S. Korea: Is an Artist a Professional or a Day Laborer? (pinko artist's legacy)

Court battle between the late 'Koo Bonju' and Samsung Fire Insurance still raging
Escalating controversy over occupation, career history, retirement age

The controversy over the legal status of artists is heating up now that the entire art community has formed the committee to address this issue and are staging protests. It was triggered when Samsung Fire Insurance Co., the insurance carrier of a sculptor Koo Bonju, killed in an freak traffic accident in 2003, appealed the court verdict on the damage compensation suit by Mr. Koo's surviving family members.

Recently, the court ruled partially in favor of the plaintiff, based in essence on the Labor Ministry's Report on Labor Wage Statistics in 2003. The court ruled that the deceased had career history of 5~9 years, and his maximum working age is 65."

However, the insurance carrier appealed the ruling, arguing that the wage scale for calculating his estimated life-time income is incorrect. Instead, the insurance carrier argued that the wage scale of an urban day laborer should be applied, and his maximum working age should be also 60,since the deceased mainly constructed large symbolic structures for buildings.

As a rule, the court uses the wage scale of an urban day laborer when calculating the damage award for an accidental death of an unemployed. However, the deceased, 37 years old at the time of his death, was an artist in People's Art, who was quite active in his field. His works are displayed at 20 different places, including National Modern Art Museum, and he was invited 3 times to major museum exhibits

The reason people inside and outside the art community pay attention to this suit is that artists usually lack documentary evidences to prove his source of income, unless they are well-established artists, and their creative performance have little correlation to age or academic credentials. Thus, when damage compensation should be awarded due to accidents, they may not get their fair share.

Kwak Young-hwa, a Western-style painter, who went through a similar legal suit, said, "I ran into a similar controversy at the time, but, in the end, I was able to get my artist career history recognized. I hope that this controversy would be a catalyst to reach the social consensus for the legal status or assessing career history of an artist."

The committee to address this issue have been working out measures in the name of the entire art community, including staging one-man protest in front of the main building of Samsung Fire Insurance Co. at Ulchi-ro, Seoul, beginning July 4th.

US Defense Seceretary Donald Rumsfeld:

I was in South Korea last week. A woman I'm going to guess was 40, 45 obviously, [inaudible] Korean War 50 years ago said to me why should South Koreans go to -- Why should South Koreans go to Iraq and put their lives at risk and get wounded or killed?

I said that is a very good question. I said that I had just gotten an honors ceremony and a memorial for the Korean War and I looked on the wall and there was the name of a pal of mine from high school who had been killed the last day of the war. I said to her, I said you know, that question would have been a fair question for an American to ask 50 years ago. Why in the world should an American go all the way over to the Korean peninsula and get wounded or killed? I said look out the window. I'll tell you why. Look out there, what do you see? You see electricity, you see [energy], you see cars, you see an economic miracle. And at the demilitarized zone with a satellite shot at night you see success south of the DMZ and you see nothing but [silence] and blackness except for one pinpoint of light in Pyongyang. That's all you see from a satellite in the Korean peninsula north of the DMZ. People are starving. They've lowered the height requirement to get in the North Korean military down to 4'10" because people don't get enough nourishment. And the people going in the army in North Korea look like they're 12, 13, and 14 instead of 18, 19 and 20. It's a country that's out proliferating ballistic missile technology, threatening to sell fissile material.

And this relatively intelligent journalist who wasn't alive then obviously doesn't get it.

And also, people don't have long memories. Here's this perfectly intelligent woman who works in a free country for a free newspaper asking that question. All she had to do was look out the window and see the difference.

While I respect your opinion, and grant you may know more about the "People's Art" organization than I do, I questioned your characterization of the group as "pinko" just by name..
I therefore did a quick check to see what I could find out about the S. Korean "People's Art" organization..
I submit the following:

Since the South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee's assassination in 1979, Korean art has known two essential tendencies: "Minjung" or "People's Art," a minority movement of essentially figurative painting and sculpture, and what Korean critics lump together under the heading of "Modernism," an assortment of ephemeral groups that practiced avant-garde art and that, according to their perceptions of every tendency of the international art scene, hatched, saw the light of day, then disappeared.

For our purposes, Modernism means art that gave a low or zero priority to political intent. Minjung and Modernism also represent what in the West would be called left-wing and right-wing political tendencies. Strange as it may seem, most artists in Korea are conservative.

Throughout most of the 1980s Minjung artists struggled against first the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan (1980-88), then the presidency of former general Roh Tae-woo (1988-93). Minjung's activities were in stark contrast with those of the majority of Korean artists, including Modernism's tolerance, if not easy acceptance of, military-style government. With the election of Kim Young-sam, the first civilian Korean president in 1993, Minjung seemed partially vindicated. Then, with Kim Dae-jung's election in 1998, it seemed that Minjung, although now officially inactive, had won the day.

