Geumgang Art Biennale

Korea's landscape works in two extremes. Either there are the mountains, where building becomes too costly, with large breadths of largely undeveloped forest, or there are the tracts of flat land where every bit of space has been parceled out for monstrous high rises, storefronts, or agriculture projects.

The Geumgang Art Biennale is an art exhibition that takes place every two years on a mountainside in the ancient Baekje capital of Gongju and finds a middleground between these two extremes. You can visit the exhibition's site here. I had a chance to go with two of my friends that I've made here at Geumgang University.

Here is one of the shining stars right here:


Most of the projects at the Biennale explore how art and construction can blend with natural environments to work symbiotically with them, while planning for the changes that the normal processes of plant growth, decay brought on by the weather, and whatnot will have in transforming their pieces. Alot of it is in the vein of Andrew Goldsworthy stuff.

We had a chance to talk with a dutch artist who made this thing.

Its a big chimney made from unfired bricks that she is gradually firing from the inside with a months worth of constant fire. Its not doing the job a normal firing process would do, but gradually hardening it up. She said that the work will be interesting for her to see in 3 or 4 years, when the elements have worn down the chimney and the foliage grows up around it to make it a normal addition to the area.

While Korea has a lot of mountains, one of the most amazing things about the whole exhibition is that the mountain is a permanent site for the biennale and these projects will stay up indefinitely after the biennale officially closes in November.

Some other things I really enjoyed looking at: This is a cliff made out of old newspapers.


And here is some more of the works, that don't need any more of my comments:

Over Ohio and High Water

After teaching a two week intensive English camp for Fulbright, I returned back to the United States for a 3 week jaunt around the life I left a year ago. Throughout this year I never really thought I would have trouble adjusting back to life in the United States -- doubting I would get the "reverse cultural shock" that everyone seems concerned about on returning -- and, truth be told, I didn't. What I did go through, however, was the strange realization that I have been gone for an entire year from my family, friends, and peers. I'm realizing now that having full interactions with people (ie. speaking the same language and having some common understanding about where each individual is coming from) has helped me throughout life to take a mental note of time while I was living in the United States. Time seems long when there are a lot of these interactions and short if there are few. Without them here in Korea, the past year flew by as if it had only been three months.

Coming home to see how time had changed my family, to hear how diseases have developed or been eased, and how people have gotten married and moved into a much different stage of their life, has made me realize how long I have been gone. But, that is a feeling I would have had even if I was still living in the states, even as close as a state like North Carolina.

All of that aside, it was nice to come back to an environment where I don't have to be as conscious about my etiquette (not that that was a big deal here, but something I did have to pay attention to), to wear my old worn-in clothes, and to eat salads in the grass. My friend Elaina also got me into seeking out wild herbs and greens: my personal favorite being Mullein, which has helped clear up my constantly-blocked sinuses. And I had a chance to go sailing, bike alot, go to a drive-in, catch up with lots of people from in and out of town, and just generally bask in those things that have come to seem genuinely American in their absence.

Cherry Blossoms

In April the cherry blossoms bloomed and it coincided nicely with voting day, on which most people have the day off from work. I took a car ride with my family to the Gyeryong Mountain where we took these pictures.

A little piece of heaven I like to call Jeju

Eighty-five kilometers south of the Korean peninsula is the volcanic island of Jeju, a province of South Korea that Koreans like to say is famous for rocks, wind, and women. It also has nice beaches and tons of citrus. Most of the close friends that I made when I first arrived in Korea moved to this island in August and so I've been meaning to visit for awhile but haven't gotten the chance until F-bright flew us down to the island for a conference this past weekend.

Thursday afternoon I flew from Gunsan airport with three of the other F-brighters that live in Hongseong. After an hour we arrived in the cleanest Korean city I've come across and the capital of the island, Jeju-si. Its amazing how fresh the air on the island feels right now compared to the mainland, with spring yellow dust storms pummeling it from China. The first night we visited a famous rock that is shaped like a dragons head and watched as people sat on rocks and ate raw seafood that old women had just fished from the sea in front of us. Close by the dragons head was a gorge/ sea-inlet where governors used to picnic. I would love to post pictures of all of these things but unfortunately I ran out of camera batteries and didn't have a chance to get new ones the whole weekend.

