This is a repository copy of Yun Isang, media, and the state : forgetting and remembering a dissident composer in Cold-War South Korea. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/168294/ Version: Published Version Article: Chang, H.K.H. (2020) Yun Isang, media, and the state : forgetting and remembering a dissident composer in Cold-War South Korea. Asia-Pacific Journal : Japan Focus, 18 (19). 3. ISSN 1557-4660 © 2020 The Author. Reproduced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Volume 18 | Issue 19 | Number 3 | Article ID 5492 | Oct 01, 2020 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Yun Isang, Media, and the State: Forgetting and Remembering a Dissident Composer in Cold-War South Korea Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang European avant-garde Abstract: Yun Isang (1917-95) was one of Korea’s most prominent composers in the twentieth century. From 1957, the year he moved to West Germany, to his death in 1995, he had an internationally illustrious career, Yun Isang (1917-95) was one of a small number garnering critical acclaim in Europe, Japan, the of composers from South Korea who had a United States, and North Korea. In South prominent career in postwar Western Europe. Korea, however, he became a controversial Born near the southern city of Tongyeong figure after he was embroiled in a national (T’ongyŏng) in Japan-colonized Korea, Yun security scandal in 1967. As part of this studied composition and cello at the Osaka incident, dubbed the East Berlin Affair at the School of Music in 1935. In post-liberation time, Yun Isang was abducted in West Germany Korea, he was a promising composer in Seoul. by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and In 1956, he left for Paris to study composition charged with espionage for North Korea. This and settled in West Berlin in the following year. experience of victimization, which also included From 1960, as his works were selected for torture, imprisonment, and an initial death prestigious music festivals, Yun found himself sentence, turned him into a vocal critic of Park an emerging figure in the European avant- Chung Hee and an overseas unification activist garde. He garnered praise especially for in contact with North Korea. This article compositions that were influenced by remembers the moral and political framings of traditional Korean music. From the early 1970s Yun Isang in South Korea against a recurring until his death in 1995, his music was politics of forgetting that masks the magnitude performed in big and small concerts in of violence that was wielded in the name of Germany, Japan, the United States, France, national security. It traces coverage of Yun in North Korea, and beyond. Reflecting his several mainstream newspapers from the first international esteem, Yun also attracted mention of his name in 1952 to 1995. It argues diverse students, including Toshio Hosokawa that representations of Yun were mediated by a from Japan, Jolyon Brettingham Smith from tension between national artistic progress and Great Britain, and Conrado del Rosario from national security, one of the central tensions the Philippines. But there was one country that defined South Korea’s Cold-War cultural where his name was under constant threat of politics. erasure: South Korea. Yun Isang’s strained relations with his native country began during the Park Chung Hee Keywords: Yun Isang, Cold War, South Korea, regime (1961-79). In summer of 1967, Yun was West Germany, North Korea, East Berlin Affair, abducted by members of South Korea’s Korean 1 18 | 19 | 3 APJ | JF Central Information Agency (KCIA) in West and the presidency since 1998. However, Berlin and forced onto a Seoul-bound flight. He almost three decades of state-centered was one of the 34 South Koreans who were narratives and media’s self-censorship arrested in Western Europe as part of the East surrounding Yun have left a legacy of taboo, Berlin Affair, a counter-espionage round-up and to date, there are no comprehensive that the KCIA staged with little evidence. Yun, studies that document the ways in which Yun who had visited North Korea from Europe in Isang was represented and discussed in the 1963, was charged with espionage for North South Korean media during his career. Korea. He was tortured, tried, and given a Scholarship on Yun in English and Korean has death sentence.1 Meanwhile, his abduction had tended to focus on stylistic analysis of his caused West German, Japanese, and American compositions, celebrating the ways in which colleagues to form action committees in Bonn, Yun tested the boundaries of Western art Washington D.C., and Tokyo, in order to raise music, rather than addressing the ways in awareness of the human rights abuse involved which he contested the boundaries of political in Yun’s extradition and indictment. One and moral legitimacy.3 While these largely particularly powerful campaign came from musicological studies make a significant Wilhelm Maler, the president of the Freie contribution to scholarship usually dominated Akademie der Künste in Hamburg at the time. by preoccupation with Euro-American He drafted an appeal for Yun’s release that was composers, they have left under-explored Yun’s signed by such luminaries as Igor Stravinsky, contested relationship with South Korea – as a Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, Herbert victim of the brutality of the Park regime, as a von Karajan, and Mauricio Raúl Kagel. Due to democratization and unification activist in this and many other international campaigns, contact with North Korea, and as a celebrated Yun was released from prison and was allowed composer. to return to West Germany in the spring of 1969. This article remembers the political and moral framings of Yun in Cold-War South Korea From this point on, Yun Isang was anagainst a recurring politics of forgetting that inconvenient figure for the Park regime. As a masks the magnitude of violence that was reminder of state violence, he also became an wielded in the name of national security. I icon of opposition within South Korean cultures examine accounts about Yun in South Korean of resistance, but any public discourse about newspapers from the first mention of his name Yun had to be shaped carefully andin 1952 to his death in 1995, drawing on more strategically as it was under the state’sthan seventy articles in three papers that were surveilling eyes. As former dissidents have vulnerable to state pressure – Tonga Ilbo, attested, in the 1970s, even mentioning Yun’s Kyŏnghyang Sinmun, and Maeil Kyŏngje (after name was considered a subversive act.2 Yun 1988, I also bring in a number of articles from became an even more delicate subject after the dissident newspaper Hankyoreh). To search 1973 as he transformed himself into a vocal for Yun Isang in mainstream newspapers in the overseas critic of Park and a unification activist second half of the twentieth century – in contact with North Korea. He would never particularly during the Park and Chun regimes again set foot in South Korea. and to some extent during the Kim Young Sam administration – is to be overwhelmed by the The victimization of Yun under the Park Chung collaborative relationship between the media Hee regime is no longer a sensitive subject in and the state. Of course, the media was not an South Korea, where a number of famed former official mouthpiece of the state, and individual dissidents have entered congressional politics journalists at various times sought to negotiate 2 18 | 19 | 3 APJ | JF the terms of what could and could not be said after the Incident and how these about Yun and other dissidents. But reports on representations swayed in response to changes known dissident figures tended to conform to in the domestic political climate and Yun’s official Cold-War narratives, attesting to a print international activities. culture where writers of any stripe, including those with activist leanings, had to use the frames of hegemonic discourse if Yun’s name was to be printed in public documents. 1952-55: Recognition in South Korea The state’s influence on the press, however, did not mean that the newspapers published a uniform image of Yun across the decades. Yun The East Berlin Affair of 1967 promoted Yun’s proved to be a challenging figure to represent image as an overseas South Korean dissident in as he confounded the two-part commitment of the Western imagination, but references to his the state to “the display of ‘South Korea’… as a name in South Korean newspapers before his developmentalist space at once opposing and departure to Germany contest this association. mirroring its northern counterpart in the global These early references from the early-to-mid 4 Cold War.” As I argue, a tension between 1950s demonstrate that Yun moved in notions of artistic progress and national mainstream cultural organizations structured security pervaded newspaper reports on Yun. by South Korea’s anti-communist, pro-U.S.