By Colin Marshall

This is one in a series of essays on important pieces of Korean cinema freely available on the Korean Film Archive’s Youtube channel. You can watch this month’s movie here and find links to previously featured movies below.

If you want to go see a movie in Seoul, you might well go to Wangsimni. Right above the neighborhood’s station on the central circular subway line stands a high-rise shopping complex whose multiplex theater boasts the largest IMAX screen in the country. It went up less than a decade ago, in 2008, but Seoul changes quickly. This has held true at least since the end of the devastating Korean War, when the capital of the new state of South Korea had nothing to do but develop. Still, Seoul remained in fairly rough shape a decade later, in the early 1960s, the time in which the protagonist of 1976’s Wangsimni, My Hometown (왕십리) last saw his homeland.

The disoriented but stylishly dressed Joon-tae first appears onscreen in a once deeply familiar Seoul, made strange in just fourteen years. As he struggles to place himself through the window of a cab, the driver asks what he’s looking for. “I don’t see the trolley,” says Joon-tae. “It’s been at least ten years since they got rid of the trolley,” the driver tells him. Joon-tae asks about another railcar he used to ride in his youth. “Trolley, railcar… that’s all history.” An Angeleno in the same era and in the same situation would have had the same conversation. Where did all the streetcars of the far-reaching Pacific Electric and Los Angeles Railways go?

Their disappearance looked dramatic enough to convince some of a conspiracy, but larger processes had converged to turn the city into something other than it had been before. Just as Los Angeles discarded the trappings of the late 19^th and early 20^th century it spent as a booming, barely-tamed settlement (and, to an extent, giant real-estate hustle) on the edge of the continent, Seoul discarded the trappings of the late 19^th and early 20^th century it spent as a subject of the Japanese empire. But that  mid-1970s Angeleno riding back into town might also wonder about something else: where did all these Koreans come from?

Though immigration from South Korea to Los Angeles began around 1900, it didn’t start happening in enough force to affect the character of the city until the exodus resulting from the Korean War and, a little over a decade later, the passage of the restriction-loosening Hart-Cellar act of 1965. The Koreans who came to America up until that time left a homeland still partially in ruins, and many never updated their mental image of the place. In her story collection Drifting House, Krys Lee writes of one such immigrant, who “had watched Korean news clips of the developing country’s daily disasters — student demonstrators attacked by pepper-spray bombs in 1986, the Sampoong Department Store collapse that killed generations of families in 1995 — and convinced himself that he had been right to leave.”

Of those former Seoulites who convinced themselves of their rightness in leaving — even, as Lee puts it, “after the country flourished and began giving academic scholarships to the brightest from Guatemala to Mongolia, and setting trends in film and technology” — the ones who return today, even just to visit, find the city utterly transformed. The trolley and railcar never came back, but Seoul, safe to say, doesn’t need them now that it has perhaps the world’s finest subway system, while even Los Angeles still struggles to build out its own.

To be fair, the Seoul Metro had a bit of a head start on the Los Angeles Metro, opening its first line in 1974 rather than 1990. Two years later, it hadn’t yet reached Wangsimni, which thus remained in enough of an urban isolation to qualify more as a true “hometown” (고향) than as just the old neighborhood. It also retained its now long-gone rough-and-tumble image, exhibited — and insisted upon — by the remains of Joon-tae’s old crew. Checking into a cheap hotel, he begins seeking them out by heading straight to the local pool hall, the hangout of choice for every Korean man of a certain generation, finding both the establishment and its owner in a diminished state.

The hall has shrunk from two floors to one, and the man, Choi, rendered nearly unintelligible (at least to my foreign ears) by ancient slang and drink, bursts every so often into intense despondency about his lack of progress in life. Joon-tae, too, sees himself as having stood shamefully still for the last fourteen years. He left Korea suddenly in order to avoid an epic inheritance dispute, his tearful fiancée chasing futilely after his departing taxi. Though the intervening time apparently saw him make quite a name for himself, as well as a small fortune, as some kind of valuable operative in the Japanese underworld, he returned just as suddenly, bringing his cashed-out savings with him and claiming to have come for one reason only: to see Jeong-hui, the girl he left behind, one last time.

