Korean Kontext

On April 27, South Korean President Moon Jae In will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for a historic summit that may include discussions of major changes for the peninsula, including denuclearisation and an official peace treaty to end the Korean War. But what do the South Korean people think about their president's new outreach?   Yonsei University Professor John Delury joins Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson to discuss this and other issues ahead of the historic summit this week.

With the exception of Gangnam Style, few mainstream radio stations have ever even thought to play Korean pop music. But in the last year or so, the United States has seen a surge of interest in k-pop, with superstars BTS appearing on the American Music Awards, Jimmy Kimmel and the Ellen Show, and with radio stations around the country starting to introduce some k-pop into their playlists.   Katie Brownlie is no stranger to the emergence of k-pop in the United States - she has been a fan of Korean pop music for about a decade, and has run a k-pop themed radio show on 90.3 FM the Core at Rutgers University for more than three years. In this episode, Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson talks with Katie about her show, about her love of k-pop, and about the genre's growing popularity in the United States.   Image from Wikimedia Commons.

After a year of discussions, the Trump and Moon Administrations recently announced their tentative agreement to update the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), focusing almost entirely on the automotive sector and a few other spots, including pharmaseuticals. But one are that was left completely untouched was agriculture, perhaps due to the fact that the United States saw significant improvements in ag trade to Korea following the implementation of KORUS. Now, with the Trump administration saying they may continue to discuss changes to KORUS, American farmers are continuing to watch the discussions closely.   In this episode of Korean Kontext, Jenna Gibson sits down with David Oppedahl, a Senior Business Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Veronica Nigh, an Economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, to discuss what KORUS has meant for the American agriculture industry, and what to keep an eye on as the agreement continues to go into effect.

This week's episode is a conversation with the third and final honoree for Korean American Day 2018! This year's theme - Recognizing Leaders in Journalism - fits this week's guest perfectly. She had a long career in print journalism, including with KoreAm, a magazine focused on telling stories for and about the Asian American community. Now, she is focusing her skills on a documentary film project called "Free Chol Soo Lee," about a Korean American man wrongly convicted of murder and the huge grassroots movement to free him.   Julie is joined in this episode by her co-director, Eugene Yi, who also shares his experiences as a journalist and filmmaker focusing on telling stories about the Korean American community.

Looking at the trade numbers between China and North Korea, trade expert Bill Brown is confident that China has finally become serious about enforcing international sanctions against the DPRK - but only in the last three months or so. Brown, who is a nonresident fellow at KEI and who writes extensively on China-DPRK trade and the economic effects of sanctions, believes this could be a tipping point for North Korea's domestic economy.   In this episode of Korean Kontext, host Jenna Gibson asks Brown why he thinks China has finally decided to crack down on its trade with North Korea, what effects this may have on the economy and Kim Jong-un's decision-making process, and more.

In the late 1930s, nearly 200,000 ethnic Koreans were forcibly removed from the Soviet Far East, packed into trains and sent to Central Asia. More than 70 years later, their descendants still live in the former Soviet Union, most of them in what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.     Victoria Kim grew up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, knowing that her grandfather was Korean. But it wasn't until much later that she began looking into what that meant - how her grandfather and other Central Asian Koreans arrived in Uzbekistan and made their lives there. This story became a multimedia project called "Lost and Found in Uzbekistan: The Korean Story."     In this week's episode, which originally aired in 2016, we talk with Victoria about the experience of Central Asian Koreans in the 1930s until today, how her project delved into these stories, and much more.     To view Victoria's project, please click here.

From February 9-25, athletes and fans from around the world gathered in PyeongChang for the 2018 Winter Olympics. But while the athletes competed for gold, the Olympics also had major political implications, especially after the North Koreans decided to send a high-level delegation to the Games and agreed to field a joint women's hockey team with South Korea.   In this episode of Korean Kontext, host Jenna Gibson spoke with Jonathan Cheng, the Seoul Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, about how he and the Journal's team chose to cover all these different aspects of the Olympics, how Korea prepared for the Games, and, of course, the rise of Korea's famous Garlic Girls curling team.

