Over at Impossible Transfer, Jae Won summarizes an event at Columbia University featuring pianist Kim Cheol-woong, who defected to South Korea from the North in 2003 (after two previous defection attempts).
Interesting stuff, including this:
Kim showed skepticism towards people fighting for human rights outside of N. Korea. He seemed to believe if it’s going to happen it has to start with the people, and that can only come about through cultural exchange. He thought highly of music’s ability to penetrate to one’s soul. For example, he seemed to believe that (speaking about the New York Philharmonic’s performance in Pyongyang early this year) N. Koreans who believed that Americans were the devil must have been astonished by the grandeur and beauty of “Star-Spangled Banner”, that they must have thought, hearing it, “So N. Korea is not the be all and end all, there are other possibilities; there are, potentially, better possibilities.” Kim made it very clear that before the N. Korean people feel this in their hearts, change will not come about (implying that change forced on by outsiders would not be just or effective).
Jae Won also posted to Youtube clips of his performance.
4 Comments
Referring to the actual article, the guy appears to be a bit of a drama queen.
We’ve been here before: a major music school in PY is named after Yun Isang, a modern composer. Every spring there is a music festival inviting performers from around the globe—Russian orchestras often perform and twentieth-century music is often played. Admittedly, it doesn’t go much further than Shostakovich and Bartok and Yun, but it’s there. And occasionally, American folk bands make appearances. Along with South Korean boy-bands, as this site has mentioned.
Sure it seems only to happen in PY, but it does happen, which is not what this whining little fart is apparently trying to promulgate.
I mean—he tried to defect twice before and had enough limbs left to succeed on the third attempt.
If you believe the stereotype of NK, he would have been sliced and diced on his first escape. He wasn’t.
Pyotr,
I was at the event, and unlike what you may think, the last thing the guy did was spew propaganda at the audience. He had a very mild and tempered tone, and he made sure we understood that he was simply a musician and not a political expert. He had a nice mixture of pride and criticism towards his home country and didn’t make any political comments. This is a guy who left a privileged life in North Korea just for the freedom to enjoy music without censorship, so I believe he knows what he’s talking about when he discusses the power of music to touch a person’s soul. You proudly set forth some facts with the implication that he’s either concealing or ignoring them (frankly, I don’t know what your argument is, but that’s my guess) for whatever reason (again, don’t quite get what your argument is), but the “whining little fart” did mention most of those facts. He didn’t specifically mention American folk bands, but he mentioned Yun Isang and the accessibility of South Korean pop music. He also laid out the specifics of musical censorship in North Korea, how even within classical music some twentieth century composers, or some pieces of otherwise permitted composers, were censored. The trigger for his defection was the experience of being detained for practicing “Autumn Leaves” in the hopes of playing it to a girl he liked, so he knows very well the hunger musicians have for music. His take on the visit of the NY Philaharmonic was also within this context. He said he’s pretty sure that his friends, obviously all musicians and many of whom he saw sitting in the audience, would have rejoiced at the chance to hear the the US orchestra play.
This tied into his thoughts on human rights activism, that we need to focus on inspiring the victims themselves into fighting for their own human rights. Exposing them to outside culture, he said, and making them realize that North Korea is actually not heaven on earth, is the best way to achieve this. Of course, these short comments were nothing really special — just the partyline of the majority of human rights activists — but I find it hard to imagine a person disagreeing with them.
Although I can’t really make out what your qualms are with Mr. Kim (that he’s too anti-North? too self-aggrandizing? too naive?), I suspect you’d change your mind if you actually heard him talk.
More likely he was taken hostage by the anti-North Korea lobby group of right wing brown-nosers and churchies that make up such an unhealthy proportion of our Korean community. Or the entrenched and equally anti-Korean lobby of left-wing academics.
Its difficult to argue against the musicians approach as depicited by Timmy.
Did he play any North Korean tunes?
Be a shame to have an opportunity to hear someone of his background play only to have to listen to the same tired classical shit every second asian immigrant plays in their race to prove themselves as culturally white.
Actually, to my surprise, he seemed reluctant to bad mouth North Korea. The only criticisms he offered were those against musical censorship, and even those were presented in a very matter-of-fact way, interwoven into the story of how and why he defected. He had numerous opportunity to criticze the North Korean government, including in the context of human rights, but he never quite directly did so. The human rights comment was actually framed in a way of mildly criticizing the approach taken by the outside world, that of trying to use external force to solve the problem. That would, I imagine, include all the right-wing organizations in Korea. I’m not sure if being in the US allowed him to tone down his rhetoric, but based on the talk alone, he seemed to be quite level-headed. If anything, he could be accused of being reluctant to denounce the brutal North Korean regime, not the other way around.
And yes, he did play Korean pieces. Out of the three he performed, the first was a North Korean song — one that all musicians are required to play at events (Don’t remember if this applied to all events. He did say that for every non-North Korean piece performed, musicians are required to play two North Korean pieces) — the second was the one that got him into trouble with the authorties and the third was his original arrangement of Arirang.