The Secret of Frequency A: An Incredible Disaster is a North Korean produced graphic novel for children. It positions North Korea as a benevolent global savior by following the story of an “Elite Youth Science Squad” trained in Juche ideology as they rescue an unnamed African country from ecological disaster.

The Youth Squad summons their supervisor, Professor Seung-min Heo, from North Korea, and together, they discover that the mysterious deaths of animals and the local human illnesses were caused by a sinister acoustic frequency emitted by a device created by a Nazi war criminal, a Japanese engineer, and an American corporate executive.

The story taps heavily into various conspiracy theories, such as climate control warfare and standard 440 Hz instrument tuning, to serve its pedagogical and anti-Western propaganda goals, and yet the story itself is quite positive, and its ideals still resonate with the goals of saving the planet, something Westerners generally wouldn’t associate with North Korea.

To be continued in “The Secret of Frequency A ~ vol. 2” folder…

The post The Secret of Frequency A ~ vol. 1 appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

The Secret of Frequency A: An Incredible Disaster is a North Korean produced graphic novel for children. It positions North Korea as a benevolent global savior by following the story of an “Elite Youth Science Squad” trained in Juche ideology as they rescue an unnamed African country from ecological disaster.

The Youth Squad summons their supervisor, Professor Seung-min Heo, from North Korea, and together, they discover that the mysterious deaths of animals and the local human illnesses were caused by a sinister acoustic frequency emitted by a device created by a Nazi war criminal, a Japanese engineer, and an American corporate executive.

The story taps heavily into various conspiracy theories, such as climate control warfare and standard 440 Hz instrument tuning, to serve its pedagogical and anti-Western propaganda goals, and yet the story itself is quite positive, and its ideals still resonate with the goals of saving the planet, something Westerners generally wouldn’t associate with North Korea.

The post The Secret of Frequency A ~ vol. 2 appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

A Boy & his Ox is a graphic-novel-in-progress. This project originally started in 2011 as an idea for a children’s novel, but it quickly evolved into a visual comic inspired by the Zen paintings I used to see on the walls of Korean Buddhist temples when I was a boy.

Thematically, my take on this classic parable synthesizes both the 12th-century Kakuan and 16th-century Pu Ming versions of the famous “Oxherding” cycle, and it is heavily influenced by the Zen poetry of Master Cho Oh-hyun and my ongoing work retranslating classic Korean religious and philosophical novels like Kim Man-jung’s The Nine Cloud Dream. But, really, the heart of the graphic novel is my love of Korean manhwa, which I was “reading” in my neighborhood manhwabang in Bupyeong even before I could read the words.

To be continued in “A Boy and his Ox” ~ vol. 2” folder…

The post A Boy and his Ox ~ vol. 1 appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

A Boy & his Ox is a graphic-novel-in-progress. This project originally started in 2011 as an idea for a children’s novel, but it quickly evolved into a visual comic inspired by the Zen paintings I used to see on the walls of Korean Buddhist temples when I was a boy.

Thematically, my take on this classic parable synthesizes both the 12th-century Kakuan and 16th-century Pu Ming versions of the famous “Oxherding” cycle, and it is heavily influenced by the Zen poetry of Master Cho Oh-hyun and my ongoing work retranslating classic Korean religious and philosophical novels like Kim Man-jung’s The Nine Cloud Dream. But, really, the heart of the graphic novel is my love of Korean manhwa, which I was “reading” in my neighborhood manhwabang in Bupyeong even before I could read the words.

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Crystal Key continues with “Vol. 2 ~ pages #61 through #120

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Seventy-five years after the Korean War, the Korean government seems poised to reckon with the U.S. bombing of Gokgye Cave in Danyang, North Chungcheong Province, which left hundreds of refugees and other civilians dead. As Koreans learn about war crimes committed by the U.S. — including the infamous massacre at No Gun Ri (Nogeun Village) — the government is taking steps to honor the victims and provide assistance to their loved ones.

Rep. Tae-young Eom of the People Power Party (representing Jecheon city and Danyang County in North Chungcheong Province) was one of 12 lawmakers who introduced a bill concerning the “restoration of honor and compensation for victims of the Danyang Gokgye Cave Incident” to Korea’s National Assembly.

