[La Cause Littéraire]

Published January 18, 2018 - Source

By Marie Du Crest, Translated from French

Return to Seoul

What we know here in France about Korea are cellphone brands, car manufacturers, a quirky pop hit heard for a while on the airwaves or online—and more recently, the military posturing of North Korea’s dictator, and Trump’s responses to this dangerous game.

I’ve long loved Korean cinema, the mysteries of its language and alphabet—Hangul—its metal chopsticks, the flavor of kimchi. I’ve visited the Korean neighborhood in New York and made a stopover at Seoul’s international airport. I know the country’s violent history: the long Japanese colonization during which, among other atrocities, women especially suffered from forced prostitution, and the Korean language itself was banned. Then came civil war after the peninsula was split between the USSR in the north and the United States in the south—a war still without a peace treaty to this day. Add to that the years of dictatorship…

Gina Kim’s small volume accompanies me, in a way, on an intimate stroll through various places in the megacity she returned to in 2009, bringing with her all her memories and images—those from childhood and those she creates in the present. The book contains a bilingual text (Korean-French), full-spread photographs that echo different chapters. Her text itself is filmic material, forming an essential part of the voice-over soundtrack: the author reads her text in English, and we also hear street sounds, the life around her, captured during filming. At the end of the book, on black pages, QR codes allow readers to listen to what they previously read in silence, in the exact order of the chapters, each accompanied by a color frontispiece photograph.

What Gina Kim tells us, in the first person, is how we approach a world we once knew and left long ago. Gina Kim does this through film, for her native country: For the very first time, I wanted to film Seoul.

The text opens with the figure of her father and grandfather, as if to mark her belonging to a past world—now foreign through its many (urban) transformations, yet familiar through the memory of the senses, like foods and their distinctive smells. She follows an itinerary that’s both geographical—by neighborhoods, up to the city’s summit at Seoul Tower (Seongbuk or Itaewon)—and above all, memorial: she traces footprints of colonization, such as the feared Seodaemun prison, or the site of the tragic collapse of the Sampoong Department Store on June 29, 1995, at 5:15 p.m. She also evokes the student protests of 1960 against Syngman Rhee’s dictatorship. The past both resurfaces and fades: the photographs are often saturated with black, partially blurred, rendered almost unreadable. Even the faces remain unidentifiable. And yet, beyond this descent into the country’s painful history, Gina Kim also captures moments of grace: spring cherry blossoms, meeting a neighborhood barber, the beauty of Japanese schoolgirls on a field trip, or the soft glow of lanterns at a Buddhist temple. For her, it’s a way of continuing, in a sense, the personal journal of an exile returning—but only returning temporarily.

The publisher offers a rich catalog of works centered on Korea.