There is a long tradition in Korea of presenting various performances–singing, instrument playing, and dancing–on one stage. Join us for another enchanting evening of Korean traditional music and dance performances, featuring virtuosos from Korea.
Ga Mu Ak: An Evening of Korean Traditional Music and Dance
Monday, July 1, 2024 | 6:30 PM
The Korea Society 350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor New York, NY 10017
Kim Joungsup (piri) is a performer and conductor who has taught at many universities in Korea, including Ewha Womans University.
Kim Myoseon (dance) was designated as Master Instructor of Seungmu, an Important Intangible Cultural Property of Korea, in 2005. She is Chief Artistic Director of Balim Dance Company and Chair of the Ubong Imaebang Dance Preservation Association.
Choy Jin (gayageum) is Professor of Music Education at Korea National University of Education.
Song Jae Young (pansori) has taught at Provincial Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts, Jeonbuk, and is the Cultural Heritage Simcheongga Performing Arts Holder of Jeonbuk Province.
Choi Eunjeong (dance) is a Master of Salpuri, the 20th Important Intangible Cultural Property, and Seungmu, the 27th Important Intangible Cultural Property. She teaches at Mokwon University.
Is the short story a fiction writer’s laboratory where you can experiment with characters, plots, and ideas? or is it an art form of its own, telling a complete story in just a few words? What does a short story need to have in order to be successful that is different from a novel? And what makes the writers return to this form of writing again and again?
Join us for a conversation between Gina Chung (Green Frog, Sea Change) and Yun Ko-eun (Table for One, The Disaster Tourist) about the art of short story writing in English and Korean.
Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in New York City. She is the author of the short story collection Green Frog (out March 12, 2024 from Vintage in the U.S. and June 6, 2024 from Picador in the U.K.) and the novel Sea Change, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a 2023 B&N Discover Pick, an APALA Adult Fiction Honor Book, and a New York Times Most Anticipated Book. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School.
Yun Ko-eun is the winner of 2021 CWA Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation and was the first Asian writer to receive the award. Her prizewinning novel The Disaster Tourist was praised as an ecothriller by English language media and received positive reviews throughout the US and UK. It was shortlisted for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Rosetta Awards, Comedy Women in Print Awards, and the Dublin Literature Award. The Disaster Tourist has been sold to 11 Countries, the UK, America, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Latvia, Poland, China, Taiwan and Japan. The TV series adaptation of The Disaster Tourist will be made in English, and Yun will be an executive producer. Table for One is Yun’s first collection of short stories to be translated into English. Her second novel in translation is Art on Fire, published in Korea in 2023.
Today, South Korea is a cultural superpower—a global trendsetter producing award-winning films like Parasite, riveting dramas like Squid Game, and chart-topping music by K-pop groups such as BTS and BLACKPINK. But behind the country’s meteoric rise to the world stage, a phenomenon known as the Korean Wave, or hallyu, is the story of remarkable resilience and innovation.
Just a century ago, Korea was in search of a new national identity, following its occupation by Japan and the Korean War. Harnessing cutting-edge technology, the country has rapidly transformed its economy and international reputation. At the same time, its creative outputs are deeply rooted in its past, with many contemporary artists, filmmakers, musicians, and fashion designers paying tribute to traditional values and art forms dating back to Korea’s dynastic kingdom days.
Hallyu! The Korean Wave features approximately 250 objects—costumes, props, photographs, videos, pop culture ephemera, and contemporary works—providing an immersive and multisensory journey through a fascinating history, and a celebration of a vibrant creative force that bridges cultural, societal, and linguistic divides and continues to reach new heights today.
First presented at Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the exhibition is currently at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and will travel to Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
Three curators—Rosalie Kim, Victoria and Albert Museum; Christina Yu Yu, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Yoon-Jee Choi, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco—discuss this captivating exhibition and South Korea’s rise as a cultural superpower.
Hallyu! The Korean Wave
The Curatorial Roundtable
Thursday, May 16, 2024
The Korea Society 350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor New York, NY 10017
Rosalie Kim joined the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2012 as the curator of the Korean collection in the Asia Department and led exhibitions including Hallyu! The Korean Wave and Lustrous Surfaces: Lacquer from Asia and Beyond. Her interest lies in Korean craft and design, world lacquer history, and the making of contemporary culture, craft and design in the digital age. Prior to the V&A, she studied philosophy and civil engineering in architecture in Belgium and Italy, before obtaining her MArch and PhD by Design from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her PhD thesis was nominated for the RIBA President’s Award for Research in 2012. She worked as an architect in Korea and Europe and led architectural design studios at Kingston University, London.
