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Category: Arts & Culture

The Other Korea: Stories from the Diaspora

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Join authors Ery Shin (Spring On the Peninsula) and Christine Ma-Kellams (The Band) as they discuss their books and stories from the Korean diaspora.

Longlisted for the 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Spring On the Peninsula is Ery Shin’s debut novel about a desultory libertine who mourns a failed relationship over the course of two harsh winters. In this unprecedented portrait of millennials living in Seoul, Shin captures contemporary Seoul in all of its glory and turmoil, and this daringly irreverent novel is a poignant meditation on modern life in a city beset by North Korea’s shadow.

A psychologist with a savior complex offers shelter to a recently canceled K-pop idol in this “first great K-pop literary phenomenon” (Debutiful), The Band is a first novel from the cultural psychologist Christine Ma-Kellams. In its “gripping exploration of the complexities that accompany fame” (Booklist), The Band considers the many ways in which love and celebrity can devolve into something far more sinister.

Part of Town Hall’s “K-Town Hall Series,” each ticket includes a copy of Spring On the Peninsula and The Band.

 

Click Here to Purchase the Tickets

 

The Other Korea: Stories from the Diaspora

Saturday, October 12, 2024 | 3 PM (EDT)

 


The Town Hall Lounge
123 West 43rd Street
(Between 6th Ave and Broadway)
New York, NY 10036

 

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About the Speakers:

Ery Shin was born in Ames, Iowa in 1986. She was raised in Manhattan for the first decade of her life, then Seoul for the second. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton University and a doctorate in the same discipline from the University of Oxford. The author of Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years, a study of Stein’s later experimental gestures and their philosophical implications within Hitler’s Europe, she is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. Spring on the Peninsula is her debut novel.

Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American. Her work and writing have appeared in HuffPost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, the Rumpus, and many more publications. The Band is her first novel.

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Banchan with Caroline Choe – In Conversation with Marja Vongerichten Minsoo Kang: The Melancholy of Untold History with Ed Lin Hyeseung Song: Docile with Emma Eun-joo Choi Writing Short Stories with Gina Chung and Yun Ko-eun

Banchan with Caroline Choe

Posted on by Yurim Oh

 

Banchan, the shared side dishes that accompany a Korean meal, are often the real stars of the table, and it’s time we celebrate them. From the kitchen of chef Caroline Choe, Banchan: 60 Korean American Recipes for Delicious, Shareable Sides offers 60 mouthwatering recipes for classic and modern banchan dishes. From namul (fresh vegetables) to buchimgae (pancakes), these tasty sides are proof that big flavor can be found in small bites.

In this conversation with Marja Vongerichten, Choe discusses her first cookbook that shares her experiences, the global emergence and evolution of Korean American cuisine, and the importance of women’s contributions to this movement.

During the event, Banchan: 60 Korean American Recipes for Delicious, Shareable Sides will be available for purchase.

 

Banchan with Caroline Choe – In Conversation with Marja Vongerichten

Thursday, October 10, 2024 | 6:30 PM (EDT)

 

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

 

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About the Speaker:

Caroline Choe is a chef, artist, teacher and writer based in New York City, and is a proud daughter of Korean American immigrants. She is the creator of The Exploratorians illustration series, and the founder of Create & Plate, a business devoted to helping create community through arts and food education. After a long career of classroom teaching, she truly believes that practicing the act of creating — whether through art, music, dance, writing, food, and much more, is what will connect people across all differences and timelines. Both she and her work have been featured in Food & Wine, NPR, Food52, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Eater, Cherry Bombe Magazine, Glamour, and NBC’s Today Show. Both she and her husband, Eric, host the podcast, An AHEM Moment.

 

About the Moderator:

Marja Vongerichten is a chef, author and TV personality. With her husband, a 3-Star Michelin Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, she hosted “Kimchi Chronicles” a PBS TV series chronicling food, culture and travel in South Korea, and she wrote a companion cookbook Kimchi Chronicles: Korean Cooking for an American Kitchen. Marja opened her first Korean restaurant with Jean-Georges in Shanghai, called CHI-Q, which was awarded Best Asian Restaurant by Time Out Magazine for two years in a row. She is the co-founder of Marja’s Original Asian sauces, sold exclusively at the Tin Building by Jean-Georges.

