Culture Making Articles items tagged korea

Woven and torn

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Andy: ?A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of visiting with the faculty of the Department of Art at Azusa Pacific University—the only member of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities that that offers an M.F.A. in studio art. Among the exceptional artists and scholars I met was Joo Kim, a visiting scholar at APU this year, whose show "Recent Works" is at the university's Heritage Gallery through this week. Her handsewn works in linen and other fabric are both accessible and difficult explorations of pain, loss, separation, and redemption—very much worth a visit if you are near Azusa, California, in the next few days.?

from "Recent Works - Joo Kim," Azusa Pacific University, 7 September–2 October 2009 :: image courtesy of the artist and Azusa Pacific University Department of Art

Love letters

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Christy: ?I find it fascinating that over five centuries ago, a Korean king, in an effort to demonstrate love for his people, created an alphabet, thus enabling them to "express their concerns." Now one of his descendants is trying to expand that gift by giving the Korean alphabet, Hangul, to nations without a writing system of their own.?

By sharing the [Korean] script with others, Ms. Lee said, she is simply expressing the will of her ancestor King Sejong, who promulgated the script. (She is a direct descendant, 21 generations removed.)

The national holiday, Hangul Day, on Oct. 9, celebrates the king’s introduction of the script in 1446. Before that, Koreans had no writing system of their own. The elite studied Chinese characters to record the meaning, but not the sound, of Korean.

“Many of my illiterate subjects who want to communicate cannot express their concerns,” the king is recorded to have said in explaining the reason for Hunminjeongeum, the original name for Hangul. “I feel sorry for them. Therefore I have created 28 letters.”

“The king propagated Hangul out of love of his people,” Ms. Lee said. “It’s time for Koreans to expand his love for mankind by propagating Hangul globally. This is an era of globalization.”

from "South Korea's Latest Export: Its Alphabet," by Choe Sang-Hun, The New York Times, 11 September 2009, image from Wikipedia

There are no televisions here

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate: ?Whether Paju Book City will live up to its motto at christening, "A City to Recover Lost Humanity," remains to be seen, but it's great to see so much thought and stunning architecture going into supporting and celebrating the life of books—of making them and of reading them.?

The idea of a city of books evokes a fantastical vision: towers of tottering volumes, narrow alleys formed by canyons and stacks of dusty hardbacks, formal avenues between loaded shelves. Like something imagined by Calvino or Borges, it conjures up a city of wisdom and surprise, of endless narratives, meaning, knowledge and languages. What it does not evoke is an industrial estate bounded by a motorway and the heavily guarded edge of a demilitarised zone. Yet somehow, South Korea’s Paju Book City begins to reconcile these two extremes into one of the most unexpected and remarkable architectural endeavours.

Built on marshland, former flood plains and paddyfields 30km north-west of Seoul, Paju Book City is an attempt to create an ambitious new town based exclusively around publishing….

At the centre of the city stands a huge cultural complex, designed by Kim Byung-yoon, a combination of hotel (in which, it was pointed out to me, there are no TVs), restaurants, auditoriums and, on the roof, an urbane, elevated realm of seating, shops, libraries and galleries overlooking the sparkling waters of the river and the Simhak Mountain.

from "A city dedicated to books and print," by Edwin Heathcole, Financial Times, 21 August 2009 :: thanks Adrianna!