Kunsthalle One-Year Anniversary Party

One of the more interesting artistic spaces in Seoul, imho, is Kunsthalle, the stack of shipping containers located close to the Dosan Park Intersection in Gangnam. And they are having their one-year anniversary party this weekend, April 8-10.


Each day from 5pm until 3am will feature events, music, dancing and plenty more. Saturday will also have brunch from noon to 5pm. Sounds like a lot of fun.

Kunsthalle has hosted a wide range of artistic events and other cool stuff since it opened last April (it was event host to the Korean Music Awards on March 30). Set up by the Berlin artistic group Platoon (they call themselves a "movement"), this is an attempt to blend the artistic and the political into a seamless entity. Or, I suspect, it is a cool way to meet girls. Whatever, I think it is worth checking out and supporting.


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Oh, and over at my main website, I talk about Seoul Fashion Week, the recent article about it in the New York Times, and Korean design in general.

Tale of Two Festivals

A couple of big festivals coming up this week -- the CHUNGMURO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL IN SEOUL and the GWANGJU BIENNALE. Both are looking quite good this year. You can read more about them over at the Korea Gig Guide.

Seoul Fringe Festival Kicks Off

Okay, this post is late, very sorry. But it is not too late to check out this year's Seoul Fringe Festival, taking place right now in Hongdae.


This is the 11th Seoul Fringe Festival, a two-week celebration of independent, underground and sometimes just plain weird art, music, theater and other cultural goodness. Do not expect to see many of Hongdae's biggest bands at Fringe. The whole point of the show is to give unestablished artists a chance to show off. They might be raw and unready (and they might not be any good), but I think it is good to shaking things up from time to time... especially in a place as hierarchical as Korea.

The festival takes place pretty much all over the area around Hongik University, with the bulk of events happening along the "meat street" area (the twisting road/park that runs just behind the LG Palace, KFC, and Soundholic).

You can download a map of Hongdae showing all the Fringe Festival locations from the front page of the English website (sorry, but it is a javascript link, so I cannot link directly to it).

Random Notes - Vol 3, No. 2

I checked out some surprisingly good bands at Freebird the other night. It has been quite a while since I even thought about Freebird, but this time it had the best bands I have seen in Korea for ages.

Most notable was ORIENTAL LUCY (sorry, I only have these crappy cell phone pics). Each song was quite different, ranging from a retro-70s-rock sound to a bizarre cover of a trot classic that sounded like something by SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES. (They have a Cyworld page here, but it is one of those annoying ones you need to sign into to use, so it is pretty much useless for most people.)


Another very good band was FRENZY, a four-man instrumental shoe-gazing band that sounded a bit like classic Echo and the Bunnymen (my friend's assessment).


The other band was JERANG, perhaps not as good, but still interesting in their own way. A bit of an early-Radiohead, whiny sound, but not bad. I believe JERANG won the most recent Korea national high school talent competition. They four guys in the band are just 20 (Korean age, I would imagine, so 19 in the rest of the world), so they have some time to improve. But a good beginning.

I just ran across a relatively new-ish magazine and website dedicated to the Seoul art scene, called NEXART (actually, I think Nex Art has been around since 2006, but I just discovered it). At the moment it is in Korean only, but the website claims that an English section will be coming in March. If you pick up the 'zine around town, most of the stories have a short English intro, which is limited but quite interesting.

Poking around on the Nex Art website then led me to the English (and Korean) website EAST BRIDGE, another site for finding out more about the Korean art scene.

As long as you are at East Bridge, do not forget to check out their huge list of Korean art links.

I just checked out the first two episodes of THE WIRE's fifth season (through totally legitimate means, I am sure... Stealing them via Bittorrent would be wrong).

Totally love it. Season 5 is, somehow, even more bleak than the first four seasons. But despite the depressing edge to things, it is still the best show on television, by far. Great writing, solid insights and, despite the dark cynicism, more than a few funny moments.

In case you have not heard, THE WIRE season 5 turns an eye to the media, in particular to modern newspapers, with all the brutal insight the show has used to examine city politics, the war on drugs, schools and all the rest.

Some early reviews have criticized the shows creator for having an exaggerated or cartoon-like perspective on the troubles facing the modern newspaper, but I think those criticisms are off-base. Sure it is not 100-percent correct, but THE WIRE is a fictional, entertainment program, not a documentary. I am guessing its view of the newsroom is as accurate as all the other institutions it has skewered over the years (which is to say quite accurate, but very much fiction).

If you are in Korea, you can still track down season 1 of THE WIRE here and there, for just 20,000 won or so. Totally worth it. Or you can order seasons 1-4 from Amazon.com.

Naxos of Evil

Since the possibility of the New York Philharmonic playing in North Korea is in the news again, here are a few more artistic exchanges happening with North Korea:

North Korea's State Orchestra is going to play the UK for 10 days in September 2008. Interesting backstory. The Orchestra will tour thanks to an invitation by Suzannah Clarke, a soprano who has performed in North Korea since 2003. She was invited in part because she is from Middlesbrough, the city that hosted the North Korean soccer team during the World Cup of 1966. In 2002, of course, was when Daniel Gordon's documentary THE GAME OF THEIR LIVES, about North Korea's improbable World Cup run in 1966.

Guitarist Jason Carter played in Pyongyang earlier this year (thanks to Philip for the fun entry and all the other good stuff he does). Carter wrote all about his trip in a long blog entry. It is quite a Kool-Aid-drink, but still quite interesting. You can even listen to an MP3 of him playing THE SOUND OF SILENCE in Pyongyang.

In August there was an art exhibition of North Korean works in London's West End. Amusingly (or interestingly, depending on your levels of cynicism and irony) the curator met a North Korean artist in Zambabwe in 2001, which is how the whole thing got started.

Of course, any planning with North Korea is always pretty dicey. Remember how the Rock for Peace concert in NK turned out.

What does it all mean? Heck if I know. But I suspect Andrei Lankov is right, that any and all exchanges mean that more people in North Korea are being exposed to the truth, and truth will inevitably chip away at the regime up there. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the saying goes.

Calling All Artists...

I just received a rather interesting email from the very cool art gallery Alseorim. Located in Bukcheon Hanok Village, Alseorim in a new gallery that is housed within a beautiful restored hanok. Just a great setting.

Alseorim is looking for foreign artists who would want to participate in an exhibition there. This particular exhibition will be held in November, but the folks at Alseorim will be having an initial meeting for anyone interested on May 30. If you are interested (or know someone interested), the gallery can be contacted at alseorim@naver.com.