But before he can get to Jeong-hui, another woman comes his way: Yoon-ae, a prostitute sent to his room by Choi and the rest of his buddies. Instantly enamored by Joon-tae’s distance, disinterest, and apparent inability to take care of himself, she goes from washing his clothes (for which he reprimands her) to inviting him over and cooking dinner (an appointment he forgets, or simply disregards) to proposing marriage, all in a matter of days. And as the whore tries to turn Madonna, the Madonna seems to have endured deeper reversals of fortune: while Joon-tae at first hears, and hopes, that Jeong-hui has married well and now lives comfortably, he comes to find out that she’s actually fallen to the status of “the biggest floozy in Wangsimni.”

Joon-tae nevertheless feels honor-bound to do right by Jeong-hui, going so far as to take out an ad in the newspaper to find her and, when he does, to buy her a new, Western-style house in cash. He does so in front of an infuriated Yoon-ae, who’d taken him for a fellow lost soul but now, having found out about his money, demands a few gifts of her own. Later, sitting amid the almost parodically 1970s décor of one of the many coffee shops that proliferated in Seoul in that era, she rejects the finery he’s just bought her and, before storming out, tells him off: “You made me think a girl like me can get married. You made me have hope. Do you know how? You looked like someone who could need me.”

But our laconic antihero has bigger problems: all throughout the film, a minder name Sasaki has tailed him through the city, trying to hasten his return in order to secure his participation in a mob war about to erupt back in Japan. Despite at first having vowed to make this trip the last time he would ever set foot in Korea, his resolve seems to waver as the complications of his situation mount. The more he learns of Jeong-hui’s current situation, the less she seems like an innocent victim of circumstances — and the more appealing Yoon-ae’s proposition becomes. Maybe, he starts to think, he can take her back to Japan with him.

Korean stories, though, have never let their characters execute their plans or satisfy their desires as simply as that. He catches Yoon-ae already on her way back to the farm village she calls her own home town, planning — doomedly, one senses — to lie her way into marriage to a childhood friend. The movie ends on New Year’s Day, with Joon-tae chased through a lumber yard by a team of enforcers assembled to bring him back at any cost. “I decided to stay,” he explains to Sasaki and his glowering, advancing henchmen. “I just realized that this is where I belong.” Just then, Choi and the rest of the fellows with whom he presumably belongs with rush up to defend their friend. The Japanese gangsters fell them easily, but Joon-tae, turned into a fighting machine by a presumable burst of hometown pride, in turn fells the distracted Japanese gangsters even more easily.

“I’ve been living all these years not caring about anything,” Joon-tae admits to Choi as they stand on a stone bridge overlooking some watery land surely soon to be developed and redeveloped. His closing monologue convinces them both to finally “lay down some roots” in the Korea that threatens to pass them even further by. “Everyone’s busy living their lives, while the two of us circle around the same spot not knowing what to do. We’re the only two who haven’t been able to really live our lives. Let’s on our lives from now on. This is our home. Why do we live like we’re just passing through? We’ve got to find our lost fourteen years and make up for lost time. Let’s make wings. With those wings, let’s fly in the sky.” The two old friends then nearly double up in non-ironic laughter.

A free-floating modern Westerner could find this stirring indeed, revealing as it does parts of the  Korean sensibility that entices many expatriates to stay: the refreshingly unquestioned emotion, the nigh-unbreakable bonds of friendship, the sense of a country and culture as collective enterprise. But that sort of thing also puts off its fair share of Koreans — including, for a time, director Im Kwon-taek. A teenager at the time of the Korean War and later vilified as the son of a communist, he saw firsthand how a society can tear itself apart. He effectively turned his back on his homeland, becoming a self-described thoughtless journeyman filmmaker known in the industry for his ability to near-continuously crank out cheap, commercial genre pictures.

The effects of Im’s awakening manifest gradually over the course of his work in the mid-1970s. Wangshimni came out in a year when he made at least three other pictures, none of which contain the kind of declaration of self he put into the mouth of Joon-tae. Over the following decades, Im would transform from a pure hack into a maker of art-house films — and sometimes blockbuster-successful art-house films — that examine the Korean condition past and present. Revivre (화장), a dreamy drama of a tormented middle-aged cosmetics executive (played by Ahn Sungki, Man-su of Chil-su and Man–su) debuted in 2014 promoted as Im’s 102^nd film, though given all the losses and rediscoveries made since he began his directorial career in 1962, nobody can be quite sure of the number.

None of us would want to subject ourselves to the societal forces that freighted Joon-tae and Choi, or indeed Im, with such apparent despair in the first place, but more recent generations of Koreans seem to have positioned themselves relative to Korea, whether inside or outside it, with less agony. When Tokyo-based American friend of mine recently visited Seoul, he caught up with some of the Koreans with whom he’d studied in Japan, all as international students, years ago. He expressed great admiration for their sentiments that, though they’d spent significant amounts of time living, working, and studying in other countries, they’d returned to Korea confident that they would, in the long term — or could, in the long term — make their homes nowhere else.

