CONGRESS_ Keynote Speech The Korean Wave, Seoul Wave! Date: June 13, 2012 Venue: Sejong Center s M Theater <Keynote Speaker> Byungki Hwang (Composer & Korean Traditional Music Master) <Overview> Korea is now at the center of a new cultural phenomenon called Hallyu, or Korean Wave. As K-pop and Korean TV dramas win popularity not only in Southeast Asia but Europe and the US as well, cultural and artistic content produced in Korea is being consumed and reproduced around the world. Until recently, Korea was recognized as a country that achieved rapid economic growth, and now Hallyu has provided it with an opportunity to be known as a new source of cultural and artistic content, an active initiator of cultural exchange and a provider of cultural dynamism and diversity. Byung-ki Hwang, one of the most renowned artists in Korea, opened the congress by posing the issue of Hallyu upon the global performing arts circles and lending an insight into the changes and future of Seoul and Korea as new providers of art and hubs for exchanges in the global age.
Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am Byung-ki Hwang. It is my great honor to deliver the keynote speech starting the annual Congress of the International Society for the Performing Arts in Seoul in 2012, as the world is brimming with new waves and changes. I am a player of gayageum, a traditional Korean instrument. Gayageum was first invented over a thousand years ago. My life is limited to less than 100 years, but I am filled with emotions recalling the fact that I have lived more than half of my lifetime playing gayageum. I held my first concert tour in foreign countries in 1964. Of course, foreign audiences around that time had no idea where Korea was, or what kind of instrument gayageum was. In 1968, I visited New York to hold a concert. An American asked me when we would release USS Pueblo. At that time, North Korea had captured and was detaining USS Pueblo, an American intelligence gathering ship, in the Korean East Sea. I felt that a lot of Americans didn't even know that Korea was divided between the South and the North. In the 1970s, I went to Europe and was traveling on a train. It was lunch time, so I went to the dining car and happened to sit opposite a German. He talked about Japan throughout our meal. I thought he mistook me for a Japanese, so I told him that Korea and Japan were two different countries. However, he continued to talk about Japan. I guess he thought Korea was a province of Japan or something. It was like that in those days. Until the '70s and '80s, Tokyo was the favorite city for a lot of musicians in which to play. Now, in 2012, a lot of musicians around the world choose Seoul as their favorite city in which to play. This is a miraculous change that reminds me of the Korean phrase "Cheonji gaebyeok," which means the separation of heaven and earth. The 20th century was a time in which the musical world, not only in Korea but also throughout the world, was completely immersed in Western classical music. In the field of popular arts, also, the world almost blindly imitated American popular music, and in other genres including the movies, theater, pop art and athletics. We, as well as others, believed that Asians couldn't match Westerners, no matter how good they were at classical music. Back then, no one thought that Yuna Kim from Korea or Mao Asada from Japan would surpass Western players in figure skating. Korea was less fortunate than Japan. It received the new Western culture through Japan during the harsh period of Japanese occupation. The new, modern education in Korea infused with the ideas that Western culture was the best and that Japanese ways were superior to Korean led Koreans to low self-esteem and cultural defeatism, looking down on Korean tradition and admiring foreign cultures. Although Japanese power was driven out of the country after the independence, the defeatism remained for years and the American culture poured in and swept over us. In 1950, while we were still in the middle of the turbulence of independence and the establishment of a new country, the ideological chill of the Cold War brought on the tragedy of the Korean War, devastating the country. In this turmoil, we had no time to pay attention to our culture. Still, the organization of the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts (currently, the National Gugak Center) was announced in January 1950, and the center opened in April 1951 in the midst of the war. In 1959, the Department of Korean Music was formally established in Seoul National University. Korean society began to be stabilized in the 1960s and we finally had some time and resources to take interest in our tradition. I went to Japan and held a solo performance of gayageum in 1964, and had a solo tour in the western US in 1965. My first album, an LP titled 'Music from Korea; The Kayakum,' was released there at that time. On this album, <Hi-Fi Stereo Review> magazine commented that it was "an antidote to today's high-speed world," and <Ethnomusicology>, a professional journal on music, gave praise, saying that there was "a certain contemporary flavor to this music, although it remains largely diatonic." However, it was 13 years later in 1978 when my album was released for the first time in Korea. I started my European concert tour in 1974. On November 13 of that year, I played at Hnuschhof in Vienna, Austria, and I received the live recording CD of the performance just recently. Nathalie
