The Korean Wave 2006 - Korean Cultural Service

The New York Times style magazine, sunday, march 19, 2006
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Lost Seoul
By PETER HYUN
Traces of old Korea are impossible to find in the
posh Cheongdam-dong district of Seoul. The
streets here are lined with spacious Prada and
Louis Vuitton stores and with fusion restaurants whose
menus and decor are hyped by the Korean-language editions
of Vogue and Cosmopolitan. Trendy wine bars have
sprung up everywhere so that sophisticated Seoulites can
now sip New World vintages at tables overlooking a skyline
bejeweled with shimmering skyscrapers.
For a city decimated by war 50 years ago, Seoul is certainly
in amazing shape. But many of the spectacular
changes that have occurred in South Korea over the last
few decades are viewed by the Korean filmmaker Kim
Ki-duk with skepticism and disapproval.
The winner of several international awards, this 45-yearold
writer and director is perhaps best known in the West
for “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring” and
“3-iron.” A quiet, lyrical film, “Spring, Summer” chronicles
five seasons in the lives of a Korean Buddhist monk
and his young protege, who live in a small wooden house
on a raft in the middle of a mountain lake. Each vignette
is filmed in a way that makes the viewer experience the
passing of time as well as the changes of season. “3-iron,”
on the other hand, concerns a young man who roams
the streets of Seoul on his motorcycle, breaking into and
inhabiting the houses of their vacationing owners. It
depicts a modern, middle-class South Korea, similar in
some ways to the United States. With their contrasting
visions – ancient versus modern, pastoral versus urban,
philosophic versus pragmatic – the films point to a duality
at the heart of contemporary South Korea, and also
in their director.
Kim Ki-duk has had no training in the arts or film. His
formal education ended with elementary school. As a
teenager, he worked in factories, manufacturing buttons
and electronic gadgets, a microscopic cog in South
Korea’s “miracle economy.” He began making films more
than a decade ago, and many of their magical, idyllic
images and oddball characters are drawn from his life.
Despite fame and some fortune overseas, Kim has yet
to be embraced at home, and he does not have the same
cult following in Korea that he does in Europe and the
United States. Yet Kim insists he couldn’t be happier, living
on the outskirts of Seoul, eating Korean food and
enjoying all things traditionally Korean. He does not,
however, wear a Korean flag pin on his lapel, nor does
he suggest that his country and its culture are superior
to others. He simply feels more comfortable in familiar
surroundings.
Kim questions the foreign values that have challenged
Korea’s millenniums-old culture, altering what had been
to hard-working South Koreans “our way of life.” But
he readily admits that not all South Koreans share his
pejorative view of Westernization and rapid change, certainly
not those in the entertainment industry of which
he is a part. Today, Seoul is Asia’s pop-culture capital,
with teenagers and hip adults emulating stylish South
Korean singers and movie stars throughout Asia, whether
at nightclubs, karaoke bars or plastic surgeons’ offices.
Kim describes a current generation gap in which parents
lead traditional, family-oriented lives starkly different
from those of their children – adoring fans of “Friends”
and “Sex and the City” who pursue cash-rich careers and
live alone in brand-new studio apartments,eating pizza
and sandwiches, which require far fewer utensils and are
less of a hassle to prepare.
Yet, in Seoul, traditional single-story Korean houses still
stand next to chic glass-panel buildings whose interiors
smell of paint. Sales clerks – whether in a European couture
shop in Cheongdam-dong or a McDonald’s in some
suburb – bow courteously to every customer. And you
can get a cup of espresso or spiked coffee in the Parisstyle
cafes, but you can also find green-tea milkshakes
and sweet-potato pastries, long a staple of the old Korean
snacking culture, sold on the streets by elderly vendors.
So contemporary South Korea isn’t entirely modern, nor
is it a country whose economy depends on foreigners
visiting ancient tourist attractions. It is, as Kim knows,
a country of juxtapositions, at times extreme, often exciting.
“Understanding black leads to understanding of
white,” he says. “They are reciprocal. Therefore, I think
they are the same.”
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Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.