UNSRC Korean Cultural Society

From the Los Angeles Times
ART
‘Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600′ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Exhibition recalls a culture’s peaceful and progressive past.
By Allan M. Jalon

April 4, 2009

Reporting from New York — In 1443, a Korean ruler named King Sejong reinvented language as a more democratic medium. He issued a royal edict establishing a new alphabet to help Korean commoners read and write more easily, while conveying what was especially Korean in a society deeply influenced by China.

“The sounds of our language differ from those of Chinese,” Sejong wrote of the new linguistic system his experts created, called hangeul. He hoped “the people will learn [the 28 letters] easily and use them conveniently in their daily life.”

A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called “Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600,” has multi-paneled scrolls, sculptural yet practical ceramics and dreamlike ink drawings. The idealism of Sejong’s alphabet frames it all.

Soyoung Lee, an assistant curator who organized the show, spoke of the “very fundamental” role that textural artifacts on exhibit — picture books and scrolls with lettering on them in Chinese and hangeul — played for a cultural nobility striving for a more civil society against the darker currents of war and occupation that shaped Korean history.

The show, the museum’s first exhibition of internationally gathered Korean work in decades, opens a season of learning about Korea for museum-goers on both coasts. On June 28, a week after the Met show closes, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will open an exhibition of work by 12 contemporary Korean artists. And before that closes, LACMA plans to open its reinstalled Korean galleries in a location far more prominent than before: directly across the plaza from Wilshire Boulevard.

Meanwhile, the Met’s show represents what Thomas P. Campbell, the museum’s new director, calls “a significant new phase in the museum’s Korean art program,” the first of several exhibits exploring periods of Korean art.

The current show posed a special challenge, organizers say, because relatively little work remains of the so- called early Joseon Dynasty period, known for its cultural awakening and a military consolidation of the Korean peninsula.

Then came invasion, followed by a later Joseon rule, which stretched until 1910, and invasion again. The 21st century retains its own legacy of division. The backward look to a period of relative peace gives this show a context both melancholy and hopeful.

It is a restorative gathering of Korea’s far-flung cultural inheritance. What Lee found had to be brought from Japan and elsewhere.

This compact exhibit — in a single divided room that normally displays the Met’s Korean permanent collection — is the hub of a wide wheel: 45 works drawn from 17 international lenders.

A falcon newly reattributed to Yi Am, the great-great-grandson of King Sejong, is a vivid example of Korean rediscovery. The bird, seen from the back, shows one side of its face, one eye noticing something beyond the scroll’s edge. It’s a regal hunter concentrating itself in a flash of intelligence. Lee, the curator, explains that the falcon (from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston) was long thought to be the work of a 14th century Chinese painter named Xu Ze. Then seals on the work — the equivalent of an artist’s signature — were found to belong to Yi Am.

The show makes a fresh Korean contribution to a global dialogue with the first-time exhibit here of a full Korean version — across the traditional eight scrolls — of the classic Chinese motif of the place where the Xiao and Xiang rivers meet. One can visit the Met’s standing Chinese and Japanese exhibits to see how their sets on the Xiao-Xiang landscape compare; the Korean is more intimate.

Viewers familiar with modern American ceramic art — including the pottery explosion of the 1950s and ’60s that has roots in Southern California — will find parts of this show are like going home. One piece was brushed with slip and etched while wet with a stick or hard brush, with such abstract and free utterance that it could have been done five minutes ago in a studio near Lincoln Boulevard.

Throughout the show, there’s a balance between competing sensations: call them cool and warm, formal and exuberant. Behind them is a philosophical approach that, even to many Americans who relate to other versions of the Asian past, is unfamiliar.

Part of the reason is the American connection to Buddhism. Many Americans are drawn to Buddhism, while Confucianism gets little notice.

The early Joseon state was Neo-Confucianist, referring not to contemporary newness but to Korean interpretations of original Confucian teachings dating back hundreds of years in China. The Met’s exhibit also shows how Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism overlapped in Joseon Korea.

One text in the show is the “Illustrated Guide to the Three Bonds,” meaning the three bonds emphasized by Confucians and Neo-Confucians: the bonds between ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife. Yet reading the bonds could yield the stereotypical image of Confucian influences as authoritarian.

That would be simplistic.

Neo-Confucianism is increasingly understood as a sensitive philosophical outlook about how one conducts oneself in daily life. Confucianism was dominated by an elite of sages. Neo-Confucianism is egalitarian in that every individual has the right or responsibility to get an education, to become sage-like.

Key pieces in the show are the group portraits of administrators quietly celebrating having passed civil service and military examinations. These may give the clearest picture of how Neo-Confucian values embodied in Sejong’s alphabet trickled into the society.

The writing on these images is mostly in Chinese; hangeul was absorbed only slowly. But Rachel E. Chung, a scholar of the early Joseon period at Columbia University who toured the Met’s show, paused in front of a scroll from 1580 titled “Banquet for Successful Candidates of the State Examination.”

