Miriam Ho
material culture | village remnants by miriam ho
disappearing Gwangju living in the debris of South Korea’s industrialisation
Nine halmoni (the polite form of address for elderly women in Korean) sit cross-legged on the linoleum, a shallow dish of kimchi and some rice between them. As the food dwindles, their chatter undying, one rises, slides open the screen door and unhooks her barbers’ shears from a peg on the courtyard wall. Amid eager gestures from the other women, a second halmoni seats herself before the mirror and lets the hairdresser pin a robe under her chin. Geum-soon has lived and worked in the neighbourhood behind Yangdong Market in Gwangju, South Korea for thirty years, running an unlicensed hair salon out of her home. Her customers are her long-time neighbours. In these colonies of low-rise houses dating from the 1960s, an aging population supports itself on simple skills. Fortune tellers’ poles pierce the air, flapping canvasses delineate makeshift restaurants and parked outside a few gates are metal wheelbarrows, used to collect scrap materials and garbage from around the city. These neighbourhoods are a vestige of industrialising Korea. During president Park Chung- hee’s 1961-1979 dictatorial rule, rapid economic expansion brought an influx of rural workers into cities like Gwangju. At the same time, traditional and ubiquitous chogajibs (thatched-roof homes) were standardised with widely available industrial materials under a political initiative for social development, the Saemaul (New Community) Movement. Using the new slabijib (slab-roof home) prototype, housing for migrant workers could be built quickly, economically and en masse. Concrete block replaced vernacular wall assemblies of straw-bale and rice paper, and concrete or corrugated metal replaced the thatched roofs that had to be rebuilt every summer in a chogajib . The efficiency of slab construction superseded classical building methods. In these settlements, where the urban lower and middle class live today, Saemaul ’s motto ‘Diligence, Self-Reliance and Cooperation’ is still evident. Tenants grow enough food for their own use on rooftop gardens and in communal vegetable plots, sharing their harvests. Geum-soon, who serves a complimentary meal with her 8,000-won haircuts, has minimal expenses:“I don’t have to pay [a separate] rent for the shop, or taxes.The food I grow outside, some my neighbours give me”.
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