Beginning today, all visitors are now required to play a game of hopscotch when they enter my studio.
Studio 208 at your service
It leads to the part of the studio where I work and not where I sleep.
This is a Korean hopscotch board.
Come inside and play!
Just kidding. Well, not really. Come play with me!
Gyeongokbokgung (Palace Greatly Blessed by Heaven) was built in 1395 and served as the main palace for more than 500 years. It was burned by the Japanese in 1592. Since 1990, efforts have been taken to restore it to its former glory.
Outside one of Gyeongbokung’s gates
It’s such a beautiful palace. A bout of déjà vu came upon me, taking me back when I visited the Forbidden City in Beijing almost 11 years ago. They felt similar mainly because of scale—it seemed to take forever to cover all of it.
One of my favorite parts is the Gyeonghoeru Pavilion, where the king gave formal banquets for foreign envoys—it’s like the royal party club. In the winter, the water around it freezes and gives the impression that it’s floating on ice.
A pavilion on ice!
Another lovely spot is Hyangwonjeong, a small pavilion that stands out because of its smallness in contrast to its neighboring Goliath structures. Behind it is another palace, Geoncheonggung, where Queen Myeongseong was killed in an assassination plot by the Japanese.
Hyangwonjeong pavilion. Isn’t she lovely?
During my exploration, I came across a total of four magpies. The magpie is South Korea’s official bird. I am so in love with this city. May good fortune befall all of us!
On a trip to Incheon, we visited Songdo, a city built from scratch on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land. Although it cost more then $40 billion to make, there was virtually no one in it, except for the employees who worked to maintain the buildings. Eerily, the cafes had no person in it, but the computers were booted up and coffee prices were advertised. The convenience stores sold a lot of canned goods, such as Spam.
A deserted subway
Among all other things, Spam! While they sell these in other convenience stores, it struck me differently because of the emptiness. No clerk inside, either.
No one. Nothing,
There were two guys in the reception desk behind us.
A cafe seemed to be available for service, with no one behind the counter.
There was no one inside!
Two of the computers are booted up. Very creepy.
What startled me out of the creepiness was the knowledge that some scenes from the viral Gangnam Style video were filmed in the Central Park building.
Songdo’s Central Park building, with a protest sign outside
It’s scary to imagine that the inhabitants of this city were kidnapped by aliens, and the workers here are just maintaining things for when they come back. Just kidding. It’s such a stark contrast to busy, busy Seoul.
Behold the bizarre awesomeness of palace guards marching past a Dunkin Donuts.
The changing of the guard at Deoksugung
I took this photo during the changing of the guard at Deoksugung, which served as the main palace of the Great Han Empire (1897-1910). It is located in central Seoul. This is one of the many contrasts I’ve seen in South Korea.
The gate to Deoksugung
Yesterday, I took what may well be the start of a monthly pilgrimage to Kukkiwon, World Taekwondo Headquarters. Located in Gangnam, popularized by Psy, it was my first trip south of the Han River, not for horse-dancing but to visit the mecca of my favorite martial art in the world.
The Kukkiwon arch
It definitely felt like a pilgrimage, since it was an uphill trek on a side street from one of the main roads, which was lined with South Korean flags. Nearing the end, I find a traditional looking arch, with the name Kukkiwon in Korean. World Taekwondo Headquarters itself is, well, just a gym, but, oh what a gym! It’s quite symbolic to have a public site specifically for a sport that welcomes practitioners around the world. I suppose it was apparent that it was my first time, at least to the security guards who were mildly amused and puzzled at a (deceptively) Korean-looking woman skipping on the mat and taking photos.
I had to. Please don’t judge me.
It didn’t look that much different from any gym, except with the flags on the ceiling, the important-looking seats on top, and the rubber mat which seemed firmer and harder than that of most dojangs. But think of all the athletes from all over the world who walked this mat! (On that note, I’m glad I was wearing socks.)
I know it just looks like a gym, but to me it’s also a mecca.
