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BAKS 2008 conference agenda announced

A reminder of the upcoming BAKS conference, The Koreas at sixty: Looking Forward / Looking Back, to be held in Cambrige 8-10 September. Full details of the cost, and how to book, are on the BAKS website here. You don't need to be a BAKS member to come along. The ...
Posted on 07-Aug-08 | Filed in BAKS, Events news | Comments (0) »

Tale of Two Sisters at the KCC

This week’s screening at the KCC is Kim Ji-woon’s (김지운) stylish suspense / horror flick Tale of Two Sisters (2003). (7 August, 7pm) Kim’s filmography is varied and of a high quality. He started with comedy - the macabre Quiet Family (1998) and the hugely fun Foul King (2000), and now ...
Posted on 06-Aug-08 | Filed in Events news, KCC Film Club, Kim Ji-woon, Moon Geun-young | Comments (0) »

Linguistics conference at SOAS

A bargain three-day conference begins at SOAS this Thursday. Full details here. A bit beyond me I'm afraid. I'm still struggling with my counting words.
Posted on 05-Aug-08 | Filed in Academia, SOAS | Comments (0) »

Advance fee frauds – the Korean connection

We have all received garbage emails from dodgy people in dodgy countries giving us a sob story explaining how they’ve managed to end up with several million dollars and need help getting it out of the country. They started in Nigeria but have now spread to other countries as well. ...
Posted on 05-Aug-08 | Filed in Strange but true | Comments (0) »

Rollercoaster #5: Triangle

T-Entertainment, March 2006 Stern(5,g) Rollercoaster's fifth album was released in 2006, after a gap of 2 years since the almost flawless fourth. Gone is the sense of rhythmic drive, of energy, of joie de vivre. Instead we have something a bit more laid back, less characterful. I had been warned that the ...
Posted on 04-Aug-08 | Filed in CD reviews, Rollercoaster | Comments (0) »

North Koreans in Britain

Every now and then a visitor to this site asks whether there are any North Koreans in the UK, apart from at the DPRK embassy. Journalist Michael Rank keeps his eyes open for evidence, particularly on the parliamentary website, and shares his findings with the BAKS list - little snippets ...
Posted on 03-Aug-08 | Filed in DPRK, Koreans in London | Comments (2) »

Alex: My Vintage Romance

Fluxus Music, June 2008 Stern(2,g) As a fan of Clazziquai, I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the first solo outing of one of its members, the male vocalist Alex. On the plus side, he has a mellow, well-controlled voice, very pleasant to listen to. And he has a reasonably distinguished ...
Posted on 02-Aug-08 | Filed in CD reviews | Comments (0) »

August events

As usual, I'll update this post as I hear more. Exhibitions Cantilever Left continues at I-MYU until 9 August. There will be a different exhibition starting soon after. Psycho Buildings continues at the Hayward Gallery until 25 August. The U_Design City_Seoul exhibition continues at the KCC until 2 August, then is replaced by Vessels, ...
Posted on 01-Aug-08 | Filed in Monthly events updates | Comments (0) »

Suh Do-ho in Psycho Buildings

Psycho Buildings is a cosmopolitan collaboration in which artists from as far afield as Tokyo and Cuba “take on” architecture. Suh Do-ho (right) is one of the diaspora of Korean artists working in various countries around the world. Like Baik Nam June, Suh has chosen to make his home in ...
Posted on 31-Jul-08 | Filed in Event reports and reviews, Other exhibitions, Suh Do-ho | Comments Off

Jennifer Barclay: Meeting Mr Kim

Summersdale Publishers, 2008 Stern(10,g) Jennifer Barclay went to Seoul with her musician boyfriend eight years ago with no fixed agenda other than a desire to get away from her job. Fortunately, while in Korea she took advantage of her free time to explore parts of the country which are not necessarily on ...
Posted on 29-Jul-08 | Filed in Book reviews: Travel | Comments (1) »

The King Baeksu counterblast to Amnesty International

J Scott Burgeson, aka Scott Bug, aka King Baeksu, has been monitoring the protests in Seoul pretty much nightly since they started. He's been filing some detailed and extended eyewitness accounts over on his bulletin board. A week or so ago Amnesty International called for the "excessive force" used by South Korean police "against ...
Posted on 28-Jul-08 | Filed in Mad Cows | Comments (3) »

A veteran remembers

Today, 27 July, is the anniversary of the end of the Korean War in 1953 – a war in which millions died, and which only ended with a ceasefire, Korea remaining divided by a heavily guarded border for fifty-five years now. Jennifer Barclay marks the occasion. Peter Poole served in the ...
Posted on 27-Jul-08 | Filed in BKVA, Historical, Interviews and features | Comments (1) »

LKL featured in Euro Journal (유로저널)

I recently had a heavy soju and singing session with Jeon Sung-min (below right), who as well has being one half of a well-known kayageum / guitar duo and nephew of the founder of 해바라기 (Sunflower) is also a feature writer at the Euro Journal (유로저널), a Korean language weekly ...
Posted on 25-Jul-08 | Filed in What K-bloggers blog about | Comments (2) »

