UNSRC Korean Cultural Society

KOREA HERALD

Lee Geon-maan [Ahn Hoon/The Korea Herald]

Hangul’s value was proved once again when a minority in Indonesia — the “Cia-Cia” tribe — officially adopted the Korean written alphabet last summer.

Recently, its aesthetic values have attracted the attention of consumers here and abroad, appearing on handbags, wallets and ties.

Designer Lee Geon-maan, a former textile art professor at Hongik University, Seoul, has always had a love for Hangeul. He has even used the alphabet as a motif at his own fashion house, Leegeonmaan AnF, which launched in 2001.

“They say ‘people become patriots once they leave their own country,’ and it was totally the case for me,” Lee said in an interview with The Korea herald on Monday, looking back on the time when he first came up with the idea of incorporating Hangeul in his designs as a student of Cranbrook Academy of Art, a graduate school of art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, some 20 years ago.

In the Korean fashion design scene, Leegeonmaan is almost synonymous with the Korean alphabet, as the collection of accessories sold under the brand name carry designs based on it.

“Fashion houses such as Chanel and Prada were not as famous as they are now when they were first born,” continued Lee, who is also known as the husband of the television actress Chung Kyung-soon. “I think it is about the right time for Korea to have its own brand of upscale fashion items.”

The price of Leegeonman handbags ranges between 300,000 won ($262.17) to 400,000 won — far cheaper than those with well-known French and Italian design labels displayed and sold at the same department stores. “With Chanel or Gucci labels on them, the bag would be sold at about 3 million won,” said the designer who is hiring seven younger talented designers for his company.

According to Lee, all the classic designer brands have a few things in common, apart from fearful price tags: Stories to prove their unique origins and global marketing ability.

“But sometimes a government’s support plays a key role in turning an ordinary brand into an internationally renowned one, as shown through the case of Comite Colbert,” Lee said, expressing his expectation for governmental support. Comite Colbert is a lobby group for 70 French Luxury brands including Chanel, Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton, founded in 1954.

With Korean characters incorporated beautifully into his products, his fashion accessories are gaining popularity in Japan — an irony, considering the fact that Japanese imperialists once banned the use of Hangeul in Korean schools.

Last June, he opened up the first Leegeonmaan store outside Korea in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, a shopping and entertainment district situated in the west of the Japanese capital. Encouraged by strong sales — income from the Japanese market accounts for about 40 percent of the company’s revenue — he plans to open four more stores in Tokyo and other Japanese cities within the year.

In an effort to provide a firmer basis for the brand’s future growth in the world’s largest luxury market, Lee is considering a marketing strategy using Korean entertainers who are well-known in Japan. “I guess it will take a lot of time for our company to compete with those luxury fashion houses. But I believe I’m on the right course of doing it — developing a brand as trend-sensitive as Paul Smith and as proud as Hermes,” he said.

By Lee Yong-sung

(danlee@heraldm.com)

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A “Korean wave” washes warmly over Asia

Jan 25th 2010 | SEOUL AND PHNOM PENH | From The Economist online

AT FIRST glance, one might take Prum Seila to be the epitome of Westernised youth, a living stereotype born of two decades’ globalisation in Asia. This modish 23-year-old Cambodian film student cuts a striking image in a country of temples and rice paddy, his tilted newsboy cap and lavender sunglasses making the young ladies swoon at local film festivals.

ReutersWho could resist?

But Mr Prum isn’t aping Western fashion. Like many Asian youngsters, he considers the trends of North America (and Japan) to be insipid relics. “In Cambodia we watch Korean dramas, listen to Korean music, and take our fashion from South Korea,” he says. He names the South Korean singer Rain and the Korean soap opera “Full House” as his favourites. Next year he hopes to attend film school in Seoul, and eventually to bring more of their artistic nous to South-East Asia.

The Koreans have a word for Mr Prum’s infatuation: hallyu, or the love of South Korean cultural exports. An international phenomenon, hallyu is driving Seoul’s nascent but growing influence across Asia. South Korean popular culture rose from relative obscurity in the late 1990s when, after decades of draconian internal censorship came to an end in the 1980s, its television dramas began to be broadcast widely in China, Japan and South-East Asia. Exports of Korean video games, television dramas and popular music (“K-pop”) have all doubled since 1999, while the total number of cultural products exported since then has increased almost threefold, to $1.8 billion in 2008. In terms of market share, these numbers still rank modestly against the Japanese comic-book industry, which dominates 80% of the worldwide market, but sales of Japanese manga have halved since reaching their apex in 1995.

