Artists put past 60 years into context

Alfred 23 Harth's "Give Chance a Peace" / Courtesy of the artist

The Korean War Armistice was a historic end to three years of bloody combat. One need only visit the fortified border or talk to a person separated from a loved one to know how deeply the moment still reverberates.

But as years pass, memories fade.

Artists play a key role in helping society understand the past and keeping history alive. In this spirit, we asked artists and writers from diverse backgrounds to reflect on the 60th anniversary of the armistice, and what it means for us today. ― ED.

Maija Rhee Devine, writer

Maija Rhee Devine

Maija Rhee Devine is the author of "The Voices of Heaven," a novel published this year by Seoul Selection.

The end of the Korean War — these words send chills down my spine and a hot surge to my eyes. I was ten years old when the Armistice was signed. To me, it only meant going home from a rented thatch-roofed room in Masan, near Busan, to a tile-roofed home in Seoul. From brooks and rice paddies to a neighborhood near the East Gate lined with houses, front gates gold with brass knockers.

In 1965, I left for "meeguk," a beautiful country, the United States of America, to do graduate work, leaving behind the American and U.N. forces to help the South Korean military to defend my country against another war. I left behind the G.I.s who had handed out Snickers bars and Wriggly's Chewing Gum. And I left my older brother who had fought alongside General MacArthur during the 1950 Incheon Landing.

At 17, he became the equivalent of Radar in the TV series, "M*A*S*H*." As part of the efforts to clear the way for the Landing, South Korean Navy and Marines subdued North Korean Communists on Youngheung Island. When he and the Marines captured the hill, they planted the U.N. and Korean flags, after which he returned to his U.S. Patrol Craft 703, one of the General's 260-vessel fleet, to work his night shift.

But while he was at work, the tide went out, making it possible for the Communists to charge across the strait and annihilate the Marines my brother had fought with—among them the fourteen soldiers, to whom he had become like blood brothers.

For the next 60 years, he carried out his personal inquisition: Why was he saved? What could he do with his life to make up for the 14 lost on that island? Whenever a memorial service was held for these men, he attended it the day before, when no one was around. He could not bear to face the parents who had lost their sons. One consolation was that he had participated in the Inchon Landing.

Up until his passing away in December of 2012, he regularly visited the General's 16-foot bronze statue standing on a pedestal in Inchon's Freedom Park. He took a jug of "makgeolli" rice wine, poured a cup for the General and one for himself. And he talked to the General.

When a national election approached, he asked him to guide the voters so that the right person for the country would be elected. When a grandchild was expected, he shared that news with him, too. After my brother drank his wine, he took a walk around the meticulously maintained park. By the time he returned to say goodbye to General MacArthur until next time and wish him well, the General's cup was always empty. Obviously, he enjoyed the wine.

Krys Lee

Krys Lee, writer

Krys Lee is a Seoul-based writer. Her first book, "Drifting House," was shortlisted for the BBC International Story Prize and winner of the Story Prize Spotlight Award. Her website is www.kryslee.com.

The Korean War never officially ended, though it's easy to forget when surrounded by the 24 hour cafes and bars of the Hongik University area in Seoul. But for North Koreans who fled their homes and made the dangerous multiple crossings into South Korea, the war exists in the present tense.

The border between North and South Korea has kept people out, and kept others in, for nearly six decades after the war that never officially ended, but merely came to a temporary halt with the Korean Armistice.

This 38th parallel on maps appears as a mere crooked line, a temporary afterthought. A closer gaze reveals an uncomfortable sight that has become alarmingly, and numbingly, familiar: soldiers lined up on both sides of the heavily guarded Joint Security Area.

The narrative of a country divided is so familiar to Koreans that an entire literary genre exists for it in Korea called "bundan munhak," or a divided country literature. The larger narrative of a country interrupted, at least on the surface, is of a divisively split nation.

