Mullae Artist Village

Seoul Art Space_Mullae




I'm in Seoul to work on the second phase of the collaboration between Substation and Seoul Art Space Mullae. Seoul Art Space Mullae is a building with artist hostels, black box theatre, large gallery space, dance studios, video editing studio and sound recording studio and editing studios for use. It also serves as a central meeting point for artists in the Mullae area, which is an industrial area with many steel and metal works. Mullae is in walking distance from Yeongdeungpo (Line 1, Blue) and Mullae (Line 2, Green). Although its location is fairly central, it is still quite a hike to get to so it is mostly quiet until there are openings in the area.


Gallery Jungdabang Project




Gallery Jungdabang Project is another space nearby that is run by Murim Park, a curator who is working with us. He was very kind to show me around his space and Mullae. Jundabang is a gallery space with cafe, bar, and a small space upstairs for classes which recalls the "dabangs" or tea rooms of years gone past, as there apparently used to be a court across the road and people would come to this space to have tea. It is one of the few spaces at Mullae that is open all the time. There is a cafe/bar and it is sometimes used as a music venue as well. Currently there is a show going on in the space and there are some really interesting works in there. We also walked in briefly on a workshop by Fabworkshop teaching about open source hardware, along with a Little Bits demo.





Seo Sumi's words as insects.
The space in Mullae was much more informal compared to Seoul Art Space Mullae, so it seemed like a better place to ask people to fill out a little "survey" drawing for me.



Asking people to reflect on what is the shape of a Korean house

솜씨 (Somssi / Cottonseed Gallery)

Another notable landmark is 솜씨 in Mullae, also known as Cottonseed Gallery, which is another small space that is open all the time and also serves as a focal meeting point in the area. It is also host to workshops, talks, small exhibitions, and the Mullae Art Archive, a project that archives each and every artist who makes work in the Mullae area.


Somssi / Cottonseed Gallery: Mullae Art Archive








There is what appears to be a particularly insightful description online of Somssi on Akive:

"As Mullae-dong is already planned for re-development, it is hard to tell how much time the Artists Village and Somssi will have for these artists. However, as urban development cannot wipe out the history of artistic creations for which dreams and ideas are shared and co-created, Somssi’s activities are deemed as sufficiently meaningful. At the second floor of Somssi, there is Mullae Arts Archive that was established in 2011. Mullae Arts Archive collects, preserves and introduces current art practices by visual artists working in the Mullae Artists Village."

Mullae Culture Magazine



Nearby, there are also writers who produce the Mullae Culture Magazine and other writings about the area.



On another street corner, there is a garden that was planted by an artist who cleaned up a disused street corner and converted it into a little garden.



There are cafes in the area which can be visited during the daytime. This is one of them.



And we visited a carpenter who makes furniture and also conducts workshops in the area. The workshops are for the people living in the area. We also visited other artists who work with other materials such as metal. Their studios are all around the area but it can be hard to find as they are hidden away amidst the metal works...












A bright splash of colour amidst the low-flatted, grey and rusty buildings of the metal industry in the area. But of course, without the last straggling bits of the metal industry there, the area would probably no longer exist in this form. When the last of the metal industry in the area moves out, the area would very likely then be subsumed into the sea of sameness and generic apartment blocks...

Posted by debbie ding at 7:56 AM

Green things and Vertical Lines in Seoul

Since my post on Green roofs in Seoul, more green things have been found! I have realized that this seems to be the same green paint that is also used everywhere on many things (other than roofs). It appears in carparks in Seoul, under bridges, on the side of highways, and notably it is also used to paint the paths for walking along rivers and canals (sometimes they use the squishy green sponges too, but other times I think it is just green paint to say "HEY LOOK ITS A GREEN FOOTPATH!"...



Green carpark



Green footpath along canal
Murim, one of the curators at Mullae, also suggested that the reason for favoring the green paint is because of cost considerations. That the green waterproofing paint is cheaper than other paints, hence its popularity with cost-concious developers. What do you all think? Can anyone offer up an actual price comparison between green waterproofing paint and white/gray waterproofing paint?

Another small distinction that should be made is that the green parts actually tend to be human accessible places. After staring out of the window and trying to figure out why there is only one big green roof amidst blue ones, it suddenly dawned upon me that all the blue roofs are true rooftops, the only green part that I see is at the human accessible portion of the rooftop!

---

On Sunday we went to see a traditional korean house, and on Monday we went to see what apartments typically to look like in Korea. We also went to the Seoul National University library (Heewoo studied at SNU) to see if there were any books on apartment block buildings in Seoul. Most of the books were in Korean but I was heartened to see so much literature and books written in Korea, some in what appeared to be very specialised topics. I've always thought that I could never learn a language (or have a genuine interest in learning the language) if it did not have a good body of literature and certainly Korean to me is one language that would be worth learning.



