Friday, July 29, 2011

late July 2011 landslides, Seoul

about 500mm of rain led to the flooding and landslides,

Thursday, July 28, 2011

bronze age - so many dolmens on the SW Korean peninsula

www.dolmen.com has an option for English and Japanese, too. The site dates to 2001, so there is not a lot of video, blog feedback or panoramic views and maps, but it does introduce this wealth of ancient society, quoting that 19,000 of the world's known 55,000 dolmens are located in the Jeollanam-do (sw province) of South Korea.

Monday, July 25, 2011

film list - possibly some formerly banned ones

www.koreanfilm.org (including articles in English)
 
=====titles that are available on DVD with English Subtitles:
"Guro Arirang" (no English subtitled DVD)
 
=====Or a little more recently:
"Yellow Hair" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Hair
"Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Movie

Thursday, July 14, 2011

border crossing people smugglers to Korea

Defecting from North Korea is a dangerous  business.
It comes at a high price and there's no guarantee of  success.
Many make the journey to South Korea with the help of  brokers - individuals and organisations who smuggle people along the illegal  overland route
known as the "Underground  Railroad". For Assignment, Lucy Williamson meets some of the  brokers in Seoul who make a living helping people escape North  Korea.
RELATED  LINKS
Download this episode  (mp3)  http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/docarchive

SHADOWY WORLD OF KOREA'S PEOPLE  SMUGGLERS
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14044794
"I'm  not a drug-dealer. I'm not bad, I'm just bringing people out. I'm
doing  something the South Korean government can't do."

Monday, July 11, 2011

famous image discussion

[KoreanStudies e-list member F.Hoffman reponds to request to identify an iconic image]

Sin Yun-bok and "Miin-do" are good keywords.
The most famous one by Sin Yun-bok is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hyewon-Miindo.jpg
The one you find in every tourist booklet, on umbrellas, as ball pen designs, etc. The term "miin-do" seems to be a generic term, not an actual title. You also find miin-do
paintings in China and Japan, also in later periods (e.g. during the Taisho period in Japan).  That is a genre that traveled and changed throughout the centuries, was kind of "back-introduced" in a modern version to Korea in  the 1920s.

The one you have there, the one the stage image is based on, looks to me like a 19th century work based on Sin Yun-bok. Especially the way the face is done would to me indicate that it is later than Sin Yun-bok's period. The Japanese National Museum in Tokyo in whose collection it is gives the painter as "anonymous."

Painter:  anonymous, 114.2 cm x 56.5 cm, colors on paper, Collection: Tokyo National Museum (in Ueno Park), http://www.tnm.jp/?lang=en

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Seoul stream restoration of the Cheonggye- Article

Flowing Back to the Future: The Cheongye Stream Restoration and the Remaking of Seoul
by Hong KAL
 
Abstract: This article concerns how the urban life in Seoul under the Lee Myung-bak government, which pursues neoliberal political economy, has come to present an immense accumulation of spectacles. It examines the Cheonggye stream restoration promoted as upgrading Seoul to become a cleaner, greener and competitive global city. The Cheonggye stream project points to a new form of governance in which the display of national progress through conventional museums or monumental structures, as previous regimes once did, is no longer effective. Instead, the representation of progress of the city and the nation is increasingly being portrayed through the popular use of urban space.
 
Key words: the Cheonggye stream restoration, Seoul, spectacle, urban redevelopment, public space, national identity, neoliberalism 

Introduction:
Public space has gained new centrality in the life of Seoul in contemporary Korea. Noticing the political potential as well as the threat of public space, in 2005 the government formally designated the area in front of the City Hall as the Seoul plaza and opened it with an official spectacle, "Hi Seoul Festival". With the construction of the Kwanghwa square in 2009 in front of the Kyǒngbok palace of the Chosǒn dynasty and the new city hall building expected to be completed in 2012 in a design more transparent and open to the public, downtown Seoul is becoming a city of "public spaces." In the remaking of the city through a display of people and participation, the most prestigious and controversial site is probably the new Cheonggye stream. While the Cheonggye stream restoration was aimed at making Seoul a cleaner, greener and competitive global city, it actively employs discourses of restoration, history and people. It is a site that stages images of the collective national body rooted in shared ancestry and historical experience. It makes the current urban transformation historically necessary and even natural and frames collective national subjectivity within the mutually constituting narratives of nationalism and globalization.