But the line is not as pristine as the map makes it out to be, just as the war that ended but never ended is more complicated and mysterious than the national narratives that both countries construct around it.

Within the forbidding territory dividing the North and South lies an untouched, magical land of fraught beauty of land mines riddling some of the most pristine natural scenery in East Asia. A select group of South Koreans with ancestral claims to the terrain are still allowed to farm within the fringes of this territory; North Korean soldiers are even said to occasionally wander in the one South Korean farming village that is still located within these ostensibly unpopulated boundaries.

There are others borders, other possibilities. Other narratives further disrupt the illusion of clean divisions.

The border between North Korea and China is traditionally porous. The Chinese-Koreans (called Joseon-jok in the South) just across the border once crossed the Tumen River in great numbers during the Cultural Revolution that left China in chaos and the less fortunate members of its population in hunger and need.

The North Koreans just across the river fed and sheltered them. Some Chinese-Koreans left after the political turbulence died down; others left behind new families and relatives. In this way, the border has always been fluid, with relatives living on both sides of the river. In the nineties, North Koreans who left during the devastating famine were sheltered by those across the river until their numbers became too many and local fatigue set in. Charity and hospitality reached its limits.

Today, the crossing is even more trepidatious as ever, and for those crossing, the ghost of the Korean War is still very present. The war that never ended keeps them locked up in a country afraid of exposure. Meanwhile, the international world awaits, anticipates, and dreads, the nation's internal collapse that will officially end the war.

The South fears the inevitable flood of refugees and the economic tsunami. For them, the war cannot end just yet. For the North, intent on its political survival, the war must not end. In the meantime, families stay separated for sixty years. Border crossers risk and suffer terrible punishment. The war, for them, has never ended.

Kim Cheol-woong, pianist

Kim Cheol-woong is a North Korean-born pianist. After studying at the Pyongyang Music and Dance Institute, he defected to the South in 2003 and has since performed on stages such as Carnegie Hall in New York.

I think we can attach sentimental meaning to the 60th anniversary of the armistice agreement. People who were born that year are now senior citizens. Enough time has passed to allow the pain of the war to fade a little bit. The two Koreas are now better positioned to narrow their misunderstanding.

Kim Cheol-woong

Like every other Korean, I am waiting for the day when old wounds will heal and the armistice agreement will convert into a peace treaty. And I hope this progress in history will be celebrated with music.

Hopefully, I will be able to go back to North Korea someday and hold a solo concert in front of the people of my birth country. I want to plan joint musical events participated by both South Koreans and North Koreans. I want to hold classical music contests for young South Koreans and North Koreans. There are a lot of things I want to do.

All this would require a peace treaty that will allow civilians of both countries to visit each other and interact. I hope by the 70th anniversary of July 27, 1953, we will no longer be remembering an armistice, but celebrating a young peace agreement.

If I had to pick a work in music that matches well with the contemporary history of the Korean Peninsula, I think it would be Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6. The music has the power to touch dark and painful memories, but also suggests a future ray of light.

The armistice anniversary has a very different meaning in North Korea compared to how it's remembered in South Korea.

There, July 27 is celebrated as the day when North Korea won the war and lavish festivals combining music and performing arts are staged to mark the occasion. Of course, the North Korean leadership intends to use these celebrations to drum up patriotic fervor among its people and remind them the enemy is still at the door.

Here in the South, it seems that things couldn't be more different. I am not sure that the majority of under-30 South Koreans can actually explain what the armistice agreement was about.

Kim Song-hwan

Gobau and friends, Kim's
most famous characters

Kim Song-hwan, political cartoonist

Kim Song-hwan has been one of the country's most influential political cartoonists. He published his works at major newspapers like Dong-A Ilbo, Chosun Ilbo and Munhwa Ilbo for 50 years before retiring in 2000.

The day the armistice agreement was announced 60 years ago, students of the Seoul's Jinmyung Women's High School bolted out of their classrooms and marched all the way to the streets of Gwanghwamun in protest.