Declarations of that kind can, of course, smack as much of complacency as devotion. For all the fuss made here about producing “global challengers,” fewer Koreans have a genuine interest in hammering down stakes outside Korea than the nation’s image of internationalist dynamism make make it seem. (This goes especially for Korean men, with their notorious resistance to embrace things foreign in comparison with the country’s more xenophilic women.) And as much sincerity as Im’s more personal films of the Wangshimni period and after evince, he also made his artistic shift with a certain degree of strategy. The blockbuster era having just begun over in Hollywood, he knew the homegrown genre pictures of the day couldn’t compete with imported multimillion-dollar spectacles. Now, of course, Korea makes its own multimillion-dollar (or rather, multibillion won) spectacles of its own, which screen right alongside the American ones. If you don’t believe me, catch a train to Wangsimni and see for yourself.

Related Korea Blog Posts:

Watching Madame Freedom, the Movie that Scandalized Postwar Korea

The Unbearable Preposterousness of Westernization: Park Kwang-su’s Chil-su and Man-su

Between Boring Heaven and Exciting Hell: Kim Soo-yong’s Night Journey

You can read more of the Korea Blog here and follow Colin Marshall at his web site, on Twitter @colinmarshall, or on Facebook.

By Charles Montgomery

The LARB Korea Blog is currently featuring selections from The Explorer’s History of Korean Fiction in Translation, Charles Montgomery’s book-in-progress that attempts to provide a concise history, and understanding, of Korean literature as represented in translation. You can read the first selection here and the second here.

Korea’s literary preferences have historically leaned toward poetry and song, a common condition in pre-print cultures as rhythm and rhyme make them easy to memorize. Even when reliable tools for writing were perfected, the survival of written materials remained quite uncertain. Unless inscribed in rock, writing is very fragile, especially when contained in bamboo books in an age when Korea often suffered invasions and had its cities looted. Consequently poetry, including poetry sung and chanted, came down from memory to memory as first form of Korean literature, just like Homer’s Odyssey in the West.

Chinese dynastic histories including the Bamboo Annals (prior to 296 BC), History of the Later Han Dynasty (compiled in the 5th century), and History of Wei (compiled 551 to 554) mention the recitation of religious oral literature by the Korean people, as well as the performance of origin myths and histories at early state meetings and in early shamanist-type rituals. These Chinese documents even describe the northern tribes as “the people who enjoy singing and dancing.” Poetry and singing were seen as a way to communicate to and build relationships between Nature, Heaven and Earth, and in this the influences of Animism and Shamanism can certainly be seen.

Korean literature began orally and in the vernacular, but slowly slid into Chinese when it moved to print. Eventually Korea’s literati, known as yangban, practiced literature solely in Chinese, while the rest of society — i.e., the lower classes and women — simply used the Korean language. As Chinese-characters were introduced, narrative folk poetry was replaced by the lyric and didactic variety known as hyangga. Simple, polished, quite lyrical or philosophical, and often short, these poems were initially recorded in Chinese characters that reproduced the sound of Korean words (hyangch’al), creating the first bridge between the two languages.

The creative process still happened in the Korean language, but when hyangch’al disappeared, the schism widened and literature became almost exclusively composed in Chinese, leaving the remainder in the hands of the singers and poets. After hyangga emerged sijo (don’t worry too much about these names; we’ll be explaining them soon), which lived alongside kasa. While sijo continued in the lyrical spirit of hyangga, kasa was didactic and entirely composed in Chinese. This split between the lyric and didactic was exacerbated by the introduction of hangeul, the Korean alphabet, which finally gave the vernacular or “common” literature an outlet in which to be recorded.

Korean poetry has had a handful of predominant forms, all partially associated with the empires under which they flourished, all of which help draw a broad outline of the development of classical Korean fiction. It is a bit artificial to use western poetic conventions to explain Korean poetry, partly because what we think of as “rhyming” is often an inconsequential achievement in modern Korean, a language whose verb forms inherently sound similar similar.

In the classical era’s “mid-rhyming,” for example, the writer of a poem arranged in five-word line would make the first, third word and fifth word play in alliteration, mid-rhyme, and final rhyme. This was possible because the poems were written with Chinese characters — and thus disappeared as hangeul gained dominance. But the idea of syllables is not sufficient to explain Korean poetry. “Korean verses allow a different number of phonemes within a metric unit and the rules of versification metamorphosize freely,” writes the scholar Cho Dong-il — which is a complicated way of saying, listen not to Korean poetry’s syllables, but to the flow of its sound.