Kim Dae-jung is a former dissident twice condemned to death by dictators, Nobel Peace Prize winner and native of the Kwangju region, which was the site of the military regime's massacre of hundreds of people in 1980. Today, former Minjung personalities and loyalists are becoming some of the key players on the Korean art scene. Minjung ideals have indeed triumphed. Or have they? In fact, what are they?

Politically, Minjung and Modernism still form the two poles of the Korean art world psyche today, even though in ethical and esthetic terms both are discredited. What these two tendencies really represent are the lost opportunity to make ethical and esthetic choices that could have changed the Korean art world: for or against corrupt government; for or against the military dictatorship whose most heinous act was the crushing of the Kwangju Uprising in a bloodbath; and, more and more, for or against the former collaborators of dictators and military criminals - big business.

Further discussion of the political involvement / philosophies of the S. Korean Art community is discussed at length in the article, but I would note the plaintiff is Samsung Fire Insurance ..

A note from the same article concerning Samsung and "like" companies in S. Korea:

It is difficult to define, much less lead the ethical life in Korea. In the 1960s and '70s, the dictator Park Chung-hee established today'sKorean economy on the "chaebol," the giant corporation turned multinational conglomerate. There are five or six dominant ones in Korea today, all of which started and thrived in that seemingly golden economic age that is one part of Park's legacy. That has made more and more Koreans today turn a blind eye to the other part of it, his reign of terror that ended in his assassination in 1979 by the head of the notorious Korean CIA. In fact today, a majority of Koreans including the current president, who only want to remember Park's economic policies, would like to even build a museum to his glory.

The chaebols provide literally everything you need in life, from delivery room to deathbed. We're not speaking metaphorically. Samsung, which is the number one or two chaebol, manufactures everything from sugar, rice, frozen fish, paper and clothing, to cell phones, stereos,computers, TVs, refrigerators, cars, apartment buildings and skyscrapers. It sells insurance and securities, and owns department stores, luxury hotels and restaurants, theme parks, a professional baseball team, an art and design institute, a major newspaper and an online auction house You can be born in a Samsung hospital, die there and have your funeral there. A Samsung backhoe will dig your grave. This is one way to see the Korean chaebols.

Another way, the accepted way, is to see them as national heroes. In korean prime-time soap operas, most of the heroes are businessmen. In korea, businessmen lead the ethical life par excellence. But then so can artists--if they're willing (and they are) to act like businessmen. Nam June Paik, the "father of video," recently made a TV commercial for Samsung in which he shouts but one word: "Creativity, creativity,creativity!" His message is clear, that business and art are but one and the same. But are business ethics and art ethics one and the same?

In 1999 we presented ten videos called "The Samsung Project" during the screening program of Multimedia Art Asia Pacific in Brisbane, Australia. One of the Samsung curators (Samsung also has an art foundation and several museums) who had the misfortune of being there by accident walked up to one of us afterwards to ask "Why do you want to hurt the country?", the implication being that Samsung = Korea. It does.

My point in all this, is that I think you mis-characterize the "minjung" art group in this case as communistic.. pinko..
I believe that is a mistake..
I may be wrong, and if so, feel free to correct me..

However, I am an artist, and if I manage to "rake in" an average of $60,000 to $100,000 a year for my efforts, I surely don't want some Insurance agency telling my family they will pay off my policy based on wages I may have earned as a "day laborer"..
Any insurance agency that even hinted at such an arrangement would never get my business..

However, if what I am reading is correct, (and I believe it is ) then this artist probably had very little choice as to where he got his life insurance, and from what company..
He was obviously a very successfull artist..
His accomplishment should be recognized and his heirs should be paid accordingly..

Re #6

Minjung(mass) is a cover word for Inmin(people), which already has communist connotation, so they changed it to a different word.

S. Koraen Left fought against the Military regime alright, but not for the official reason they proclaimed, the democracy. Especially during 80's. These lefties in 80's are Juche Lefties. Their ideological homeland is N. Korea, not Soviet Union nor China. That is why they were able to survive after the fall of Eastern Europe. Their ideological homeland, however wretched it is, managed to hang on.

They spew all glowing rhetoric for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, and venomous diatribe against U.S. and S. Korean establishment. Their art works are thinly veiled versions of socialist realism. They are no different from what you can see in N. Korea or old Soviet Union. Suffocating, stale, shrill and stark.

I do not mind artists fighting over insurance policy of big corporation. I know this insurance is pulling cheap shot. I am just amused that pinko artists fight over insurance policy from capitalists. I do not has patience for high living pinko artists leeching on capitalist society they claimed to hate so much.

I don't have you fighting for your fair coverage. Actually, I could support your fight if you were in such a sitation described above.:-)

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