“Although the Danyang Gokgye Cave Incident is a tragic episode in our modern history, the surviving family members have had to live with that pain, without receiving any compensation, for 75 years. We hope that restoring the honor of the incident’s victims and their family members and providing them with compensation from the state will promote human rights and national unity,” said Eom, who is the bill’s lead sponsor.

The bill was modeled on the special act for the No Gun Ri Incident, another massacre of Korean civilians by U.S. bombing during the Korean War.

The No Gun Ri Incident took place on July 25-29, 1950, in the early days of the Korean War. In the incident, hundreds of refugees and other civilians were killed in the U.S. bombing of Ssanggul Bridge, on the Seoul-Busan railroad line, in the village of No Gun Ri (Hwanggan Township, Yeongdong County). The special act sought to restore the honor of the victims and compensate their families.

The bill on the Danyang Gokgye Cave Incident would set up a committee to review victim rehabilitation and compensation; disburse compensation, medical assistance and living expenses; safeguard the rights of the victims and their families; and organize memorial projects.

The amount of compensation suggested by the bill is 90 million won (U.S. $70,000) for deceased and missing individuals and up to 90 million won for individuals with lasting disabilities. The envisioned projects include organizing memorial events, building a monument, establishing a foundation and operating a memorial center.

The families of victims of the massacre were gratified to hear about the bill.

“Better late than never. This bill will help me stand proudly before my ancestors,” said Byeong-gyu Cho, the 79-year-old chair of an action committee for victims of the Gokgye massacre.

“We hope the bill passes so that compensation for the families and memorial projects can become a reality,” Cho said.

The Danyang Gokgye Cave Incident occurred in Sang Village, Yeongchun Township, Danyang County, on Jan. 20, 1951, while the Korean War was raging.

Gokgye (also called Goekke) is a spacious cave running for 80-100 meters. Many of the locals and refugees who had taken refuge there were killed in the U.S. bombing.

A leaflet from the time signed by the commander of UN forces said, “Any individuals or groups of individuals who move toward UN positions will be shot.”

The villagers, who had been warned that their village might be attacked, left their homes. But with American tanks blocking the roads, they fled to the cave, where they were slaughtered by U.S. bombers engaged in a scorched-earth campaign.

Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2008 that over 200 people died in the massacre and recommended that Korea and the U.S. carry out a joint investigation and arrange for the payment of compensation and damages, but the issue was not followed up on until now.

A total of 167 victims have been identified in the massacre, 104 of whom were minors. Even now, rites for deceased ancestors are held around the area on the same day.

Cho and other bereaved family members have pushed for a thorough investigation of the incident and for measures to rehabilitate the victims, but Seoul has been reluctant to act on crimes committed by the U.S. military.

“I was 4 years old at the time. I’d gone to hide in the cave but was kicked out because I was crying so much, which is how I ended up surviving. But my grandfather and three other family members didn’t make it,” Cho said.

“When you include those without any families to remember them, the total death toll is over 360,” he went on. “It’s time for the U.S. to stop passing the buck and for our government to take responsibility as well.”

By Yoon-joo Oh, Cheongju correspondent
Please direct questions or comments to [en*****@*****co.kr]

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Korea’s ancient stories are full of wondrous creatures – wise dragons, clever rabbits, stupid tigers and kings that live under the ocean with sea serpents. These magical beings may not come up in daily conversations, but they reside deep in the Korean psyche.

The same characters that reappear in folktales have worked their way into many folk songs and longer sung stories (pansori) from ancient times. These persistent beings have lately discovered and inhabited Korean pop songs, including those of the Korean alternative pop band Leenalchi.  The band will have its Minnesota premiere at the Cedar Cultural Center on November 7

Descendants of the Dragon King

Leenalchi was formed in 2019, when composer/bass player Young Gyu Jang selected and invited certain classically-trained Korean musicians and vocalists to record a music score.  One was vocalist Yi-ho Ahn, a co-founder and current Leenalchi member, who answered an emailed interview from KQ.  