Not much remains of the literature of the Silla dynasty, which lasted from 57 BC to 935 AD. What does survive takes the form of hyangga poetry, written in hyangch’al. The word “hyangga,” which means “rural village song” derives from what the Silla people called their empire. A total of fourteen poems were passed down in the Samguk Yusa: Legends And History Of The Three Kingdoms Of Ancient Korea (c.1285), and eleven more survived in the Tales of Kyunyo.

The first of these, recorded in the Samguk Yusa, also informs us that the poem was sung by members of the Karak state during the third moon in the year 42. This is the Seodong-yo (The Ballad of Seodong), an uncomplicated four-line lyric by a commoner named Seodong, who wrote the poem to persuade the king that the king’s daughter has slept with he, Seodong. As it happens, his poetic ruse succeeds: the princess, banished for her fabricated lack of chastity, eventually marries the author.

Hyangga forms vary, including four-line, eight-line, and ten-line poems. In ten-line hyangga, the first section introduces the idea of the poem; the second either distills or distorts feelings related to the topic; in the third, which runs for only two lines, a declaration comes to a strong conclusion. This general form of construction is quite similar to that of the sijo, which we shall discuss shortly. The Buddhist monk Weolmyeong’s Requiem for My Sister, until its rather traditional and predictable religious end, exemplifies the structure quite beautifully:

The road to life and death
Stands fearfully before us.
Without saying good-bye,
Have you left me?

The early morning wind in autumn
Scatters leaves here and there.
Though from the same branch
They know not where they’ve gone.

Oh my dear sister, to see you again in Amitabha’s Paradise,
I shall wait, perfecting Buddha’s way.

(Translation: Robert Fouser)

During the Goryeo dynasty of  918 to 1392 AD, the use of hyangch’al disappeared as conventional Chinese characters came to dominate Korean literature. Hyangga itself did not entirely disappear, but turned from a literary form into a religious one, leaving the so-called Goryeo Songs as a legacy. The elimination of hyangch’al meant that no even approximate way to write down “native” Korean poetry remained, so it continued primarily to be expressed orally. As Chinese characters became the de facto written language of Korean literature, and the Goryeo dynasty become increasingly mannered, Korea’s literati began to look down their nose at poetry composed in hyangch’al, refusing to record and reproduce it. In its place, they developed a new form of poetry, the kasa.

Although primarily oral, kasa lived long enough to be recorded in hangeul during the later Joseon dynasty. Unfortunately, for political and linguistic reasons, the new dynasty was not particularly interested in saving the literature of the previous one. Through conscious destruction and indifference, much literature was lost, though the popularity of kasa itself continued to grow, achieving its greatest heights toward the end of the Joseon era. As the Goryeo dynasty declined, this loss of literature overtook much of the Goryeo works as well. When the Joseon succeeded the Goryeo, it adopted a policy similar to that the Goryeo’s of expunging the “inappropriate” and “obscene” poetry of the recent past — and so barely sixty works of Goryeo poetry survive.

The kasa had two forms: shorter, with one stanza, and longer, with up to thirteen. Each stanza includes a refrain in the middle or at the end intended to establish the mood of the piece or tie the stanzas together. More loosely structured than its predecessors, and took on far bolder topics, even love. It often discussed such subjects rather bluntly, though often also didactically, a quality that over over time saw the kasa lose popularity to the more lyrical sijo. Kisaeng, the officially recognized Korean female courtesans, often performed the kasa, which may give some clue as to the reason behind their directness and sexuality relative to their predecessors. Although kisaeng technically ranked among the lowest in the Korean caste system, they were also entertainers of great skill who sometimes worked for yangban or the court.

Relatively unimportant during the Goryeo period, the kasa became more robust and well-known in the Joseon dynasty in the form of works like the Manjeoncheun, an anonymous love poem likely from the mouth of a kisaeng. Most readers will note a narrator shift towards the end:

Were I to build a bamboo hut on the ice
Were I to die of cold with him on the ice,
O night, run slow, till our love is spent.
When I lie alone, restless, vigilant,
Only peach blossoms wave over the west window.
You have no grief, welcome the spring breeze.
I have believed those who vowed to each other;
“My soul will follow yours forever.”
Who, who persuaded me this was true?
“O duck, beautiful duck, why do you come
To the swamp, instead of the shoal?”
“If the swamp freezes, the shoal will do.
A bed on Mount South, jade pillow, gold brocade.
And beside me a girl sweeter than musk,
Let us press our hearts together, our magic hearts.

