Wednesday, February 5, 20254:00 PM (Pacific Time)Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
The late novelist Cho Sehŭi, whose masterpiece The Dwarf (1978) offered one of the most scathing critiques of capitalist industrialization in South Korea, expanded on capitalism's environmental devastation in its sequel, Time Travel (1983). His nascent ecocriticism took aim at the contemporary Han River Comprehensive Development Project that had created Chamsil, an integral part of Gangnam, Seoul. In Cho's eyes, Chamsil is a 'pavilion on the sand' (sasangnugak), a classical Chinese adage equivalent to the English 'house of cards'. In fact, Chamsil used to be a sandy beach on the Han River before the construction of reinforced concrete high-rise apartments. Cho wrote, “everything would crumble into the sand and blow away were it not for cement and rebar.” Following Cho’s lead, this talk will explore the ferroconcrete dreams of Han River development, paying particular attention to the materiality of urban construction represented by the concrete infrastructure and buildings along the southern banks of the Han. The sociocultural significance of these dreams is also evident in Bong Joon Ho’s The Host (2006) and Kim Bora’s House of Hummingbird (2018).
While the ecocriticism of Cho Sehŭi or Bong Joon Ho certainly has a point, there is another “way of seeing” that this talk will offer: Young June Lee’s photography and “machine-criticism” (kigye pipyŏng) finds “desolate beauty” (sangmangmi) in the same concrete-laden landscape, singing the praises of urban infrastructure that bears the weight of “the modern world on its shoulders” and without which, indeed, everything would return to sand.
Pil Ho Kim is Associate Professor of Korean Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea (University of Hawai'i Press, 2024). His next book project investigates the trans-Pacific cultural impact of Black freedom movements on modern Korean history.
Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies
Thursday, January 30, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM10383 Bunche Hall (10th floor)
Wednesday, February 12, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM10383 Bunche Hall (10th floor)