Waldmann, who is writing a thesis on Korean music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, discovered the live recording at Ṏsterreichische Mediathek, the Austrian Audiovisual Archive and Museum of Technology, and recorded it on the CD. <Song Lines>, a world music magazine published in the United Kingdom, carried a feature article on my music in March 2009, and selected my album 'Dalha Nopigom' released by ARC Music in the UK in August 2007 as one of the top 10 albums of the world. Currently, Andrew Killick, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Sheffield, is writing a book on my music, which will soon be published by Ashgate Publishing Company. In addition, I received the Grand Prize at Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes in Japan on September 16, 2010. I think music is a social outcome. It is because a musician's value is determined based not only on his individual genius but also the influence of social conditions. While Beethoven's supreme position in the history of music was essentially due to his musical genius, I think it was the audience of the Western civil society in the 19th century who made him a maestro revered by everyone. I told you earlier about my episodes in a kind of self-praise, but I have been able to lead such a fortunate life because of two major social factors that I'm going to talk about. I am deeply indebted to and grateful for these social conditions. The first one is that I was born in Korea, with its long tradition and history. Gayageum, the musical instrument that I play, was created by our ancestors around 1,500 years ago and thus is a product of an old tradition and history. If they didn't make such a beautiful and profound instrument, I would have continued to study law, which was my original major, and led a comfortable and ordinary life. Secondly, I would like to thank my contemporaries who have always been filled with energy and enthusiasm. This must be the most dynamic and energetic age in the history of Korea. Those people who spread the unprecedented and powerful wave called Hallyu, the Korean wave, in the field of performing arts around the world are all my contemporaries. We can't deny that the development of IT technologies and economic growth helped this trend, but it was due to their efforts that the creative wave of Hallyu was expanded throughout the world first in the genre of popular music and then in various other areas of arts based on Korea's unique traditional arts and indigenous sentiments. Until the middle of the 20th century, Korea was one of the small and weak countries of the world, and its poverty and political instability prevented its people from proper recognition and consideration of the value of its traditional culture. They looked up to the American and Western cultures as the best and absolutely superior ones, partly due to their economic dominance, and imitated them without hesitation. Hallyu, or Korean wave, was an unthinkable concept until the mid-20th century. I witnessed a transition from a society overwhelmed by the superiority of the Western culture that dismisses national culture as outdated and low-grade to one in which people crave for cultural diversity. In this age, thanks to the great energy of dynamic and enthusiastic Korean performing arts circles, my music is being newly evaluated and drawing attention from overseas scholars and audience. The fact that I am now standing in front of 350 leading arts managers and performing arts professionals from around the world, introducing Seoul, which is being reborn as a city of the most dynamic culture, and bringing up the topic of Hallyu, is because of these social forces. Hallyu, or Korean wave, is often called just Hallyu these days among foreign scholars and relevant experts. This is not just for simplicity of the term but it reflects the fact that Korea's status in the world has improved. When writing my name in English, they used to write it Byung-ki Hwang but now they write Hwang Byung-ki, in the usual Korean order, which I think is out of the same context as in the case of Hallyu. According to what I have found, the term Hallyu was first used in China in the late 1990s. At that time, <What Is Love>, a Korean TV drama series, aired on CCTV in China and gained great popularity. People in China started to mention Hallyu to denote how popular stars or trends were rolling in from Korea just like sea waves. This was at the end of the 20th century. Shortly after that, <Winter Sonata> won huge success in Japan, and Yong-joon Bae, the star of the drama, emerged as a popular icon. The Hallyu boom that started with video content of TV dramas grew to become a large and continuing flow in the 21st century with K-pop at the center. Geographically, it spread from China, Japan and Taiwan to Southeast Asia and has been expanding over the Middle East, North America, Europe, Africa and South America of late. In April, Caracol TV, the largest private TV station in Colombia, produced and aired 'K-Pop Reality,' an audition program for future local K-pop stars, and drew a lot of