Non-kisaeng female writers were generally not published during either the Goryeo or Joseon dynasties, but the record hints that yangban women did write thousands — probably hundreds of thousands — of kasa in hangeul. This was mainly anonymous, and is today known as kyubang kasa, or “inner-room kasa,” so named because the women’s rooms in a traditional hanok house were located toward its center. Mostly instructional in nature and typically given to a younger woman on the occasion of her marriage and departure to her husband’s house, these poems transmit advice and admonition from one generation of women to another:

Listen, my dear child,
Tomorrow is the day of your leave-taking.
Leaving your parents’ home,
You will be entering your husband’s.
As your heart must be,
So is mine, also uneasy.
Your things loaded on a white horse
And the gilt saddle firmly tied down.
As I send you off out the gate
I have much advice to give you…

Neither spellbinding as literature nor intended to be, these vessels of exemplary advice. But in many cases these kyubang kasa, passing from generation to generation,  came to include many other kinds of passages. In fact, while the most common form of kasa was admonitory, the kyubang kasa also included the “songs of lament” and the “songs of flower viewing” — the latter perhaps hinting at the rather philosophical or even effete tendencies sometimes evinced by poetry of the era.

During the Joseon period, from 1392 to 1897, Korean poetry shifted to the sijo. The original sijo poets were yangban who wrote poetry to pass the time and amuse their friends. There is an amusing split here: while “serious” literature was still supposed to still be composed in Chinese characters, or hanja, apparently Goryeo-era yangban had begum to “slum” in hangeul. This may help explain both the spread of hangeul itself and the continued popularity of the sijo form. Its themes, consequently, were often Confucian in nature and focused on loyalty. Sijo had three stanzas (often expressed in lines) of four feet each and can be compared, in some ways, to the Japanese haiku, though the sijo’s longer form allows for greater explication of themes and more syllabic flexibility.

The form of the sijo is semi-regular: three lines of fourteen to sixteen syllables each, with a total between 44 and 46. Readers often first encounter sijo in an “idealized” western structure based on syllable count, but this ideal is complicated and often inaccurate. A more natural way to explain the sijo is that its topic is introduced in the first line, explored in the second line, given a surprise twist at the outset of the third line, and then concluded by the end of that line, a structure intended to create an aesthetically “complete” poem that unfolds in a brief space, but without hurry.

Sijo originated with the yangban’s expression of philosophical or religious concerns, but in the eighteenth century its popularity quickly spread among common people. With this new mass popularity, the form also began to change, ultimately splitting into the p’yong (flat) and changhyong (long) sijo. The new sijo also tended to be less rarified, often focusing on commonplace emotions and satire. The first sijo compilation, the Cheonggu Yeongon, was not printed until 1728, but many individual works remain scattered in the private collections of the families of the yangban who wrote them.

The sijo below was composed by the famed Admiral Yi Sun-sin in 1599, on the eve of a battle with the Japanese — a battle he won, but in which he was unfortunately slain:

At Hansan Island Fortress
Moon-bright night on Hansan Isle, and I sit alone atop the lookout.
I hold my great sword by my side, and as my worries deepen.
From somewhere comes the single note of the Mongol flute, piercing to the very bowels.

Interested readers can find it translated in Richard Butt’s The Bamboo Grove: An Introduction to Sijo.

Pansori, or “story-in-song,” is still enjoyed today. Believed to have developed from the shamanist chants of southeastern Korea in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, pansori differs from those in not being based on religion, and in fact often focusing on more tangible subjects including the yangban and issues of social structure. It began in the second half of the Joseon era (during the reign of King Succhong, or Kim Yeongjo, between so 1674 and 1776) and was most likely — though there is no definitive proof — an outgrowth of shamanic practice in Jeolla-do. But pansori subverts shamanism, and in fact often mocks. To western eyes, pansori may seem less like literature and more like song-and-dance, but Korea considers it a literary form (and recognized, of course, as song and dance as well).

Presented as an up to eight-hour-long narrative musical performance with two performers, a drummer and a singer, it consists of two internal musical forms, the main song called ch’ang and rhythmic spoken passages called aniri, with the latter serving as kind of thread running through and connecting the former. Pansori emerged from a primarily oral tradition, and one that revolved around superhuman characters, myths, and the like, but by the late Joseon period it had evolved into a set of stories based on more typical events using human characters. The plots, therefore, became increasingly “true to life.” Pansori mixed prose and verse as well as vernacular language, including slang, sarcasm and jokes, with the more traditional classical language of the past.

