The Latest at Goethe

The parallels are just as obvious as the differences; the division in Germany’s past is still the sad reality in Korea. The Goethe-Institut now carried the “mother of all walls” to the Far East. At the border between Korea and Korea, an installation for the German anniversary is being set up – as well as an associative added value. By Thomas E. Schmidt

In this rain, things simply look pitiable, the low houses, the cars and the few people outside. The rain washes the reddish yellow earth from under the maize and tomato plants. Korea’s best-known writer Hwang Sok-yong watches amused. On this monsoon day, he is working at the Art Studio outside of Goyang, no longer recognizable as part of the town or the outskirts, while Goyang, a satellite settlement with one million inhabitants, itself is part of the vicinity of Seoul. Hwang has just used a piece of charcoal to draw the bars of a prison window on a piece of the Berlin Wall simulated in Styrofoam for the cameras of a Korean TV station.

The Goyang Art Studio is the setting of an art project conceived by the Goethe-Institut for the year commemorating the fall of the wall. Other scenes of “The Wall in the World” are Yemen, Israel and Palestine, Mexico, China and Cyprus. These are all countries in which division and being walled in are realities and not merely a memory of a world-political event as they are in far-away Central Europe. The Iron Curtain was raised in Germany, making the Berlin Wall the mother of all walls – that is being sent around the world in the form of pristine rectangles. In Korea, the Goethe-Institut is cooperating with the National Museum of Contemporary Art, which offers native and foreign artists studio and living space in its Art Studio.

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Hwang’s involvement in the project is quasi compulsory, since he experienced the fall of the wall in Berlin firsthand in 1989-1990. The other two participants are fine artists. Ahn Kyu-chul, born in 1955, is a sculptor and conceptualist, works as professor at an art academy and studied in Stuttgart in the 1980s. Today he is one of the few Korean artists who see their work as expressly political. Suh Yong-sun, born in 1951, is a painter and graphic artist, best known for his vividly colourful, representational paintings that are clearly influenced by German Expressionism. This year, he was chosen Korea’s Artist of the Year.

All three are established artists and belong to a generation for whom the division of their own country still plays an aesthetic role. This is not self-evident, for the artistic mainstream in Korea is more aligned to international Post-Pop art. In Korea, too, invocation of the trauma of national division today triggers resistance, even boredom, in people in the arts, above all the younger ones.

Dashed hopes in Obama

In 1989, Hwang Sok-yong travelled without permission to a writers’ congress in Pyongyang and stayed for a number of weeks. This pleased the “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung, but not the government of South Korea. Immediately afterwards Hwang went into exile in Berlin and then in the USA, not retuning to Seoul until 1993. He was then sentenced to seven years in prison in spite of the fact that his country had rid itself of the dictatorship in 1987 and become a democracy. Hwang was released five years later.

“We had hoped that the informal state of war between North Korea and the USA would at least end with Obama,” says Hwang, “but it doesn’t look that way. Both Koreas have made mistakes. They missed the right time for negotiations.” The Korean artists’ uses of the plastic rectangles are quite different.

The writer painted his piece as a symbol of imprisonment, then lettered it with quotes from his novel The Old Garden, with the effect of a very personal, melancholy remembrance of the will, the unexpected luck, yet also of the impermeableness of borders.

The North’s peculiar logic

Suh Yong-sun, by contrast, attacks his rectangle with a knife and transforms it into a sculpture of a watchtower, from which soldiers grimly peer down. It is very direct, but more than a politically correct protest against the end of the Iron Curtain, for Suh’s South Korea has also closed itself off with mines, barbed wire and sentries. Only Ahn Kyu-chul treats the subject matter playfully: “I want to show all of the world’s political walls on my block, I want to list what is technically required to build such walls. I also wish to give viewers the space to leave their own messages behind on the piece of wall.”

In the west, Kim Jong-il has been declared a psychopath, but those in Seoul know quite well that the North uses its own kind of logic – and that means chiefly reacting swiftly than others to South Korean domestic policy. Kim countered the end of détente – the ebbing of his survival funds – with threatening gestures. Although the South Koreans know this, now Kim is fatally ill and the North’s aggressive manoeuvre give rise to the speculation that fierce battles for his succession are already being fought among Pyongyang’s leadership.

Lacking a role model

The South Koreans are certain that the final bastion of Communism will not fall as a result of international sanctions. True peace is first and foremost the task and the destiny of Korean policies. They followed German reunification closely, too, yet there is little they can learn from it ultimately. Whatever happens will be very different.

Hwang Sok-yong is no longer a role model today. He is criticized for his old leftist habits, for his non-conciliatory opposition, yes, even his expedition to the Great Leader is seen by many in retrospect as only a contemporaneous political performance: too much sympathy for the wrong cause. This may be unfair, but Hwang can also not serve a role model for the democratic left. This position remains unfilled.

At first glance, the Goethe-Institut’s The Wall in the World may appear to be inspired by the desire to learn something about Germany through the eyes of foreign artists; at all of its stops it nonetheless produces something akin to an associative added value, which remains wholly the possession of the artist and can be transported undiminished to other contexts. For this project, Koreans Ahn Kyu-chul, Suh Yong-sun and Hwang Sok-yong sought three very individual solutions having to do with themselves and their biographies, but not necessarily with our terms of “wall” or “reunification.”

If the Goethe project is able to trigger such discourses about the lack of a political alternative, then it was a success in Korea. What the rectangles look like in the end is all but beside the point.

The text is an excerpt from the reportage “Macht mal wieder Mauerschau” which appeared in the 23 July 2009 issue of “Die Zeit” (Issue 31/2009). You can read the complete article at “Zeit Online” (in German)