That night I stayed with my friend Tom and his host family, where we made cookies with his host mother. I fell asleep early and while Tom was off to school for the morning I took a bus to the southern end of the island to look at Sanghang Mountain before our conference began. I enjoyed the bus rides almost as much as getting out and looking at things. The island is lush green right now, the cherry blossoms had just bloomed and lined so many of the roads, and all of the land is broken up by fences made from volcanic rock. Sanghang mountain was a wide, rocky pinnacle that sort of just jutted straight out of the ground and then leveled into a relatively flat top. While I wasn't able to hike up to the top -- its not really possible without gear -- there was a set of steps that led up to a pretty amazing cavern where Buddhists had built a large Buddha statue. I was about to leave to catch an earlier bus but don't called and convinced me that I should walk down by the water. I'm glad I took his advice -- the waves eroded the rocky shore line away so that it was a bunch of pock-marked rock faces. Old women sat with tubs of raw fish and soju for anyone that wanted to stop for raw seafood and drink alcohol.

From the mountain I took another bus into the southern town of Seogwipo, where our conference was being held in a nearby hotel. We had conferences throughout the afternoon and caught up with each other. That night we went to a western-styled bar that played a good mix of 90s American r&b and had decent but overpriced red wine. The next day we had more conferences and then traveled to a village with traditional Jeju houses and then to an extinct volcano named sunrise point. We were able -- maybe illegally -- to walk through the center of a big crater that dotted the center of this volcano. It was a pretty amazing sight -- a solid, grassy field with rocky peaks at every corner. When we got to the far edge of the crater, it looked over a 200 foot or so drop to the ocean where rocks jutted out from clear blue water. On the outside rim of the volcano, people rode slabs of cardboard down the grassy, but slick hillside and did somersaults to the base. We caught a bus back to the hotel where I drank too much rice wine and wandered around a garden path that wove around our hotels property, next to the shore.

I woke up with a bad hangover, three hours of sleep to add to the previous night's five, and the biggest mountain in South Korea to climb at 9 o'clock in the morning. With my friends Rosie, Laura, Emily, Amber, Ariah, Jeremy and Jen I climbed the 1900+ Halla mountain. This was by far the best hike I've had even though it rained, half the mountain was covered in snow, and I developed a large boil-like sore on my back from lugging a pack poorly on my hips. Maybe because Jeju wasn't bombed heavily during the war and because its warm enough year-round on the island that people don't need fire wood, the island has large trees and tons of seemingly undisturbed plant life. On Halla I saw the biggest pines I've ever come across in Korea, but the interesting thing about the mountain was how quickly the flora changed as we went up. Eventually the flora gave way to a bare peak and a stair case the last few dozen meters to the top -- a nice reprieve from the snow. Usually, you are supposed to be able to overlook a huge crater lake with tons of odd forests surrounding it, but we were in the clouds and the fog was too heavy to see. Nonetheless seeing the louds swirl and dip down along the bare top were worth sitting at the top for a few minutes.

By the time we came down the mountain we had done a 7 hour, 20 km hike. We took a bus back to Jeju city and I waited for my flight to Seoul, where I stayed in a bathhouse with Rosie, Laura, and Emily until we could catch a flight back to Hongseong at 5:30 the next morning. With another night of 3 hours of sleep, I was picked up from the train station and taught a full day of class.

Hiking stories

With spring here, hiking has resumed. I've been able to get out the last three weekend and two of those were spent at a nearby mountain named Yongbongsan. Its not a famous mountain, but popular throughout the region because its short (only about a 2 hour hike on the main path) and it climbs very quickly to jagged granite peaks. It attracts hiking groups who want a beautiful climb that won't take up an entire day and that is short enough that copious amounts of food can be lugged up top to eat at the peak. This gets to insane proportions: 2 weeks ago a group had a 10-pound rice cake, dozens of jugs of rice wine, and a pigs head on a spit that they were handing food from to everyone that passed. What I thought was a weird, one-time occurrence was there again this past weekend when I hiked the same trail -- a big group with a huge pigs head that they were offering to people that passed. Another interesting part of the trip was riding with a well-dressed Korean man who told me that he lived in Washington DC for two years, despite knowing very little English. He kept pointing at his tooth and I thought he was trying to tell me that he had gone to Washington DC to get his tooth replaced and wondered what kind of great dentist America has in Washington DC to attract international customers like this man. As he tried to talk to me about the election and I mentioned that I liked Obama I was able to make out that he saying an African American man who had walked across the street in Washington DC, punched this man in the face, and so he had to get his tooth replaced in Washington DC. This, he told me, was why I should like Hillary and not Obama.

