David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
The art of becoming: RM, Yun Hyong-keun and modern Korea
RM / Korea Times file
By David A. Tizzard
I’ve read countless books, attended multiple conferences, and given more lectures than I can remember on the subject of Korea’s modernity. This week, I sat through another talk addressing the country’s reflexive move through second modernity and all the crises presented: the world’s lowest birth rate, elderly suicide, teenage depression, gender issues and everything else. Korea is a country experiencing pathological disaster resulting from a desire for perfection. A civilization that has warped its people and culture into artificial beings for financial success and Western recognition. That’s the message we hear a lot — from the media, professors and tired foreign correspondents. This is a country that took the worst of Confucianism and the worst of Capitalism and smashed them together in a postmodern dystopian Asian Frankenstein baby with perfect features and white skin.
And then you take a step back and remember what Korea was before today. How dark it was. How the shadows filled people’s lives. How the struggle for breath came at every moment. How the effects of imperialism, colonization, division, civil war and dictatorship all linger. How the psychological effects of all this remain under diagnosed. How the poverty, the dirt roads, the lack of nutrition and the farms used to define this place much more than pop music, tattoos, and award-winning movies. Korea has experienced a remarkable transformation that people are quite simply unable to realize. Even Korean people themselves do not always understand how poor and underdeveloped the country used to be. You show them photos of Apgujeong when it was a field. Or Gwanghwamun Square without Admiral Lee Sun-sin, King Sejong the Great, or even Gyeongbok Palace visible, and they raise an eyebrow as if to say, “What kind of country is this?”
It’s Korea a few decades ago. It’s the Korea that gave birth to Dansaekhwa, a form of monochrome painting developed in the mid-1970s. The Korea of Yun Hyong-keun and other artists born under foreign occupation and raised under military dictatorship. The Korea of such rapid industrialization and architectural transformation that those depicting it had little choice but to do so in abstract lines, shapes and colors. Unable to pinpoint objects amidst the vortex of modernity. RM, who featured this artwork on his solo album “Indigo” says of Yun, “He lived through the Japanese invasion, the war, he was tortured by the government, but he never gave in. In his work, I see anger, sadness, complexity, beauty.” And he’s right. It’s those four emotions that really encapsulate what needs to be seen here: anger, sadness, complexity and beauty.
Many see modern Korea as a failure. While acknowledging its technological transformation, fueled by driver-less buses, robots serving coffee and Wi-Fi connections that would make Europeans blush, they lament its moral and social stagnation. There is a subconscious tendency to see the country as a few decades behind the west. “Give it 20 or thirty years,” public sentiment says, “and then it might be at the same level in terms of gender, psychology and basic human rights.” I’m inclined to offer a different view. Rather than being behind schedule, Korea is far further in front that anyone would have imagined. The depths of its poverty in the 1960s can be explained in numbers but its hard for people to actually recognize how low this nation ranked in terms of anything resembling basic statehood and modernity. The Korean economist Ha Joon Chang does this well because he actually lived through the period. Like my wife and others of her generation, he remembers having to take stool samples into school, being forced to do physical exercise every morning, the mandatory saluting of the flag, and the signs erected all around the country urging citizens to build a better future.
And, consciously, under pressure from Pyongyang, Korea did exactly that. They built a better future. From refugees living in the dirt of a war-torn country, they applied their blood, sweat and tears, sacrificed personal dreams, and shared a common goal to ensure that their children would not go hungry. Their offspring would not know war and deprivation. That foreign powers would no longer colonize this land or language. And they achieved it.
Korea achieved a remarkable feat that is the envy of many others. I run the risk of generalizing here, but I have many students from Southeast and Central Asia who admire what was achieved in Korea. “If only we had a dictator like Park Chung-hee,” they remark wistfully. And while the legacy of that man remains the topic of another conversation, it’s important to remember that Korea has achieved what many others couldn’t. And how did they do it?
RM explains this beautifully. So much so that after spending a semester with my students, unloading all the philosophical, sociological and historical information I can muster, they still often look at me upon leaving and say, “I’ll never forget what RM said about this country.” And, smiling in return, I nod. I’m happy to play second fiddle to a man that not only understands where the country has come from but has also, at the same time helped define where it is going. Not just with the commercial success of his music, but with his patriotism, his military service, his contributions towards the arts, and his willingness to speak openly in a society that is still far too quick to silence those who have audacity to have an opinion.
When questioned by a European news outlet about Korea’s modernity and the trials and tribulations faced by its citizens, RM was unambiguous in his response. Just as Yun Hyong-keun found transcendence through repetition and restraint, modern Koreans pursued development through work and self-discipline, each brushstroke and paycheck part of the same ritual.
“In the West, people just don’t get it. Korea is a country that has been invaded, razed to the ground, torn in two. Just 70 years ago, there was nothing. We were getting aid from the IMF and the U.N. But now, the whole world is looking at Korea. How is that possible? How did that happen? Well, because people try so fucking hard to better themselves. You are in France or the UK, countries that have been colonizing others for centuries, and you come to me with, 'Oh God, you put so much pressure on yourselves; life in Korea is so stressful!' Well, yes. That’s how you get things done. And it’s part of what makes K-pop so appealing, although, of course, there’s a dark side. Anything that happens too fast and too intensely has side effects.”
That’s a mic drop. Nothing I write afterwards will add to it more than to say that RM gets it. He knows that his country was forced into a barbaric situation. A state of being most would find untenable. And yet, antifragile as they are, the people of Korea found a way to not only survive, they made themselves and the people of the world proud. They gave hope to millions. They established a new version of success. One that incorporated and represented Jo Young-pil, Park No-hae, Nam June Paik, Ham Sok Hon, Park Chan-wook, Kim Hyesoon and Balming Tiger.
And sure, there are side effects. But maybe that’s what happens when beauty is born from trauma. Perhaps the next step is to simply make RM president. Imagine that. It’s easy if you try.