Exhibiting Korea
A New, Monthly Series of Gallery Talk Programs at The Korea Society

How Did Korea Become a "Land of Apartments"?

with

Valérie Gelézeau
Associate Professor of Geography at Marne la Vallée University and author of The Republic of Apartments

Thursday, April 5, 2007 at 6:30 PM

Residents of Seoul from the early 1960s would hardly recognize their city today. Back then, traditional single-family homes were the norm. Today, the South Korean cityscape is dominated by large apartment complexes (ap'at'ŭ tanji). In Seoul, the total share of apartment in the housing stock jumped from 4% to 53% between 1970 and 2006. During decades of rapid economic growth, mega-sized tanji (megaplexes) drove Seoul's urban frontier outward, and smaller miniplexes quickly transformed marginal neighbourhoods in the 1990s. This rapid change has radically changed South Korea's housing culture, and Korean culture at large.

Geographer Valérie Gelézeau believes that the causes of South Korea's housing shift are cultural as well as demographic and economic. At her talk, Gelézeau will argue that the shift augurs more than a simple response to urban growth, housing problems and land pressure.

Born Korean, Becoming South Korean: The Cinematic Golden Age and Cold War Culture

September 21, 2006

After the armistice, South Korean society rushed full-on towards economic development, soon pulling itself up to become one of the most advanced and dynamic countries in the world. It's a story with a happy ending, but Han Joon Magnan-Park, an assistant professor in the Film, Television and Theater Department at Notre Dame University, showed his audience that at the time, Korean cinema wasn't nearly as cheery about the country's prospects.

Using the 1961 film The Stray Bullet as an example, Magnan-Park noted how director Hyun Mok Yoo had consciously patterned the work on the 1948 Italian neo-realist film The Bicycle Thief.  The Bicycle Thief depicted an Italian family struggling to survive in the aftermath World War II; though masterfully sympathetic, all attempts by the characters in the film to preserve their family push it one step closer to disintegration.

So too in The Stray Bullet: The main character, a government accountant, sacrifices his meager salary to meet his family's needs-to the point of ignoring his own toothache rather than paying a dentist to fix it. But it's just not enough. Beset by chronic unemployment and despair, the accountant's brother turns to robbery and his sister to prostitution. Adhering to neo-realist strictures, The Stray Bullet leaves it to audience members to formulate their own "answers" to the problematic reality it displays.

More than just a philosophical exercise, the film expresses a deep and uniquely Korean unease: the feeling that the Confucian value system isn't up to the task of regulating an increasingly modernizing society. A pillar of Korean society for centuries, Confucian thought mandated clear duties for every individual. All the characters in The Stray Bullet perform these duties as best they know how, and still end up mired in poverty and chaos. With this in mind, Magnan-Park suggested, the film's lack of resolution can be read as a question posed to Korean society: What value system do we rely on now?

Produced during the brief flowering of South Korean democracy that followed the removal of Syngman Rhee, The Stray Bullet's question-and its depiction of a bleak, chaotic society-struck a nerve with viewers. When Park Chung Hee assumed power shortly after its release, the film was banned.

August 31, 2006 

Made from overwrought anguish and predictable improbabilities, melodrama doesn't encourage its audience too look too deep. But according to Robert L. Cagle, a cinema studies specialist at the University of Illinois, look at post-war American melodramas and post-IMF crisis South Korean melodramas and you'll see critical thematic similarities-as well as even more critical philosophical outlooks.

Both sets of cinema were produced by recently traumatized societies: WWII in the case of 1950s America, economic calamity in the case of late-90s Korea. Both societies were embracing economic growth and watching as consumer culture sparked conflict between tradition and modernity. In mid-‘50s America, filmmaker Douglas Sirk presented these realities in films like There's Always Tomorrow, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. All three melodramas highlighted characters striving to escape lives they feel trap them, in the process creating an even more anguished personal mess. A common thread, Cagle noted, is that American melodramas of the period tend to feature characters that are afraid of losing their place in the world; either physically, through losing a home, or emotionally, through damaging important relationships.

The same can be said for contemporary Korean melodramas. In recent films such as The Man Who Went to Mars and Cracked Eggs and Noodles, Korean melodrama directors portray an emotionally deadening consumer culture through the symbolic pervasiveness of Korean electronic gadgetry. The characters go through the same process of disillusion and loss.

American and Korean melodramas do part ways, however, when it comes to the end of the film. In American melodramas, characters whose world has collapsed around them usually find another form of personal satisfaction and re-invest their faith in the typical American dream: a classic Hollywood happy ending. Contrast this to Korean melodramas, where the main characters don't recover. When Korean melodrama characters realize they've lost it all, the film usually takes them back to a fleeting memory of past happiness and then ends, eschewing resolution.

This perspective gives South Korean melodramas a more sophisticated feel than their American counterparts. Korean melodramas, Cagle said, "dare to raise questions...they don't give audiences the false hope that American films do, and don't feel as manipulative."

A 16-member troupe from the Seoul Performing Arts Company presented an exquisite program of folk dances as well as contemporary interpretations of ancient court and shamanic dances in five cities from coast-to-coast in the U.S. This tour was organized and funded by The Korea Society in association with the Seoul Performing Arts Company. Several members of the company also presented a workshop for high school students at the Wilshire School in Los Angeles on Tuesday, November 15.

The Seoul Performing Arts Company was established on August 1, 1986 with the founding objective of presenting the indigenous Korean performing arts in new attire and promoting them around the world. The Company has created many productions of musical and traditional Korean song and dance. It has gone on the road in over 45 countries, staging about 850 performances. Its performances at the closing and opening ceremonies of the '88 Seoul Olympics, the promotional event for the 2001 World Cup, '99 Winter Asian Games, the 2000 Korea Millennium Grand Gala, and other major international cultural events held in the United States, Japan, and several African and European countries have brought the company to a high standard of polish.

November 8 - 16, 2005