Qingdao Beach | Katharina Hesse

by Liz on April 28, 2013

in Art & Design

About a year ago, I was immensely lucky to interview photographer Katharina Hesse for AsianTalks, and speak to her in length of her work with publications like TIME and Newsweek. Her projects have taken her to Bangkok, around Asia, and recently to China’s northeast where she has photographed North Korean refugees who are fleeing the DPRK.

For those of you in New York curious to learn more about Hesse’s work, there is a special exhibit at the Open Society Institute that will be on view through December 13, 2013. Hesse, along with several other globally situated photojournalists will be featured as part of the Moving Walls exhibit, with works addressing a “variety of social justice and human rights issues.”


I’ve always been a huge fan of Hesse’s work, because even beyond weighty subject matter she fluidly captures the essence of a place, and particularly China. These black-and-white photographs of an urban beach in Qingdao, Shandong province, were taken in August 2010, which I imagine is the height of some kind of beach season in China. To me, they exemplify what Hesse does best.


Hesse never subtracts from what’s already there, but neither does she embellish her subjects. For the photographer and her lens, subjects, light and composition are all sufficiently captivating, an observation that humbles a more blase viewer into renewed appreciation.


It’s been argued in some circles Chinese contemporary art is defining China and inflecting Chinese reality as much as it is being affected by it.

Here — I’d argue Hesse’s photography does the same for a quotidian beach in Eastern China.

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South Korea’s Disgraced Power Structures

by Liz on February 6, 2013

in Books & Entertainment,Opinion

Democracy : demo from studio shelter on Vimeo.

What is democracy anyways?

According to this tongue-in-cheek “video game” by South Korean outfit, Studio Shelter, it’s just another platform for repression.

In under three minutes, a video simulating a MIDI game found in penny arcades takes you through 20th century Korean history, marked by protests, uprisings, and people power quelled by repressive South Korean governments.

There are some dictatorships along the way. Most of them didn’t end well.

But what’s interesting is the characterization of even democratically elected leaders as a rehash of old school repression. Outgoing president Lee Myung-Bak, and incoming leader Park Geun-Hye are all villains and lackeys of some sort.

It all sounds pretty terrible, if the medium itself wasn’t so entertaining, with scorekeeping tracking gains for The People vs. Brutal Leaders of Past, Present and Future.

Democracy according to this slice of entertainment (and representative of certain segments of South Korean public opinion), though, represents a problem.

With a leader going out and another coming in every five years (in a country where a second term is banned), we now have a society that is perpetually coping with a disgraced power structure every 35 dog years.

The devastating result?

All past leaders are despicable, and all future leaders will be, eventually.

And that represents a conundrum for a young democracy like South Korea’s.

(HT Co. Design)

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Cultural Symbols and Nationalism

by Liz on January 29, 2013

in Opinion

Source: Tumblr


With all the buzz about the clash of nationalisms in Asia today, I found my attention slowly turning towards less newsworthy but visually arresting items.

Like this captivating photograph of a Japanese geisha, whose finery, grace, and beauty underscores an important point about gender: because in Japan, even if men are politically powerful, it is Japanese women, or at least their symbolic significance, who carry the charged aura of their nation.

Nationalism in Asia, of course, and the visceral discourse that it naturally gives rise to, is an unending conversation mired in a bit of modern absurdity.

The long forgotten logic of East Asia, or even the subjective notion that it is somewhere ‘in the East’ didn’t really enter the national vocabulary until the mid- to late 19th century, a pivotal historical period that I’ve been studying independently.

It was around this time both destruction and creation took place, starting in Japan, then moving along the Korean peninsula and Qing China.

Which kind of brings us back to the geisha.

When I look at this picture, I see a powerfully seductive image of not an actual woman, but rather an abstraction of femininity that may be a paragon of Japanese culture. (And please do correct me if I am wrong.)

But perhaps on a more subversive level, I also see an expression and vision of the Japanese nation that binds the collective imagination. It stays on, it lingers. We remember Japan because we remember the geisha.

And it’s images like these, or Korean pop music, or even the Beijing Olympics, that posits a near-superficial cultural unity or a source of pride for an East Asian national.

What we forget, though, is that limiting Asian identities to the cultural-turned-national symbol, in a way, also creates paradoxical dependencies on these potent concepts that now differentiate one population from another.

They fuel the nationalisms that make the headlines, and encourages the hostilities we see today.

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Seoul’s Gwangjang Market

by Liz on January 25, 2013

in Food,Travel


It was a chilly day when I visited Gwangjang Sijang in Seoul, but the subzero temperatures didn’t seem to bother some of Korea’s hardiest street stall entrepreneurs.

Most of them, nearly all women, were too preoccupied with pancakes on the griddle, or cauldrons filled with porridge.


Maybe it was because it was a Saturday, but the food stalls from north to south were packed! Which, to me at least, came as a surprise, because I’m quite familiar with this market.

