Korean culture through the eras

The Korea Herald revisits the past six decades through the lives of iconic cultural figures and examines how their professional and personal development reflect the nation's complex and often tumultuous history.

1950s: Choi Seung-hee
Of aristocratic birth, Choi trained under modern dancer Baku Ishii in Japan. She developed her own dances by combining traditional Korean movements. “Choi Seung-hee was a creative, innovative artist who recreated the forgotten and traditional into something new,” says Kang Joon-shik, whose biography of her was published last year, the centennial of her birth. “She was the first hallyu star, already charming audiences in Japan, China, the US, Europe and South America back in the 1930s.”
Pablo Picasso attended her performance in Paris in 1939 and described her as “a real artist who exceptionally portrays the dream and ideal of our time period”.
Following Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, Choi was condemned for performing for Japanese troops during the war and defected to the North with her husband, an active supporter of the North’s Workers’ Party of Korea. Supported by Kim Il-sung, she founded the National Institute of Dance.
She was purged in 1967 and disappeared from view. In 2003 Pyongyang revealed that she had died in 1969.

1960s: Patti Kim
This beloved pop singer made her debut at a US military base in Korea in 1959, taking the stage name Patti after the American singer Patti Page. In 1960 she became the first Korean pop singer to perform in Japan and in 1963 in Las Vegas. She met her first husband, composer Kil Ok-yoon, while on a tour of Vietnam entertaining the Korean troops there and their collaboration left a string of enduring pop songs, including “Song in Praise of Love” and “Dear Maria”.
Kim retired last year at age 75. “Being on the stage is like an addiction,” she said, “but I wanted to leave while I’m still healthy, sing well and feel sexy.”

1970s: Nam June Paik
Renowned as a groundbreaking artist on New York’s art scene, Nam June Paik was a pioneer in video art as well as a composer, performer and inventor who broke down cultural barriers. Living in New York since 1964, he gained fame in the decade that followed with, among other pieces, a cello made of three TV sets, a concept that led him to coin the term “electronic superhighway” in 1974.
Born in Seoul, Paik studied in Tokyo and Munich and worked all over the world, establishing log-term friendships with composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and cellist Charlotte Moorman. In 1999 Art News magazine named him one of the century’s 25 most influential artists.
The best-known Korean-born artist overseas, he died in 2006.

1980s: Kim Min-ki
In an era of student pro-democracy activism, the 1970 song “Morning Dew” by singer and playwright Kim Min-ki served as an anthem.
Arrested in 1972 for teaching his tunes to university freshmen, Kim saw his albums censored or banned. He took jobs in a factory, a mine and a farm, but returned to Seoul in 1983 to write and produce plays and musicals. “Line 1”, his adaptation of a German musical – about a woman encountering people of diverse backgrounds while riding the subway – remained onstage for 15 years and was performed in China, Japan and Germany.

1990s: Seo Tai-ji
Seo Tai-ji was the singer who introduced rap to Korea, who fans called “the president of culture”. Now 41, he debuted as part of Seo Tai-ji and Boys in 1992, alongside Lee Juno and Yang Hyun-suk. Their first single, “Nan Arayo”, was an instant hit despite being – or because it was – a dramatic departure from the mainstream, featuring upbeat rap lyrics and catchy choruses.
Kim Young-sam became Korea’s first civilian president, the PC revolution began and everyone was swooning over TV romantic comedies. “Seo Tai-ji’s music was the soundtrack of the time, our youth,” says fan Kim Ji-hee, 37. “My teenage years were all about him.”
The music of Seo Tai-ji and Boys represented the young and innovative Korean Generation X. “Class Idea” criticised a repressive education system and “Come Back Home” dealt with runaway teenagers. After they disbanded in 1996, the grooming of “idol groups” began, such as HOT, Fin.K.L and Sechs Kies, who preceded today’s hallyu stars like Girls’ Generation and Super Junior.
Seo continues to pursue a solo career.

2000s: Kim Ki-duk
One of the best-known Korean filmmakers overseas had his breakthrough in 2004. Long considered an “outsider”, he was named best director at the Berlin Film Festival for “Samaritan Girl” and in Venice for “3-Iron”.
Kim was a labourer who’d never attended film school when his first feature, “Crocodile”, came out in 1996. Early works like “Wild Animals” |and “The Isle” were largely dismissed as “eccentric”, misogynistic and extremely violent. But the double triumph of 2004 made him one of the most significant filmmakers in contemporary Korean cinema. Last year his 18th feature, “Pieta”, won top prize in Venice.
His latest movie, “Moebius”, was only allowed to be screened in South Korea after Kim agreed to remove scenes depicting incest, but the Venice festival invited him to show it this year out of competition.

2010s: Shin Kyung-sook
Author Shin rose to international prominence when the English translation version of her 2008 novel “Please Look after Mom” became a bestseller in the US in 2011.
She won the prestigious Man Asian Literary Prize for the same novel last year, becoming the first Korean and first woman to receive the honour.
“The novel is an incredibly moving portrait of what it means to be a mother, but also the tradition and modernity of the family in South Korea,” said Razia Iqbal, who chaired the Man Prize jury. Others have called it a “pioneer of literary hallyu”, since no other Korean novel has enjoyed such popularity overseas.
“Realising that I have foreign readers, on top of my Korean ones, encourages me to do what I’ve been doing,” says the author.