Rina Oh
Pachinko, an Apple Plus original limited series based on the best-selling novel by Min Jin Lee, is a story about the struggling colonial Joseon era in Korea, 1905-WWII.
Season 1 introduced audiences to the main character in the series, Sunja portrayed by Korean actress Mina Kim. Sunja, an only child is born into a lower-class family with a crippled father and a mother who runs a boarding house in Busan. Sunja is portrayed by three actresses: young childhood (Yu-na Jeon), teenage and young adulthood (Minha Kim), and older Sunja as a grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) with each reflecting a different passage of time in her life. The story begins with her birth, during a time when the Korean peninsula was colonized by the Imperial Japanese Army in Joseon. She continues to identify herself as a Joseonji throughout the series – a terminology that is still used today to define Korean expats by the Japanese. This was the beginning of the great Korean Diaspora of what used to be the Hermit Kingdom for hundreds of years.
A naïve Sunja, as a teenager (portrayed by Mina Kim) meets and falls in love with an older, married man Hansu who already has a Japanese wife, and children. He is part of the Yakuza. He emigrated to Japan in his earlier years and after losing his father during the Kanto earthquake in 1923 joined the Yakuza organization to survive in a cruel and discriminating foreign country. Often referred to as lower than pigs – the Joseonji’s living in Japan, in Pachinko deliver a detailed first-person experience of what it was like to live in those hard days.
Sunja becomes pregnant, carrying the child of Hansu while he makes a proposition to provide her a life of comfort, as his concubine. She refuses to be his mistress when he tells her they cannot wed – and runs away from him. Shortly afterwards, she weds a pastor, Isak who provides Sunja and Hansu’s (portrayed by Hallyu Star Lee Min Ho) child with a legitimate surname. Noah is born in Osaka to where the newlywed couple immigrate with hopes for living a better life. They are faced with unimaginable hardships for decades. We are brought back and forth between the colonial era and the current time portrayed in this series (roughly 1980’s). In the post war era, Joseonji’s in Japan continue to struggle with identity in a foreign nation ruled by their colonizers, living as a subservient race in a xenophobic Japanese society often experiencing violence directed to the community and individuals.
on the Parterre du Midi of the Château de Versailles
This is a story I desperately longed to learn more about, and while watching each episode – I was given much insight as to the feelings, political status and hostile geo-political and socio-economic environment of Koreans in modern Japan, Joseonji’s are still called by that name while South Koreans call themselves ‘Hanguk-saram’. As North and South are divided, we no longer see or hear about the Northern provinces, due to restricted access.
Hansu returns to Busan, to find his identity after living a rough life in the underworld – disguising himself as a Japanese National to avoid discrimination. Since the colonial era, in 2020’s Japan, fourth generation Joseonjis are still denied citizenship but encouraged to forfeit their cultural identify. Of roughly 500,000 stateless Koreans living in Japan today, these stateless Koreans do not have citizenship in any country.
Season 2 continues the storytelling of author Min Jin Lee’s book, of the protagonist Sunja’s plight to survive in Japan, during the colonial rule of Imperial Japan over the Korean Peninsula. Both Season 1 & 2 of Pachinko are available to watch via Apple TV. I recommend watching the first series, reading the novel, and watching Season 2. Exactly in that order. Min Jin Lee is a South Korean born author and journalist who identifies herself as a Korean American.
She currently resides in Harlem, New York. Her work often addresses the Korean Diaspora. Her parents owned a wholesale jewellery store on 30th Street and Broadway in Koreatown, in New York City. She is a 1.5 generation Korean American and shares a common denominator with those whose parents immigrated to the United States in the 1960s-1980s. South Korean immigrants, 1990s to today are different from those who came here decades ago. Today, they come with college degrees, many having spent most of their lives living in comfort unlike the previous generation. There is a divide between these two groups of Koreans. They identify themselves differently. Korean Americans and Koreans from Korea, are a separate group of immigrants. Many do not get along with each other. For those of us able to access both sides of the immigration groups, it is a gift which places us artists in our own unique category, as the filmmaker and novelist have done here.