attention. In the preliminary audition for selecting eight contestants, 500 people reportedly gathered. Bogota, Colombia's capital city, is geographically located on almost the opposite side of the earth and is culturally disparate from Korea. The amazing sight of more than 50,000 audience members singing K-pop and dancing excitedly in an outdoor performance hall couldn't possibly have been imagined 10 years ago. Some of you may think that Hallyu is restricted to Korean popular music and video content such as TV dramas, but it is actually extending to all areas of culture. For example, the TV drama <Daejanggeum> won huge popularity in China and Southeast Asia, and it raised interest in traditional Korean culture, including necessities of life such as Korean food, Korean clothes, Korean housing and Korean oriental medicine. Food, clothing and shelter are necessities of human life. If you are to understand a culture, you should learn about these necessities first. In relation to this, I would like to briefly introduce Korean food, clothing and shelter. Concerning our food, kimchi is the food that represents Korea. Until the early 20th century, kimchi was considered a shameful and low-grade food item by Koreans and foreigners, especially the Japanese, sneered at it with ethnic prejudice, calling it smelly, salty, spicy and uncivilized. Japanese people pointed at kimchi when they disdained and laughed at Koreans. Today, what has happened to kimchi? It is displayed in major Japanese department stores and supermarkets as a hit item. I heard that it is known not only as health food and but also as beauty food among some Japanese women. I saw American supermarkets selling kimchi back in the 1980s. Kimchi is widely recognized as a unique and healthy fermented food throughout the world. Now, I would like to talk about traditional Korean housing. It has a lot of distinctive characteristics, but the most original feature of traditional Korean housing is ondol, its heating system. Ondol is different from other heating systems in that the heating part and the heated part are separated from each other. It is an indirect heating system of making fire outside the house to heat the floor inside. Ondol is based on the common knowledge of oriental medicine that it is good for health to keep the feet warm and the head cool. The fireplace was used for a long time in the West for heating. It is a representative heating system and the symbol of Western housing culture. You must have seen a stove or fireplace installed in every room in splendid Western castles. When I was young and regarded Western culture as being of the highest value, the object of longing for most Korean youth was the fireplace in the living room. However, as it is a direct heating system, you have to put up with smoke, ashes and dust if you make fire in the fireplace. I heard from an architect close to me that recently, some Western architects became interested in Korean ondol, have actually built ondol and received good responses. A lot of foreign tourists visiting Korea these days experience temple stay, and the fact that more and more tourists are sleeping on ondol and taking part in Buddhist services means that the interest in traditional Korean culture is increasing. As the scope of Hallyu expands geographically, its internal width and depth are growing to reach the necessities of living -- food, clothing and shelter. When I was learning to play gayageum, only about 10 gayageums were made each year. However, now, about 10,000 gayageums are newly produced annually. While the number of Korean gayageum players increased, that of foreigners who learn to play gayageum also grew. I visited Fukuoka, Japan in 2010 to receive the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes, and I was surprised to find out that there was a gayageum school in Fukuoka and they were selling music scores that I wrote. Renowned music dictionaries of the world such as <New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians>, <MGG>, a German music encyclopedia and <Contemporary Composers> list my name as a player and composer of traditional Korean music. I am saying this to let you know how world music is becoming more diversified and evolving. The Hallyu that I have talked about until now is something that was created in Korea and is spreading to foreign countries. Now, I would like to introduce the Hallyu of Nam June Paik, which was generated abroad and then returned to Korea. Nam June Paik is an artist who invented video art by combining the music of the 20th century with state-of-the-art electronic technology. In 1984, he marked the start of the year on New Year's Day with an international satellite installation linking New York, San Francisco and Paris. George Orwell foretold a gloomy autocratic world in his novel <1984>, but the actual world in 1984 was not in such a pessimistic situation. Paik's show was a monumental performance through which he sent a message of hope carrying his unique humor and optimism that