Their message was clear: they wanted the Korean and allied forces to further progress up north and unify the peninsula. An armistice to halt the war and separate the two Koreas clearly was a disappointing outcome for them. Of course, those hopes were not realistic, not with Communist China involved in the war.

At the time, I was a young cartoonist working for a weekly propaganda magazine for the Korean army then headquartered in Daegu. It was a busy job as I had to do the layout, draw cartoons and pick the pictures for a 30-page magazine.

I wasn't a soldier, but just a cartoonist hired by soldiers. Still, I felt privileged that I was recording a very significant moment in history through my work. For the slew of events that happened back then, it's the protest of high school students that I remember the most.

Throughout my career, I was able to draw cartoons of some of the most important moments in South Korea's contemporary history.

There was the April 19 Revolution that took out the autocracy of our first president, Syngman Rhee. And of course, there were a lot of dramatic events since then.

It hasn't always been easy drawing political cartoons. The Rhee government fined me for one of my cartoons, which they claimed "insulted" the President.

However, my case somehow became famous and added to the mounting public anger against the Rhee government, later toppled by a popular uprising. As a cartoonist, I guess that's a proud thing to remember.

It has been six decades since the armistice and we should be talking about a peace process by now. Of course, considering the lopsided economic development between the two Koreas, it will be hard to expect the North Koreans to be willing at the negotiating table. Still, I hope the two Koreas will move in the right direction little by little.

Alfred 23 Harth

Alfred 23 Harth, artist

Alfred 23 Harth is a Korea-based, German musician and artist currently participating in the "Real DMZ Project" at Artsonje Center.

It was in 2000 when I first visited the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), then just as a tourist. It was a rainy afternoon and the DMZ was dark and grey. This was a time when the place didn't have the leisure facilities for travelers it does now.

It's a totally different picture these days of course. The areas near Imjingak in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, which is where my studio is located, and Cheorwon, Gangwon Province, are buzzing with activity.

There are restaurants, there are regular festivals and bikers ride along neatly-paved bicycle roads. I remember when the same areas that are so fun and friendly today were looking dangerous and threatening, which wasn't such a long time ago. I was reminded of the depressing old border between East and West Germany in those days.

In the earlier part of the 1980s, there weren't many people in East or West Germany feeling that dramatic changes were about to come. The falling of the Iron Curtain felt sudden as that curtain for the most part since the end of World War II felt like a permanent institution to us.

The situation in the Korean Peninsula now is more or less the same as it was in Germany during the 80s. Many people talk about unification and South Korea even has a ministry dedicated to it. But talk has been talk and there has been a paucity of approaches aimed at real results. Change of course could come quickly and unexpectedly.

Of course, there are also many differences between the conditions influencing the Korean Peninsula now and what things were in Europe before the German unification. I have the impression that neighboring Asian nations like Japan and China don't want dramatic changes to the Korean Peninsula. Neither does the United States.

As an artist, I interpret the DMZ as a Cold War relic of Korea, a political playground where China and U.S. are the main players. The current location of my studio is close to the DMZ, but also where Seoul is accessible. I also learned about the history of the DMZ and became fascinated about it.

My installation at Artsonje, "Dugout," reflects my impression of the DMZ during my visits as well as the areas around my studio since I first settled here in 2007. I tried to take threatening army objects and turned them into something artistic and playful.

"Give Chance a Peace" is a piece made of spectacles in 1988 and the title is a turnaround of John Lennon's famous saying "Give peace a chance." And they stand on a copy of the Armistice Agreement from 60 years ago, which I added for this exhibition.

In some student drawings I found at an elementary school near the DMZ, one of them says "peace is priceless." Geographically, these children are much closer to danger than other Koreans. They reminded me of my own childhood in Germany where my family lived near a missile base. If you live close to potential danger, it influences you in some way. If I didn't decide that my studio should be near the DMZ, maybe I wouldn't be participating in the current project.