In terms of literary “quality,” pansori was a kind of pastiche that included well-known truisms, a surprising amount of earthy humor, and a mixture of high- and low-level speech (the Korean language has formal registers for communication between equals and those who are not equal, for various reasons including age, education, and sex). As time went by, this latter set of opposites caused pansori, initially the literature of the common man, to split into two schools: a common version representing entertainment for the masses, and another that continued to depict the lives of the royal court.

Pansori began in the oral tradition, but passed down from generation to generation, they became increasingly memorialized in print as well. There were two different stylistic strands:the sung (indicated by the Korean word ka) and the written (cheon). According to Kim Hyunggu, the three most popular pansori novels were Tales of Shim Cheong, The Tale of Chunghyang, and The Tale of Heungbu, the last of which remains popular as a children’s tale.

As the popularity of these and similar works grew, and as they were transmitted in first oral and, from eighteenth century on, written form, novels that appealed to common tastes were increasingly prevalent, partly due to the fact that they were also now available in hangeul. Over time, pansori moved away from relentless focus on one main character, and so-called “family novels” became more popular. This period represents the first mercantilization of Korean literature, when we can first see the focus of the works themselves move away from the self-expression and meditations of the yangban to material crafter for success in the emerging fiction market.

The length and breadth of pansori, as well as the general appreciation for the form, lead to its becoming, in a sense, the first “common” literature of Korea. As it began to spread in printed form, it gave first form to the Korean “classic” novel. Peaking in the nineteenth century, pansori entered a slow, apparenly inevitable decline thereafter. Performances of it can still be seen in Korea, usually in extremely truncated forms, and only in locations of formal cultural presentation such as the National Theater at Mt. Namsan.

Before we can continue to the creation of the “classic” novel and the invention of literature as we know it now, we must take a short detour next time to discuss perhaps the most important development in the emergence of a common Korean literature: the unprecedented creation of a national alphabet, hangeul.

Related Korea Blog posts: 

Where is Korean Translated Literature?

What Shaped Translated Korean Literature?

Looking Back at Modern Short Stories from Korea, the Very First Collection of Korean Fiction in English

The Triumph of Han Kang and the Rise of Women’s Writing in Korea

Bright Lies, Big City: Korean Authors and Seoul

Charles Montgomery is an ex-resident of Seoul where he lived for seven years teaching in the English, Literature, and Translation Department at Dongguk University. You can read more from Charles Montgomery on translated Korean literature here, on Twitter @ktlit, or on Facebook.

 By Colin Marshall

Video monitors started appearing on Seoul’s subway trains long before I arrived here. More video monitors — or, to be precise, old televisions — started appearing on those video monitors a few months ago, announcing a big show of the work of video artist Nam June Paik. (Paik made his name in the West, literally, with not just unconventional Romanization but a Western-style re-ordering that put his given name first and family name second.) The straightforwardly titled Paik Nam June Show (백남준 쇼), which runs through October at Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza, commemorates the tenth anniversary of the death of the most creative old-television enthusiast ever to live, as well as, for a time, the most famous Korean artist — and quite possibly the most famous Korean — in the world.

“I start in 1960, first time television sets become cheap, become secondhand, like junk,” said Paik in a 1975 profile by New Yorker art critic Calvin Tomkins. “I buy thirteen secondhand sets in 1962. I didn’t have any preconceived idea. Nobody had put two frequencies into one place, so I just do that, horizontal and vertical, and this absolutely new thing comes out.” He refers to his discovery that manipulating the electronics television sets use — or then used, anyway — to produce an image could produce, in an unpredictable fashion, another, stranger image.

This led to his creation, with Japanese engineer Shyua Abe, of the more controllable Abe-Paik Video Synthesizer, and ultimately to his status as the father of video art, builder of television robots, television cellos, television-watching Buddhas, and television maps and flags of the United States of America. While other artists began to use video around the same time he did, when the gear came down in size, down in price, and out of the studio, none displayed quite the same intensely zealous interest of the early adopter.

Paik’s embrace of the moving image as displayed on consumer electronic devices now looks prescient, as do several of the futuristic ideas upon which he speculated. He even coined, in a 1974 proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation (a major source of funding for early video artists), the term “electronic superhighway,” imagining a time in which “we connect New York with Los Angeles by means of an electronic telecommunication network that operates in strong transmission ranges, as well as with continental satellites, wave guides, bundled coaxial cable, and later also via laser beam fiber optics.”

