Museums and Hip Hop

What in the world do museums and hip hop have to do with each other? Well, my weekend, for starters...

My weekends in Seoul fall into two categories - their are either boring, uneventful and consist mostly of time spend resting in my apartment, or they are so busy and social that they leave me feeling like I need another day just to recover before going back to work. This weekend was one of the latter. I came home from work on Friday night feeling dejected, exhausted, self critical, and generally not happy with the world. Thankfully, I woke up on Saturday morning feeling like a new person, and the last two days have really made me feel human again. It's not that I dislike my job, I just enjoy the weekends so much more.

On Saturday I finally made it out to the Seoul National Museum, which only opened a few months ago. I have been told that it is the largest museum in Asia. Like the Lourve in Paris, the Seoul National Museum really merits several visits, at least if you want to do it justice. It has three gigantic floors plus a special exhibit, and as with most public places in Korea, it's very very crowded. Even with the crowds though, it is a very impressing museum, with sufficient information about most of the pieces to make it a good educational expierence. The artifacts are well chosen and nicely displayed, and the building itself is beautifully designed; very clean, modern and stark, yet grandios at the same time.

My museum buddy for the day was Jacqueline, a friend I met through Matt. She is a married lawyer from Seattle who is only here for three months. At this point, she only has two weeks left in Seoul, which is too bad, because she and I get along quite well. After munching on some meat on a stick from the vendors outside, we headed in with lofty ambitions to see as much as we could, but ended up pooping out after only doing one floor. Like I said, this place is HUGE. It took us over 2 hours to do only one floor. I love museums, but after a few hours in any museum, I usually hit a wall where I just can't take any more and have to go. So I predict I will make it back to the Seoul National Museum at least two more times.


The part we did see contained art from Indonesia, Japan, central Asia, and of course Korea. These are some of the things I saw.








The most impressive part would have to be the Buddha room, which held 7 or so very large Buddha statues of various styles.

A tour group in the Buddha Room.

My favorite Buddha head; I just love the expression.A traditional Buddhist Temple Bell

A cute little girl in front of a very cool gong.

After leaving the museum, we ate a nice dinner at the wonderful Toque Bistro, an Italian restaurant that Matt discovered awhile back. Dinner at the Bistro is never a disappointment, because every dish on the menu is outstanding. The highlight of this meal was the coffee bread pudding -- I'm not a fan of bread pudding, but this stuff was decadent. We left feeling happy full and revived, and parted ways for bit to change into our "evening clothes."

After spending the day soaking the culture and beauty of historical artifacts and fine art at the largest musuem in Asia, what does one do in the evening. Well, go dancing, of course! We joined up with Taejin (formerly refered to as Whitney) and Stephen and headed out to Hongdae to go dancing. Hongdae is one of the most popular night life spots in Seoul, chock full of trendy stores, bars and dance clubs. It used to be mostly Koreans only, but the foreigners are slowly "discovering" it. In fact, many clubs have signs saying "No GI's," because the military guys have a reputation for starting fights. And no offense to the any of them, but I like it much better like that.

Dancing was a great release after a long work week. I realized that for the past three years, I haven't really done much dancing, and I missed it alot. And dancing at Korean clubs is nice because Korean guys are not "predatory;" they will dance with you, but they are generally not aggressive or creepy, and for the most part are very respectful. As a female, this makes the club scene a whole lot more tolerable. The club we went to was called M2, one of the more popular dance places in Hongdae. It played mostly hip-hop, and I have to admit I am not a huge fan of of mainstream, MTV hiphop. There are a few songs that get me going, but for the most part it does not inspire me. Give me techno or salsa anyday! But I had a great time nonetheless.

And what does one do after a night out dancing at the clubs? Go to another museum of course! Today Jacqueline and I headed out to a place called the Leeum, which houses the personal collection of the Samsung family, one of the richest families in Korea. (No pics of this one, photos were not allowed anywhere inside.) You have to make reservations a week in advance, and it costs a little more to get in, but I thought it was totally worth it. The architecture of the building and the display of the objects was just as impressive as the collection itself. The display rooms were almost completely dark, with the only light coming from the glass display cases. So the basic effect was that the only clearly visible parts of the room was the inside of the display cases. And unlike the Seoul National Museum, the collection was fairly small, but virtually every object was exquistite. About half of them were National Treasures as well. Celadon vases, gold belts worn by kings, burial objects from the 400 b.c.....I guess these are the kinds of things you collect when you are the Samsung family.

The Samsung collection also contained a number of modern paintings and installations, including works by Rothko, Warhol, and De Kooning. Nothing that left much of an impression on me, except for one. I've already forgotten the name of the artist....Matthew Blaney I think? The main part of the installation was a video. It caught our attention because it had about 20 can-can girls wearing pasties and bikini bottoms, frolicing in a big tub full of sudsy bubbles. Then the girls got out of the tub and proceeded to do the can-can, something you could only expect of can-can girls. From that point on, it only got weirder, with more dancing girls, a man in a pink wig and kilt climbing through the floors of a building, another man in a gas mask splashing ladles full of lard against a wall, and a woman turning into a tigress and trying to kill the man in the pink kilt. It was like someone's bad acid trip, and here it was playing in the personal museum of the richest family in Korea. Very, very bizarre, and quite a nice contrast to the exquisite ancient artifacts we had started out with.

After leaving the museum, we plopped down in a coffee shop and took a bunch of photos of ourselves, probably leading the waiter to think we were a bunch of vain nutballs.

A cool photo I took of Jacqueline
And one she took of me

The Coffee Shop/BarA cool sculpture inside the coffee shop

The waiter - even if he thought we were weird, he still didn't mind having his photo taken.

Then we hit up a few antique stores with a ton of beautiful Asian furniture that I couldn't afford to buy OR ship home, but I did buy a beautiful celadon sake set with a red, white and black cherry blossom design. We also hit up a couple of gaudy costume shops. Jacqueline tried on a dress which looked great on her, but just wasn't willing to spend $300 on something she would probably never wear. When we have more energy, we are going to go back, try on a bunch of costumes and make Matt take photos.


Eventually I split up with Jacqueline and had a mellow dinner with Matt, then came home. I should be headed for bed, but have a feeling I will be up late tonight. I always stay up late on Sundays, because it prolongs my weekend, and I always regret it when I get up in the morning and realize I didn't enough sleep. Such is life....