5 Korean Foods for Adventurous Eaters
Restaurant search apps tend to favor quantity over quality. Most mine the web to produce general results vouched for by random strangers who think Kimbap Heaven actually lives up to its name. The MangoPlate team set out to create a better restaurant app that’s not just a directory, but a useful tool that makes restaurant...
The Drunken Poets Lying Around Itaewon
Seoul-based creative Andy Knowlton’s current project ‘The Drunken Poets’ is a quirky take on poetry and art. The American multi-media artist searches for materials on the street – trash, basically – and turns the items into unusual-looking dolls which he then attaches a small bottle to. Within that bottle he places a poem and leaves...
Street Art and Steel Factories in Mullae, Seoul’s Art Village
To many, Seoul is a city that is stark and clean. Cloned, white high-rise apartment buildings are replacing old, demolished houses, and graffiti and street art is rare. Some neighborhoods have yet to be redeveloped, such as my neighborhood in northeast Seoul, comprised of 1970s style houses with kimchi pots and gardens on rooftops. Others are slowly being converted,...
Photoessay: Seoul’s Moving Metal Staircases
Anyone who has ever played Super Mario Brothers knows that taking any one of the many secret ‘pipelines’ is usually a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you find yourself in a brand new subterranean eco-system, filled with potential riches and the promise of advancing a great distance toward your ultimate goal of completing the...
Bbang in Hongdae
There’s no dearth of music venues in Hongdae. On any given night, there are hundreds of gigs taking place in the brightly lit, super-hip space between Hapjeong and Sinchon. To catch live music in Hongdae, you needn’t even cross a single threshold, with buskers occupying virtually every street corner or open space. Hongdae is Seoul’s...
The Tim Burton Exhibit: Horrifyingly Beautiful
The bizarre and creepy genius of artist, writer and director Tim Burton has worked its way around the globe from New York, Melbourne, Toronto, Los Angeles and Paris - to now South Korea, temporarily calling the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMa) home. The exhibit, which began Dec. 12 with Burton making his first trip ever to the ROK,...
Gyotaku: Printmaking With Dead Fish at Jankura Artspace
I was ten years old. Before following my classmates outside, I grabbed some sheets of white paper and a thick crayon—the homemade kind, comprised of old, leftover pieces of Crayola crayons, the colors swirled together, molded by cupcake wrappers. Outside, I pressed my paper against bark, leaves, bricks and chain-link fences, boldly rubbing my cupcake-shaped...
Seoul’s Simone Handbag Museum
A handbag museum with a collection of over 300 handbags that date from the 16th century to the 21st century opened this summer in Shinsa-dong, Seoul, South Korea. Judith Clark, V&A curator and London College of Fashion professor worked on this project for the last two years with a team of academics and curators. This...