Tomkins, in the New Yorker profile, wrote of Paik’s vision for a familiar-sounding “’global university’ — a place where vast quantities of up-to-date information on every conceivable subject can be stored, with computers to provide instant retrieval, so that a student of any age can pursue his own education at his own pace.” And so it feels highly appropriate to see him celebrated in his homeland, a place whose high internet speeds and rates of connectivity get it routinely described, in the 21^st century, as the most wired country on Earth.

His countrymen tend to seize upon each new device as soon as it comes to market, and even among Koreans close to Paik’s own generation (he was born in 1932, with the end of the Japanese colonial era still nowhere in sight), one sees much less of the kind of technological foot-dragging common among older people in the West. American youth might just have got around to teaching their grandmothers how to use a smartphone; in Korea, grandma’s already in line for the next one. Those screens on the subway already seem superfluous; who can get bored enough to watch the advertisements they play between station announcements with a personal screen in the palm of their hand?

Often enough I’ve looked up on a subway ride to see literally every other passenger absorbed in what Koreans call their “handphone,” texting, gaming, and scrolling through page after page of one kind of information or another. Sometimes, on these occasions, I’ve looked up from my own, an iPhone so bashed and so many generations behind that, here, its ownership almost violates some sort of social taboo. Besides, for every (newer) iPhone user in Korea, several have a local model made by Samsung or LG instead — companies that also manufactured more than a few of the many screens glowing from within the works on display at the DDP.

Paik’s sculptures, made of not just wood-grained and dial-controlled sets of long-forgotten brand but paint, neon, cameras, and many kinds of non-televisual junk, present what museum professionals call a “preservation challenge.” Peer around the back of the hulking, friendly-looking robots that greet you as soon as you enter, and you see that someone has hollowed out the bulky, even-then-obsolete televisions that compose their bodies and mounted outward-facing flat-panel displays of various sizes up against the glass.

Paik could hardly have known, putting his television robots together in the 1980s when the Korean economy still grew itself — and with astonishing rapidity — through industries like shipbuilding, that flat-panels (surely a term soon to go the way of “computerized” and “portable”) would do much to make his homeland a global economic power. Had by that time spend a decades away from that homeland, in a kind of exile. “Because of South Korea’s stringent military-conscription law,” Tomkins wrote in 1975, “he could technically be arrested as a draft dodger if he ever returned.”

He’d left with his family in 1950, after their luck at home finally ran out — a luck that came in large part due to his merchant family’s open collaboration with the Japanese occupiers. They managed to retain their status for a time even after liberation, albeit not for long. “Growing up in a very corrupt family in a very confusing time,” he later said, “I learned how to survive, and survive well.” Paik’s family settled in Japan, where he graduated from the University of Tokyo before moving to Germany to study avant-garde music composition.

The Japan connections continued throughout the rest of his career and life. He and Yoko Ono both once counted themselves as members of the Fluxus artistic movement (there exists a later photograph of Paik, Ono, Shuya Abe, and John Lennon standing in front of a wall of televisions). He married Shigeko Kubota, a Japanese colleague in video art. His work incorporated many pieces of Japanese technology, like Pioneer’s LaserDisc media and Sony’s Watchman handheld televisions, still flickering away after all these years.

Paik eventually made it back to Korea in 1984, writes scholar Robert Fouser in “Having Fun with New Toys: Nam June Paik and the Aesthetic of Jaemi.” This homecoming “started a broad shift in Paik’s work. Despite the immense change in Korea during the intervening 35 years, the jaemi of the streets of Korea brought back memories of the street jaemi that Paik had known as a youth.” The what? Fouser quotes the Minjungseorim’s Essence Korean-English Dictionary‘s definition of jaemi (재미) as “interest; amusement; enjoyment; fun.”

Artistically, it means that “a work or performance needs to entertain and stimulate an audience through amusement and fun. Humor, sarcasm, and visual stimulation all qualify as jaemi,” which also “contains the element of surprise and keeps audiences slightly off balance with jocular spontaneity.” According to Fouser, “jaemi best summarizes the dominant aesthetic of Korean modernism,” and to my mind also summarizes the enduring appeal of Paik’s art. His robots, grinning or raising a glowing arm in salute, exude, and possibly define, late-20th-century techno-whimsy.

