xDahn Yoga Korea Club

December 1 Meeting

The Korea Club provides Dahn Yoga students with three ways to experience Korean culture more deeply:

The May, June, and August meetings of the Korea Club provided members with a direct experience of Korean culture -- food, dress, and music.

At the July 7 meeting, the Korea Club began the first step in getting an overview of this rich 5,000 year-old-culture that provide a context for the direct experiences of Korean culture. The first film about South Korea called South Korea: Land of Morning Calm was shown. "Land of the Morning Calm" the name by which Korea was known during the Choson Dynasty which lasted from 1392 until 1910 when modern-day Korea was born.

At the September 1 meeting, the Korea Club continues its immersion into Korean culture through a fascinating DVD called Cloud Path -- American Buddhist Monk. The DVD showed the story of A Paul Muenzen who grew up in Rahway, New Jersey in a Catholic family that expected him to become a priest. However, after going to Yale and Harvard Divinity Schoo, he chose to be a Zen Buddhist monk and moved to Korea! Now Venerable Hyon Gak Sunim, he is based in South Korea and is the Head Teacher of the Seoul International Zen Centre at the Hwagyesa Temple. He goes on meditation retreats which could last up to 100 days in the remote mountainous regions, and draws several thousands to his talks. His book “From Harvard to Hwagyesa,” was a bestseller and is credited with reviving interest in Korean Zen Buddhism!

The October 6 Korea Club meeting is a perfect follow-up for the September meeting because we will see is the award-winning film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring by famed director Kim Ki-duk. This is a haunting story about a Buddhist monk and his young student at a monastery on an island retreat

The December 1 Korea Club meeting showcases Chi-Hwa-Seon: Painted Fire, one of the most stunning films by acclaimed director Im Kwon-Taek who is considered the founder of modern Korean cinema. See more about Im's illustrious career on the Korean Films page.

This searing drama directed by the acclaimed Im Kwon-Taek recounts the rise of painter Chang Sung-up (Choi Min-Sik) during the late Choson period. With the help of the affluent and generous Kim Byong-moon (Ahn Seong-Gi), Chang grows as an artist but never quite belongs in the world of his mentor. Chihwaseon, the film by Im Kwon-Taek, the prolific grand old man of South Korean cinema, is one eminent artist's biography of another. The subject of the film is Jang Seung-Ub, a 19th-century painter known by the pseudonym Ohwon, who lived, in Mr. Im's rendition, like a vagabond rock star. Jang, born a commoner and discovered as a boy by a sympathetic aristocrat, dazzled and scandalized his country's politically-fragmented ruling class and spent his long career in and out of favor, and in and out of trouble.



The following excerpt is from: http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/koreancinema_2002.html

Initially copying the work of Chinese classical masters—landscapes, birds and flowers—by memory, after only seeing them once, each, Jang breaks out of tradition and finds his own style. He is portrayed as a disheveled bon vivant, who believes that sex and alcohol are necessary to support the creative impulse. I am not familiar at all with the work of the actual painter, but I suspect that a great deal of artistic license has been taken in this depiction as a way for Im to present himself as being, simultaneously, a “classical” and a radical filmmaker. He has been Korea’s most highly acclaimed director both within and outside his country for about twenty years now, and, recently, the very first monograph on a Korean director, in English, was published on his work.[5] His forte has been the exploration of Korean history and culture, and the development of a specifically “Korean” cinema characterised by a more open expression of strong emotions than would normally be found in contemporaneous Japanese and Chinese films, yet sharing these national cinemas’ interest in all aspects of visual composition.

In this sense, Chihwaseon is an excellent example of his (and Jung’s) work. In the critical discussion of a perceived “energy” and “dynamism” in Jang’s paintings by his peers and in the translation of these elements into the style of the film, one is reminded of Vincente Minnelli’s Hollywood biography of Van Gogh, Lust for Life (1956), Martin Scorsese’s episode on a wild, macho, abstract expressionist painter (played by Nick Nolte) in New York Stories (1982), and John Maybury’s lurid, unsanctioned portrait of Francis Bacon, Love is the Devil (UK, 1998). In fact, a screen that Jang paints for one of his lovers is even somewhat reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s work. Clearly, Im wanted to celebrate an artist’s creative individualism in this film, which is a well-worn subject to Western observers. Also, Chihwaseon depicts three of Jang’s (sexual) love relationships, with a young, upper class woman, So-woon and two “kiseangs”—genteel, cultured prostitutes (not unlike Japanese “geishas”)—which, from “our” present-day perspective, are highly clichéd relationships.

The real-life Jang Seung-ub disappeared without a trace in 1897 and the film imagines this “disappearance” with a shot of Jang walking on coals into a pottery furnace, followed by a detail shot of a fired pot on which an indigo ink drawing of a man on a boat has magically appeared. The inference is that Jang must have painted it inside the fiery oven!

Chang Sung-up and Im Kwon Taek

The following excerpt is from http://www.asiandb.com/browse/people_detail.pfm?code=7&mode=article&num=7

In an interview with the magazine Film 2.0, the director described his philosophy about art and his motivations in making ``Chihwaseon.’’ Im said that he began thinking about making the film some 30 years ago. ``Back then, there wasn’t a lot of information available about Chang’s achievements, but I became very interested in him from what I read, especially about how freely and independently he lived,’’ he said. ``It was the 1970s (when I first became interested in Chang), when a military government ruled Korea, so I think that his individualism was an added attraction for me. But of course, I had to wait before being able to make the movie. ``I also saw a lot of similarity between myself and Chang; at that point in my life, I was also a drifter who liked women and drinking,’’ he added.


This excerpt is from: http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/koreancinema_2002.html

Initially copying the work of Chinese classical masters—landscapes, birds and flowers—by memory, after only seeing them once, each, Jang breaks out of tradition and finds his own style. He is portrayed as a disheveled bon vivant, who believes that sex and alcohol are necessary to support the creative impulse. I am not familiar at all with the work of the actual painter, but I suspect that a great deal of artistic license has been taken in this depiction as a way for Im to present himself as being, simultaneously, a “classical” and a radical filmmaker. He has been Korea’s most highly acclaimed director both within and outside his country for about twenty years now, and, recently, the very first monograph on a Korean director, in English, was published on his work.[5] His forte has been the exploration of Korean history and culture, and the development of a specifically “Korean” cinema characterised by a more open expression of strong emotions than would normally be found in contemporaneous Japanese and Chinese films, yet sharing these national cinemas’ interest in all aspects of visual composition.

In this sense, Chihwaseon is an excellent example of his (and Jung’s) work… Clearly, Im wanted to celebrate an artist’s creative individualism in this film, which is a well-worn subject to Western observers. Also, Chihwaseon depicts three of Jang’s (sexual) love relationships, with a young, upper class woman, So-woon and two “kiseangs”—genteel, cultured prostitutes (not unlike Japanese “geishas”)—which, from “our” present-day perspective, are highly clichéd relationships.

The real-life Jang Seung-ub disappeared without a trace in 1897 and the film imagines this “disappearance” with a shot of Jang walking on coals into a pottery furnace, followed by a detail shot of a fired pot on which an indigo ink drawing of a man on a boat has magically appeared. The inference is that Jang must have painted it inside the fiery oven!