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The Rise of Korean Contemporary Art with Peter Kahng

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Join us for an engaging discussion with Peter Kahng, an expert on the intersection of global art markets and contemporary Korean art. As a lecturer at Stanford University specializing in “Global Art Markets in Asia,” Peter Kahng will provide a unique perspective on the thriving contemporary art scene in Korea. Explore how Korean art movements, including the influential Dansaekhwa, have garnered international acclaim and how contemporary Korean artists are making significant waves on the global stage.
Hyundai Commission: Anicka Yi: In Love With The World, 2021, at Tate Modern, London. Photo by Will Burrard-Lucas ©ArtNews
Seung-taek Lee, Tied White Porcelain © Gallery Hyundai
Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture No.16-78-81 © MMCA
Kyungah Ham, What you see is the unseen – Chandeliers for Five Cities © Kyungah Ham | 

Join us for an engaging discussion with Peter Kahng, an expert on the intersection of global art markets and contemporary Korean art. As a lecturer at Stanford University specializing in “Global Art Markets in Asia,” Peter Kahng will provide a unique perspective on the thriving contemporary art scene in Korea. Explore how Korean art movements, including the influential Dansaekhwa, have garnered international acclaim and how contemporary Korean artists are making significant waves on the global stage.

 

The Rise of Korean Contemporary Art with Peter Kahng

Wednesday, October 2, 2024 | 6:30 PM (EDT)


 The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

 

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About the Speaker:

 

Peter Kahng is a lecturer at Stanford University, where he delves into the financial dynamics of global art markets with a focus on Asia. His expertise bridges the worlds of finance and art, providing a comprehensive analysis of the art ecosystem. In addition to his academic role, Mr. Kahng is involved on committees of prestigious art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Tate Modern.

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Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation Series on Ethics & Common Values: A Conversation with Minister Kyung-wha Kang

Posted on by Yurim Oh

 

With the ever-growing need to understand ourselves and humanity as a whole, it is necessary to examine the concepts of morality, ethics and universal values as guiding principles of the human condition. With generous support from Y.T. Hwang Family Foundation, The Korea Society presents a Series on Ethics and Common Values.

This series promotes the understanding of central themes of our human existence – morality, ethics, personal responsibility, compassion and civility – through a series of lectures by distinguished speakers and conversation with extraordinary individuals who exemplify the universal values in line with the mission of Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation and The Korea Society.

The Korea Society and Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation is proud to present Minister Kyung-wha Kang, President and CEO of Asia Society, in a conversation with Ambassador (ret) Kathleen Stephens.

 

 This program is made possible by the support from Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation.

 

Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation
Series on Ethics & Common Values
A Conversation with Minister Kyung-wha Kang

Tuesday, October 1, 2024 | 6 PM (EDT)


 The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

 

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About the Speaker:

 

Minister Kyung-wha Kang is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Asia Society.

Minister Kang served as the first female Minister of Foreign Affairs of South Korea, from 2017 to 2021. She is a veteran diplomat in the Korean Foreign Ministry and the United Nations, holding positions in Seoul, New York, and Geneva. Prior to her appointment as Minister of Foreign Affairs, she served as Senior Advisor on Policy to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, as well as Chief of his Transition Team. Minister Kang also served as Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs from April 2013 to October 2016, and was Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights from January 2007 to March 2013. Her roles in the UN marked the highest positions held in an international organization by a Korean woman.

Before entering the United Nations, Minister Kang was Director General of International Organizations in the Republic of Korea’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade, becoming the second female Korean diplomat to serve at the director level. She was a Minister in Korea’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations from 2001 to 2005, during which period she chaired the Commission on the Status of Women. Prior to joining the Foreign Ministry in 1998, Minister Kang assisted the Speaker of the National Assembly in the fields of women’s advancement and parliamentary diplomacy. Earlier in her career, she worked for the Korean Broadcasting System’s news bureau and international radio bureau, and lectured in universities both in Korea and in the United States.

Minister Kang graduated from Yonsei University and has an M.A. in mass communication and a Ph.D. in intercultural communication from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is currently a distinguished professor at the Institute for Global Engagement and Empowerment at Yonsei University in Seoul. She is also a trustee of several Korean and international non-governmental organizations.

