About the Exhibit

I came to Korea by way of Monterey, California, where I drove in 1991 to take a summer course in Russian. There I met Min-Myn Jung, who had flown in the opposite direction to earn a Russian studies MA. Over the next couple of years I visited her at home in Seoul, we reunited in Moscow, and we were married in East Hampton. We spend several weeks each year in Korea with our three children, visiting family and exploring the country by car or train. Last summer we traveled with a friend who is a New York-based Buddhist monk. She introduced us into the temple complexes you see in some of these photos.

        Korea is an enchanting and paradoxical land, at once surpassingly ancient and cutting-edge modern, with a tragic history, a proud culture, and the most Internet connectivity anywhere. It is a small and mountainous country (if you could smooth it out, they say, it would be huge) of great natural beauty and colossal urban development. Cities expand between mountains, and where the high-rises stop, rice paddies and greenhouses begin. The mountainsides are steep, seldom built upon except by temple monks who fled the towns centuries ago to escape persecution by Confucians.

        Some notes on the pictures: Bukchon is an old neighborhood of Seoul, next to a royal palace, where many of the traditional houses called hanok still survive. It has become very chic, with many cafes and boutiques, not to mention the Owl Museum.

        Coexartium is part of a maze of convention centers, theaters, hotels, shops, and restaurants in a new area of the city south of the Han River. The red poster spells out, in the Korean writing system called Hangul, the English words “Chorus Line.” Hangul is arguably the world’s most logical alphabet—and the only one designed by a committee, which King Sejong appointed in the 16^th century. Aiming to widen literacy, which was limited until that time by the years of study it took to master Chinese ideograms, Sejong told the scholars to devise a set of phonetic letters “that a wise man can learn in a day, and a fool in a week.”

        On our way south last summer to stay at temples, we spent a day at Ocean World, a vast water park constructed in a pastiche of ancient Egyptian architecture with pyramids, obelisks, and spouting statuary: surreal in the extreme, and great fun.

        Seoul is 35 miles from what is often called the world’s most dangerous border: the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. Strewn with land mines and barbed wire, this swath of mountainous territory, 160 miles from west to east and three miles north-south, is paradoxically—by dint of its hostility to human intrusion—a de facto nature preserve, abounding in birds and plants that have become rare or extinct elsewhere on the peninsula. Almost nothing has been built there since the Korean War ended in 1953, and a movement is afoot to keep it that way as a “Peace Park,” if and when the two Koreas reunify. In one photo here you see a view north across the DMZ where it comes to an end at the East Sea.

        Photography is a passion I pursued as a student, spending innumerable hours at the alchemy of the darkroom, and have returned to from time to time since. Recently I’ve grown increasingly fascinated with the possibilities of digital processing and printing. I took most of these pictures in 2010 with a Leica M9 digital camera, one in 2006 with an Epson RD-1, and the three earliest with film cameras, scanning the negatives this year into digital. I’ve adjusted them in Adobe Lightroom and printed them on Epson Velvet or (the two largest) UltraSmooth fine art paper, using an Epson inkjet machine. Web galleries of these and other photos of mine are at www.nabigallery.com.

—Val Schaffner

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