mankind was doing well contrary to Orwell's concern. I played at Paik's New York Town Hall Concert in 1968 and also participated in his second satellite show 'Bye Bye Kipling' in 1986. After that, Paik had his video installation exhibited at the Venice Biennale and his retrospective exhibitions were held at Whitney Museum of American Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York. Although we remember Paik as a video artist rather than a musician, Peter Yates wrote, in his book titled <20th Century's Music>, that the music of the 20th century started with Debussy and ended with Nam June Paik's four dimensional music. Now we have reached the point where we should consider and seek the future direction of Hallyu. Among various areas of Hallyu, economic Hallyu is also important. Samsung mobile phones have risen to the No.1 position in the world and the Korean IT industry is frequently coming up with remarkable evolutions. However, there is a concern that the process of turning the fever of Hallyu into business interest may lead foreigners to feel animosity or become tired of Hallyu or Korea. We have to remember the fact that Japan's aggressive drive in overseas markets in the '70s and '80s raised ill feelings among foreigners and gave the Japanese the shameful nickname of 'economic animal.' We have to gather our wisdom so that we can minimize such ill feelings and deal with undesirable situations. It is time we should pay attention to improving the quality of Hallyu, rather than the speed or amount of growth, and the best way to solve this problem will be to combine Hallyu with our distinctive traditional culture. Until recently, Korea was seen as a unique country for its outstanding economic growth achieved in a short period and the political tension between South and North Korea. However, now the country is regarded as a new source of cultural and artistic content contributing to the dynamism and diversity of the global culture and providing new energy to the international stage. The fact that Korea, which used to be a small, peripheral country in Asia, is promoting dynamism and diversity of the world culture in the 21st century based on its economic growth and globalization, is a good example that demonstrates the transition of the entire world, as well as Korea, into a new era. I think that this cultural and artistic phenomenon deserves to be the theme of in-depth discussion and discourse around the world, as a central force of the global cultural change. I would like to conclude my speech with a story about a book titled <Dignity of Difference> written by Jonathan Sacks, a Jewish rabbi. The foremost problem that we have in the 21st century is not the difference of race, culture, world view or religious view, but the failure to recognize the difference. Western music and oriental music are different from each other. There is no superiority or inferiority -- they are just different. The author says that this difference should be respected at any rate. The 21st century is a time of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. In this age, when cultural diversity is the need of the times, Seoul, Korea is in the middle of a new value, a new cultural phenomenon called the Korean wave. Recognition of diversity is based on mutual respect. Self-conceit coming from nation-centric thinking or the 19th century-style imperialistic winner-take-all thinking should be avoided. We shouldn't compete with other countries. Hallyu can continue to contribute to the world culture only if we recognize and respect various cultures, promote global cultural diversity and help enhance world peace. As a traditional Korean musician and, at the same time, as a world citizen, I believe the existence of Hallyu and many different other waves, and continued emergence and diversification of these waves will lead various regions and the world as a whole to share cultural richness in both quantity and quality as well as usher in a new era of coexistence. Today, here in Seoul, the origin of new cultural and artistic content and a hub for exchange, and at this congress, you are in a crucial place where the East and the West think and come together to discuss the recent changes and future of Korea, thereby weighing the future of global performing arts and further, world culture. I sincerely hope that the fire of Hallyu will burn for a long time like a beacon of hope contributing to world peace. Thank you.