Be an artist, right now!

In this funny and friendly talk, renowned Korean novelist
Young-ha Kim talks about why each one of us needs to be an artist. Sharing his old memories of younger days as an example, he argues that this world gives us hundreds of reasons to refrain from being artistic. However, it is not those hundreds of reasons but only one reason, he insists, that really makes you an artist. He appeals to us to have an artistic mind for the sake of our own joy and happiness, and the multiple identities we may have in the future.

The theme of my talk today is,

"Be an artist, right now."

Most people, when the subject is brought up,

get tense and start to resist a little in their hearts:

"Art doesn't feed me, and right now I'm busy.

I have to go to school, get a job,

do lots of things and send my kids to lessons."

You think, "I'm too busy and have no time for art."

There are hundreds of reasons why we can't become artists right now.

Don't they just pop up in your heads?

There are so many reasons why we can't be.

Indeed, we're not sure why we should be.

We don't know why we should be artists,

but have lots of reasons why we can't be.

Why do people instantly resist the idea of associating themselves with art?

Perhaps you think that art is for the greatly gifted

or for the thoroughly and professionally trained --

and some of you may think you have strayed too far from art.

Well you might have, but I don't think so.

That's the theme of my talk today.

We are all born artists.

If you have kids, you know what I mean.

Almost everything kids do is art.

They draw with crayons on the wall,

and dance Son Dam Bi's dance on TV when

you can't even call it Son Dam Bi's dance -- it's the kids' own dance, actually.

So they dance a strange dance, and they sing and torture everybody.

Perhaps the quality of their art is something

only their parents can bear -- (Laughter) -- and because they do such art all day long,

people honestly get a little tired around kids.

A child sometimes performs a monodrama --

playing house is indeed a monodrama, a kind of a play.

And some kids, when they get a bit older,

start to lie.

In general, parents remember the very first time their kids lied.

They get shocked.

"Now you're showing your true colors," Mom says, thinking, "Why does he take after his dad?"

and chides the kid, "What kind of a person are you going to be?"

But you need not worry.

The moment kids start to lie is the beginning of storytelling.

They are talking about things they didn't see.

It's amazing. It's a wonderful moment.

Parents should celebrate. (Laughter) (Applause)

"Hurray! My boy finally started to lie!"

All right! It calls for celebration.

For example, "Mom, guess what? I met an alien on my way home," says a kid.

Then a typical mom says, "Stop that nonsense," and scolds the child.

Now, an ideal parent is someone who responds like this:

"Really? An alien, huh? What did it look like? Did it say anything?

Where did you meet it?" "Um, in front of the supermarket."

When you have a conversation like this,

then the kid says the next thing to be responsible for the nonsense he started.

And then the kid says more, developing a story.

Of course this is an infantile story,

but thinking up one sentence after the next and the next

is indeed doing the same thing as a professional writer like me does.

In essence, they are not different.

Roland Barthes once said of Flaubert's novels,

"Flaubert did not write a novel.

He merely connected one sentence after another.

The eros between sentences, that is the essence of Flaubert's novel."

That's right -- a novel basically is writing one sentence,

then, within the scope of not violating the first one,

writing the next sentence.

And you continue to make connections.

Take a look at this sentence:

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."

Yes, it's the first sentence of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."

Writing such an unjustifiable sentence -- (Laughter) --

and continuing in order to justify it,

became the masterpiece of contemporary literature.

Kafka wrote the sentence but didn't show it to his father.

Kafka was not on good terms with his father.

On his own, he wrote these sentences.

Had he shown his father, "My boy has finally lost it," he would've thought.

That's right. Art is about going a little nuts

and justifying the next sentence,

which is not much different from what a kid does.

A kid that has just started to lie

is taking the first step as a storyteller.

Kids do art.

They don't get tired and they have fun doing it.

I was in Jeju Island a few days ago.

When kids are on the beach, most of them love playing in the water.

But some of them spend a lot of time in the sand,

making mountains and seas -- well, not seas,

but different things -- people and dogs, etc.

But parents tell them,

"It will all be washed away by the waves."

In other words, it's useless;

there's no need.

But kids don't mind.

They have fun in the moment

and they keep playing with sand.

Kids don't do it because someone told them to.

They aren't told by their boss

or anyone, they just do it.

When you were little, I'm sure you had a moment enjoying the pleasure of primitive art.

When I ask my students to write about their happiest moment,

many write about a primitive artistic experience they had as a kid.