Christina Yu Yu is the Matsutaro Shoriki Chair, Art of Asia and leads a team of curators in overseeing the Museum of Fine Arts’ collection of more than 100,000 works from Japan, China, Korea, South and Southeast Asia, and the Islamic world. She first joined the Museum in 2018, after serving as the director of the USC Pacific Asia Museum. Christina was born and raised in China, attended Wellesley for her undergraduate studies, completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and began her curatorial career with an internship at the MFA. She has also previously held positions at LACMA, Chambers Fine Art (a gallery based in New York and Beijing) and the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan.
Yoon-Jee Choi recently joined the Asian Art Museum–Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art & Culture as the Assistant Curator for Korean Art. Before she joined the University of Chicago Ph.D. program in 2018, she studied Korean art history in general at Ewha Womans University and interned for the National Museum of Korea. While she serves as a specialist in Korean art at the current institution, her larger body of research focuses on the art historical exchange among Northeast Asian countries during the early modern era, especially on the 19th-to-early-20th-century cultural interactions and exchanges between Korea and Japan. She is set to complete a Ph.D. examining the industrialization and modernization of the craft industry in Northeast Asia.
“Award-winner Hur’s latest historical intrigue is well researched and doesn’t shy away from depicting elements of this real king’s brutal history, and the resulting tale is immersive, intense, and engaging. A page-turner.” —Kirkus Reviews
To save her sister, a teen girl becomes entangled in a political conspiracy with an enigmatic prince in this fiery new YA novel. June Hur, bestselling author of The Red Palace, returns with a devastating and pulse-pounding tale based on a true story from Korean history.
A Crane Among Wolves is set in 1506 Joseon, where people suffer under the cruel reign of the tyrant King Yeonsan, powerless to stop him from commandeering their land for his recreational use, banning and burning books, and kidnapping and horrifically abusing women and girls as his personal playthings.
Seventeen-year-old Iseul has lived a sheltered, privileged life despite the kingdom’s turmoil. When her older sister, Suyeon, becomes the king’s latest prey, Iseul leaves the relative safety of her village, traveling through forbidden territory to reach the capital in hopes of stealing her sister back. But she soon discovers the king’s power is absolute, and to challenge his rule is to court certain death.
Prince Daehyun has lived his whole life in the terrifying shadow of his despicable half-brother, the king. Forced to watch King Yeonsan flaunt his predation through executions and rampant abuse of the common folk, Daehyun aches to find a way to dethrone his half-brother once and for all.
When Iseul’s and Daehyun’s fates collide, their contempt for each other is transcended only by their mutual hate for the king. Armed with Iseul’s family connections and Daehyun’s royal access, they reluctantly join forces to launch the riskiest gamble the kingdom has ever seen.
In her conversation with Ellen Oh, June Hur discusses her new novel and writing YA novels based on lives and stories from Korean history.
June Hur: A Crane Among Wolves with Ellen Oh
Monday, May 13, 2024 | 6 PM (EDT)
The Korea Society 350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor New York, NY 10017
June Hur is a bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author of YA historicals, including The Silence of Bones, The Forest of Stolen Girls, The Red Palace, and A Crane Among Wolves. Born in South Korea, Hur spent her formative years in the USA, Canada, and South Korea before studying History and Literature at the University of Toronto, and working at the city’s public library. Her work has been featured in Forbes, NPR, The New York Times, CBC, and KBS. June resides in Toronto with her family and can be spotted writing in coffee shops.
About the Moderator:
Ellen Oh is the author of the new young adult novel The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee and an award-winning author of middle grade novels Haru Zombie Dog Hero, Finding Junie Kim, Dragon Egg Princess, The Spirit Hunters trilogy and The Prophecy Series: Prophecy, Warrior and King. She is the editor and contributor of You Are Here: Connecting Flights, a collection of interwoven stories, editor of the middle grade anthology Flying Lessons and Other Stories and the young adult anthology A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. She is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing diversity in children’s literature. Oh lives in Rockville, Md., with her husband, three human children and two dog children.
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 Min Jin Lee in a conversation with Kyung B. Yoon.
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 Min Jin Lee
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 | 6 PM (EDT)
The Korea Society 350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor New York, NY 10017
Min Jin Lee is the author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award. Lee is the recipient of the 2022 Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity. She has received fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee has been inducted into the Hall of Fame for the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Writers, and the Bronx High School of Science. She has been honored by the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Asian American Journalists Association, the Korean American Community Foundation, the Council of Korean Americans, the Queens Public Library, and the Korean Community Center. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Chosun Ilbo, Vogue, and Food & Wine. She has introduced the Penguin Classics edition of The Great Gatsby. In 2023, Lee served as the Editor of the The Best American Shorts Stories. She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon and a nonfiction work, Name Recognition. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College and serves as a trustee of PEN America and a director of the Authors Guild. Lee lives in Harlem with her family.
