SEOUL, July 27 — The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho turned from the street into a passageway barely wide enough for two people. “Look at these dirty stairs,” he said rhapsodically, pausing to peer through a doorway at tiles of perhaps ‘70s-era vintage. The passageway descended farther and took a hairpin turn into a pedestrian alley of uneven brick walls, overhead knots of electrical wire and drying laundry. “Maybe a detective could chase a criminal here,” he said, presumably imagining actors careening down the alley. “I have to shoot something here before something destroys it.”
Bong, the critically acclaimed director of the dystopian thriller “Snowpiercer” as well as “The Host,” which is set in Seoul and stars a man-eating river monster, is not your average tour guide. And that was exactly the idea. I had visited the South Korean capital once before, during a rainy autumn, and while dazzled by the neon lights and spectacularly effective subway system, had barely scratched the city’s surface.
Seoul is the heart of an urban area of more than 25 million people — among the largest in the world — and like any 21st-century megalopolis, it is impossible to grasp as a single entity. From N Seoul Tower, a 777-foot-spire atop an 800-foot hill, the densely packed city rolls away into the hazy distance, stopping only where it comes up against the encircling mountains. If you look down from the top, there could be hundreds of Seouls, and I didn’t know which to choose.
I knew, though, that I wanted to see contemporary culture beyond the best-known exports — the television shows that are staples across Asia and the perfectly choreographed K-pop videos. And so I sought out native informants, each a creative force unto his or herself: Shin Kyung-sook, a best-selling novelist; fashion designer Juyoung Lee; Kim Sehwang, a musician; and Bong. I invited each to show me a part of Seoul that inspired them or held special meaning. One invited me to a museum, one to her place of work, and the other two to favourite neighbourhoods. They decided which versions of Seoul I would see.
Bong
“Snowpiercer” was based on a French graphic novel and shot in the Czech Republic with actors from at least seven nations. In it, people of all classes, humanity’s last survivors, are jammed together on a hurtling train. I should not have been surprised, then, that Bong, 45, chose to share a global Seoul. To get to our rendezvous, I climbed the sloping streets of the Itaewon neighbourhood, past a cluster of gay and transgender bars, and, farther on, an increasing quotient of Middle Eastern restaurants.
In Itaewon, you can take a date or business associate out for a suitably impressive dinner on Itaewon-ro No. 27, or get a cellphone hooked up after hours in Nigerian Alley, side streets that respectively draw full-freight expats and the scrappier remittance class. I passed these places on my way to meet Bong at the Seoul Central Mosque, set on a hilltop where Itaewon meets the neighbourhood of Hannam, its dome and twin minarets a beacon to Korea’s tiny minority of Muslims.
While Friday congregants milled behind us in the late afternoon sun, we sat on a bench that looked out over the city. “This part of Seoul is amazing,” he said. “It symbolises the incoherence of a city that doesn’t have strong continuity.” He held his hands up and made a rectangle with his fingers, framing an imaginary shot. “Look at the layers,” he said.
In the foreground were old houses, then a church steeple in the middle distance, a common sight in a country that is nearly a third Christian. Beyond lay the Han River and too many high-rises to count. “In five or 10 years these old houses will be gone,” he said. “This is a city of destruction and reconstruction.”
As the call to prayer sounded, Bong led me away from the mosque and onto a narrow street, Usadan-ro No. 10. The businesses we passed fell roughly into three categories. There were specialty shops — haberdashery, hardware — where it appeared neither staff nor signage had changed in 50 years. There were restaurants of more recent origin serving kosher Korean food or Turkish kebabs. And then there were the newest arrivals: a 3-month-old wine bar, a juice bar, a tattoo-studio-slash-art-gallery called Soul Ink, a clothing shop in which every item was either black or white. One cafe sported a name that, as near as I could figure out, roughly translates as “maybe we’re open today”; two invitingly fluffy white Samoyeds named Cloud and Storm “work part time,” according to the barista. The neighbourhood hovered in that sweet spot just before people start complaining about gentrification. “Here it all mixes very naturally,” Bong said.
We walked farther down the street to a bar called Aoi Sora with a triangular sign. It specializes in daytime drinking, Bong said; from Monday to Thursday, it closes at 7 pm Inside, by the light of a single large square window at the back, he ordered clams in their shells and a bottle of clear alcohol with a ginseng root winding through it, which was not on the menu but was created by the bartender, who in his off hours teaches a class in traditional booze-making. We sipped from small ceramic cups, and Bong talked more about his changing city. “Every alley has its own story,” he said.