Saturday documentaries at the KCC

This Saturday there will be a screening of a short film entitled "The History of Gold" at the Korean Cultural Centre at 12pm, 2pm and 4pm. Each screening will last around 30 minutes. Silla dynasty gold earrings, 6th century AD. Diameter 3.5cm, Height 8.3cm. National Treasure No. 90, Seoul National Museum. Silla people ...
Posted on 24-Jul-08 | Filed in Events news, Film, Historical, KCCUK | Comments (1) »

The Gyopo PI

Leonard Chang: Fade to Clear Thomas Dunne Books, 2004 Stern(9,g) This is the third novel featuring the private investigator Allen Choice, a Korean American whose name indicates how far he has moved away from his Korean roots. He can’t speak the language, but he gets annoyed when people call him Chinese or Japanese. ...
Posted on 23-Jul-08 | Filed in Book reviews: Foreign literature | Comments (0) »

Meet Mister Kim. Now.

It's the publishing event of 2008. More hotly anticipated than the latest Harry Potter, and certainly more entertaining, Jennifer Barclay's Meeting Mr Kim, or How I went to Korea and learned to love kimchi, is in the shops now, priced at just £7.99. Jen's trip to Korea was actually back in ...
Posted on 22-Jul-08 | Filed in Books | Comments (0) »

LKL Celeb of the Month #3: Lee Dong Wook

Reviewing my website statistics one month I was surprised and delighted to find that there was so much interest in one of the artists I had written about. But then, when I saw that many googlers were not interested so much in his artwork as in seeing pictures of him ...
Posted on 21-Jul-08 | Filed in Celebs | Comments (1) »

The Dawn of Modern Korea

Andrei Lankov - The Dawn of Modern Korea EunHaeng NaMu publishing, 2008 Stern(7,g) This entertaining book has, paradoxically, taken me a devil of a long time to finish. That’s not because it’s difficult. It’s because it’s the opposite. The book is co-branded with a series of articles that Andrei Lankov has been writing for ...
Posted on 20-Jul-08 | Filed in Book reviews: History, Book reviews: other | Comments (0) »

Excess Baggage goes north of the DMZ

After last week's feature on South Korea with Jennifer Barclay, this week's Excess Baggage looked at North Korea with Robert Willoughby, author of the Bradt Guide to North Korea (right), and Doris Richards, an avid traveler. Willoughby's introduction to North Korea was as an English language examiner working for the British ...
Posted on 19-Jul-08 | Filed in DPRK, Travel | Comments (0) »

Official photos from the Dano festival

Justina Jang of the Korean Cultural Promotion Agency, the organisers of the Dano Festival in Trafalgar Square, has kindly sent me some of the official photos of the event, which I have now uploaded to Flickr. Some good photos of the very entertaining Noridan (above), some great crowd scenes which really ...
Posted on 17-Jul-08 | Filed in Dano 2008, Event reports and reviews, Pictures | Comments (0) »

Dae Hun Kwon in The Situation

There’s some sort of funky alternative event being held at the funky alternative end of Clapham on Thursday, to do with London Lit Plus: The Situation: Back to Basics July 17, 2008 7:00 pm to July 18, 2008 1:00 am. The Situation presents the dialectical unification of art and life: art / ...
Posted on 16-Jul-08 | Filed in Events news, Kwon Dae-hun, Other exhibitions | Comments (0) »

Photos from this year’s Mudfest

I just found some great photos over on Flickr, courtesy of pwalks. Here's a tiny taster, deliberately small so that you go visit the original yourself. Enjoy the full slideshow here.
Posted on 15-Jul-08 | Filed in Boryeong Mudfest, Travel | Comments (0) »

KFC – Korean Fried Chicken – and French Korean Links

Jennifer Barclay reports from the Korean Food Festival, held in the garden of the Fountain Pub, New Malden, Saturday 12 July 2008 By 10.30 on Saturday morning, I’d already done my best to introduce millions of BBC Radio Four listeners to the delights of kimchi. I’d been invited onto the travel show ...
Posted on 15-Jul-08 | Filed in Event reports and reviews, Food Festival 2008 | Comments (1) »

James Church: Hidden Moon

(Thomas Dunne Books, 2007) Stern(5,g) After A Corpse in the Koryo, the rip-roaring start to the Inspector O series, Hidden Moon comes as a bit of a disappointment. Maybe the freshness of the debut is a tough act to follow, but somehow the first time round Inspector O had more character. He's ...
Posted on 14-Jul-08 | Filed in Book reviews: Foreign literature | Comments (2) »

Boryeong Mud Festival 2008

The Festival is on around about now. The traffic on my two other posts about the festival is going through the roof. If any reader based in Korea is going along and feels so moved, feel free to send me in some photos and an article to tell everyone how great ...
Posted on 14-Jul-08 | Filed in Boryeong Mudfest, Travel | Comments (0) »