 

About the Moderator:
 

Ambassador (ret) Kathleen Stephens was a career diplomat in the United States Foreign Service, 1978-2015. She was U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea 2008-2011, the first woman and first Korean-speaker in that position. Other overseas assignments included postings to Trinidad and Tobago, China, Korea, former Yugoslavia, Portugal, Northern Ireland, where she was U.S. Consul General in Belfast during the negotiations culminating in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and India, where she was U.S. Chargé d’affaires (2014-2015).

Ambassador Stephens was William J. Perry Fellow for Korea at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, 2015-2018. She has served as President and CEO of the Korea Economic Institute of American (KEIA) from 2018 to 2023. She is board vice-chair of The Asia Foundation and board chair of Pacific Century Institute. Ambassador Stephens’ U.S. government awards include the Presidential Meritorious Service Award (2009) and Linguist of the Year (2010). Other awards related to Korea include the Kwanghwa Medal of Diplomatic Merit, the Sejong Cultural Award, the Korean-American Friendship Association Award, the Kevin O’Donnell Distinguished Friend of Korea, AmCham Korea’s Outstanding Achievement Award, and in 2022 the First Baek Bum Kim Koo Award.

Ambassador Stephens studied at Prescott College, University of Hong Kong and Oxford University, and holds a BA Honors from Prescott. She holds a Master’s degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School. In the 1970s she was an Outward Bound instructor in Hong Kong, and a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea.

 

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Dyadic | Annette Hur & Hayoon Jay Lee

Posted on by Yurim Oh

Exhibition: September 12 – December 13, 2024 |

In the modern tradition of abstract art, artists look beyond what we physically see. Using color, shape, line, and texture, they express strong emotional content without constraints of representation.

Two Korean-born artists based in New York present their own expositions and elucidations in Dyadic, a duo exhibition. With her bold colors and brushstroke, Annette Hur deliberately positions her paintings in between abstraction and figuration, dealing with the conflicts of the real lived experience and how her body remembers and processes it. Hayoon Jay Lee uses rice as object, motif, metaphor and visceral biomorphic forms, meticulously and meditatively arranging individual grains of rice into a surface with modeling paste to create physical and emotional topographies.

The Korea Society Gallery is open only by appointment. The appointment must be made at least 24 hours prior to the scheduled visit. To make an appointment, please contact info@koreasociety.org.

 

Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 10 AM-4:30 PM
By Appointment Only

Click here to make an appointment

 

  Dyadic | A Duo Exhibition
Annette Hur & Hayoon Jay Lee

 

@ The Korea Society 
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor, NYC

**Pre-registration is now required for all Korea Society events, and an ID is required for security.**

For more information, please contact info@koreasociety.org or call (212) 759-7525.

 

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Annette Hur was born in South Korea and lives and works in Brooklyn. Her recent exhibitions include solo/group exhibitions at Hesse Flatow, Home Gallery, Ross + Kramer, Assembly Room, Wallach Gallery, Gavin Brown Enterprise, RegularNormal, Urban Zen, Times Square Space in New York; Phillips Auction Seoul & Hong Kong; Long Story Short LA, Helen J Gallery, Los Angeles; Unit London, London. Hur was a nominee for Rema Hor Mann Grant, a resident of BOLT Residency at Chicago Artists Coalition and she holds a BA from Ewha Women’s University, a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA from Columbia University.

Hayoon Jay Lee is an interdisciplinary artist who frequently combines installations, performances, sculptures, videos and paintings. Born in Daegu, South Korea, Lee obtained both a BFA and MFA in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Among other awards, Lee received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship award from the U.S. Department of Education and a Full Fellowship Artist in Residency Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her work can be found in the collections of the Zimmerli Museum; Asheville Museum; the Gwangju Contemporary Museum of Art; the Henan Museum in Zhengzhou, China; Hollis Taggart Gallery; and many private collections.

 

The South Korean Film Industry with Sangjoon Lee, Dal Yong Jin, and Jason Bechervaise

Posted on by Yurim Oh

South Korea’s film industry is producing movies and original series eagerly anticipated by the global audience, and it is now arguably considered one of the few countries outside the United States to have captivated the world’s hearts and minds through pop music, TV dramas, and film. Similarly, the exponential growth in the South Korean film industry has been mirrored by increasing interest from the press and academia all over the world.