“The idea that society was essentially a meritocracy did trickle down to the society at large,” Chung said. “Does this mean that every farmer put down his plow and engaged in education? Probably not. Did it erase poverty and the class system? No. But there was a new awareness of a better direction society was taking and people wanted to participate.”

calendar@latimes.com

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Korea Times
04-09-2009 15:19

[The Dawn of Modern Korea] (514) Daehan-minguk

Daehan-minguk
By Andrei Lankov

Most of our readers live in the country whose official name in English is the “Republic of Korea.” But how does that name sound in Korean? And how did this name come into being in the first place?

To start with, the official Korean name of the ROK consists of four syllables, Daehan-minguk. Each syllable might be seen as a separate word, or rather a separate root, and all these syllables-words are of Chinese origin (well, with one of those syllables, things are not that simple as we’ll see).

We should not be surprised about this: The languages of East Asia are over-saturated with Chinese loanwords, and pretty much all social and scientific vocabulary in Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese consists of Chinese loanwords, or of words which were once “assembled” from their Chinese roots.

Let’s start from the second syllable, “han.” This is a name of Korea that is also a part of its short form, “Hanguk.” Historically speaking, Koreans have had many names for their country, and even now the North and South use completely different names for themselves. The North is “Choson,” while the South calls itself “Hanguk.”

Where does the name come from? At the very beginning of the Christian era, the Chinese texts began to refer to some tribes that then inhabited the southernmost part of the Korean peninsula. Those tribes were known as Mahan, Jinhan, and Byeonhan, or, collectively, as the “Three Han.”

It seems very likely that Chinese scribes used the Chinese character “韓” to transcribe some unknown word in a local language which was likely to be some proto-Korean dialect (albeit we cannot be 100 percent sure about this).

Eventually, those tribes were integrated into Korean kingdoms, which emerged several centuries later. The name “han” was not used any more, but it did not disappear from public memory completely.

In the 1890s, when the Korean kings proclaimed themselves “emperors,” breaking the ties of formal quasi-dependency on China, they needed a name for the new state; a name that should be distinct from the old name of Choson.

They chose to call their state Daehan or “Great Han” Empire. This was the official name of the country for the last years of its independence, between 1897 and 1910. When the Japanese took over, they chose to use the former name, Choson.

In 1919, the representatives of the Korean independence movement gathered in Shanghai, China, and proclaimed the foundation of the Korean government-in-exile, known as the Provisional Government.

This was a decisive move, and they needed a new name for a Korean state-to-emerge. They did not want “Choson,” since the name had been appropriated by the Japanese colonial regime, so they decided to revive the name used in the final days of independence.

Thus, Korea once again came to be known as “Daehan” or the Great Han state.

However, the people who gathered in Shanghai did not want to restore the monarchy. A new Korea should become a republic, and this had to be reflected in the official name of the future state.

Back in the early 1900s, the languages of East Asia were flooded with freshly made words to express the then new ideas and institutions coming from the West.

In most cases, the new words were made from ancient Chinese roots, a bit like Europeans used their common Greek and Roman heritage to devise names for telephone or television (the difference being that in East Asian languages of the era, the revival of ancient roots was far more common).

For example, the Chinese characters for “steam” and “chariot” were used to coin a word for train, while “battle” and “chariot” meant “tank.”

Many of the new terms took some time to settle and often two or more words competed to express the one idea. In the case of “republic,” there were two proposed translations. Some believed that the republic should be called “民國” (minguk in Korean, minguo in Chinese pronunciation), which literally meant “people’s state.” Others suggested a different translation, a longer 共和國 (gonghwaguk in Korean, gongheguo in Chinese) which would mean the “state of shared mutual harmony.”

The second translation, despite being longer (and, to be frank, a bit too flowery for my taste) eventually won, becoming the standard term for republic in all languages of East Asia.

However, the founding fathers of the Korean Provisional Government chose the other version, “minguk,” which soon became obsolete.

Perhaps, they were influenced in their decision by the then official name of China, which also included the same pair of characters to convene the word “republic.” Hence, Daehan-minguk was born in 1919.

The Provisional Government was launched as a cooperative project of the Right and Left, but soon became an exclusive right-wing affair. Its leaders eventually returned to Korea in 1945 to establish the South Korean state.

Their life-long connection to the Provisional Government was a major boost to their legitimacy, so, to stress the continuity with this past, they decided to give the nascent Korean state the name once used for the largely symbolic government-in-exile.

When in August 1948 the South Korean state came into existence, it was called Daehan-minguk or the Republic of Korea in English. The Communist North chose a different name.

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He has recently published “The Dawn of Modern Korea,” which is now on sale at Kyobo Book Center and other major bookstores. The book is based on columns published in The Korea Times. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.

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Korea Times
04-09-2009 16:26

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