Shin
Over eight days in Seoul, destruction and transformation were regular themes. Shin, the novelist, explained her city this way: “In Paris or New York, when you have an appointment with a friend, you can meet her in the same place that you did a year ago. In Seoul, you can’t, because there will be something new there.” New Yorkers may quibble, but her point stands; in Seoul the change is especially fast and comprehensive. But, Shin said, those same qualities are part of the city’s dynamism and energy.
They are also ones essential to her work. Shin, 52, is the author of “Please Look After Mom,” which sold more than a million copies in Korea and was published in English in 2011. In it, an old woman from the countryside comes to visit her grown children in Seoul. She makes it as far as the central train station and then disappears, lost in the matrix of the shape-shifting city. “Seoul is an important backdrop because I wanted to represent the clash between generations,” Shin said.
The city is not all frenetic evolution. There are serene oases in its parks and greenways, on the grounds of its centuries-old palaces and in its museums. Shin asked me to meet her at the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art. It displays Korean art through the centuries, as well as contemporary works by both Korean artists — like the video-art pioneer Nam June Paik — and international stars like Andreas Gursky and Louise Bourgeois. When we arrived just before opening, an air of tranquillity prevailed.
A small group of us — Shin, a poet friend of hers, an interpreter and I — followed an English-speaking guide through the Mario Botta-designed wing that houses mostly traditional art. (Other parts of the museum complex were designed by Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas.)
The first piece we saw was an ethereal celadon ewer from the 13th century, decorated in a raised-relief lotus pattern. Beneath a soft spotlight in the darkened room, it looked almost translucent. Under the Goryeo dynasty, which lasted from the 10th to the 14th century, Korean artists adopted the Chinese method of making the glazed, pale-green pottery, then refined the craft to the point that many art historians consider Korean celadon among the finest ever made.
Though a well of knowledge herself, our human guide had also handed us digital ones. Museum audio guides tend to be clunky and overly insistent, but these lightweight, touch-screen paddles invited play. My sleek little machine sensed which object I was looking at and silently presented its image with white-on-black text. Some of the objects could be enlarged and spun around on the screen, allowing me to study curves and texture in minute detail — the next best thing to being able to pick up the items. In front of a 15th-century blue-and-white porcelain jar, I became so absorbed in the digital display that I fell behind the group.
One specific item was our true destination. It was a foot-and-a-half-tall, white, rotund, 18th-century porcelain vessel called a moon jar. Lit from above, it appeared to float like a heavenly body over its pedestal. A jagged, tea-coloured stain cut across the surface like an abstract painter’s flourish, the result of oil once held in the vessel seeping out. Shin said the jar reminded her variously of a mountain, a pregnant woman or a woman in a hanbok — a voluminous traditional dress — on a windy day.
She visits the jar regularly, she said, and it offers her peace when she is stressed. If Seoul’s manic side pulses through her settings, the jar shapes her work in a different way. “I want to write sentences as beautiful as the moon jar,” she said. “I haven’t done it yet.” She is particularly in love with the oil stain. “The line of the stain shows the flow of time. Humans didn’t make it; only history and nature could.”
Lee
Lee, the fashion designer, invited me to visit her at her showroom in Gangnam, the district made internationally famous after being cheerfully ridiculed by the pop singer Psy. Gangnam has had an exceedingly short modern history — two locals, only half-jokingly, told me that it began in 1988, when the country’s first McDonald’s opened there and became a popular meeting place.
By reputation a land of bling, it is where the luxury brands that line ritzy avenues around the world have established their Korean beachheads. It is also the seat of Korea’s own fashion industry, home to labels like Jinteok and Bakangchi, both stars of Seoul Fashion Week. They and other Korean designers share the stretch of Samseong-ro between Hakdong-ro and Dosan-daero with Lee’s brand, Resurrection.
Lee, 44, is a traditional Korean woman in some respects: She went into the same business as her mother, who works in the same building, still a designer, and helps care for Lee’s two sons. But she is also known for her sumptuous neo-Gothic creations, which have clothed, among other foreign celebrities, Marilyn Manson. When he played in Seoul about 10 years ago, Lee seized fate and delivered some of her clothes to the concierge at his hotel. Ten minutes later, she said, Manson called her and asked for more. “He has a strange beauty, a grotesque beauty,” she said, calling him one of her biggest influences.
So it was perhaps not a surprise that I found her in the Resurrection showroom, which is open to the public. Her hair was streaked magenta. Dozens of red candles set in front of an enormous mirror suggested an altar, and wrought-iron chairs contrasted with a red wall that displayed an eclectic set of crosses. I would not have been surprised to find a well-appointed dungeon nearby. All this was backdrop to clothes made of sheer fabrics, leathers and synthetic furs, visible heirs to the designs of Alexander McQueen.