Ahn said the original score he and others were invited to sing was written for the animated musical The Dragon King, staged at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju. The musical is an adaptation of the traditional folk tale known as Sugungga. To their delight, the music was a big hit with the audience.  “We figured it would be fun to perform just the music, and it worked out great,” he explained.  “That’s how Leenalchi came to be.”

In addition to singing for Leenalchi, Ahn also co-writes and composes the band’s music with founder and director Jang. Korean traditional sounds are still quite new to American ears, but Ahn explained that the Korean bands who compose and play music drawn from ancient musical traditions, like Leenalchi, SsingSsing, and Sangjaru (which performed for the first time in Minnesota in September), are not really a new thing anymore.

“There are actually more of these bands than people would think, and they’ve been around longer than they might expect,” Ahn explained. “However, it’s very rare to find a band that operates with such a clearly-defined musical direction across all their creative and operational choices like Leenalchi does.”

In 2020, Leenalchi took South Korea by storm with its music for a series of Korea tourism promotional music videos, Feel the Rhythm of Korea, created in collaboration with Ambiguous Dance Company and Korea Tourism Organization. In the videos, dancers wearing bizarre, Korean-inspired costumes strut and dance to Leenalchi’s music in front of some of South Korea’s most ancient and modern sites. Audiences in the U.S. and other countries also saw the music videos.  Since then, the band gained a global fanbase, completing a tour in the U.K. and Western Europe in 2025.

Music that defies category

Culture writer Shannon Lee wrote on the band’s own website describing the character of their music.  Leenalchi always sings in Korean, and about folk stories most Westerners have never heard told.  However, Lee explains, it’s likely that a lot of Koreans could not tell you what Leenalchi’s songs are really about either – they may understand enough to know that it is a Korean folktale, and that “it may be something about a rabbit’s liver, or something about a soft-shelled turtle,” she writes.

Lee describes their lyrics as poetic, allegorical, and also buried in the ancient tradition of pansori, musical sung-storytelling, a kind of cross between opera and folk stories, “rooted in shamanism and developed in the Joseon Dynasty (17^th century), these songs tell epic tales of love, virtue, sorrow and dragon kings.” Its folk tradition roots are interesting, drives the engine of its lyrics, and are one of Leenalchi’s superpowers, but they are not the whole point.  While the stories are ancient, the songs are edgily modern. They are also fun and approachable. 

The interesting part is the beautiful final product Leenalchi produces through their deep training in ancient music paired with their driving rock/funk/pop style.  In the psych pop indie music scene in Korea, there is agreement that Leenalchi represents a radical branching off, an alternative to the very produced, choreographed, and (some would say), more predictable creation of the Kpop scene.

Teamwork makes new music

Born in 1968, composer/leader Jang has been on the inside track of South Korea’s music scene for a long time. Significantly, he witnessed during his musical career how hallyu, the Korean wave of pop culture, including popular music, was spread to every country in less than 20 years. Fast-forwarding to the present, Jang is now a major player in the country’s small but dedicated indie music scene; he is also a prestigious film composer who has scored soundtracks for some of Korea’s most celebrated movies like Train to Busan, The Wailing, and The Good, the Bad, the Weird.

Jang began to work with music from the pansori tradition in 2007, after composing a piece entitled Bari for choreographer Eun-me Ahn. Working with musicians from that project, Jang went on to several other projects, and eventually helped to found several alt-pop groups, including BIBING, SsingSsing and Leenalchi.

Ahn described how their group process of songwriting works in recent times.  “Our songwriting process is a bit unconventional,” he said. “People usually expect us to pick a pansori passage first and then build an accompaniment around it, but it’s the exact opposite.”

Instead, he said, composer Jang often brings the other band mebers short musical phrases to ruminate on. He depends on their imaginations along with folk music and pansori knowledge to come up with a match with some lyrics. “The vocalists (sorikkun) then test-fit various pansori passages onto those phrases,” Ahn described. “Once we select a matching passage for a phrase to build a primary framework, drums and bass can come in [to create] layers of multi-dimensional texture.”  Ahn said bassist Seo-jin Ra added that in the final evaluation “respecting both elements – the pansori elements and the pop elements – are equally the most important thing.”

