Psycho Buildings is a cosmopolitan collaboration in which artists from as far afield as Tokyo and Cuba “take on” architecture. Suh Do-ho (right) is one of the diaspora of Korean artists working in various countries around the world. Like Baik Nam June, Suh has chosen to make his home in America. Suh’s work has in … [Read More]
Month: July 2008
Jennifer Barclay: Meeting Mr Kim
Summersdale Publishers, 2008 Jennifer Barclay went to Seoul with her musician boyfriend eight years ago with no fixed agenda other than a desire to get away from her job. Fortunately, while in Korea she took advantage of her free time to explore parts of the country which are not necessarily on the tourist route. This … [Read More]
The King Baeksu counterblast to Amnesty International
J Scott Burgeson, aka Scott Bug, aka King Baeksu, has been monitoring the anti-FTA mad cow protests in Seoul pretty much nightly since they started. He’s been filing some detailed and extended eyewitness accounts over on his bulletin board. A week or so ago Amnesty International called for the “excessive force” used by South Korean … [Read More]
A veteran remembers
Today, 27 July, is the anniversary of the end of the Korean War in 1953 – a war in which millions died, and which only ended with a ceasefire, Korea remaining divided by a heavily guarded border for fifty-five years now. Jennifer Barclay marks the occasion. Peter Poole served in the Korean War as a … [Read More]
LKL featured in Euro Journal (유로저널)
I recently had a heavy soju and singing session with Jeon Sung-min (below right), who as well has being one half of a well-known kayageum / guitar duo and nephew of the founder of 해바라기 (Sunflower) is also a feature writer at the Euro Journal (유로저널), a Korean language weekly newspaper distributed in Koreatowns in … [Read More]
Saturday documentaries at the KCC
This Saturday there will be a screening of a short film entitled “The History of Gold” at the Korean Cultural Centre at 12pm, 2pm and 4pm. Each screening will last around 30 minutes. Silla people decorate their houses with silk interwoven with golden thread, and use golden plates and cutlery at meals (Arab historian, 10th … [Read More]
The Gyopo PI
Leonard Chang: Fade to Clear Thomas Dunne Books, 2004 This is the third novel featuring the private investigator Allen Choice, a Korean American whose name indicates how far he has moved away from his Korean roots. He can’t speak the language, but he gets annoyed when people call him Chinese or Japanese. He dates a … [Read More]
Meet Mister Kim. Now.
It’s the publishing event of 2008. More hotly anticipated than the latest Harry Potter, and certainly more entertaining, Jennifer Barclay’s Meeting Mr Kim, or How I went to Korea and learned to love kimchi, is in the shops now, priced at just £7.99. Jen’s trip to Korea was actually back in 2000, so this little … [Read More]
Mock funerals make Koreans focus on how to live
Hyung-Jin Kim of Associated Press has done a nice piece on a new idea from Korea Life Consulting Co: fake funerals. It has been run in the Taipei Times (South Koreans give their deaths a trial run: ‘Well-dying’ – having a mock funeral after a set of seminars – is touted as a tool to … [Read More]
LKL Celeb of the Month #3: Lee Dong Wook
Reviewing my website statistics one month I was surprised and delighted to find that there was so much interest in one of the artists I had written about. But then, when I saw that many googlers were not interested so much in his artwork as in seeing pictures of him naked, I realised that there … [Read More]
Book review: The Dawn of Modern Korea
Andrei Lankov – The Dawn of Modern Korea EunHaeng NaMu publishing, 2008 This entertaining book has, paradoxically, taken me a devil of a long time to finish. That’s not because it’s difficult. It’s because it’s the opposite. The book is co-branded with a series of articles that Andrei Lankov has been writing for the Korea … [Read More]
Excess Baggage goes north of the DMZ
After last week’s feature on South Korea with Jennifer Barclay, this week’s Excess Baggage looked at North Korea with Robert Willoughby, author of the Bradt Guide to North Korea (right), and Doris Richards, an avid traveler. Willoughby’s introduction to North Korea was as an English language examiner working for the British Council, assessing the language … [Read More]
Official photos from the Dano festival
Justina Jang of the Korean Cultural Promotion Agency, the organisers of the Dano Festival in Trafalgar Square, has kindly sent me some of the official photos of the event, which I have now uploaded to Flickr. Some good photos of the very entertaining Noridan (above), some great crowd scenes which really convey the atmosphere of … [Read More]
Dae Hun Kwon in The Situation
There’s some sort of funky alternative event being held at the funky alternative end of Clapham on Thursday, to do with London Lit Plus: The Situation: Back to Basics July 17, 2008 7:00 pm to July 18, 2008 1:00 am. The Situation presents the dialectical unification of art and life: art / music / performance … [Read More]
Photos from this year’s Mudfest
I just found some great photos over on Flickr, courtesy of pwalks. Here’s a tiny taster, deliberately small so that you go visit the original yourself. Enjoy the full slideshow here. [Read More]
KFC – Korean Fried Chicken – and French Korean Links
Jennifer Barclay reports from the Korean Food Festival, held in the garden of the Fountain Pub, New Malden, Saturday 12 July 2008 By 10.30 on Saturday morning, I’d already done my best to introduce millions of BBC Radio Four listeners to the delights of kimchi. I’d been invited onto the travel show Excess Baggage to … [Read More]