Some scholars find an explanation for hallyu in the family-friendly, Confucian teachings typical of South Korean dramas; these values, they say, appeal to Asians more than does the usual Western fare. But this explanation seems to require imputing a uniform mentality to at least two billion people. Michael Shin of Cornell University argues instead that by their rags-to-riches storylines these dramas are able to speak directly to audiences who have lived the Asian economic boom of the past two decades. Popular characters often abandon monotonous middle-class jobs to seek fame, or a “dream job”—perhaps suggesting that many Asians feel dissatisfied with their careers, despite the prosperity that has come with growth.

The first hints of hallyu came just as South Korea’s economy collapsed during the 1998 financial crisis in Asia, when GDP plunged by 7%. In the stagnant decade that followed, three administrations looked to hallyu as a tool of soft power, hoping to expand South Korea’s profile abroad along with demand for its cultural exports and tourism. Since 2005 the government has taken a more mercantilist approach. Organisations that introduce Korean culture overseas have won millions of dollars in government grants.

The efforts may be working. A survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in 2008 found that about 80% of respondents from China, Japan and Vietnam (three of the largest markets for hallyu) look to South Korean culture with high respect. It is not clear however that this esteem has increased trade and tourism. Park Jung-sook, a former soap-opera actress and now a scholar of hallyu, thinks the government should relax its aggressive marketing, lest foreigners recoil from the smell of nationalism. China is used to running a trade deficit with South Korea, but its deficit in the trade of cultural goods is ten times greater than in industrial goods. On several occasions since 2006 China has threatened to limit the number of South Korean soap operas and concert tours allowed into the country.

North Korea’s method is blunter. Pirated South Korean soap operas have become so widespread there that in recent years the regime mobilised border squads to execute DVD smugglers, according to the Korea Institute for National Unification, a think-tank funded by the South Korean government. A police commander who defected from the North last year says its leaders are getting nervous about the free-market fantasies spun by the imported dramas. (When North Korea revalued its currency in November, it essentially wiped out the country’s personal savings—and with them the black market for foreign goods.) Yet this backlash, uniquely, could work in Seoul’s favour. Roh Moo-hyun, the late president of South Korea from 2003 to 2008, once remarked that hallyu will someday unify the peninsula.

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Benjamin Joinau

“The best of Korean cuisine is regional specialties,” says Benjamin Joinau, talking about doenjang jjigae or soybean paste stew he tasted recently in Hongcheon, Gangwon Province. The Frenchman has been traveling all over Korea since November last year, when he started his own show introducing Korean cuisine to English-speaking audiences in Korea and abroad, “Tasty Trail with Benjamin,” on Arirang TV.

The concept of the show — traveling far away from the stuffy studio — comes from Joinau’s belief that the core of Korean cuisine can be found in the provinces, not in Seoul. He made kimchi at the Haeinsa Temple in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang Province, and had traditional bibimbap or rice with mixed vegetables in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province and temple food in Gangneung, Gangwon Province.

“I can’t forget this small restaurant in Gangwon Province. There were just a few side vegetable dishes, soybean paste stew and a bowl of rice. It was simple but so delicious. People think of fancy, fusion Korean dishes when hearing about Korean cuisine going global, but I believe the real stuff is in simple dishes you eat every day that are true to fundamentals,” he says.

During a doctorate program in anthropology at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Joinau chose to teach in Korea in lieu of compulsory military service in 1994. He taught French and Latin for five years at École Française de Seoul and Hongik University.

It was Korean food that persuaded him to stay. He had become a fan as he made kimchi, soy sauce, soybean paste, and red pepper paste himself, and concocted dishes with vegetables from the mountains.

Yet initially he had a hard time getting used to it. “It was difficult for me to get used to the smell of sesame oil everywhere. I ate too much trying to get used to it for the first two or three months after I arrived in Korea. In the end, I got sick so I had to stop eating Korean food. But the problem was there weren’t many restaurants in Korea that served foreign food at the time. I had to start eating Korean food again in order not to starve. But from then on, I had no problem eating and digesting Korean food,” he recalls.

He now plans to publish a book about taking Korean cuisine to the world, comparing the history of Korean and Western cuisine and situating Korean food in a wider global context. He also wants to be more aggressive about the publishing house he set up in 1998, specializing on Korean culture.

“I set up a publisher with five French friends, and have published 12 translated books in French. We’re making guides and magazines about Korea. More Europeans take an interest in Korean culture, but there are not many readable books,” he says. In his fluent Korean, he adds, “It concerns me that books don’t sell well, but I do it all because of the emotional attachment I feel to Korea.”

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