Diplomatic World_nummer 56.

Installation view of “Master Mould and Copy Room”
© The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing
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exactly what Koreans are reluctant to be confronted with.
They’re born in their convention; if your dad died in the
Korean war, then you must become a doctor, you know?
The whole society is coded like that, so Wanderlust has
no place at all. And there you have an interesting starting
point. So, we decided to make an exhibition in which we
would bring five wonderful Wanderlust artists from Belgium
to Korea. And that worked fantastically, because at the end
of the year 2012, an art magazine in Korea asked fifteen
critics to discuss the exhibitions that had taken place that
year and nine times Wanderlust ended up being number one
in the list.
In your analysis work, to find a good approach
for your events in other continents, how can you
be so self-assured that you are right? Take Korea,
the image you convey is that “leaving their village,
going to the top of the mountain and looking
across” is something Koreans will never do. How
do you explain then the international embedding
and fabulous export performance of the big Korean
multinationals?
In my view, that has a lot to do with the fact that they
imported their economic model. Let me try to explain.
It’s interesting that in the seventies North Korea was
much more prosperous than the South. So, “the Korean
multinational” is a relatively recent phenomenon, because
the country was completely destroyed and they had to
build everything from scratch. That gives a lot of space to
entrepreneurs, it gives lots of space to a kind of complicity
between governments and economic players … and that is
very strongly present in Korea. I mean, everything is really
borderline corruption, right? We’ve seen that now with
the Samsung scandal … I was not surprised at all. These
corporations in Korea are considered the vital bodies of
the society and, since they emerged from scratch, imported
Japanese models were the most appropriate. What does
that mean? It means that your “real” family name is not
your name but the corporation’s name. Koreans have an
incredible labour ethic, they’re all living for the prosperity
of their firm and their whole lives are determined by that.
They live in conditions in which the “individual” worker
is hardly considered, only the prosperity of the firm is
considered important.
I’d like to come back to my first question on
cultural diplomacy, when you said that you’re
now taking more and more distance from this
terminology. You recounted an extremely
interesting story, but you didn’t fully answer the
question why you’re now distancing yourself from
the term cultural diplomacy. Can you pinpoint more
exactly why you’re doing that?
The fact is that by using a term such as cultural diplomacy
we accept the idea that there can be confusion. Why?
Because diplomacy is a well described activity that’s
part of the international relations between countries and
culture plays a crucial role in that. So, when you use the
term cultural diplomacy, governments stick to the term
diplomacy and glue culture on top of that. Hence, you’re
automatically incorporated into an official network of
relations, but we’re not working in an official network of
relations. We’re working for governments, we’re offering
services to governments but our base is the university, not a
government authority. It should be like that.
Since we’re based in the university and the university
network, we have the freedom and the framework that
allows us to come up with the best possible projects and
to execute those projects as a mandate of a government.
But we’re not part of the original diplomatic body itself.
We deliver added value but we do it starting from the
university’s background. I think that is an important
difference. In that sense, we’re a bit closer to institutions