A reviewer on the Instagram page of radio station KCRW wrote a mini-review of the band, commenting that Leenalchi succeeds in “taking the pansori tradition and bringing it starkly to the present, bringing a wildly kinetic sound, from elastic basslines (with not one, but two bassists), drums, and a chorus of voices and personalities that can move from whispering ideas to full-throated release in a matter of seconds.”

In pursuit of sound qualit

Pansori singers are trained in a rigorous and specific way. In tradition, singers in training build their strength and volume by practicing next to a waterfall, not only to be able to project their voices over the noise but also to be able to replicate the water sounds and other natural sounds. Pansori music requires a wide vocal range, from low and gravelly to the sweetest and most delicate soprano.   

Leenalchi creates its music with only western instruments, but only traditional Korean vocal sounds. The usual line-up consists of two bassists and a drummer who play rhythms back and forth, and vocalists (all trained pansori singers) who trade lines, emotions, sung conversations and harmonies.  Ahn’s colorful voice supplies much of the gravel, the roar, and the range that makes pansori so thrilling.  The three women singers on the U.S. tour – Soo-bum Park, EJae, and Su-in Choi – bring the delicate and skillful vibrato, and can all belt out the powerful and piercing high notes which are so characteristic of the pansori style.

As Lee’s review suggests, there are many “soris” (or sounds), in pansori to listen for, also present in Leenalchi’s compositions, including animal and nature exclamations, like “hee-hee,” “hut-hut,” “ssukguk ssukguk,” or even bird-like sounds such as “joorooroo,” or “lala lala.” The result is music that contains story, language, and sound effects, giving the listener a sense of the lyrics, even in a language they do not understand.

As the KCRW reviewer put it, “The arrangements are brilliant and leave room for every rhythmic twist, but the perceived effect is anything but minimal. Voices bend and play around the beat while the rhythm section holds everything down, locked into a pocket that feels equal parts ancient ritual, psychedelic funk, and left-field pop.”

As with all expertly-performed music, the virtuosity of Leenalchi’s musicians creates a loose feeling. They exchange looks, seem to ask questions and answer one another musically, and the result is delightful. As KCRW’s reviewer observed, “Leenalchi aren’t treating tradition as something preserved behind glass. They’re playing with it and showing us how it can be flipped, reverse-engineered and renovated.”

The real Lee Nal-chi

In naming the band, the group chose the name of a real pansori master who became something of a folk hero in the late Joseon era (1880s).  Lee Nal-chi started out his performing career as a traveling tightrope walking (jultagi) performer. Born into a low social class, as the son of a servant, he began by joining a troupe of street performers (gwangdae). That he achieved in the highly-skilled profession of pansori in those times of  a tightly-controlled class structure gave him folk hero status.

The Korea Herald reported that author Da-Hye Jang is writing a fictionalized account of the mysterious pansori master’s life, and the story is slated for a new drama series. Like the folk hero, the band may have also been in the “unlikely to succeed” category in the beginning, but like their namesake, has beaten the odds with skill, talent and persistence nonetheless.

Appreciating audiences on their first U.S. tour

Ahn understands Korean audiences the best, but believes they don’t necessarily have the advantage over non-Korean speakers.  They may place too much emphasis on the idea of  pansori, he said. “Because they focus on understanding the “tradition” or the “narrative content,” it sometimes ironically gets in the way of just enjoying Leenalchi’s music,” he remarked. “U.S. audiences, on the other hand, seem to let go of trying to decode the content or lyrics, and focus on a more immediate musical experience.”

There is storytelling and comedy within the music, he said.  And, “If you understand the lyrics and catch the unique humor in the narrative, you can enjoy Leenalchi  from another angle — but there’s no need to feel like you’re missing out if you don’t. Leenalchi’s music is intended much more for listening and dancing than storytelling. So, if your shoulders and hips are swaying and your feet are tapping while listening, you are already enjoying Leenalchi  to the fullest.”

His wish for Leenalchi’s music is that it penetrates the listeners’ daily lives in a positive way. “I dream of music that shakes off the fatigue of the commute, blows away the nagging from your boss, and drowns out the noise of the vacuum cleaner.”