Learning to play piano for the first time and playing four hands with a friend,

or performing a ridiculous skit with a friend looking like idiots -- things like that.

Or the moment you developed the first film you shot with an old camera.

They talk about experiences like that.

You must have had such a moment.

In that moment, art makes you happy

because it's not work.

Work doesn't make you happy, does it? Mostly it's tough.

The French writer Michel Tournier has a famous saying.

It's a bit mischievous, actually.

"Work is against human nature. The proof is that it makes us tired." Right? (Laughter)

Why would it tire us if it's in our nature?

Playing doesn't tire us.

We can play all night long.

If we work overnight, we should be paid for overtime.

Why? Because it's tiring and we feel fatigue.

But kids, usually they do art for fun. It's playing.

They don't draw to sell the work to a client

or play the piano to earn money for the family.

Of course, there were kids who had to.

You know this gentleman, right?

He had to tour around Europe to support his family --

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart --

but that was centuries ago, so let's make him an exception.

Unfortunately, at some point our art -- such a joyful pastime -- ends.

Kids have to go to lessons, to school, do homework

and of course they take piano or ballet lessons, but

they aren't fun anymore.

You're told to do it and there's competition. How can it be fun?

If you're in elementary school and you still draw on the wall,

you'll surely get it from your mom.

Besides,

if you continue to act like an artist as you get older,

you'll increasingly feel pressure --

people question your actions and ask you to act properly.

Here's my story: I was an eighth grader and I entered a drawing contest at school in Gyeongbokgung.

I was doing the best I could, but then

my teacher came around and asked me, "What are you doing?"

"I'm drawing diligently," I said.

"Why are you using only black?"

Indeed, I was eagerly coloring the sketchbook in black.

And I explained,

"It's a dark night and a crow is perching on a branch."

Then my teacher said,

"Really? Well, Young-ha, you may not be good at drawing but you have talent as a storyteller."

Or so I wished.

"Now you'll get it, you rascal!" was the response. (Laughter)

"You'll get it!" he said.

You were supposed to draw the palace, the Gyeonghoeru, etc.,

but I was alone coloring everything in black,

so he dragged me out of the group.

There were a lot of girls there as well,

and I was utterly mortified.

None of my explanations or excuses were heard,

and I really had it big time.

If he was an ideal teacher, he would have responded like I said before,

"Young-ha may not have a talent for drawing,

but he has a gift for making things up," and he would have

encouraged me. But such a teacher is seldom found.

Later, I grew up and went to Europe's galleries --

I was a university student -- and I thought this was really unfair.

Look what I found. (Laughter) (Cheering)

Works like this were hung in Basel

while I was beaten -- (Laughter) -- and stood in front of the palace with my drawing in my mouth.

Look at this. Doesn't it look just like wallpaper?

Contemporary art, I found out later,

isn't explained by a lame story like mine. No crows are brought up.

Most of the works have no title, Untitled.

Anyways, contemporary art in the 20th century

is about doing something weird and then filling the void with explanation and interpretation,

essentially the same as what I did.

Of course, my work was on a very amateur level,

but let's turn to more famous examples.

This is Picasso's.

He stuck handlebars into a bike seat and called it "Bull's Head." Sounds convincing, right?

Next, a urinal was placed on its side and called "Fountain" --

a ready-made fountain. That was Duchamp.

So filling the gap between an explanation and a weird act

with a story -- that's indeed what contemporary art is all about.

Picasso even made the statement,

"I draw not what I see but what I think."

Yes, it means I didn't have to draw Gyeonghoeru.

I wish I knew what Picasso said back then. I could have argued better with my teacher.

Unfortunately, the little artists within us

are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art.

They get locked in.

That's our tragedy.

What happens when such a little artist gets locked in, banished or killed?

Our desire doesn't go away.

We want to express, to reveal ourself,

but with the artist dead, the artistic desire is revealed in dark form.

In karaoke bars, there are always people who sing

"She's Gone" or "Hotel California,"

miming the guitar riffs.

Usually they sound awful. Awful indeed.

Some people turn into rockers like this.

Or some people dance in clubs.

People who would have had much greater pleasure telling stories

end up trolling on the Internet all night long --

that's how writing talent reveals itself on the dark side.

Sometimes we see dads get more excited than their kids

playing with Legos or putting together plastic robots.

They go, "Don't touch it. Dad will do it for you."

The kid has already lost interest and is doing something else,

but the dad alone builds castles.

