South Africans venture to South Korea to teach English — and that’s about it. The idea of going to Korea on holiday never occurs to most of them.
Although this probably has to do with the vast distance between the two countries, it is also because Korean culture has not made its way here in quite the same way that aspects of Chinese and Japanese cultures have.
So we simply have no lures: Korean restaurants are few and far between, the Korean version of the kimono has never caught on as a fashion trend, and karaoke, which is taken seriously in Korea, even at a diplomatic level, is thought to be something inherently Japanese.
But as unlikely as it would seem, South Korea and South Africa share a social philosophy — ubuntu, the idea that our personhood is derived from our connectedness with other people.
This I learned on a recent trip to the Gwangju Design Biennale, where an exhibition of works by reputable architects from South Korea and the rest of the world, titled Living, had been curated around the concept of ubuntu. Of course, in Korean it is not called ubuntu (and in South Africa the theoretical importance of ubuntu is not always evident in everyday interactions), but the connection is there, says Byoung-Soo Cho, the curator and architect responsible for the exhibition.
Before I could get to know the similarities between these two principles with different names and different manifestations, I was dying to know how Cho got to hear of the African version in the first place.
He had never been to South Africa prior to the exhibition, yet the word “ubuntu” appeared, with a definition from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in the exhibition’s wall text, catalogue and press release — it was everywhere. Cho, a Harvard University alumnus and professor of architecture, explained that he first came across the word through his daughter, who travelled through sub-Saharan Africa and learned it while in Cape Town. Some feverish googling then led him to the archbishop.
The exhibition was divided into two sections: Rest and One Earth, One Sun, both of which were inspired by a traditional scholars’ garden near Gwangju, called Sosaewon. This is claimed to be the birthplace of the Korean version of ubuntu, represented by an alphabetical character in which two lines lean against each other, representing two interdependent people.
In the Rest section big-name architects, including Mohsen Mostafavi (dean of architecture at Harvard), Foreign Office Architects and Cape Town’s own Mokoena Makeka, built small resting pavilions, each about the size of a Zozo hut, which could be shared by visitors who needed to reconnect with other people and have a break from all the walking demanded by the rest of the biennale.
In One Earth, One Sun 24 real-time web videos were screened, showing the quality of light on identical model houses installed in 24 different time zones around the world. One video streamed from the top of Makeka Design Lab’s head office in St George’s Mall in Cape Town.
Cho explained that in this work “ubuntu is illustrated in the fact that everyone around the world is under the same sun”. First, he said, “this is a metaphor for our common humanity, which unites us despite our racial, cultural and geographic differences”. Second, in having a simultaneous experience of the sun’s rays, our physical distance from people in other parts of the world is metaphorically shortened, which, in turn, suggests (even more metaphorically) that our interpersonal barriers collapse.
But the problem with ubuntu, as with One Earth, One Sun, is that at the crucial moment people are sometimes switched off the idea of togetherness. The few persistently blank screens in the display were reminders that, whether in Korea or South Africa, ubuntu, when it works, is finicky.
Anthea Buys attended the biennale as part of a curator residency.