SNU Central Library



Books on Korean Dwellings
There were a number of books that looked interesting but were all in Korean. It seems there is very little english material on the nature of Korean apartments. One of the good books was 콘크리트 유토피아 (concrete utopia) by 박해천. It had many amazing aerial shots (which also showed many green roofs, by the way). There was also an old book from 1989 that was apparently a contest that was held for designer to come up with ideas for building apartment blocks for low-income housing. It had many pictures in it of building plans but we could not tell from looking at the book whether any of these "utopian" low-income high-density buildings were ever built in Seoul, although they did look very generic:




Looking at apartment blocks, we also have seen many blocks with vertical line patterns on their sides. I wonder why this is so? Possibilities envisioned so far are as follows:

1. structural - to use vertical structures to improve vertical strength of side wall?
2. visual design - to use strong vertical lines to emphasize great height
3. cultural disposition for strong geometric lines on buildings?
4. preference for buildings that face north and south with no facings to east and west - resulting in two side walls without windows and a big wall on the side which needs some cheap and simple design which helps break up the monotony by not being entirely flat?

Here are a couple of apartment blocks that we have seen over the last 2 days. Take note of the vertical lines on the sides of almost all of the buildings. Note these aren't low-income housing, some of these are probably quite large on the inside:

Posted by debbie ding at 8:47 AM

Green Roofs in Seoul

Yesterday morning I got to Seoul. As we had a rather interesting lunch at Shinsegae, we looked out into a view like this where I noticed that most of the visible roofs were painted green…



Green roof (view from Shinsegae) (신세계)

From every high point that we went to, we also seemed to see more and more green roofs.




Small house with green roof.

When I went back, I also googled for green roofs and found this picture on flickr:



Painted Green roofs in Gangnam
By Kaizer Rangwala ( Seoul, October 10 2011)

Googling for it didn't turn up many relevant hits because "green roof" is also a term for a roof that has plants on top of it to help make it more energy efficient. But this green roof is not green with plants, the roofs here simply appear to have been neatly painted with green waterproof paint.

Speaking of roofs, Heewoo also brought me to see the area around which the President of South Korea resides. It was flanked by a beautiful mountain behind it.



Cheongwadae (청와대)



Better picture of the Cheongwadae with more accurate colour.
By toughkidcst (Byoung Wook - Toughkid Kim 김병욱) on May 13, 2007.

Known as the Cheongwadae, which is literally "the platform with azure-tiled roof", this building isn't known as the blue house because it is blue, but because it has a blue colored roof. Googling for blue roof turns up many more hits, and from the internet it says that the blue roofs were popular because they once denoted royalty, so today many people favor painting or tiling their roofs in the same blue colour. Another thing is the New Community Movement" in which poorer agricultural villages were provided with cement to make new roofs. Blue was encouraged as it was one of the "traditional korean colours of obang-seak".

Finally, I went back to Google Satellite and this is what the roofs look like.



Location: ‪30 Mullaedong 1(il)-ga, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, South Korea‬

To be honest, the only really green one is the one that I can see from my window. The rest (many of which I cannot see from my window actually look blue to me. I don't really know why.

But after thinking about it, my new conjecture is that the blue-green distinction is another one of those things that Koreans don't distinguish between (blue-green are the same colour, there is perhaps no distinction between the blues and the brighter blue-greens shades that we might describe as "green").



Chinese character for blue/green.
Like the letters k and g, or the letters l and r. For example, we went to a place called 신세계 which by right ought to be Sin-Se-Gae yet it is pronounced as Shin-se-gae. Or how the word "kimchi" sometimes sounds more like "gimchi" to me. Could the blue/green be simply a matter of how they define colours, and that this is more a phenomena of things being blue-green on top? Can any korean people or Seoul dwelling people shed some more light on this?

  Posted by debbie ding at 10:02 AM

DBBD: Artist Talk, 9 July 2012

Yesterday we had a talk at the Random Room. Heewoo shared more about her works, and I brought the rocks from the Singapore Psychogeographical Society's collection to the Random Room. I think we will keep the rocks here for the rest of the open studio duration, so people who want to come see the rocks or exchange rocks can come down any week day now! We got a donation of 3 rocks yesterday.

DBBD: Heewoo and Mulim's arrival, World Cities Summit, Marina Bay City Gallery, and URA City Gallery

This will be a loose account of what we've been up to so far, from Debbie's viewpoint.

