There was a period in high school when I listened only to classical music. During this time I remember overhearing some of my Korean friends talk excitedly about the Korean rapper Seo Taeji and feeling ashamed that I didn’t know who he was. I felt like not knowing about this musician somehow made me less Korean than my peers, so I bought a Seo Taeji album (on cassette!), hoping that it would help me fit in with the other Korean Americans I saw at church or at language school on the weekends. I remember trying to convince myself that I liked the music in the misplaced hopes that I could prove to others and myself that I was Korean enough. This was a common theme in my youth—feeling like I had to contort myself into unnatural shapes to fit into outside ideas of what it meant to be Korean. My West Coast Asian friends tell me that this is classic East Coast Asian vibes.

From June 3 to 10 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic presents its, a celebration of the music and artistry of South Korea and the Korean diaspora. Over this week, five concerts, curated by renowned composer and Seoul native, feature Korean musicians performing works from the Western classical repertoire as well as works by some of Korea’s most exciting composers. GYOPO, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the work of Korean diasporic cultural producers, complements these concerts with video installations, a symposium co-curated by Korean American musician , new music by KIRARA, and an afternoon of performances as part of GYOPO Diasporic Refractions in partnership with LA Phil Insight. What’s liberating about the Seoul Festival’s concert series and GYOPO Diasporic Refractions is that they show the breadth of Korean cultural production and the impossibility of trying to limit or pin down what constitutes Korean cultural identity.

SASAMI
It is fitting for an LA-based organization to conduct this exploration into Korean culture. In the aftermath of the Korean War, which caused the deaths of 3 million people from 1950 to 1953 (the majority of whom were civilians), a considerable diasporic population was scattered across the globe, the largest of which settled in the Los Angeles area. GYOPO, which means someone of Korean heritage born or raised outside the country, seeks to uplift the voices of Korean cultural producers who have been marginalized in Korea—adoptees, mixed-race Koreans, and queer people—due to continued nationalism, ethnic essentialism, and queerphobia in South Korea. 

Bringing the variety of musical talent and perspectives from across the diaspora was a priority of Chin’s. “The programs of the whole festival have an extremely wide spectrum. It starts with classical repertoire and goes to the premieres of brand-new pieces; from instrumental concerto to chamber music,” she says.

Among the more traditional offerings, a chamber concert features works by Debussy, Schoenberg, Schumann, and Brahms on June 10, while performs the piece that helped him become the first Asian and youngest competitor in 40 years to win the Leeds International Piano Competition: Brahms’First Piano Concerto, on June 6. In addition to presenting these incredible interpreters of Western classical music from Korea, the concert series featuresworld premieres of works by Korean composers Whan Ri-Ahn, Sunghyun Lee, Kay Kyurim Rhie, and Texu Kim, and the West Coast premiere of Unsuk Chin’s haunting and colorful Clarinet Concerto. These innovative composers often combine a variety of influences from the Eastern and Western hemispheres and build on top of these traditions. Kay Kyurim Rhie, for example, blends influences from jazz, the European avant-garde, Korean folk music, and the blues in her work. The June 3 concert, part of the new music series, is dedicated to works by composers , Sun-Young Pahg, Yie Eun Chun.

Sunwook Kim
Throughout the week, by will be on view in BP Hall. This large-scale video installationdebuted at the Korean Pavilion during the 2019 Venice Biennale. Based on 10 years of research into the genre of Korean theater called yeoseong gukgeuk, in which all roles are performed by women actors, the artwork connects four artists, creating a concise lineage of queer performance. It features Lee Deung Woo, a yeoseonggukgeuk male-role actor; trans electronic musician KIRARA; lesbian actor Yii Lee;and Seo Ji Won, a disabled woman who is a performer and the director of the Disabled Women’s Theater Group “Dancing Waist.” siren eun young jung has said that she intentionally uses flash, afterimage, velocity, and noise—which are traditionally discouraged elements in video art—to subvert the genre (and, by extension, ideas surrounding gender). This creates a queer aesthetic and politic in a work that is fragmented and frenetic but ultimately liberating and empowering.

KIRARA
One thing that struck me from the sustained, months-long protests in South Korea against former President Yoon Suk Yeol was the critical role of music in Korean protest culture; every protest seemed to include spontaneous chanting, dancing,and singing. On June 7, a timely co-curated by SASAMI will bring together diasporic Korean artists from various disciplines to speak about using their work as tools for examining and deconstructing systems of oppression. As part of the event, there will be an intimate set by singer-songwriter . Capping off the weekend on June 8 is an in the Blue Ribbon Garden co-curated by , featuring artists , , and . In another gesture toward communal solidarity, the afternoon ends with a guided procession led by the artist.

NoSo
The third movement of Juri Seo’s (which will be performed June 3 as part of the New Voices from Korea program) is a jazzy fugue and an aptmetaphor for cultural identity. In a fugue, what’s less important (and less interesting) is each individual voice; what matters instead is the way that these melodic fragments weave and work together. Similarly, each individual artist in this series inverts, flips, reverses, or transposes Korean identity in their own unique fashion, and this week is a way to step back and catch a glimpse of the larger, ever-expanding tapestry of Korean cultural identity, an identity that is complex, improvised, and even playful. 

Culture is always changing as people are exposed to and are influenced by others. What this week of programming emphatically states through its sheer breadth and, most interestingly, through its insistence on blending traditions, forms, and genres is that anything done by someone of Korean descent is part of Korean culture—full stop.

That boy who thought it was more Korean to like Seo Taeji than it was to love Beethoven and Shostakovich was right about one thing—Korean cultural identity is (still) ungraspable. But he thought it was ungraspable because he was trying to fit into other people’s narrow visions of Korean identity. As this week’s programming attests, Korean cultural identity is ungraspable not because it is too narrow but rather because it is too large to pin down, perpetually evolving as we collectively design and build this identity together.