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In most famous museums overseas, the sections dedicated to Korean art and culture are much smaller than the sections for China and Japan. Often they don't even have a proper guidebook, and if there is one it usually contains a lot of wrong information. While many Koreans have learned this but done nothing about it, a graduate student has taken the initiative in improving the situation. The man is Seo Kyoung-duk, a doctoral candidate at Korea University.
The 33-year-old Seo signed a contract on Nov. 15 with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., to equip the museum's Korea Gallery with 10,000 copies of a guidebook. The museum will produce the guidebook, and Korean smartcard company GK Power will pick up the costs of US$50,000.
Last year Seo surprised the public by getting New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art to provide Korean guide services. For the contract with the Smithsonian museum, he flew to Washington in August to meet the exhibit's curator Paul Michael Taylor. In the meeting, he showed his deep knowledge of the museum, which he had studied for two months by memorizing 1,000 pages of information he downloaded from the Internet and reading some 20 books.
"The curator told me how impressed he was that an ordinary individual could do a thing like this," Seo said. "I initially planned to produce explanation pamphlets, but the curator suggested producing guidebooks." Opened in June, the Korea Gallery displays some 200 objects such as half-moon shaped swords, calligraphy works and wooden furniture.
Seo describes himself as a "Korean PR expert." In 2005, when Korea was arguing with Japan over control of the Dokdo Islets, he ran an advertisement at his own expense in the New York Times that asserted that the islands belong to Korea. In April of this year he placed an ad in the Washington Post on the plight of the Japanese Army's former sex slaves. Having seen the ad, an Asian history professor at Columbia University contacted Seo to ask permission to cite his efforts in a study.
Seo's passionate patriotism has sometimes put him in danger, as he claims to have received several threatening phone calls from Japanese. "I was scared, but that couldn't stop me," he said. The next issue he plans to take on is China's Northeast Project, an attempt by China to co-opt ancient Korean history as its own. "I'm going to start a project to counter China's Northeast Project. No matter what, Koguryo is part of Korean history," Seo said.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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