Outside the gym, the hallway was decorated with photographs of taekwondo history. One showed a photo of taekwondo jins from North and South Korea. Another showed people practicing taekwondo on the streets of Cambodia, barefoot. Surprisingly, there were two old posters from taekwondo championships held in Manila. I even recognized some of the people in the pictures.
A bit of history
It was a chilly foggy day in the perpetually busy city of Seoul, but as pilgrimages go, the journey was long but destination was worth it.
Scroll below for an informal giveaway!
My desk, January 2013
Annyeong! I’m posting from my studio in Seoul, where I’m based for a while. This is my current desk. See if you can spot the following:
1. My lucky caganer
2. A bubble maker
3. A biography of Robert Irwin
4. Thaumatropes (which have been mistaken for eye masks—yes I am in Korea!)
5. My English and Chinese names translated in Korean
6. Receipts, mostly from Etude House
7. A Post-It pad shaped like a heart
8. Chinese astrology for 2013 (I found it on the back of my bus ticket, which I found interesting.)
9. Something from SVA IxD
10. A Korean bank book
The first three people who can email me a photo with the above items encircled and guesses at least 6 correctly gets a postcard, stickers, and a poem specially written for them. Not kidding.
So I’ve decided to move to South Korea. Seoul, to be precise.
When I tell my friends I’m moving to Korea, I have three common reactions:
Common reactions to my move to Korea
But seriously, it’s to do an art residency in Seoul. While it will be my fourth home city (“home” being anywhere I’ve lived in for at least six months because really, it’s probably the only criterion I have left), it’s my first time to live in East Asia.
Seoul, my fourth home city
A big part of choosing South Korea among all other countries is, duh, taekwondo, which I have realized has way more impact on my creativity than I think I give it credit for. Yes, I expect training after studio hours to be the most badass there, so I have high expectations for Dojang/School #15 and Sabonim/Master #29.
Korea, land of taekwondo. Oh la la! Hurray!
I only had a few weeks to pack as much Korean in my head as I possibly could, as I don’t think taekwondo terms will help much. For future expats in Korea, check out the incredibly helpful and hilariously engaging videos of Eat Your Kimchi and SweetAndTasty, which I’ve also written about in a previous post.
Simon and Martina of Eat Your Kimchi
Professor Oh and Friends
Thanks to the internet, I have come with things like deodorant, bedsheets*, and bras that will fit me—things that are apparently very hard to find in Korea.
Things I was advised to pack
And so the past two weeks were of doing what I now call The Expat Thank-You and Farewell Rounds (Part 7) of saying goodbye and having conversations with close friends and mentors. Closing another chapter through conversations, no matter how short that chapter was, is important to me, hence the lightning round of brunches, coffees, lunches, dinners, and drinks that make me question the human need of saying farewell over carbs. It’s quite sad to leave again, but I choose to look on the bright side. I am looking forward to uninterrupted time of continuing my work in a country that values tradition, skin care, and taekwondo as much as I do. Woohoo!
Ciao, friends! See you soon!
In the past nine years, I’ve always headed out west, and so this should be quite an adventure. Truthfully, it kind of feels like I’m going to another planet, or a parallel universe. I’m going to pretend the entire country is a dojang to minimize any untoward cultural misunderstandings. The bowing, the removal of shoes before getting in the room, shaking hands while touching your elbow—I’ve been doing this in taekwondo for the past 16 years.
Thanks to taekwondo, I feel that the chances of me unwittingly insulting a local are radically decreased.
It seems like only six months ago when I packed up my life and said goodbye.
Oh wait, it was.
Well, here goes nothing.
*Edit: So I’m here in my studio and they DO have bedsheets, or at least something that covers the bed. What the hey, internets.
For reasons I will write about later, I have decided to learn the Korean language and culture. More specifically, I have decided to pack as much useful Korean phrases as possible into my head (and know how to say them in context) in the next few weeks.
I didn’t think that open source courseware from universities was the way to go. I love using online resources such as Khan Academy, Udemy, and Coursera, but they don’t really specialize in languages and cultures. In addition, with the timeframe I was giving myself, I didn’t want to feel like I was taking a class.
