National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art is hosting a number of temporary exhibitions this summer. The artists on display are varied from Korean, to international, as well as hot new up-and-coming artists, to artists with long and illustrious careers. It is the objective of MMCA to provide a retrospective of the tradition of modern art as well as the new trends of today. The museum has three branches: Gwacheon, Seoul and Deoksugung. Each branch is closed on Monday. The Gwacheon location is family friendly as it has a children’s gallery.

Patbingsu: The Taste of Korean Summer

How do you tell when summer is drawing close? Of the five senses, the most obvious might be touch: go outside, feel the heat. Next might be sight – abundant greenery replacing the blossoms of spring. But in Korea the sense that proves summer's imminent approach is taste, as restaurants and cafés throughout the country unite in offering the classic Korean dessert “patbingsu” - literally “red bean ice flakes.”

Kyung-sook Shin is a celebrated author in her native South Korea. She made her literary debut in 1985, winning the Munye Joongang New Author Prize for her novella Winter Fable. She recently came to international attention with the translation of her latest book, Please Look After Mom, into a number of languages for distribution in 33 countries. The book is about a mother who disappears and the family’s desperate search to find her. It won the prestigious Man Asian Literary Prize for 2011, the Asian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize. The first Korean and first woman to win the prize, she beat celebrated Asian authors such as Haruki Murakami and Anuradha Roy. TJ’s Hong Kong correspondent David Nunan caught up with Ms. Shin at the recent Hong Kong International Literary Festival where she was a featured speaker.

DN: When did you decide that you wanted to be a writer?
K-s S: My dream to become a writer came very naturally to me. I grew up in the rural countryside, a long way from the city. We raised animals like cows and chickens and then we would kill them and eat them. I had many siblings, many brothers who would bring books home and leave them lying around. I read them and fell in love with literature. Many of the questions I had about life were answered in the books. I loved the characters and felt that I was experiencing the same thing. So my dream to become an author was very natural to me. When I was 16, I went to Seoul to go to high school, and my love of literature got deeper there.

Rethinking the MBA

As the global financial crisis has subsided, some business schools have added one or two courses on ethics to their MBA programs. The courses are mostly an afterthought. The thinking behind them is: “Our financial institutions have behaved badly, so maybe it would be a good idea to add a touch of ethical instruction to the curriculum.” Nothing could be more revealing of the mindset of our economic thinkers than that business ethics has become a sideshow, an add-on, an extra frill.

The prevailing view of the economy as a giant autonomous mechanism following inexorable laws is a highly abstract, quasi-scientific conception. Like the laws of gravity, there isn’t much room for ethics. But, in fact, this prevailing view conflicts sharply with how we actually experience the economy in our day-to-day encounters.

The Hungarian philosopher Karl Polanyi emphasized the importance of what he called “tacit knowledge,” or non-conscious knowledge that accumulates from our experience with ideas, objects, people or institutions without our being fully aware of it.