, was painted by Chusa Kim Jong-Hui, an early 19th-century figure and arguably the best calligrapher in Korean history. The latter, by Kang Hee-An, a 15th-century literati painter, depicts a lone scholar (or a Taoist sage) enjoying a mountainous landscape. The title can be translated as “Painting of an Virtuous Man Watching Water.”
Baekjisuk (exhibition planning, art criticism)