It is no longer surprising to see Korean arts grace summers in New York
New York is the center of the world’s culture and arts, and the Lincoln Center is the symbolic hub of art in New York. We were invited to perform during Korean Arts Week, a special program within Summer for the City, Lincoln Center’s summer festival.
 
The summer festival hosted by Lincoln Center is special to the citizens of New York because it was designed to rejuvenate artistic activities in the city that were discouraged during the pandemic. Started in 2022, Summer for the City is a large-scale festival in which Lincoln Center broke out of its public perception as a classical institution by creating a place where diverse residents and audiences can mingle to enjoy art together. This year’s festival featured Korea Arts Week as a significant pillar that exhibited various aspects of Korean culture and arts. Many programs for music, fine arts, and literature filled the summer of New York City for four days.
 
On the stage at David Rubensten Atrium for two days with Gray by Silver was a performance by Dongyang Gozupa, a group introducing contemporary creative music from Korea. Other stages in Lincoln Center also featured various Korean music of different genres including indie, classical, K-pop DJ night. Because it was the first time that the festival presented a program focusing on one country’s music, many New Yorkers showed great interested in the performances. Gray by Silver was also met with a crowd larger than anticipated, allowing me to experience the passion for Korean culture and arts firsthand.

 

Poster for the Summer for the City festival ⓒLincoln Center

 

On July 22, the last day of Korea Arts Week, we went on stage as the last performers. Lincoln Center’s creative team, who hosted us with detailed care that began in the preparatory meeting held in Korea, exhibited excellent teamwork befitting their renown and elicited the best performances from the musicians. Such hard work was rewarded by standing ovation from the audience. I discovered an interesting fact while talking with the audience members after the show. Most of them expressed a sense of familiarity to modern and traditional Korean music, and many of them were students who were studying various forms of art. One person who was majoring in musical composition and film soundtracks in a music college surprised us with interest and affection for traditional Korean music by telling us the names of many traditional Korean instruments. Another audience member accompanying that person also talked about his love of Kim Sun-nam, a Korean folk musician whose work Gray by Silver interpreted through a contemporary perspective, and mentioned other contemporary Korean artists.
 
I was happy to present a new trend in Korean music to students in New York who are developing their artistic worlds. At the same time, I became certain that we must persist in creative endeavors going beyond simple experiences so that we can continue to put on shows in front of audiences with sophisticated backgrounds and experiences. I felt many emotions as I left Lincoln Center because we spent a long time preparing for the performances and exhibited much of our passion, although not excessively so. We were immensely fulfilled by the smiles of our colleagues at Lincoln Center who helped stage the show, as well as the wonderful reception by the 476 members of the audience.

 

What movements can we see in the outskirts of the city?
With Manhattan, New York, the loudest and the most congested city in the world, behind us, we headed to Kingston, a quiet town in Upstate New York two hours north by train. We were visiting Isabel Soffer (founder of globalFEST and programmer for The Local performances), whom we first met during a showcase in 2018. A person with a warm smile, she found depth in our music. Even after five years, Isabel greeted us with her characteristically friendly smile. After we were introduced to her favorite places in the town, we sat down to discuss future performances.
 
The first place she took us to was Opus 40, a sculpture park harboring deep traces of time that a man created for thirty-seven years without using heavy equipment. Every year, the park turns into a cozy and low-key venue for a local festival in summer evenings, with local residents enjoying music by a bonfire. After the park, we headed to The Local, Isabel’s performance venue that opened earlier this year after remodeling an old church building. At the entrance of the venue were the words “Giant Step.” As someone who studied jazz, I could not just pass by the words, so I asked Isabel about them. Her answer, however, surprised me: that was what day care centers are called in the United States. Like those words preserved in the entrance, the performance venue continued the spirit of blending the local residents with visitors through performing arts. We discussed how we wanted to stage a performance by Gray by Silver in the near future.
 
Isabel has been creating a space where people can continue to get together. After having operated large festivals and performances in the busy environment of New York City, she was craving a slower and longer pace. She took on a passionate face as she told us about her dream of creating deep experiences in which the audience and musicians can enjoy a warm cup of tea and fruit after the performance to freely discuss the origins of their music, the power of such moments of encounter, and the flow of future events.

Good performances are made under good circumstances, and good circumstances are made within good relationships among people who create the performance together. Because musical performances are interpersonal operations before they are businesses, I think better circumstances are made when people spend more time together to get to know each other. We were focused more on adequately delivering our story, but now we hope to listen to others’ stories. Just like the interplay of improvisational plays in jazz performances, the time we spent to meet and harmonize with people drove our thoughts to a refreshing place outside of the fence.

A massive artistic union surrounding the city
Back in Manhattan, we visited The Public Theater, a multipurpose art theater hosting performances of various cultures and genres and the center of a massive artistic union in New York City. One of the first nonprofit theaters in the United States, the venue has long maintained the principle that theaters generate an essential cultural power and art and culture are for everyone. The theater also works to present new artistic trends to audiences through numerous festivals and performances in the city. I was impressed by its collaboration with renowned artistic institutions including Lincoln Center to supply various quality artistic projects to the public.
 
We staged an evening show at Joe’s Pub, a stage affiliated with The Public theater, to paint the New York cityscape gray. We were able to engage in deep experiences with the New York audience, who returned to our performance after the Lincoln Center show.
 

It is time make contemporary Korean music more than a novel experience and consistently promote it abroad
When asked what kind of people Koreans are, I always think that we are a people of the arts. We have always had a particular taste for the arts, and activities of our people have been imbued with a deep artistic sensibilities. We are certainly a beautiful people who have immersed ourselves with beauty, and I feel that the world has begun to take interest in our artistic sensibilities.
 
What surprised me this year during my trips to Argentina, Mauritius, Europe, the United States, Japan, and other continents and regions was that the Korean cultural industry was no longer in the fringes. Everywhere I went, there were plenty of people who new more than me about Korean film, TV shows, and popular culture. While K-pop appears to be center stage in this trend, many people that I met were more interested in the trends of pure Korean music and curious about where it was going. Many overseas audiences know and have already experienced traditional Korean music. Because of that, I think it is time for us to go beyond delivering one novel experience to them and consistently promote the ever-changing trends in contemporary Korean music.
 
Going overseas to find pure arts and meet new people
For the past several years, I have been persistently asking the basic question of why we need to perform overseas. Going beyond the monodimensional aspirations of promoting Korean music abroad or to attain global fame, I hope to throw myself into diverse cultures to blend into the world in addition to finding distinct characteristics, all the while rediscovering our music through a transparent perspective. We will continue forward with the belief that erasing all borders to purely resonate with people wholly through music will put us on the right path.

 

Gray by Silver ⓒLawrence Sumulong