Tickets for Leenalchi’s November 7 performance at the Cedar Cultural Center are at the Cedar’s box office website, and information about the ongoing U.S. tour is on the band’s website at this link.

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I’ve watched foxes waiting near a grave. Crows turning in rhythmic circles overhead. And somewhere, in a barren stretch of land, an iron spike working its ploy beneath the ground

The first time I watched the Korean film Exhuma, I was simultaneously intrigued and confused by these images. Understanding what these images meant gave the fear a shape, at first.

Red ink is one of these images – in Korea, it is traditionally associated with the dead, and writing a living person’s name in that color can carry a cold threat. When that color appears beside a living character’s name in film, it is meant to be a death sentence.

Some numbers carry a negative connotation as well. For instance, the number 4, or sa (사), is a homophone for the (Chinese-derived) Korean word for death. Korean apartment buildings and elevators sometimes skip the fourth floor entirely, labeling it “F” instead. For those who understand, the 2006 horror film 4 Horror Tales: Hidden Floor becomes that much more relatable.

However, not every recurring image in Korean film carries such a dark meaning. Rain, in Korean dramas, usually means the opposite of dread.  For a romantic couple, getting drenched by a sudden rainstorm is a sign of good luck for their relationship. There are often images of two people caught in the rain and forced to share one umbrella while walking home, laughing. The Korean drama Something in the Rain takes its very title from the idea.

Snow toes the line between beauty and danger. A first snowfall is meant to be an omen of change, which can mean both hope or terror depending on the circumstances. The drama Goblin makes use of the image for both a confession of love and a character’s death.

The appearance of red ink, the number four, rain, snow and other symbols in Korean stories do not mean anything on their own. Western horror hands you an explanation as it guides you through the mystery of the haunted house or the past of the possessed doll. Korean horror, on the other hand, uses visual repetition, wherein an image first appears casually and returns later to surprise the audience with the sheer gravity it holds.

I’ve caught myself pointing at my laptop screen while watching a Korean movie, trying to remember where I had seen a particular image before.

This is because memory supplies context in Korean horror. Folklore knowledge can turn an otherwise ordinary detail into a warning, giving a culturally-fluent viewer a richer experience compared to someone not in the know. At least it can have that effect in the hands of certain filmmakers.  With others, the horror to be unleashed has no warning system.

The iron spike and the fox den

Exhuma is an example of a film where folkloric awareness wills the audience toward an explanation of events.  The clues point toward a buried history. An aged geomancer tastes the earth at a grave near the border with North Korea. He frowns. The stone is unmarked, with only coordinates cut into its back. Foxes watch from the surrounding trees. There is a stillness, and the stillness spreads to the audience like a spell.

In the story of Jae-hyun Jang’s Exhuma (2024), a shaman is recruited by a wealthy Korean American real estate developer to identify the mysterious, and apparently spiritual, illness affecting the family’s newborn son. The shaman Hwa-rim decides a vengeful ancestor’s spirit is the cause, and the family’s patriarch enlists the help of Hwa-rim and her colleagues, a mortician and a geomancer, to relocate the grave. A generous fee motivates them to take the job.

Their ignorance is their downfall because the malevolent spirit unleashes a wave of destruction on the living. The unearthing of the grave is linked historically and spiritually to the unearthing of the truth of Korea’s past as an occupied people.

The story is loaded with spiritual clues and portents.  For generations, Korean stories warned against burying the dead near a fox den. Foxes are semi-spiritual creatures in the Korean mindset. There are some spirits, such as the gumiho, who can shape-shift to human form; while in spirit form it appears as a nine-tailed fox. Some believe the foxes disturb the grave and can assume the identity of the person interred beneath it.

In Exhuma, , the ground gives up a second casket beneath the first one, wedged completely upright. Inside is a Japanese general. Driven into the earth beside him is an iron spike. For the Korean audience, the scene recalls the still-debated and controversial belief that Japanese colonial authorities drove metal stakes into the peninsula’s mountains to sever its geomantic energy. Incapacitating that energy, in traditional belief systems, would also weaken the Korean people’s energy to unite and defend their native soil from the invader.