To my surprise, it wasn’t easy to find good online courses that teach Korean, perhaps because a lot of Korean people already speak English. Still, I believe that learning a people’s language is one of the best ways to understand them. When I lived in Barcelona, it was only when I started learning Spanish and Catalan that the locals started opening up to me. (Not that they weren’t nice to me before, but you get the idea.)
Learning a new language and culture always gives me what I refer to as a “brain massage”—I can feel my cerebral cortex almost groaning under all that cognitive load. Incorporating language classes into a busy schedule isn’t easy, and it was important to find learning material that were easily packaged into digestible pieces that are easy to recall.
Looking at the relatively small landscape of Korean culture and language videos, here are the two that are keeping me up at night (both from Youtube):
1. Professor Oh and Friends (SweetAndTasty on Youtube)
I’ve never come across better styled and more entertaining language and culture videos than those of Professor Oh’s. Her first video caught my eye, and I remembered her because her mnemonic for Korean consonants was to sing them to the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. This was something that we used to do in high school, but to remember all the Chinese dynasties. (It’s quite a versatile song, yes?) It’s also really helpful that she points out common mistakes in pronunciation. She’s come quite a long way from that endearingly shy first video, and now she’s morphed into several characters. As someone with many alter egos as well, I totally relate to her. Keep going!
(Also check our her other alter ago as Ramona Champion.)
Professor Oh and Friends: Making the Korean language unforgettable. No kidding. (Photo from their Facebook page)
Because desperate times call for desperate measures, my Korean language notebook has frantically wriitten notes in the five languages I know, to highlight similarities and make me learn faster. Some Korean consonants were very similar to Mandarin, for example. It’s also funny that some words were the same in lots of languages. Banana is, well, pretty much banana in several countries.
2. Eat Your Kimchi with Simon and Martina
It’s impossible not to talk about Korean culture blogging without writing about Eat Your Kimchi. Canadians Simon and Martina Stawski came to South Korea in 2008 to teach English and started doing video blogs about their experiences as expats. They blog about the K-pop industry, but it’s their videos on culture that’s helping me. Now hugely popular, they have more than 260,000 subscribers on their Youtube channel. They even surpassed their Indiegogo goal to register EYK as an actual business.
Simon and Martina of Eat Your Kimchi. Prepping expats for Korean living (and K-pop) since 2008. Whatup, nasties! (Photo from the Eat Your Kimchi Facebook page)
From what I’ve learned from both Professor Oh and Eat Your Kimchi is this—having that human connection where the speaker is looking at you is a plus. Having well-defined characters or personalities allow for more contextualization, and when I remember the words and phrases, I hear the characters speaking them in my head together with their idiosyncracies. It also helps that they seem to be genuinely nice people with normal lives. Thoughtfully written scripts also work well in helping me remember. I switch back and forth from these channels because it’s great to have both Korean and non-Korean perspectives.
These people all feel familiar to me, and I might instinctively give them high fives if I ever see them. Seriously, thank you, for making this process wonderfully entertaining and useful.
Last December 1st, I held my first draw-a-thon. (You know what a marathon is, right? It’s just like that, except that you’re drawing.) It was at the Museo Pambata (Children’s Museum) of Manila, Philippines, for their Children’s Advocacy Program. I brought in two of my projects, DrawHappy (a global art project on drawing your happiness) and Rorsketch (a visual perception project where you draw your interpretations of clouds). After showing them some current sketches and making them warm up their hands, we got to drawing.
Kids, I have to say, are not only talented and completely open to new experiences, but also insatiable when it comes to pouring their imaginations on paper. The terror of a blank canvas doesn’t apply much. Here are some of the sketches:
Rorsketch
DrawHappy
And some photos of how it rolled:
Then we had chocolate ice cream, fudgee bars, and grape juice. Oh, to be eight years old again!