Even his more austere pieces, such as those Buddhas staring eternally into their own motionless images reflected by television screens, draw chuckles from their viewers. As for the element of surprise and jocular spontaneity, Paik began using that well before he entered the secondary market for TV sets, driving nails into pianos on stage (one critic called him “the world’s most famous bad pianist,” a title in which he delighted), snipping ties and shirttails with scissors off of it, and, with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, staging topless or otherwise scandalous musical performances (some of which had her wear a “TV Bra” of Paik’s invention).

Despite his start in the avant-garde, his work has retained plenty of relevance in our time when the term “avant-garde” itself no longer means much of anything, and when new technology, especially new technology related to the display of images, no longer impresses on anything like as deep a level as it once did. But to the younger generations who’ve started to regard VHS cassettes as nostalgia objects, images out of a cathode ray tube look compellingly unusual and rich with imperfection. Twenty years ago, sheer availability had rendered the household electronics Paik made his signature materials almost invisible. In the 21^st century, they’ve regained the something of the strangeness — now accompanied by echoes of the past instead of messages from the future — he must have sensed when first he discovered their artistic potential.

Call it a kind of “authenticity,” an aesthetic quality much prized by the retromaniac hipsterism of the West, a movement that has so far shown few signs of penetration into the neophiliac un-irony of modern South Korea. Though possessed of a formidable sense of humor, Paik’s work has never exuded irony. In that, the Japanese-educated artist who spent most of his life in Europe and the United States — as well as the Buddhist who never drank, smoked, or drove — represents the sensibility of his people more than he might at first have appeared to.

Korea almost automatically celebrates its native sons and daughters who’ve won acclaim for themselves abroad, and thus acclaim for their country, no matter how aberrant their behavior or unfashionable their creations. Fouser sees Paik, who accomplished what no other Korean artist could by “influencing the West with a subverted view of its own culture,” as “a combination of Paik the inheritor of Korean modernism and Paik the inheritor of bourgeois careerism.” Having drawn his first feelings of “techno-jaemi” from listening to the radio, riding in the car, and playing the piano in his youth, he went on to observe his family “use its wealth and power to maintain the status quo after liberation,” learning that “systems have to be manipulated for self-protection, and that ideals matter less than practicality.”

Fouser credits Paik’s use of jaemi as having “helped to desanctify art and make it fun again.” Asked by Tomkins why he doesn’t make boring art, Paik himself replied: “I come from very poor country and I am poor. I have to entertain people every second.” Not that you’d know, strolling through Zaha Hadid-designed Dongdaemun Design Plaza and into the Paik Nam June Show, that either Paik or South Korea came from poverty. It even ends in with a genuine spectacle, in a room built for a huge sea turtle made entirely out of 1990s-style television sets, all boxy yet rounded. Every few minutes, much newer projection technology, still impressive in itself, sends the entire floor around the electronic reptile through a rippling metamorphosis, from solid to liquid, concrete to abstract.

From there you exit straight into another room containing (this being Korea, after all) a pop-up coffee bar and a display of all the Nam June Paik merchandise available for purchase. The hallway outside that contains a video work built in tribute to Paik by the media artist Choi Jongbum — making use, the signs tell us, of the latest models in Samsung’s lineup of “quantum dot display” ultra high definition TVs — and a lounge area bristling with cables loungers can use to charge their handphones. They might well need to, having drained their batteries snapping selka (샐카, or the Korean version of “selfie”) with friends standing beside Paik’s robots, or in silhouette against the colorful video collages of his not-quite-regular grids of monitors.

All this does little to actively refute the notion, long held by Paik’s critics without seeming to bother the artist himself, that his work wasn’t quite serious, that it was a little too much fun. As the standard translation of “fun,” jaemi, sound like a highly specialized cultural concept though it may, is one the very first vocabulary words a student of the Korean language learns. If you want to say you enjoyed something, you say “Jaemi isseosseoyo,” literally something like “There was fun.” If you want to say you didn’t enjoy something, you say “Jaemi opseosseoyo,” or “There wan’t fun.” This becomes something of a crutch later on, when people begin to expect more specific responses, but later in the day I’d seen the Paik Nam June show, when a friend asked how it was, my response — jaemi isseosseoyo — sounded a great deal more meaningful than usual.

Related Korea Blog posts: 

Writing About Korea, in Korean, for Koreans — as an America: an Interview with Robert J. Fouser

Why Korea Needs Alain de Botton (and Why Alain de Botton Needs Korea)

You can read more of the Korea Blog here and follow Colin Marshall at his web site, on Twitter @colinmarshall, or on Facebook.