Later in the film, the shaman Hwa-rim draws a knife across her thigh and her cheek. She smears ash onto her face. Her eyes close in something between pain and rapture, the drums going the entire time. It is a visceral scene, meant to unearth unease in the viewer. Pigs are sacrificed as substitutes, meant to absorb the bad energy that would otherwise harm a living person.  Hwa-rim keeps moving to a rhythm different from the one the drums are playing.

 Every one of these clues is foreshadowing, planted early and meant to add up to something the audience can name. I believe Exhuma keeps its promise, rewarding the trust it asks of its audience.

Competing claims on the body

The Wailing (2016), in turn, breaks that promise on purpose, using ambiguity as a match point. The story describes how a mysterious Japanese man settles in a remote mountain village in South Korea.  An infection breaks out, affecting the villagers with strange symptoms. They become deranged and violently kill their own families.  The story centers around a police officer who is investigating the mystery after his daughter becomes infected.

The film introduces scenes the viewer cannot understand.  The shaman Il-gwang, called in to help, arrives in a colorful robe and chants over a girl writhing on the floor. Miles away, another man kneels over his own arrangement of bones and photographs, working the same way with different hands.

I felt unsettled while watching The Wailing for the first time.

There is a helpless feeling in knowing that the signs don’t give you mastery over the horror of the story. Both scenes are clearly rituals, but the viewer cannot tell which one, if either, was supposed to really be happening.  The rituals function as competing claims on the same body. While director Hong-jin Na imparts to the audience enough cultural fluency to recognize what’s unfolding, a reliable answer is kept just out of reach of the audience.

If anything, the more we understand as viewers, the more the uncertainty closes in, because we can no longer tell ourselves we are simply missing the context. The Wailing asks for that same trust, then declines to repay it.

Downhill to the semi-basement

A third register exists in Korean horror films, a characteristic that is stranger than the two before. It is one where horror belongs intrinsically to the society, and where the pressure of the rot and injustice spills over and lets loose a kind of social redemption. The famous Joon Ho Bong film Parasite (2019) rents space here, and Bong’s The Host (2006) is also a permanent resident.

There is a role for nature in the resolution of these stories, but nature is not an evil force. It is powerful, yet neutral. In both films, society’s inequitable systems assume the role of the malevolent spirit, while nature becomes a force for redemption.

Late in the convoluted story of Parasite, a torrential rainstorm floods Seoul, and there is a long overhead shot of the wreckage. We see whole rooms full of the ruined objects of people’s lives floating loose in the brown floodwater that blurs and evens out the landscape.  The shot wipes out the ordinary noise of the city, introducing a quiet horror of resignation.

The Kim family, who have been employed as domestic servants by a family in the wealthy heights above Seoul, descend through the city as the water rises, to the submerged streets of the poor neighborhoods below. They find their semi-basement home swallowed by sewage and floodwater. It’s humbling to see how the same storm that barely interrupts one wealthy family’s evening destroys the homes and livelihoods of so many families in the urban slum. The wealth is positioned above the flood, and the poverty below it. It’s as if the water follows the city’s existing hierarchy downhill.

What the river leaves behind

The Host is a monster movie, in which a creature is created accidentally from chemicals dumped into the Han River by an American military mortician. Ritual and knowledge prove irrelevant here. There is no way a character can read the danger from a fox’s stare.

Rather, the horror is human, systemic and created with bureaucratic indifference made monstrous and let loose into the water everyone depends on. When the creature attacks, it does so in broad daylight, at a riverside park full of ordinary families.  There is no genre grammar that cues the audience to brace. The flood comes and takes the rot with it, and what’s left is a ruined landscape that has to be rebuilt.

In each of these four films, something horrifying but distant eventually becomes close and impossible to ignore. Whether it is the emerging horrors of the past that we recognize through folklore or repeated images and symbols as in The Wailing, the wartime horror intruding into the present day as in Exhuma, or a human-caused modern horror, like The Host or Parasite, the audience is paralyzed as evil is upon us.  The water rises, and the people with the least are left with nowhere to go.

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