My Korean-American Life

  The figures were enormous. Not in actual dimension — the paintings were canvas-sized, the sculptures bronze and finite — but in their insistence on being looked at, their refusal to make themselves small, their absolute rejection of the apologetic posture that a certain tradition of art criticism has always preferred from figurative painting. They took up room. They took up the room. And standing inside the Hangaram Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center on the afternoon of May 3rd, moving from canvas to canvas in the long galleries, I began to smile and understand his humor and philosophy behind the paintings and sculptures.  "I have never painted a fat figure in my life," Fernando Botero once told his daughter Lina, who co-curated this exhibition. "What I created was a universal sense of volume, where every human figure, animal, landscape and object was treated in the same way — with the intention of giving generosity and sensuality to form." Volume is a philosophy...

  Hyo , Filial Piety: On Universal Ballet's Simcheong Official Highlight Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFwRD0zX4NQ She walks to the edge of the ship. The sea below is dark and churning, rendered in the theater with the particular combination of light and fabric and sound design that ballet uses to make the impossible present: the waves, the danger, the depth. She is sixteen years old, or the dancer playing her is — young enough that the sacrifice reads as a sacrifice rather than a decision, which is perhaps the point. And she jumps. I was sitting in the Opera House at the Seoul Arts Center on the evening of May 3rd, watching Universal Ballet's fortieth anniversary production of Simcheong , and I was thinking about my father. · · · The story of Simcheong is one of the oldest in the Korean repertoire — its origins lost in the oral tradition, its earliest written traces appearing in the eighteenth century, though scholars believe the tale is older. It has been told in ev...