The Korean Diaspora in Generations: Mono-ha Movement
Lee Ufan, a Korean minimalist painter and sculptor who works in Paris and Kamakura, has lived through the blood, sweat, and tears we watched the fictional characters in Pachinko go through. A self-proclaimed wanderer and lifelong cultural border-crosser, Ufan stands out as an artist born in 1936 in colonial Korea, decades before the 38th Parallel lines were drawn, dividing the Korean Peninsula into two halves. His rejection of the unification of North and South Korea and his promising career as a significant artist of the 20th and 21st centuries, accounting for life as a combination of colonial suppression and massive political change ultimately took him and his studies overseas to Japan. While Lee Ufan is primarily known today as a successful minimalist artist and pioneer of the Mono-ha movement in Japan, he is a philosopher whose literary work beautifully paints inner thoughts filled with criticism of global issues juxtaposing the calm of his visual work. His early essay: Sonzai to mu wo koete Sekine Nobuo ron (Beyond Being and Nothingness – A Thesis on Sekine Nobuo) (1979-71), is much celebrated and shared in the art world today. The literature reads like an artist in the process of contemplation, creation, working in sections, and finishing a piece of artwork by making final edits. He is one of the founders of the Japanese avant-garde art movement Mono-ha (‘School of Things’),whose members use stone, iron, plate steel, rubber, glass and cotton to explore the relationship between objects and space.
The Mono-ha movement emerged in the late 1960s-early 70s in Japan. Lee Ufan’s environmental work is projected through his usage of natural materials, both in form and placement. Identifying himself as Korean. born in Haman-gun, Lee Ufan contributed to both the (anti-western movement and Mono-ha in Japan and Korean Monotone Art (Dansaekjo Yesul).
He is a pioneer in the Korean contemporary art world, becoming one of the first of very few masters who’ve succeeded in marking their place, philosophy and gathering international acknowledgement early on in his career. His Mono-ha work was first exhibited in 1967 at the Sato Gallery in Tokyo. His contribution to the 1971 Paris Biennale consisted of a Relatum piece where a rubber mat was held down and stretched by three strategically placed rocks. The year after, in From Object to Being, Lee published a collection of critical pieces as the manifesto-like anthology In Search of an Encounter, in the art journal Bijutsu techō accompanying a seminal Mono-ha roundtable and was fervently embraced by young Japanese artists while sparking off a ‘Lee Ufan fever’ in Korea.
As the artist evolved, his philosophies followed. I can see it in his treatment of nature, following the work of architects in its minimalistic and non-evasive form. A mirroring of natural materials composed like a musical symphony that is visually delivered through the sound notes of a flute sonata. This is an overall reaction to the retrospective work, while sections in time are played with various instruments. Lee Ufan uses tools to utilize the brush- strokes in the form of Korean munjado.
Lee Ufan explores the relationship between his art, the viewer and the surrounding space and events taking place within it. ‘I bring together natural stone and industrial steel plate, there’s nothing more to it than that ,’ Lee has been quoted:, ‘Yet this encounter gives rise to an enigmatic experience.’
Lee Ufan does not change the stones he uses in any way – he simply relocates them. Selecting the right stone is a painstaking process. ‘It is as difficult to understand the stones of a certain region as it is to understand the people who live there,’ Lee wrote in 1988. The components of a Lee Ufan sculpture are encounter, emptiness, space and time – they all come together in the stones he uses.
It is oftentimes, the critique and or opinion of one artist to another which is considered the highest type of regard, more critical versus an academic who may not completely understand the nuances of the artist. From artist to artist, there is no greater compliment. Lee Ufan began his career as an art critic, and artist. Moving from critiquing to sharing his philosophical, oftentimes solemn pessimistic outlook on life. Lee Ufan’s Art of Encounter is a philosophical book, that has a collection of essays he’s authored. I highly recommend reading this book. Korean expats from Lee Ufan’s generation carry with them, the legacy of Confucianism. Much like the fictional story of the working-class protagonist in Pachinko, the artist embarked on a journey to the promised land (Japan). He grew up during an era, where succeeding in the homeland of your colonizer would be equivalent to achieving the American Dream for modern day Korean expats like me. At least he’s lucky enough to have retained his Korean citizenship. For many of the expats who migrated during colonial times, they are part of the stateless Koreans living in Japan demographics. Becoming a successful Korean artist in Japan during the civil rights era is almost equivalent to getting an EB1 visa in the United States today.
I wonder if Lee Ufan experienced similar struggles as a young college student, learning the language, culture, and displacement in a new environment much like the fictional characters in Pachinko. Living in the home of his colonizer, whose attitude towards Korean immigrants in Japan were more discriminatory than welcoming. I wonder if his minimalistic work reflects his calm demeanor, is it cultural or the result of the physical human environment. His criticism in written form stand in contrast to the calmness of nature we see in his body of work over decades. Perhaps that pessimism in his philosophical literature is a deep wound of a life he could’ve lived had our history as Koreans steered in a different direction.
Lee Ufan’s anti-unification led to his arrest by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency KCIA in 1964 for throwing himself against the South–North unification movement and the military regime. This was the beginning of politics influencing his life, then work and continuous reflections as a philosopher. Perhaps this was the cause that led the artist to spend so much of his time in meditation and thought.
