Translator’s note: “Lonesome Jar” is a collection of 20 short fables expressing wisdom about life. These beautiful editions of translations of Jeong Ho-seung’s “children’s stories for grown-ups” benefit from the illustrations from the Korean editions. Contents: Author’s Preface • 5 | A Hangari Jar • 13 | Lovebirds • 22 | Flood Tide and Ebb … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 118)
Loving
From the agent’s website: A gentle fable by the South Korean poet, which is like a balm for the reader. The story is a simple one. A restless wanderer learns there is no place like home. This wanderer is a fish on a wind chime called Blue Goggle Eyes, and she is in love with … [Read More]
Catcalling
From the publisher’s website: Lee Soho’s debut collection of poems is an experimental lyric bildungsroman that confronts dynamics of abuse as it challenges poetic form. Catcalling exposes and ridicules the violences that the speaker-protagonist Kyungjin encounters as she navigates a patriarchal world. Divided in to five formally distinct sections – ranging from lyric to prose … [Read More]
To the Warm Horizon
From the publisher’s website: A group of Koreans are making their way across a disease-ravaged landscape—but to what end? To the Warm Horizon shows how in a post-apocalyptic world, humans will still seek purpose, kinship, and even intimacy. Focusing on two young women, Jina and Dori, who find love against all odds, Choi Jin-young creates … [Read More]
Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema
From the publisher’s website: Korean cinema as industry, art form, and cultural product. Seoul Searching is a collection of fourteen provocative essays about contemporary South Korean cinema, the most productive and dynamic cinema in Asia. Examining the three dominant genres that have led Korean film to international acclaim—melodramas, big-budget action blockbusters, and youth films—the contributors look … [Read More]
King Chŏngjo, an Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea
The first detailed analysis in English of monarchy and governance in Korea during King Chŏngjo’s reign. Were the countries of Europe the only ones that were “early modern”? Was Asia’s early modernity cut short by colonialism? Scholars examining early modern Eurasia have not yet fully explored the relationships between absolute rule and political modernization in … [Read More]
The Korean Singer of Tales
Publisher description: P’ansori, the traditional oral narrative of Korea, is sung by a highly trained soloist to the accompaniment of complex drumming. The singer both narrates the story and dramatizes all the characters, male and female. Performances require as long as six hours and make extraordinary vocal demands. In the first book-length treatment in English … [Read More]
Exploring North Korean Arts
This book is a cooperation between the MAK and the University of Vienna and contains a number of in-depth essays by international writers on a wide spectrum of issues, and with much detailed background information. The relationship between art and ideology is examined, how modern and traditional values are dealt with, as well as the commercial … [Read More]
Art Under Control in North Korea
Nuclear bombs and geopolitical controversy are often the first things associated with the isolated Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea and its volatile leader Kim Jong-il. Yet behind the secretive curtain also lies a little known and slowly expanding world of art. This is the first book to be published in the West which explores the … [Read More]
Modern Korean Ink Painting
Modern Korean Ink Painting promotes a general understanding of how Korean art and the times it represented were related. The book starts with the dawn of the modern age in Korean art (1876-1910), which looks at the legacy of court painting and the last of the literati painters. Next the book moves on to the … [Read More]
Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, Interaction
Publisher description: Starting with the armistice that divided the Korean Peninsula in 1953, this one-of-a-kind book spotlights the artistic movements and collectives that have flourished and evolved throughout Korean culture over the past seven decades – from the 1950s avant-garde through to the feminist scene in the 1970s, the birth of the Gwangju Biennale in … [Read More]
Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method
Starting in the mid-1960s, a group of Korean artists began to push paint, soak canvas, drag pencils, rip paper, and otherwise manipulate the materials of painting in ways that prompted critics to describe their actions as “methods” rather than artworks. A crucial artistic movement of twentieth-century Korea, Tansaekhwa (monochromatic painting) also became one of its … [Read More]
Korean Art from the 19th Century to the Present
Publisher description: Korean artists are a permanent fixture on today’s international art scene, as interest in modern and contemporary art from South as well as North Korea has grown in strength. Museums and individual collectors eager to tap into this rising market are acquiring many more Korean artworks. But how are we to understand Korean … [Read More]
Dynamics of Expansion and Reduction – Selected Writings on Korean Contemporary Art
Publisher description: This book, the first major publication in English devoted to the Korean critic and art historian Lee Yil, is a collection of texts on aesthetics, theory and history of art by the main observer of “Dansaekhwa”, or Korean monochrome. It also brings together essays and monographic prefaces that gave wide coverage to artists … [Read More]
The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost
Publisher description: The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost incorporates Korean folk tales, ghost stories, and myth into a phenomenal depiction of epic tragedy. Written by a zainichi, a permanent resident of Japan who is not of Japanese ancestry, the novel tells the story of Mandogi, a young priest living on the island of Cheju-do. Mandogi becomes unwittingly … [Read More]
Kannani and Document of Flames: Two Japanese Colonial Novels
Publisher description: This volume makes available for the first time in English two of the most important novels of Japanese colonialism: Yuasa Katsuei’s Kannani and Document of Flames. Born in Japan in 1910 and raised in Korea, Yuasa was an eyewitness to the ravages of the Japanese occupation. In both of the novels presented here, he is clearly … [Read More]