As part of KEI’s annual commemoration of Korean-American Day on January 13th, KEI honors exceptional Korean-Americans in various fields and industries for their respective contributions to both their professions and the Korean-American community.    For 2018, KEI honored three Korean-American journalists. Jenna Gibson also sat down with honoree Chang Lee, a photojournalist from  the New York Times. He spoke with Jenna on how he first became interested in photography and his experiences of covering everything from war zones to the Olympics.    The New York Times featured Chang Lee and his photographs from the Pyeongchang Olympics in a February 15th article, which can be found in the link below.   https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/lens/a-times-photographers-journey-home-to-the-winter-olympics.html   Note: The interview took place on January 12th and prior to the start of the Pyeongchang Olympics.

At his first State of the Union, President Trump took an interesting approach to integrating North Korea policy into his speech. By inviting North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho and the parents of Otto Warmbier to the speech, the President focused on highlighting their suffering at the hands of the Kim regime instead of the harder military or policy options that have been floating around Washington recently.   Rosa Park, Director of Programs and Editor at the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, the organization that helped organize logistics for the defectors who met with President Trump after the State of the Union, spoke with Korean Kontext about President Trump's strategy and his continued focus on the human elements of North Korea policy.

This year for KEI's Korean American Day celebration, we chose to honor three great Korean Americans in the field of journalism and the media. One of this year's honorees was broadcast journalist May Lee, who is a correspondent at CGTN America and founder of Lotus Media House, who has covered major news events around the world and in the United States, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia.   In this episode, Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson talks with May about how she got into journalism, what it is like to be one of the few Korean Americans on TV, and how the changing media landscape of today has affected her and her work.

On February 9, years of hard work will culminate in the opening of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. A month later, on March 8, the 2018 Winter Paralympics will continue to bring excitement to PyeongChang. At a recent event organized by The Korea Society in New York, Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson was able to speak briefly with Jung Seung-Hwan, one of the stars of the South Korean Para Ice Hockey team. They discusses his background in ice sledge hockey (now known as para ice hockey), his goals for PyeongChang, and how he got the nickname "Rocketman."   Photo courtesy of The Korea Society

Spanning nearly a century and multiple generations, Min Jin Lee's Pachinko tells the story of a Korean family struggling to find their place in Japan before, during, and after the Korean War. It is a story that touches on a myriad of themes, including identity, the role of women, war, and discrimination. Pachinko has been widely praised, earning a place as one of the best books of 2017 on lists from The Chicago Tribune, NPR, CNN, and many more.    Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson spoke with Min Jin Lee over the phone about why she started writing Pachinko, how the story evolved over time, and what she's working on next.

A woman in hanbok joyfully rises above Mt. Baekdu, arms raised, in a art piece entitled Umma Rises: Towards Global Peace. This is just one of many recent art pieces by artist Mina Cheon featuring her North Korean persona, Kim Il Soon. Using her colorful and provocative style of "polipop" art, Cheon has been exploring issues such as information flow into North Korea, propaganda, and motherhood. Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson recently sat down with Cheon to discuss her creative inspirations, some of her recent and past work related to North Korea, and much more.   To see some of Cheon's work and learn about her recent exhibition at the Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York, please click here. 

A group of women gossiping about the new neighbor. A feisty middle schooler using a homemade drone to prank his classmates. A young military officer seeking information from his past. These themes could be from any American TV show. But they are, in fact, storylines from a new wave of soap operas produced by the North Korean state.   Former AP journalist Jean Lee, now a Global Fellow at The Wilson Center, analyzed four of these North Korean soaps for a new research paper commissioned by KEI. In this episode of Korean Kontext, she discusses some of her observations, including a shift from emphasizing military service to emphasizing family ties and a focus on youth and the next generation of North Koreans - themes which may indicate some of Kim Jong-un's main domestic priorities.

After more than a year of tensions over the Terminal High Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) system that is now deployed in South Korea, Seoul and Beijing seem to have made steps toward thawing relations. But is the row over THAAD really over? Will South Korean business see a return to normal in China? And what will the Chinese learn from this experience of using economic leverage to influence South Korean political decisions?   Bonnie Glaser, senior advisor for Asia and director of the China Power Project at CSIS, joins Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson to discuss the latest in South Korea-China relations, as well as what it means for security and diplomacy in the region moving forward.