Our Korean cultural fixes are sadly still exclusively online. One year into the lockdown, maybe I’m beginning to suffer from Zoom fatigue: the coming month feels the most barren for a while. Current highlight is the tail end of the Glasgow Film Festival, at which Korea is the focus country. But I’ll be aiming to dial in for the RASKB talk by Martin Limón, author of the entertaining series of crime thrillers set in 1970s Korea, and also get Bluebeard off the reading pile.
SOAS has two interesting talks this month:
- J.P. Park on Rescuing Art History from the Nation (19 March)
- Hwisang Cho on the Epistolary Revolution in Chosŏn Korea (26 March)
Edinburgh has a busy month (those on the BAKS list should get details emailed into their inbox; others need to check the Facebook page):
- Sharon Yoon: An Ethnography of Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing’s Koreatown (3 March, 3pm)
- Hyaesin Yoon: Robert aid and autism (10 March, 3pm)
- Kyung Hyun Kim: Hegemonic Mimicry: Korean Popular Culture of the Twenty-First Century (24 March, 5:30 pm)
- Todd Henry: Queer Korea (31 March, 11am)
The RASKB has some good ones (generally at 10:30am UK time | 7:30pm Korea time)
- Martin Limón: The American military in Korea, 1968 through 1986 (9 March)
- Sujeong Lee: Reading Buddhist Art (23 March)
George Washington University has a couple of talks at a manageable UK time:
- Si Nae Park on The Korean Vernacular Story (11 March)
- George Kallander on The Diary of 1636 (29 March)
Book discussions this month feature
- Sohn Won-pyung’s Almond (RASKB, 18 March) and
- Ha Seongnan’s Bluebeard’s First Wife (- with its author and translator. KCCUK, 24 March, register by 15 March)
Online exhibitions include
- The last two days of Collect
- The last week of Bloomberg New Contemporaries
- The last couple of weeks of Jewyo Rhii at the KCC
Apart from all that,
- The British Korean Society’s AGM is on 25 March
- The KCC is running a kimchi-making class on 18 March
- The KCC will be closing its recruitment drive for K-vloggers on 17 March
To escape from your computer screen, how about reading Michael Gibb’s travel book A Korean Odyssey, Bae Myung-hoon’s satirical sci-fi collection Tower, or browse the lists of recent and upcoming publications for something that catches your interest. Let me know what I’ve missed.