Seoul Nights
After the quarantine, Seoul at last.
It’s not even two weeks that I’m here, and time flies by way too fast, when you’re fighting to absorb a gigantic data dump faster than than a 5G-speed mobile antenna is throwing at you. Data that come in a thousand forms.
Seocho-i-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul
On the business side, new people and endless information as I ramp up as fast as possible the consulting mission that brought me here in Korea (in the “new economy” space, which requires an additional layer of exciting cultural adaptation for the “old economy” guy that I am).
And on the personal side, a whole city and its operating system: the essentials of functioning and moving in a metropolis 10 times larger than the village I live in, Paris; the rules to follow and habits one forms in this super-controlled COVID world (I’ve been temperature-checked more times since I landed here than the entire rest of my not-so-short life); of course the food, part of a whole culture together with a different language and script.
A language digression: I must try and get a bit further than just saying 안녕하세요 (“hello”) and 감사합니다 (“thank you”) every other second… even if the Koreans themselves are forever peppering their talk this way, together with plenty of 네 which means “yes” but mostly “I heard you” and “right?”. I can read the script, and that’s one step forward compared to the minefield of Japanese kanjis, but that does not mean understanding what one reads…
(By the way, I’m suddenly realizing that there is some benefit to the synthetic nature of a kanji — the instant recognition of a meaning independently of a sound: 中 is “middle” even if you don’t know that it reads “naka” in Japanese and “zhōng” in Chinese, and 大 is “big” whether it reads “ō” or “dà”. They use these two kanjis even here in Korea, as shorthand to show medium and large portions on restaurant menus…)
But enough on language….
I was talking of data overflow. Well, another one comes from the visual landscape.
After three years in old, quaint Europe, the Asian urban environment is assaulting me again. I’d had some training in Tōkyō, but it takes a moment to get used again to the relentlessness of an Asian metropolis. It’s slowly getting back at me, the familiarity I had built back then and there. For the time being, though, I still have to find my footing, and choosing my frames while shooting is still a very tentative venture. It will take time before one or more visual narratives emerge from my raw files. Long editing sessions await me this winter. But I guess the temptation of a preview is too strong.
So here we are, with a possible theme to develop in the next weeks. The city at night. Maybe a cliché, but still one with an irresistible emotional resonance. Enjoy. More will sure come.