Day 1 - Arrival! 

We picked up Heewoo and Mulim back from Changi Airport and got them settled in to Hangout @ Mt Emily, after which we took them to a friend's surprise birthday jam at The Substation Theatre. I'm not entirely sure how "surprise" this jam was, but the very talented Bani had indeed a go at a jam with friends and some beautiful sounds were made.
 

Bani's Birthday Jam 

Day 2 - World Cities Summit 

I took us all to the World Cities Summit as I was involved in a presentation there.

The backstory: Over the previous weekends I had attended a Urban Prototyping Weekend (UP Singapore) in which they made amazing datasets available to us (a bunch of developers, programmers, thinkers, marketeers, designers, architects, etc) and we were challenged to make an application with this data over a one-weekend hackathon. I worked on a prototype for an idea that I had in waiting for ages, called the "Postcode Postcard", and together with my friend Yuta Nakayama (a japanese design engineer working at the Design Incubation Centre's R&D department at NUS) we built a simple prototype for a postcard generator that would combine datasets from that location/postcode and generate a beautiful data visualization for that location - http://postcard.sg

This simple idea seemed to take off and we were asked to show it in a presentation at the WCS Expo Forum 2012 at Newton Circus' booth. They made a great video about the project, and I also loved Peter Hirschberg's presentation as the idea of urban prototyping as a means to convincing governments and companies to share their raw data so that people can build better apps and smarter cities from them is something that totally resonates with me.

UP Singapore: "What matters now is engaging the population of a city in its own reinvention" - Don Tapscot

 

UP Singapore: Crowdsourced data and citizen mapping 

Here are some other pictures from the Expo, which also included the lovely City Form Lab. One of the UP participants that we had met, Raul, was there at the City Form Lab booth and he was kind enough to explain the project in detail - the city form lab as a kind of urban analysis toolbox. Basically, the City Form Lab seeks to come up with and calculate certain metrics in cities (such as betweenness, straightness, etc) and to use this data to design and engineer better and more efficient cities. This quite excites me, as I had never known of the existence of such a project so close to home (SINGAPORE!) - as I have always been personally interested in the work of UK-based Barlett's SPACE group (Space Syntax) which also operates in a similar fashion, which also is focused on urban spatial analysis and its influence/effects on socio-economic activities in the area.

SUTD & MIT: City Form Lab 

URA also had a booth showing another one of their awesome city centre model. I met my old classmate Joyce there who was incidentally standing by to provide information on the model. She had been working there as a City Planner for the last 5 or 6 years. At the URA, planners are assigned to specific areas and focus on the planning for that specific area.

World Cities Summit: URA Booth 

Other highlights:
A robotic jellyfish in the Water Expo located at the floor below. Also ironically on the next day at the expo, there was a bit of flooding after a storm and some of the booths at the Water Expo experienced a bit of excess water...

Day 3 - Marina Bay City Gallery

There was some heavy rain in the morning which was totally unexpected. I brought in more books for Heewoo to take a look at and we also looked at some of the material that I had collected from the WCS. After that we made a trip to the Marina Bay City Gallery, taking the strange circuitious underground route I frequently use to get from Raffles Place MRT to Marina Bay Sands. It takes around 20 minutes and one will have to go through a goodly half-dozen underground "link" malls in order to get there.

I am amused by all these underground routes which have been devised to allow human traffic to flow underneath all these buildings, although I guess it would probably be a nightmare for a person who hates malls. Although I know that I do not enjoy being in malls in theory because they are sinkholes of banal consumption, something about a mall is utterly... Singaporean? I'm not sure whether to be glad or horrified to say that I associate the "non-place" of the shopping with the idea of "home". It is simply that I have found that I can travel to far off countries where everything feels new and foreign to me, but whenever I see a modern shopping mall in a foreign country, it is so generic and boring and predictable looking that it feels "at home". It is something that could have been built in any city in the world - it could even be in Singapore.

Heewoo in Raffles Place

Under the giant solarpowered fans along Marina Bay

(Sadly I had to leave early for a work meeting that day at the big lotus flower... as I am planning a talk later this month for the http://artsciencepocketbooth.org/, a project I had built for the ArtScience Museum)

Day 4 - URA Resource Centre and City Gallery

I made an appoinment for us all to visit the URA Resource Centre, arguably one of the best kept secrets in libraries on urban related records in Singapore. I know we aren't supposed to take pictures but I just need to say that I love the way how they have little individualised box files storing the information brought back by people who are sent overseas by URA to do studies about other countries. Kind like they were sent on Singapore's behalf. I love this method of information collecting and when I see this it makes the archive and URA library even more valuable and important to me.