About the Moderator:
Kyung B. Yoon is the President and CEO (as well as co-founder) of the Korean American Community Foundation (KACF), the first and largest philanthropic organization in the U.S. dedicated to strengthening Korean American communities. Her career in poverty alleviation, development economics, and media encompasses her roles as the Executive Producer of Television at the World Bank Institute and a correspondent for WNYW-Fox Channel 5 where she made history as the first Korean American broadcast reporter in NYC. Kyung is currently a contributing reporter to CUNY-TV’s Asian American Life, which is broadcast nationally on PBS stations and for which she received an Emmy nomination. She has previously served as the board chair of Philanthropy New York and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, as a trustee of the New York Foundation, and as a board member of the United Way of New York City.
How can a Korean artist—however one identifies as such—shape their own narrative in this fast changing, global environment? Educated, living, and working in both the United States and South Korea, three Korean artists ponder what home means to them by exploring the landscape surrounding them. Working in three distinctive media—sculpture, photography, and contemporary mother-of-pearl art—this group of young artists represent the international experience and diversity within the new generation of Korean artists and the fluid definition of one’s identity and home in the age of intercontinental living.
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
Heejung Cho is a sculptor and printmaker born in Korea and currently lives in NYC. She has completed residencies at Museum of Arts and Design, Newark Museum, Bronx Museum of Arts, Lower East Side Printshop, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Robert Blackburn Workshop. Her work is featured in numerous venues internationally in the U.S., Korea, China and Sweden. She received her BFA at Seoul National University and a MFA at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
Cho abstracts the urban landscape by breaking down the structure and perspective with reclaimed wood scraps. Deconstructing and reconstructing her personal landmarks into structures of perspective, the works represent spaces beyond the specific place and time, presenting an abstraction of space, texture, color and pattern of urban landscape.
Simpson Kim is a South Korean photographer, specializing in street style and fashion photography. In 2011, he left university and headed to New York to become a street photographer. He walked New York’s streets every day, capturing the eclectic styles of the city. Since 2015, Simpson has worked with WWD for street style during Seoul Fashion Week.
His photographs have been featured in Vogue US, British GQ, and Hollywood Reporter, among other publications. He has also worked with various fashion brands around the world, including Louis Vuitton, Bureau Betak, Eider, and many others. Currently, he serves as an ambassador and muse at Nikon Imaging Korea.
Jian Yoo is a contemporary mother-of-pearl artist residing and working between Korea and the United States. While studying Interior Design at Pratt Institute of New York, Yoo chose mother-of-pearl—or “jagae” in Korean—as her medium, inspired by her father, a master of “najeonchilgi” or Korean nacre lacquerware who ran his own studio throughout her childhood. Returning to Korea in 2013, Yoo embarked on pioneering the modern mother-of-pearl art while establishing her own studio, ARIJIAN.
Yoo designed the trophy for the first Seoul Smart City Prize, and her artwork was chosen as the Presidential State Gift for the South Korea-US Summit of 2023 and 44 other heads of state and foreign dignitaries. She held a solo exhibition at the Andaz Hotel Gangnam in Seoul, Lotte Hotel Seoul, Culture Object in New York, and was featured in exhibitions at, among others, Downtown Design Dubai, UNESCO Headquarter in Paris, and National Folk Museum of Korea, which also acquired her artwork. Jian Yoo has also collaborated with brands such as Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, Cartier, Blancpain, Girogetti, and many others.
A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in A Magical Girl Retires, a delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga by Park Seolyeon.
Our protagonist is a normal girl; that is, a 29-year-old millennial woman drowning in credit card debt and unable to find a job after the pandemic rendered her unemployed. She has no family left, no friends, no prospects. One night she goes to Seoul’s Mapo Bridge to end all her troubles—until her attempt is interrupted by a white-clad woman who introduces herself as magical girl Ah Roa. Roa is clairvoyant and searching for the greatest magical girl of them all. And our protagonist just may be that special someone.
Magical girlhood isn’t what our protagonist expected. It’s work: real work, work that can pay off credit card debt! There are magical girl job fairs, magical girl classes, a magical girl cult…and a magical girl union Roa works under. The union is concerned with the greatest threat to humanity of them all: the climate crisis. They think our protagonist can defeat it. But what exactly are her abilities? And why is her magic wand a credit card?