The South Korean Film Industry is the first detailed scholarly overview of the South Korean film industry, discussing topics from short films to popular television series that have engaged global audiences and exploring the major changes in South Korean film making and marketing, as well as the international popularity of South Korean films.

Join us for a conversation about the South Korean film industry with three contributors to this new volume: Sangjoon Lee, Dal Yong Jin, and Jason Bechervaise.

 

The South Korean Film Industry with Sangjoon Lee, Dal Yong Jin, and Jason Bechervaise

Tuesday, September 10, 2024 | 6 PM (EDT)


 The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

 

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About the Speakers:

Sangjoon Lee is an Associate Professor of Asian cinema at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media. Lee is the author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network (Cornell University Press, 2020; Korean edition in 2023 and Chinese edition in 2024) and the editor/co-editor of Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (University of Michigan Press, 2015), Rediscovering Korean Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2019; 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title), Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (Routledge, 2024), and The South Korean Film Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2024). Currently, Lee is completing a monograph titled Destination Hong Kong: South Korean Cinema’s Encounter with Sinophone Cinemas, which chronicles the seven-decade-long interactions between South Korean cinema and the diasporic Sinophone cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. He is also working on a new edited volume, Netflix and South Korean Media in a Globalizing World (Brill). Lee’s works have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian.

Dal Yong Jin is Distinguished SFU Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, where his research explores digital platforms and digital games, globalization and media, transnational cultural studies, and the political economy of media and culture. He is the author of numerous books, including Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (MIT Press, 2010), New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social Media (University of Illinois Press, 2016), Smartland Korea: Mobile communication, Culture and Society (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Globalization and Media in the Digital Platform Age (Routledge, 2019), and Transmedia Storytelling in East Asia (ed. Routledge, 2020). Jin has also published many articles in scholarly journals, such as New Media and Society, The Information Society, Media, Culture and Society, International Journal of Communication, Telecommunications Policy, Television and New Media, Games and Culture, and Information Communication and Society. He is the founding book series editor of Routledge Research in Digital Media and Culture in Asia while directing the Center for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST) at SFU.

Jason Bechervaise is an academic and film critic based in Seoul where he has taught Korean Cinema at Korea University and at other universities. His Ph.D thesis, titled Bong Joon-ho and the Korean Film Industry: The National and Transnational Cinema Intersection, was completed at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea (2017). He is the author of several articles including “Parasite Forges New Paradigm on Transnational and National Cinema Intersection” (2020), “Inter-Korean Relations Remain Precarious: The Spy Gone North, Illang: The Wolf Brigade, Swing Kids and Take Point – trends in Korean Cinema in 2018” (2019), in Contemporary Cinema Studies, Contemporary Cinema Research Institute. He has regularly written film criticism in The Korea Times and Screen International and is currently featured on KBS World Radio as a film critic.

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Korean Couture: Generations of Revolution | A Curator’s Perspective

Posted on by Yurim Oh

Korean Couture: Generations of Revolution is a compelling exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art about the history and transformative legacy of Korean fashion, presenting garments ranging from excavated 17th-century aristocratic garments to contemporary Korean couture by leading and emerging designers, including André Kim (1935–2010); Lie Sang Bong (b. 1954); Lee Chung Chung (b. 1978), for LIE; Lee Jean Youn (b. 1978); and Shin Kyu Yong (b. 1988) and Park Ji Sun (b. 1988), for Blindness.

Through juxtaposing historical and contemporary ensembles, Korean Couture: Generations of Revolution recounts the definition of “couture” from an inclusive perspective, amplifying how tradition has empowered contemporary Korean fashion designers to invent a new artistic language.
Photos Courtesy of Lie Sangbong 

Korean Couture: Generations of Revolution is a compelling exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art about the history and transformative legacy of Korean fashion, presenting garments ranging from excavated 17th-century aristocratic garments to contemporary Korean couture by leading and emerging designers, including André Kim (1935–2010); Lie Sang Bong (b. 1954); Lee Chung Chung (b. 1978), for LIE; Lee Jean Youn (b. 1978); and Shin Kyu Yong (b. 1988) and Park Ji Sun (b. 1988), for Blindness.

Through juxtaposing historical and contemporary ensembles, Korean Couture: Generations of Revolution recounts the definition of “couture” from an inclusive perspective, amplifying how tradition has empowered contemporary Korean fashion designers to invent a new artistic language.

