JB Life January 2017

Lee Min Hyeok (we’re Lees all around the table, but
not related), who has come along for an interview
about their work, the construction of traditional Korean
hanoks.
We sip our tea on the balcony, watching and waiting
patiently for the specks of white in the trees
around the reservoir to spread their heron wings and
dive into the water. You can’t help but wonder if it
looks as beautiful and graceful from the perspective
of the fish, who are about to become a side dish.
But perhaps the fish have accepted the flow of nature
better than us.
Their work sounds grueling as much as fascinating.
I am enchanted by the description of removing
an ancient rooftop for repairs, but maybe less
so by the choking dust resulting from twenty tons
of mud that has been drying for five hundred years.
This is no exaggeration, it turns out. Forty thousand
pounds of mud is quite standard for the construction
of a hanok roof. I ask more about old materials, expecting,
I think, a similar strain of what I’ve heard
from home of carpenters digging carefully for old,
hand-fashioned colonial nails at destruction sites,
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much higher in quality and durability than our modern,
machine-produced versions. It takes a while
and a few drawings and phone translations for me to
understand what they are trying to explain about ancient
Korean “nails,” though, which turn out to often
be tight collections of dried reeds. Massive beams
of hard wood that take five strong men to move into
place are held there, for hundreds of years, by tough
little twigs.
BK gestures to the hills sloping all around us and
reminds me that during the war the country was
stripped of trees. I had heard that the Arbor Day tradition
of replanting was waning, as there are about
as many trees as there is room for between the growing
skeletal, ever-taller apartment building invasion
of the landscape. What I hadn’t thought of was what
this means for the age of the overall Korean forest.
There are plenty of forty or fifty-year-old trees,
which is fairly young in tree years. So for hanoks,
stronger, old-growth wood is imported from North
America.
I ask BK if it seems sad to him that the trees aren’t
actually Korean trees. Somehow, I had the impres-
sion that, after a cold waterfall shower in the morning,
the hanok builders would turn around and hug
the nearest tree, patriotically. Not exactly. Traditionalism,
and even Korean pride, aren’t always exactly
what you would expect.
It seems a shame to me, at first, considering the
patriotism the trees might feel. But then I remember
my first flight across the States to the Pacific Northwest,
the ugly brown squares cut out of the beautiful
deep green mountains of old-growth forest. “Kimberly
Clark,” said the woman next to me in disgust.
“It all gets chopped down for toilet paper.” If the
majestic, kind, and furry Douglas firs must come
down, I am much more heartened to see them loved
into a beautiful, harmonious hanok far away than
to become local toilet paper. Globalization can be
bittersweet.
“Too-strict rules make us lose culture,” says BK,
poignantly. He tells me about the struggles of building
projects with hard and fast rules about the tools
that can be used. It does seem to make sense that
the original tools would need to be used to create
an authentic structure. He shows me a picture in his
phone of a terrifically old beam revealed in a recent
restoration project. In front is a fresh, light, probably
North American beam, glided into place next to
an older one that is still strong, but dark with age.
Instead of the pettable, smooth furriness of newly
cut wood, the old beam bears proudly the shine of
thousands of painstaking grooves that were left by
someone who must have spent days shaping it by
hand hundreds of years ago.
It’s hard to say if all Korean traditional builders
would feel the same. Patriotism is strong in Korea,
of course. BK has lived and worked in other
countries, embraced other cultures warmly. Perhaps
he can see from the perspective of the bird and the
fish, and perhaps knows exactly how they can build
their nest.
PHOTOS: [Previous and current pages]
Hanok projects by Byoungkyoung
Lee and his crew. [Photos courtesy of
BYOUNGKYOUNG LEE]
Jeonbuk Life 25