Barun Roy: The other Seoul that drives Korea

ASIA FILE

When the Vienna Philharmonic performed in Seoul last February under the renowned Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa at the Sejong Centre for the Performing Arts, tickets cost $ 214 or more.

But Koreans didn't mind, as they didn't when Zubin Mehta came to town with the same orchestra last year. The La Scala Philharmonic is due in September and tickets won't be any cheaper. Neither would they when the New York Philharmonic goes on stage in October.

Culture is a big thing with the Koreans and they don't mind the cost when big names come calling. With some of the finest concert halls and art museums in Asia, Seoul is rapidly gaining reputation as a cultural city.

Right now, a major Marc Chagall show of 120 of his drawings, paintings and panel works is on at the Seoul Museum of Art and over 100,000 people had already seen it in the first three weeks of its opening on July 15.

Crowds filled the hall when the Warsaw Philharmonic performed last month. Moscow's famous Obraztsov Puppet Theatre has launched a three-part show at the HoAm Art Hall in downtown Seoul that goes on till October 23. At the Seoul Arts Centre (SAC), a comprehensive, $ 2 billion cultural complex run by the government, the calendar is pretty tight all the way through June 2005.

There aren't many Asian capitals that are so culturally driven or where the cultural infrastructure is so well developed and extensive.

Ever since the famous Whitney Biennial exhibition came to Seoul in 1993, multiculturism has swept the Korean scene and new museums, galleries and concert halls have come to be established to host shows and performances from all over the world.

In design, technology, and equipment, these museums and concert halls are among the best one can get anywhere.

SAC, for example, is so good that foreign performers come to Korea because of it. There's no "dead" corner in its Concert Hall, big enough to seat 2,600 people, and the sound is so clear that, as soprano Gundule Janowitz said, "you could even hear a mouse laugh." The Opera Theatre has 2,300 audience seats, a 660 square metre main stage, and a three-level orchestra pit that's good for 100 people.

SAC also includes a Music House, a Calligraphy Museum, an arts library, and an art museum, the Hangaram, making it perhaps the most comprehensive cultural and artistic complex in the whole of Asia. Sprawling over an area of 15,434 square metres, Hangaram is the largest arts museum in Seoul, fully temperature and humidity controlled, and its galleries are big enough to mount even the gigantic-scale paintings of western artists.

But Hangaram is not an exception. Seoul offers an array of exhibition spaces, both large and small, that's truly amazing. The Kumho Museum of Art is still talked about for its Miro exhibition in September 1997. The Sonje Gallery is known for its penchant for the works of cutting-edge artists. At the Sung-Kok Art Museum's spacious sculpture garden, nature and contemporary art find an extraordinary mix. The National Museum of Contemporary Art, with a Guggenheim-like central ramp core that resembles a torch, is Seoul's most beautiful, set in the city's Grand Park and devoted to 20th century experimental art.

What makes South Korea's obsession with culture so unique is that the private sector shares it as deeply as does the government.

In fact, Korea's leading corporations got together in 1994 and formed a business council specifically for the arts so as to deepen their interaction with the artistic community.

Every year, the council picks a company that's judged to have done the most for the arts and honours it in public.

Last May, in a further effort to promote the arts, Korean lawmakers initiated a Bill that would allow private corporations to buy art directly under company accounts and show it as company asset to receive tax breaks. It isn't the case now.

Two other things will indicate how serious the government is about art and culture.

A 1,200-seat tent theatre, with complete stage and sound systems, will make its debut on September 10 in northern Seoul and then travel around in the area so that people there don't have to make long trips to watch a show in the city.

And SAC has just engaged a French architect, David-Pierre Jalicon, to head a $ 30-billion project that will not only transform an old-fashioned opera house into a high-tech musical theatre by 2006, but also turn the neighbouring Mt. Wumyeon area into a multi-function cultural complex.

Changes like these make a city special, something that people can identify with and feel proud about. Much like the way Parisians feel about Paris, or the world feels about Paris. There's no denying that Seoul has come a long way to becoming a global cultural stop.