Join us for a conversation with Darnell-Jamal Lisby, who co-curated the exhibition with Sooa Im McCormick.

 

Korean Couture: Generations of Revolution | A Curator’s Perspective

Thursday, September 5, 2024 | 6:30 PM (EDT)


 The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

 

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About the Speaker:

 

Darnell-Jamal Lisby is Assistant Curator of Fashion at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he develops projects rooted in fashion studies that connect with the institution’s comprehensive art collection. As a fashion historian, Lisby has a thorough understanding of the global history of fashion dating back to the 1300s. Notably, he has sought opportunities throughout his career to raise awareness around the intersection of Blackness and fashion studies from the 1800s to the present. Thus far at the CMA, he’s helped organize the museum’s iteration of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion and curated the exhibitions Egyptomania: Fashion’s Conflicted Obsession and Korean Couture: Generations of Revolution.

Lisby holds degrees from the Fashion Institute of Technology, including an MA in fashion and textiles studies: history, theory, and museum practice and a BS in art history and museum professions. Before coming to Cleveland, he worked at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, as the sole fashion historian on the curatorial team for the Willi Smith: Street Couture exhibition and as an education coordinator for advanced audiences organizing programming, including the museum’s first virtual symposium, “Fashion, Culture, Futures: African American Ingenuity, Activism, and Storytelling.” Before Cooper Hewitt, Lisby worked at an array of institutions in New York City, including the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He also taught in the Fashion Institute of Technology master’s program in fashion design, fortifying emerging designers with the historical knowledge they require to pursue fruitful careers. He has published extensively in academic and mainstream platforms, including the Fashion and Race Database, Cultured Magazine, The Fashion Studies Journal, and Teen Vogue.

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Minsoo Kang: The Melancholy of Untold History with Ed Lin

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“With his quietly magical debut, Kang delivers a book that only a history professor such as himself could write. The novel switches between a profoundly personal story of loss and a grand, mythic epic, poking at the varied ethics and aims of historicism as it goes.”— Bustle

A beautifully crafted, enriching saga inspired by East Asian mythology, The Melancholy of Untold History is Minsoo Kang’s debut novel, steeped in history and lyrically exciting, interweaving four complex yet entertaining stories as they shape and create a nation’s literary narrative through the themes of love and grief.

Famous for his dispelling of the national myth, a history professor understands the power of narrative. He has inspired another young professor to search for her own truths, while trying to understand the way fiction creates fact and how sometimes the past can only be understood by filling in holes with a new narrative. Which is exactly what he needs when his wife passes away to parse meaning out of a world that no longer makes sense.

Together the protégé and the Historian find comfort in each other. Yet they know their time together is fleeting, as time usually is. Only the gods have an abundance of time, and yet—the two discover—even that might not be so clear cut. Part of their homeland’s myth tells of four gods who squabbled and argued and destroyed and rebuilt time and again. Or did they?

Spanning 3,000 years and multiple voices—with tales within tales woven expertly together—The Melancholy of Untold History reveals people who seek to confront the hardships of life through storytelling. Mixing the East Asian mythos with a postmodern approach to standard sci-fi/fantasy narrative tropes, Minsoo Kang has created a challenging, beautiful, sad, humorous, and ultimately unforgettable novel of love, grief, and myth-making.

Minsoo Kang discusses his debut novel with Ed Lin.

During the event, The Melancholy of Untold History will be available for purchase.

 

Minsoo Kang: The Melancholy of Untold History with Ed Lin

Wednesday, July 24, 2024 | 6:30 PM (EDT)


 The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

 

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About the Speaker:

Minsoo Kang is a historian, fiction writer, and translator, currently a professor of history at the University of Missouri – Saint Louis.  He is author of the history book Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination, the short story collection Of Tales and Enigmas, and the Penguin Classics translation of the Joseon dynasty novel The Story of Hong Gildong.  The Melancholy of Untold History is his debut novel.

 

About the Moderator:

Ed Lin, a native New Yorker of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. His books include his first novel Waylaid, and a trilogy of mysteries set in Manhattan’s Chinatown in 1976. His current mystery series is set in Taipei, and the latest of which, Death Doesn’t Forget, was published by Soho Crime in 2022. His YA debut, David Tung Can’t Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College, was published by Kaya Press in 2020. Lin lives in Brooklyn with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung, and son.

