Category: Korean culture (Page 2 of 3)

Kind of interesting, imho — the Ministry of Culture and Tourism has opened a website full of items whose copyrights have expired, and so are available for free use. Literature, music, art, just oodles of interesting stuff. The Ministry claims over 10,000 works will be available at first, with more to come, although I have not tried counting. It is all in Korean, but even blind clicking can turn up some interesting artworks (try poking around this area).

As I have mentioned before, the Ministry of Culture is currently pushing “Han Culture” (traditional Korean culture) as a way of moving the Korean Wave to a second phase, beyond just pop culture. I am pretty ambivalent about this idea for many reasons… I mean, I like the idea of better presenting traditional Korean culture. But I have doubts about how receptive the world will be on a popular level to this campaign. And I am in general skeptical anytime governments get involved in culture.

Instead of creating a new campaign, I would be much happier if the government just cleaned up its existing palaces (get rid of the linoleum and mold and put in real traditional paper floors) and created interesting brochures and audio tours (written and performed by professionals… not some vice-minister’s niece or whatever). Or give Ryu Seung-whan a few dollars to set his new violence fest in the Chosun Dynasty, that could be fun.

Sure, Korean culture has a lot of great stuff — but so has Thai culture, and Mongolia, and Kenyan, and Maori, and… and… and….

Point being, if you want to raise your profile and become significant to the world, you need to present works that capture people’s imaginations. You cannot just sit back and expect the world to come to you and love you.

The Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism just announced a new promotion called HAN STYLE, which focuses on Korean traditional culture. Han Style refers to six major aspects of Korean culture: Hangul (Korean writing), Hansik (Korean food), Hanbok (Korean clothing), Hanok (Korean houses), Hanji (Korean mulberry paper) and Hanguk Eumak (Korean music).

(A bit of the cheat on that last “Han”, btw. “Eumak” is music, but since that lacks the “Han” thing, they called it “Hanguk Eumak”, which is just “Korean music”).

Anyhow, Ministry Kim Myung-gon has been talking about this for a while. When Minister Kim addressed the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club in September to talk about the Ministry’s huge aid package for the movie industry, he also spent a good while talking about Korean traditional culture.

He emphasized the need to develop and preserve traditional culture to keep the current success of the Korean entertainment industry strong. “Water without a source cannot flow far,” Kim said. “Likewise, if the foundation of the Korean Wave is weak, it will be little more than a passing fad.”

While I usually do not like government mucking about in the arts, this seems to me to be a fairly benign, even useful move for the MCT. Korean traditional culture is perceived as less “sexy” than much of its neighbors. I think a lot of that is because of how it is marketed these days. For example, the palaces in Seoul tend to be poorly maintained. (Linoleum floors? And moldy at that…). Tourist guides tend to be written in Korean for Koreans, then translated into English; as a result, they are mind-bogglingly dull and obscure. More stuff like JEWEL IN THE PALACE could be a big help… People are not going to love Korean culture because Korean culture is so innately super-cool-beautiful. Rather, people will take an interest in Korean traditional culture when that culture is a part of interesting, well-told stories and other artworks.

But I do wish the government and other Korean bigwigs would widen their idea of what “Korean culture” is. There is a whole world of cool stuff that happened in Korea between the end of the Joseon Dynasty and the 1990s, just as interesting and deserving of preservation and marketing as any gayageum or hanok.

Given that Korean pop music is pretty dreadful, it is always kind of surprising to hear cool music coming from so many advertisements on TV and radio. Sure, there is a lot of pop and mainstream stuff like James Blunt (The Face Shop), Pink (Anycall) and Boa (Olympus). But there is also more interesting stuff like the Clash (LG Telecom), Kings of Convenience (Maxwell House) and The Killers (Shinwha Bank).

Sometimes, however, even cool music can be quite funny (like when LG’s Chai Apartments use Magnetic Fields’ “100,000 Fireflies”, and you hear the line “It makes me want to kill myself”… I doubt that association was what the advertising company was aiming for).

Sometimes, I hear music that I cannot identify, but fortunately we have a couple of websites to help out: www.tvcf.co.kr and www.cfmusic.co.kr. Both sites have a wealth of information about the advertisements currently gracing the Korean airwaves. Unfortunately, you do need to register to have access to most of those sites, and the sites are only in Korean. But if you can dig up an ID and can handle the Korean on the sites, both are extremely useful and fun.

The one ad that has been really bugging me for the last couple of months was the recent Nike ads, featuring Korean and Japanese athletes, and the singer BoA (they made local versions for Korea and Japan, but BoA was in both). I thought the song was really catchy, but had the worst time trying to find out what it was. Googling did not help me out either.

Actually, in this case, even CF-Music and TVCF did not help me enough. Only Naver could help. And even then, “Boa + Nike” did not help at all. But for some reason, “Nike + Boa” brought up the song name in the first hit — Go Team. Good stuff.