Park Seolyeon explores real-world challenges that are both deeply personal and universal: the search for meaning and the desire to do good in a world that feels like it’s ending. A fun, fast-paced, and enchanting narrative that sparkles thanks to award-nominated translator Anton Hur, A Magical Girl Retires reminds us that we are all magical girls—that fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight can be anyone’s game.
In this episode of Author Talks, Park Seolyeon discusses her career and her English debut.
Park Seolyeon was born in Cheorwon, South Korea and lives in Seoul. She made her debut in the journal Silcheon Munhak and received the 2018 Hankyoreh Literary Award for her novel The Girl in the Air. Her works include the novels Martha’s Work and The Shirley Club, as well as the short-story collection My Hormones Made Me Do It. She runs the literature platform Dungeon.
Zero Waste is a timely documentary film that explores the current recycling efforts in South Korea through the personal stories of six changemakers. These individuals are advocates for a circular economy who fight against the ongoing plastic waste pollution crisis in the country which has been aggravated by the recent global pandemic.
To better understand how so many recyclables end up in our ocean and landfill, director Danny Kim picked up his camera to document if our efforts are wasted after decades of neglect, or if we can make a real impact with our recycling endeavors. A winner of the Green Award at the 2023 Terraviva Film Festival in Italy and the Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 39th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, Zero Waste paints a portrait of both the magnitude of the problem, and the perseverance of those people willing to address them.
On Earth Day 2024, watch the documentary film and join us for a Director’s Talk.
Zero Waste
Virtual Screening: April 21-22 A Director’s Talk: April 22
The Korea Society 350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor New York, NY 10017
Danny Kim is an award winning documentary filmmaker based in Seoul, South Korea. His first feature documentary film Love Child as a producer have screened at such festivals as Sundance, Jeonju International Film Festival, and Wisconsin Film Festival. His recent credits include director/writer/editor/DP for feature documentary Zero Waste which won the emerging filmmaker award at the 39th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Kim is also a founder of Docu+, an impact film studio based in Seoul, South Korea. Kim is a graduate from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he holds Masters of Fine Arts degree at Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts program in Durham, NC.
About the Moderator:
Carina Lee works in the media business field and is responsible for acquiring movies and TV series in Korea. She has built a diverse career ranging from Journalism to content strategy field at global companies such as the Associated Press and Warner Bros Discovery. Carina has also served on the Asian American Journalists Association Seoul board since 2014 and was the Seoul Vice President from 2020 to 2022.
“Weirdly wonderful and wonderfully weird.”— Kirkus Reviews
In the first short-story collection of hers to be translated into and published in English, South Korean author Yun Ko-eun conjures up slightly off-kilter worlds tucked away in the corners of everyday life. Table for One is bursting with images that toe the line between realism and the fantastic, comedy and an element of the surreal, interwoven with the hopelessness and loneliness that pervades the protagonists’ decidedly mundane lives. Mixing quirky and melancholy commentary on densely packed urban life, Yun calls attention to the toll of rapid industrialization and the displacement of traditional culture, presenting a parade of misfortunes that speak to all readers in their unconventional universality.
One of South Korea’s breakout young writers, Yun Ko-eun and her English translator Lizzie Buehler discusses her career and writings.
Author Talks: Yun Ko-eun with Lizzie Buehler
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
The Korea Society 350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor New York, NY 10017
Yun Ko-eun is the winner of 2021 CWA Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation and was the first Asian writer to receive the award. Her prizewinning novel The Disaster Tourist was praised as an ecothriller by English language media and received positive reviews throughout the US and UK. It was shortlisted for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Rosetta Awards, Comedy Women in Print Awards, and the Dublin Literature Award. Since her first publication in 2008, Yun has steadily built a body of work that is so unique, critics have dubbed it the “Yun Ko-eun genre.”
Yun’s first novel in translation The Disaster Tourist has been sold to 11 Countries, the UK, America, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Latvia, Poland, China, Taiwan and Japan. The TV series adaptation of The Disaster Tourist will be made in English, and Yun will be an executive producer. Yun’s second novel in translation is Art on Fire, published in Korea in 2023.
Lizzie Buehler is the translator of The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun and Korean Teachers by Seo Su-jin. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and has studied comparative literature at Princeton and Harvard.
National Museum of Korea; Cultural Heritage Administration |
In this lecture, Professor Sunglim Kim explores various metalwares and decorative arts throughout the history of the Korean peninsula, and craftsmanship and techniques used to create them.
Sunglim Kim is an associate professor of Korean art and culture at Dartmouth College. She specializes in the material and consumer culture of the late Joseon period and women artists in modern and contemporary Korea.