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Hyeseung Song: Docile with Emma Eun-joo Choi

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Author Photo: Jack Sorokin

“Docile is the rarest of things: a scorchingly honest, beautiful, hugely evocative memoir that’s also a proper pageturner: I read it breathlessly in a single sitting, transported and deeply moved. It’s at one and the same time the story of a life and a meditation on identity, family, trauma, illness, and the nature of love, art, and success. It’s wonderful.” — Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author of H is for Hawk

A daughter of Korean immigrants, Hyeseung Song spends her earliest years in the cane fields of Texas where her loyalties are divided between a restless father in search of Big Money, and a beautiful yet domineering mother whose resentments about her own life compromises her relationship with her daughter. With her parents at constant odds, Song learns more words in Korean for hatred than for love. When the family’s fake Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Song moves to a new elementary school. On her first day, a girl asks the teacher: “Can she speak English?”

Neither rich nor white, Song does what is necessary to be visible: she internalizes the model minority myth as well as her beloved mother’s dreams to see her on a secure path. Song meets these expectations by attending the best Ivy League universities in the country. But when she wavers, in search of an artistic life on her own terms, her mother warns, “Happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves when they don’t have the talent and drive to go after real success.” Years of self-erasure take a toll and Song experiences recurring episodes of depression and mania.

So begins her sweeping journey to heal herself by losing everything. In her extraordinary debut memoir Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl, Song expertly weaves together the beauty and complexity of her experience. It is an immigrant story, but also a mother-daughter story, a mental health story, and ultimately a redemption story. Poetic and unflinching, Docile is a lesson in the power of love and legacy to shape us and finding the bravery to be our authentic selves in spite of the expectations we carry.

In a conversation with Emma Eun-joo Choi, Song discusses her memoir.

Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl will be available for purchase.

 

Hyeseung Song: Docile with Emma Eun-joo Choi

Thursday, July 18, 2024 6:30 PM (EDT)


 The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

 

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About the Speaker:

Hyeseung Song is a first-generation Korean American writer and painter. She lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.

 

About the Moderator:
 

Emma Eun-joo Choi is a writer, comic, and “journalist.” She is a producer, writer, social media head, and New York City correspondent at NPR’s flagship trivia/comedy/news show Wait… Wait… Don’t Tell Me! From 2022 to 2023, she was the host of its spinoff podcast Everyone & Their Mom, where she interviewed everybody from celebrities to asparagus psychics to her own mother, and regularly records segmented out in the field. She is the youngest ever NPR program host. Equal parts comedian and fiction writer, her short stories have appeared both online and in print and her plays have been produced professionally at DC Fringe. Her fiction falls between the genres of horror and magical realism and is often deeply sad. She is currently working on a novel about a haunted house. 

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Author Talks: Miye Lee

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* Indies Introduce Pick for Summer 2024

“This delightful story transcends…..A comforting story of dreams, lives, and the ways people process all that reality offers them.”—Kirkus Review

What if there was a store that sold dreams? Which would you buy? And who might you become when you wake up? A captivating story that will leave a lingering magical feeling in readers’ minds, Miye Lee‘s The Dallergut Dream Department Store is the first book in a bestselling duology for anyone exhausted from the reality of their daily life.

In a mysterious town hidden in our collective subconscious there’s a department store that sells dreams. Day and night, visitors both human and animal shuffle in to purchase their latest adventure. Each floor specializes in a specific type of dream: childhood memories, food dreams, ice skating, dreams of stardom. Flying dreams are almost always sold out. Some seek dreams of loved ones who have died.

For Penny, an enthusiastic new hire, working at Dallergut is the opportunity of a lifetime. As she uncovers the workings of this whimsical world, she bonds with a cast of unforgettable characters. 

Miye Lee discusses her debut novel, which has been translated into English by Sandy Joosun Lee.

 

Author Talks: Miye Lee

Tuesday, July 9, 2024


 The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

 

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About the Speaker:

Miye Lee was born in Busan in 1990. After graduating from the Busan National University School of Materials Science and Engineering, she worked as a semiconductor engineer at Samsung Electronics. Her debut novel The Dallergut Dream Department Store has sold over one million copies in Korea and was named the 2020 Book of the Year by numerous bookstores and websites, including Yes24, Interpark, Aladdin, and Youngpoong Books.

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