Lee is unusual in the world of high-end fashion as a woman who designs mainly for men. Or, at least, she sends mostly men down the runway, often looking like futuristic vampires, but women buy her designs, too. Her menswear, in turn, sometimes incorporates feminine details. She showed me a men’s sleeve garter inspired by women’s garter belts.
Men, women, East, West — Lee mixes it up. Her love of black and leather reflects her Western side, she said (she studied at Parsons School of Design in New York). Lately, though, she has been reaching into the Korean past.
She walked to a rack of clothing and brought out a gold, red and black brocade jacket. This kind of silk was once used to make hanbok, she said, and she learned how to work with it from her mother. She showed me another piece, a men’s jacket for her 2015 collection, in a traditional embroidered swan pattern. “That’s my homework,” she said. “To combine Korean traditional fabrics with the modern.”
Kim
All the artists I met seemed to observe more than lament Seoul’s ceaseless transformation. All of them, though, without making an explicit point of it, showed me how history ran through their city and their work. Kim Sehwang, a nationally renowned guitarist, suggested we meet in the neighbourhood of Samcheong, and invited along a longtime friend, movie producer Jimi Nam.
We sat down to lunch upstairs at a busy restaurant called Nunnamujip, near a window overlooking the street, where the stairway is lined with celebrity signatures. They ordered a spread of traditional items that included succulent marinated beef ribs (dok kalbi), tofu with kimchee and North Korean dumplings, which are bigger and rounder than the usual South Korean kind. Spicy rice cake sticks (dok boki), a dish that Kim said he misses when he goes abroad, rounded out the feast.
Kim and Nam, both in their 40s, had similar takes on Samcheong, remembering it as an old, rundown but romantic neighbourhood that somehow, around a decade ago, became fashionable. Having escaped the kind of wholesale overhaul that has affected other areas, it has undergone a different, more gracious kind of modernisation. It is still home to many hanok, traditional houses with wood frames and curving tiled roofs. Most are no longer the homes they once were, but have been restored in keeping with their original design and repurposed as shops, teahouses and restaurants. The buildings’ arched eaves line the stair-step passageways that lead up from the main road, Samcheong-ro.
Kim’s mother would bring him to a noodle soup restaurant in the neighbourhood when he was a boy, and when he was dating his now-wife, they would come to its cafes or the restaurant where we had lunch. The soup restaurant he and his mother would visit, Sujebi — also the name of the soup itself — is still there, and when we walked by, more than a dozen people waited outside. Groups of friends strolled the sidewalks, some couples embracing the curious local custom of dressing to match each other, stripe for stripe and toque for toque.
Nam said he first came to the renewed Samcheong in 2004, when Park Chan-wook, director of the revenge movie “Oldboy,” invited him to meet at a French restaurant. “I was skeptical,” Nam said, “but he told me that the neighbourhood was starting to change.” Now he doesn’t come to Samcheong often, but when he is publicising a new movie, he rents out a whole cafe in the neighbourhood and invites the news media.
We finished our neighbourhood tour over iced drinks in a cafe; its windows were wide open to the sun and a light breeze ruffled our napkins. Out on the sidewalk, Seoulites passed glass storefronts and curving tiled rooftops, sometimes both part of a single building that stitched together old and new. Kim looked up and down the street and said, “I wish I could come here more often.”
If you go
Vast and efficient, Seoul’s subway system puts to shame most of those in North America and Europe. It’s well-signed in English, Korean and simplified Chinese, and there are bathrooms in every station cleaner than those in your average airport in the United States.
Taxis are reasonably priced and easily flagged, though odds are the driver won’t speak English. Non-Korean speakers should have someone write down their destination in Korean and hand it to the driver. Note that the government recently revised South Korea’s official address system, but many residents (including some cabdrivers and delivery men and women) prefer to use the old addresses, which can be confusing. The addresses listed here are the new ones.
Where to eat
Aoi Sora, 79-1 Usadan-ro No. 10-gil, Yongsan-gu; 82-70-4217-1977.
Nunnamujip, 136-1 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu; 82-2-739-6742.
Sujebi, 101-1 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu; 82-2-735-2965.
What to see
The Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, 60-16 Itaewon-ro No. 55-gil, Yongsan-gu; 82-2-2014-6901; leeum.samsungfoundation.org/html_eng/global/main.asp.
N Seoul Tower, 105 Namsangongwon-gil, Yongsan-gu; 82-2-3455-9277; nseoultower.co.kr/eng.
Seoul Central Mosque, 39 Usadan-ro No. 10-gil, Yongsan-gu; 82-2-793-6908; koreaislam.org/en/mainpage.
Resurrection by Juyoung Lee, 742 Samseong-ro, 2nd floor, Gangnam-gu; 82-2-512-3384; resurrectionbyjuyoung.com. — The New York Times