My maternal grandmother fled North Korea in the late 1940s with two little girls (one of them, my mother). After the Korean War she began selling fabrics at one of the above-level floors of Gwangjang. She worked there, I believe, for five decades, and we would visit her. She would awake at 4AM, so this was the only way we’d actually see her during the day.

On our way home, we’d sometimes stop at one of the many stalls serving Sundae (Korean blood sausage), kimbap or tteokbokki.


But up until recently, there were never too many people at this market largely dominated by humble migrants from Hamgyeong and Pyongan provinces.

All that’s changed now, and it seems TV media, both foreign and domestic, may have had something to do with Gwangjang’s status as the new, hip place to be.


It’s interesting to note food in Korea, even the most ordinary everyday stuff, is fetishized.

Koreans used to eat to live. Nowadays, it’s safe to say, they live to eat.

The Korean market has always been a traditional feminine domain. Women seem to be doing all the money-making, and the day I went certainly proved this point.

But with a new woman president at the helm in South Korea, perhaps the political power-making will be in the hands of women as well.


So here’s to a new year, new pancakes on the griddle, and more importantly, to our appetite.

Gwangjang Market is located at 6-1 Yeji-dong, near Jongno-5(o)-ga station, Line 1, exit 8.

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North Korea Talks Consumer Slaves

by Liz on November 23, 2012

in Books & Entertainment,Opinion

Liu Bolin, Hiding in the City No. 83, 2009, Photograph, 47 1/4 × 47 1/4 inches. Courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art.

Today is Black Friday.

In the United States, this is a chance for citizens to prove their financial worth by shopping for things they don’t really need. Or, go into debt trying to accomplish this bizarre feat.

Through some Foucauldian coup of governmentality, we now believe a citizen isn’t really a citizen unless that citizen is also a consumer.

This isn’t just the case in the West — to an even greater degree this holds true in the capitalist domains of East Asia.

You could say I write this out of cynicism, but in some ways, though, the ceaseless brainwashing campaign that has people running, pushing, and trampling on each other for a lampshade or a video game console has been so successful, that by and large we don’t even take its effects into scrutiny. We take them for granted.

I spotted this “bizarre North Korean documentary” on Laughing Squid in August. But both times I’ve found nothing really bizarre about it, only some interesting Marxist perspectives about class, capitalism, and the manufacturing of propaganda so frighteningly effective it is, in many ways, impossible to dismantle.

One interesting example loops the creation of the ‘consumer slave’ (i.e. us) to the raising of funds/taxes that then go onto finance wars in the Middle East that damages thousands of innocent lives in these countries. Another points out the creation of the vague, empty slogan, something everyone can rally around. Everyone, that is, who are consumers.

The origins of the documentary are unclear. The YouTube user who uploaded the video claims it was handed down from North Koreans disguised as defectors. But my guess is it might even be a creation of South Korean producers with very clever North Korean touch-ups.

In the end, capitalism isn’t ugly because it creates armies of slave labor that stamp out t-shirts for Walmart that its wearers don’t really need. Capitalism is ugly, not to mention a bit scary, because it is a source of fuel for ongoing wars.

It’s the building of an empire that can’t be dismantled. Imperialism without a face.

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The Last Prince Of Korea

October 31, 2012

Many people don’t know this — but Korea’s royal family was guaranteed into the mid-twentieth century to regain their role as monarchs if Korea was ever liberated from Japanese colonial rule. For Korea’s royals, it was only a matter of time. The end of the second World War and the near immediate effect of the [...]

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NYCAS 2012

October 12, 2012

New York state is not yet a hotbed of Asian Studies, but there are signs it already rivals Tokyo and Hong Kong. This was one consensus at the annual New York Conference on Asian Studies at SUNY New Paltz, the largest regional academic conference of the Association of Asian Studies. Over the course of two [...]

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Laowai-Foreigner | Kraine Gallery

September 21, 2012

What’s the latest connection between China and New York? After visiting the ‘Laowai-Foreigner’ exhibit at Kraine Gallery in the East Village, the answer was pretty clear. It’s art. Curated by Cory Dixon of the New York Academy of Art, the tiny corridor nestled on the second floor of a walk-up building on East 4th street [...]

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Meanwhile In Tibet

September 10, 2012

I received this Tibetan parable in my inbox. It’s from Ji Hyang Sunim who’s the head of the Wellesley Buddhist Community. Such a great morning read. Or any time of the day. There was a great teacher in the land of Tibet named Milarepa, He had a very bright, promising woman student named Paldabum. She [...]

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Portraits in Taiwan | Brenda Zlamany

August 2, 2012

The human gaze is a powerful thing. I realized this the other day as I was watching a video featuring MIT Professor Sherry Turkle as she spoke of the emergence of sociable robots. These imitators look you in the eye, gesture in friendship, and practice face recognition, that last piece of trivial technology now the [...]

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