Literary texts are not background to cinema. They are the inherited form of thought that every image carries inside it. Essays on poetry, prose, translation, and the classical traditions that persist — transformed — long after their moment has passed.
Kim Jeong-hui(金正喜) An Introduction to the First Complete English Translation of Korea’s Greatest Scholar-Artist This is the series introduction to Kim Jeong-hui: The Complete Poems, a full English translation of the poetry contained in Volumes 9 and 10 of the Wandang Jeonjip (완당전집 / 阮堂全集), the collected works of Kim Jeong-hui (1786–1856). The series comprises … Read more
Kim Jeong-hui(金正喜) How Chusa Turned Classical Chinese Poetry into a Literature of Restraint and Exile There is a particular kind of literary experience that arrives not as feeling but as pressure. You read a poem and nothing in it announces itself as painful. The diction is formal, the images precise, the classical references correctly placed. … Read more
Kim Jeong-hui(金正喜) A Complete Introduction to Korea’s Most Revolutionary Scholar-Artist Most people who encounter the name Kim Jeong-hui come to it sideways — through a reproduction of Sehan-do in a museum catalogue, through a fragment of his calligraphy on a gallery wall, through a footnote in a book about East Asian art that trails off … Read more
The moon in Li Bai’s poetry observes human life without judgment or urgency. How Tang China’s Most Radical Voice Turned Impermanence, Wine, and the Moon Into a Philosophy That Still Resonates a Thousand Years Later There is a legend about how Li Bai died. Drunk on a boat one night, he leaned over the side … Read more
National Treasure No. 180, Kim Jeong-hui, “Sehando” (歲寒圖), 1844 Source: National Museum of Korea How Korea’s Most Radical Calligrapher Turned Exile Into an Aesthetic Philosophy the West Wouldn’t Discover for Another Century There is a moment, standing before a work of calligraphy by Kim Jeong-hui, when the eye refuses to settle. The strokes do not … Read more