This shows the artistic impulses inside us are suppressed, not gone.

And they often reveal themselves negatively, in the form of jealousy.

You know the song "I would love to be on TV"? Why would we love it?

TV is full of people who do what we always wished to

but never got to do.

They dance and act -- and the more they do, the more praise they get.

So we start to envy them vehemently.

We become a dictator with a remote, and start to abuse the people on TV.

"He just can't act." "You call that singing? She can't hit the notes."

We easily say things like that.

We get jealous, not because we're evil,

but because we have little artists pent up inside us.

That's what I think.

Then what should we do?

Yes, that's right.

Right now, we need to start our own art.

Right this minute, we can turn off TV,

log off the Internet,

get up and start to do something.

Where I teach students in drama school,

there's a course called Dramatics.

In this course, all students must put on a play.

However, acting majors are not supposed to act.

They can, for example, write the play,

and those who write well may work on stage art.

Likewise, stage art majors may become actors, and in this way you put on a show.

Students at first wonder whether they can actually do it,

but later they have so much fun. I rarely see anyone who is miserable doing a play.

In a school or the military, even in a mental institution, once you make people do it, they enjoy it.

I saw people like that in the army -- many people had fun doing a play.

I have another experience:

In my writing class, I give students an assignment like this.

I have students like you in the class, and many of them don't major in writing.

Some major in art, some in music, and they think they can't write.

So I give them blank sheets of paper and a theme.

It can be a simple theme:

Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood.

There's one condition: You must write like crazy. Like crazy!

I walk around and encourage them,

"Come on, come on!" So you have to write like crazy for one or two hours.

You only get to think for the first five minutes.

The reason I make them write like crazy is because

when you write slowly and lots of thoughts cross your mind,

the artistic devil creeps in.

This devil will tell you hundreds of reasons

why you can't write:

"People will laugh at you. This is not good writing!

What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!"

It will say a lot of things.

You have to run fast so the devil can't catch up.

The really good writing I've seen in my class

was not from the assignments with a long deadline,

but from the 40- to 60-minute crazy writing students did

in front of me with a pencil.

The students go into some kind of a trance.

After 30 or 40 minutes, they write without knowing what they're writing.

But in such a moment, the nagging devil does not appear.

So I can say this:

It's not the hundreds of reasons why one can't be an artist,

but rather, the one reason one must be that makes us artists.

Why we cannot be something is not important.

Most artists became artists because of the one reason.

Now, when we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art,

enemies appear on the outside.

Mostly, they have the faces of our parents. (Laughter)

Sometimes they look like our spouses,

but they are not your parents or spouses.

They are devils. (Laughter) Devils.

They came to Earth briefly transformed

to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists.

And they have a magic question.

When we say, "I think I'll try acting. There's a drama school in the community center," or

"I'd like to learn Italian songs," they ask, "Oh, yeah? A play? What for?"

The magic question, "What for?" This is what they ask.

But art is not for anything.

Art is the ultimate goal.

It saves our souls and makes us live happily.

It helps us to express ourselves and be happy without the help of alcohol or drugs.

So in response to such a pragmatic question,

we need to be bold.

"Well, just for the fun of it. Sorry for having fun without you,"

is what you should say. "I'll just go ahead and do it anyway."

The ideal future I imagine is where we all have multiple identities,

at least one of which is an artist.

Once I was in New York and got in a cab. I took the backseat,

and in front of me I saw something related to a play.

So I asked the driver, "What is this?"

He said it was his profile. "Then what are you?" I asked. He said he was an actor.

He was a cabby and an actor. I asked, "What roles do you usually play?"

He proudly said he played King Lear.

King Lear.

"Who is it that can tell me who I am?" -- a great line from King Lear.

That's the world I dream of.

There's a golfer by day and writer by night.

A cabby and an actor, a banker and painter,

secretly or publicly performing their own arts.

In 1990, Martha Graham, the legend of modern dance, came to Korea.

The great artist, in her 90s, arrived at Gimpo Airport

and a reporter asked her a typical question:

"What do you have to do to be a great dancer?

Any advice for aspiring Korean dancers?"

Now, she was the master. This photo was taken in 1948 and she was already a celebrated artist back then.

In 1990, she was asked this question.

And this is what she said:

"Just do it."

Wow. I was touched.

Only those three words and she left the airport.

That's it. What do we need right now?

Let's be artists, right now. Right away. How?

Just do it!

Thank you.

(Applause)