Museum village freezes Seoul's former life
Two human figures representing evicted business owners hang from a building slated for remodeling, beneath a giant figure of a police officer, in Saemunan Village, on Jan. 29, 2016. The area was renovated into Donuimun Museum Village which opened in April 2018. / Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar
By Jon Dunbar
There has been so much attention on various new public parks and facilities across Seoul, that
seemed largely forgotten.
It first opened up to visitors in September 2017 in time for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, but didn't officially open to the public until April 2018. Even now over a year later it still feels sort of incomplete.
Donuimun Museum Village is built on the former site of Saemunan Village. Essentially the city took an old neighborhood, known mainly for its restaurants, then hollowed it out, reinforced some buildings to bring them up to code, and repurposed them for various exhibition spaces.
Additionally, a newly constructed hanok village offers 11 sparkling new houses, built on land previously occupied by historic hanok houses.
Many of the buildings are still not fully repurposed, and the owners of the former establishments are still not back in business. When I visited the vinyl bar here on Feb. 2, 2016, the owner told us he was expecting to close soon and reopen on the spot a few years later. He is not back, and the building that housed his vinyl bar is still an empty husk.
The process from active neighborhood to museum village was not entirely smooth. Protest signs in the form of banners and graffiti appeared all over the area, visible from the sidewalk out front. Two life-sized characters, one in white chef garb and the other dressed in black, dangled from the roof of one old brick building. Behind them, a massive cutout of a police officer towered over them. The “cop titan,” as I called him, was to advertise the Korean National Police Heritage Museum, and the sign he held showed the emergency number 112. It created a grim scene reminiscent of the violent Japanese franchise “Attack on Titan,” in which humans fight off monstrous giants through the use of vertical maneuvering gear that allows them to scale urban landscapes similar to this one. In the end, that's not that bad a metaphor for Korean urban renewal.
After a couple years, in 2017 the construction fences began to come down, revealing the first public glimpse of the new museum village, full of early modern and hanok architecture. It was quite different from the original, a sterile copy still incomplete. Over time the various facilities began to take shape.
Most impressive is the museum built inside two houses, both constructed in the 1960s, now connected by a walkway. One had been an Italian restaurant named Agio and the other was a traditional Korean restaurant named Hanjeong. The museum inside shares the story of Saemunan Village and the nearby redeveloped Gyonam-dong, both located outside the traditional city gate of Donuimun. There is also an exhibition space showing the ruins of Gyeonghui Palace wall.
This space breathlessly documents the meticulous work done to archive the history and dimensions of the former villages before their removal, drawing attention to the battle for architectural preservation, perhaps unnecessarily. Maps show the original street grid and water table of the area, and a scale model reveals some very unique examples of traditional Korean architecture, before they were callously wiped off the map in favor of soulless high-rise apartment complexes for the wealthy or heavily indebted.
The museum suggests that, as Korea continues to obliterate its historic urban fabric, at least we can expect more places like this where the memory of such locations is kept alive for those who wish not to forget.
The Business and Culture Club of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch will
during lunch hour on Tuesday, May 21. Members and nonmembers are welcome.