Thanks so much to the Museo Pambata for hosting me! Visit them on your next trip to Manila. And do emaill me at theperceptionalist[at]gmail.com if you’d like to do a draw-a-thon in your school or organization.
My dreams of the sleeping kind are often about flying, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that I’m considering aviation. However, as someone who nearly fell out of a building at 8-years-old, I am afraid of heights. But childhood trauma be damned! As a tiny yet tangible step to being an actual explorer, I went on an ultralight for a ride overlooking the Philippine city of Angeles (about 1.5 hours from Manila) two Sundays ago.
Rorsketch: The Flying Edition
The desire to fly, or be up in the sky without the stressful ordeal of commercial flights, to which I am no stranger, also has something to do with my cloud project. For years now, I’ve looked up at the clouds. It would be awesome if I can actually be at the same height as them!
Arayat is a mountain with its own share of myths that feature gods who battle other gods and/or giants in nearby mountains or disguise themselves as humans. It’s pretty. I want to climb it. But that will be another story for another day.
On the way, the clouds were already teasing me:
Arayat. With clouds that look like the food chain. Thanks, Stephanie, for stopping the car.
It’s difficult not to imagine the Wright brothers, who worked on planes and gliders of a similar size. The smallness of it! It’s like a bike with wings. But here goes nothing:
So this is an ultralight. From afar, it’s like a dragonfly.
Fist in the air! I’m afraid of heights, but it was not the time to think about that. Photo by Steph Tan.
Up, up, and awaayyy!
A bicycle in the sky
Flying via small planes has often been compared to being on a roller coaster with invisible tracks. Unlike commercial flights, which can give you the similar, and sometimes even better views, there is no barrier between you and the atmosphere. You control the vessel (well, Captain Max who was sitting on my right did, but he let me work the controls for a bit) and it is like riding a bike in the air. It’s quite exhilarating. And the skies told their stories:
The clouds are like the net that’s catching the moon! Do you see it?
What I like about flying in relation to this project is that it makes me a part of the canvas now.
Yes, I’m in there! Photo by Steph Tan.
The change of height and vessel also brought about one crucial, if not obvious, thing: I can see the ground below. And so grass and fields and roads turned into playgrounds of visual perception as well. Living in big polluted cities all my life, it is always startling to see huge patches of green. While we were rocked by scary gusts of wind, it was air that tasted of rain and sunlight and coconuts.
I see a tangram. Sort of. You?
Broccoli!
That day, my friends and I witnessed another plane doing aerobatic sequences in the sky using a bright yellow biplane. My jaw dropped, and I stared for several minutes. Then I started squealing. I can’t wait to do that eventually.
It’s a bright yellow biplane and it’s absolutely gorgeous. And I think it was doing the sky equivalent of cartwheels.
A hangout in the hangar (Yes, puns are not funny)
When the plane landed, I marched up and interrogated the pilot, Captain Mike, who humored us and described how the plane was made. Back in the hangar, he pointed out a pair of wings being made. Each part has its own paperwork so that it can be traced should anything go wrong.
The skeleton of a wing.
Even the hat and glasses are very steampunk. Look!
I want that hat.
Planes in the hangar. Valet parking provided.
On the way back, we had fresh coconut juice from the roadside. The sunset painted the clouds a pale orange, and I caught two that looked like dolphins. The day was almost too cinematic.
I see kissing dolphins!
I grew up loving Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and was thrilled to learn that the author himself was actually a pilot. I’ve devoured his other writings, especially Wind, Sand, and Stars, Night Flight and Flight to Arras. I think traveling in general allows for creativity, but traveling alone allows you to get lost in yourself and discover these pure grains of truth that shape you without you consciously knowing it. I think this has been the reason why I keep moving and seeking new and strange experiences, and once you start, it’s difficult to stop.
Steph and Kristel Tan, and me. Thank you, ladies!
Thanks to Stephanie (@StephLTan) and Kristel Tan, The Angeles Flying Club, Captain Max, and Captain Mike!
Rorsketches to be posted soon. But check out previous ones here.
Catherine Sarah Young 