This isn't the first conversation that I've had with someone who had this kind of sentiment and it gets into a whole other issue about how race is perceived here that I'll write about -- or point to someone else who has written about it here -- some other time.

Health

Suddenly it is spring and I am back in the country. Since returning to Hongseong and starting school again I've learned that it is Namul -- or wild greens -- season. Koreans believe that the winter slows down your metabolism from lack of activity and that eating wild greens in the spring helps to restore your appetite. My host family's dinner table has been filled with all kinds of interesting greens that are found in the mountains or creek beds and in the afternoon I can often see old women out there picking them to sell at the market. On a recent trip to Cambodia, my homestay parents also invested over $300 dollars in forty-year-old medicinal mushrooms called Sang-Hwang mushrooms (Phellinus Linteus). We now brew the mushrooms at night in a big crock pot and drink the tea in the morning. At least the immediate effects are pretty amazing -- the tea's really calming and dispelled a few big headaches I've had after stressful days with kindergarteners.



Koreans care alot about health. When local media published stories about GMOs and their ubiquity in soybean crops, tofu prices dropped dramatically throughout the country enough so that the government pushed through pretty liberal GMO laws that require products containing GMOs to be labeled. Organic foods -- while they are incredibly expensive here -- are also gaining major ground. This is a small town and even the local grocery store has an organic produce section. And while junk food is gaining quick ground here, people still that I've run into eat fresh food at most meals and reserve junk food for snacking in between. I've grown really interested in traditional medicine here and have been trekking down to the local traditional medicine shop to buy different herbs, mixing them together to see what effect they have (I do research about them first). Possibly unhealthy, but nonetheless an entertaining past-time. My current mix is fo-ti (an herb supposedly drank religiously by a chinese man that lived to be a 130, and renowned for its purported ability to return color to grey hair), Astralagus, and Polygonatum -- both supposed to do a bunch of cool stuff as well. Whatever the case, its a nice tasting blend to drink in the evening that has a vague coffee resemblance. Other herbs that I have been enjoying: Schizandra berry, Goji berry, ginkgo picked from the trees outside my school, cinnamon bark, ginger, licorice root, reishi mushroom, red and white ginseng, and local green tea.

Jon takes Seoul

The end of January is approaching and I've almost completed one month of living in the second smallest space I've ever lived in at Seoul's premier boarding house, the MAX Livingtel. Because Korea has a very long winter break I have January and February off and moved to Seoul at the beginning of the month to take Korean classes and work an internship come February. I'm living in the college neighborhood of Sinchon and while I have no view of it, or anything for that matter, from my windowless room, the neighborhood's frenetically beautiful, amazing in how much flashy stuff it crowds into such a tight space.





Living here reminds me so much of my freshman year in the college dorms. Like in college, there is a kid who leaves his door open and that I have never seen not wearing pajamas or playing video games. Also like in college, I can hear everything my neighbors do through the walls and even gone beyond that: I can actually feel the shape of my neighbors body when he leans against our common wall!

High points so far:
I visited Sanchon vegetarian restaurant, a buddhist mountain food restaurant run by a retired monk. The restaurant brings you out an enormous meal with dozens of side dishes to share amongst many people as you watch traditional dancing and singing.



I went to an ice festival near the north korean border. The river in the town freezes over and they split it into different sections for ice fishing, ice sledding, ice go-karting, ice sliding, and ice skating.







Trying to figure out the cities music scene and stumbling upon an amazing tribute show for Korean psychedelic singer kim jeong mi. From what I've been able to find on the internet so far, Korea had a pretty strong psych scene in the late 60s and early 70s. I also stumbled into a free improv show that turned out to be some one's birthday party. The place was also a gallery, but instead of the crackers cheese and wine for h'ordeurves they served boiled fish and meat on sticks with hard liquor.