The process of concept to creation is an act of meditation, and criticism of the environment whether that environment is nature, man-made socially, politically charged, and many times for immigrants it brings unimaginable hardships, and it affect us psychologically. Sometimes, – we just need to escape and calm ourselves.
In 2021, Filmmaker Dan Buyanovsky made a short film on Lee Ufan where he verbally shares his philosophical thoughts. A few quotes are translated from Korean to English below.
“I have a pessimistic perspective; I believe that it is time for mankind to end its era on earth”.
“I think we need to reduce our emptiness and all- over-ism and familiarize ourselves with a ‘minus’ way of thinking”.
I believe that the time of living with a ‘minus’ way of thinking along without ‘plus’ has to come, by simultaneously considering to make something and to dissipate something”.
The Divided Koreas: Polipop
aka Political Pop Art with a Q & A
Mina Cheon, (b.1973) is a new media artist, scholar, and activist best known for her Polipop paintings inspired by Pop Art and Social Realism who spends her time divided between the US and South Korea. She describes herself as a Korean living in America. Her work is inspired by Pop Art and Social Realism. I’ve been fascinated by Cheon’s renditions of North Korean female soldiers for a few years and get a sense of voyeurism through her paintings. They bring out mixed reactions that are nostalgic, enigmatic, placing us in a timeless time capsule while asking ourselves: does it really exist out there? I get to visit and see a place I would never get to unless I’m perusing old films, reading about the defectors, or watching an entirely made-up fictional K-drama about the intangible North Korea.
Cheon describes Polipop as “Political pop art. It is visually accessible, eye-catching colorful work that is layered by cultural comparative studies and inquiries of global geopolitics and warfare. Wars are lucrative and peace is an expensive endeavor. Using the rhetoricof pop art, the political statement is about peace on earth.”
There are Korean communist sympathizers today, and South Korea is most unwelcoming of these political views. Before there were two Koreas, there was the Independence Movement which existed throughout the colonial era. Today, the two Koreas exist in parallel universes. We speak the same common language, with a noticeable accent from either side of the border. As an expat – I see the two Koreas as two parts of my ancestral land. I recently began perusing the lives and more curiously – the food my counterpart motherland is consuming. About a decade ago – I watched every video online I could find and specifically searched for North Korean Cuisine. I was researching to write a Hansik cookbook when I read Pyongyang was the former capital of the Korean Peninsula and so the king moved the capital to Seoul. I read the Northerners prefer non spicy whereas the Southern provinces of South Korea love to put red pepper on everything. But in Seoul it all comes together like a melting pot.
About a decade into my research on Korean food, I began to look to see reflections of the lives of the people who consumed the foodstuffs. And that’s when I found Polipop in New York. It sounds like a lollipop, except we’re not consuming food literally (not at first glance). We’re experiencing a subtle conversation between the North and South, comically, in a non-threatening and curious fashion.
The Polipop movement is the Asian counterpart of the Western Pop Art Movement, with an added extra layer of politics to everyday living. The Pop Art of the two divided Koreas is a cultural exchange and a communication tool. Part of Mina Cheon’s practice includes diplomatic messages communicated through videos and as she describes “it’s similar to the Hunger Games”. Cheon has previously sent the popular Choco-Pie to North Korea in little packages. Food is the most non-invasive and best way to communicate across national borders. North Koreans are fascinated with Cheon’s dialogue of Choco-Pie, and their reaction was: “It’s fun”, in the Korean language.
The Choco-Pie site specific installations were exhibited twice. The first time, with 10,000 and the second, with 100,000 sponsored by the manufacturer, Orion at the Busan Biennale.
During my brief interview these were some of the questions along with responses by the artist about where the inspiration comes from for her Polipop work.
Mina Cheon explained: “As a Korean, my prominent artistic subject being about the Koreas, it is the basis of my curiosity and identity, from there, I view the world from this lens. If a country is split, so should the artist in practice, therefore I work both as a South Korean Mina Cheon and North Korean Kim Il Soon.” Her typical Polipop work grazes between her real self, presented through metaphorically symbolic forms of the subconscious mind (Mina Cheon) and alter-ego presented as the North Korean counterpart (Kim Il Soon).
Here we have a combination of two split personalities, while delving into a deeper understanding of why the artist focuses deeply in this subject area. The divided Koreas is apparent in the parallel universe existing between truth and reality. What we know and see vs the unknown is Cheon’s alter ego exploring that option, with history and reasoning explained about her ancestral hometown.