The New Yorker has a very interesting essay up on the work of the artist Oh U-Am, whose oeuvre focuses upon the rapid transition — in the space of a single extended generation — of his native Korea from war-ruined privation to extraordinarily advanced material prosperity. (Korea coverage in general, and not just in The New Yorker, seems to have improved lately — I’m not quite sure why — so check out also the E. Tammy Kim piece on US-ROK wargames in the same publication.) The piece is well worth your time, not least because Oh’s life and background are extraordinary. One pull suffices:

“I remember kids throwing rocks at the North Korea People’s Army and climbing up on tanks,” [Oh] explained. During the Korean War, Oh’s mother had been kidnapped and killed for serving food to soldiers on the wrong side of the civil conflict. “When I became an orphan, I suffered a great trauma,” he said, motioning to his stomach. He and his two brothers shuffled from place to place, and he managed to attend only elementary school. After the war, he enlisted in the South Korean Marine Corps (“I went because I was getting beat up. I wanted to be feared”), then found work as a resident handyman in a nunnery near Busan. For the next three decades, he drove the nuns around town and maintained the heating system and the garden. “In the boiler room”—where there was surplus enamel paint and wood boards—“sometimes I didn’t have a lot to do, so I began to paint,” he told me.

The artist’s tale reminded me of the 2004 Korean film — released long before Korean cinema could bank on a shot at an American audience, and therefore not well known — Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War, which focuses upon the based-on-thousands-of-true-stories tale of two brothers in the Korean War. Inevitably, one of them fights for the Communists, and the other for the republic — and just as inevitably, the culminating scene has them meet on the battlefield. I’m not giving anything away with the revelation: good cinema is characterized by excellent process, in my view, rather than outcomes, and Taegukgi is a good in exactly this vein. The scene where the Southern brother’s unit, enraged by a Communist massacre of villagers, goes on a revenge hunt will suffice to illustrate the whole. 

The Korean War in general doesn’t get the American attention it deserves, in either popular memory or scholarship. Taegukgi rectifies that to an extent, in communicating the intra-communal savagery of it, and — in its bookended opening and closing, which I will not spoil here — in showing the profound disconnect from that era and ours. The war was massive in ways Americans don’t quite grasp. The United States lost about thirty-six thousand in battle in that war, expanded to about fifty-four thousand altogether. The Koreans, on the other hand, lost about three million — a literal decimation of North and South alike, in a total peninsular population (in 1950) of just over thirty million. One in ten of everyone dead: it’s nearly impossible to imagine anything like it, including for a modern, post-democratic-opening Korean.