The Korean apple, I can report, is far from rotten, thanks in large part to artists like Lee; Do-Ho Suh, who presented “Blueprint,” a translucent fabric facade of the town house where he lives in New York, at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale; and Bae Young-whan. Bae made a name for himself by taking found objects—say, an old wardrobe pulled from a house about to be demolished to make way for yet another toweringly ugly apartment block—and refashioning them into guitars. He is presently working with technical diagrams of guns and musical instruments. “Both are beautiful,” he told me. “And when you see them together, it poses the question, Which would you rather produce?”
Guns, of course, are a central feature of Korean life. Seoul is a mere 40 miles from the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, beyond which resides one of the world’s last great dictators, Kim Jong-il, an ailing crackpot with his finger on the nuclear trigger. One can’t help but wonder if the dynamism of the South—the money, the fashion, the movies—is in some way a reaction to the insanity roosting farther North. But that is the kind of question only a foreigner would ask. If you float such theories past a Korean, she will laugh politely and tell you that South Koreans don’t spend a single minute thinking about the North. And it appears to be true. My visit to Seoul coincided with the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, and there was more grainy archival footage and survivor interviews on CNN International than on Korean TV.
What Koreans are thinking about is the future. And the faster they can get there, the better. A few days after visiting Bae’s studio, I stepped inside another factory-fresh building, a recently remodeled mall called Doota, which houses boutiques selling stylish, reasonably priced clothing designed and made in Korea. Outside, tour buses disgorged throngs of Chinese and Japanese tourists.
I bought a short-sleeve shirt by a label called K1973, then rode the escalator back to the street and hailed the nearest taxi. The driver had the radio tuned to a show commemorating the war’s anniversary; a woman in her 70s was recalling its terrible beginning. She was 13 on the day the fighting began and was rousted out of her house to join a long line of hungry refugees
headed south. Accompanied by violins in a minor key, she reminisced about lost loved ones and those stranded on the wrong side of history, and her voice quavered. And then—just as the violins began their upward sweep, building toward the story’s wrenching climax—the driver jabbed a button and changed the station. Upbeat Korean pop filled the air, and the lights over the Han sparkled in the night.
