Tag Archives: korea

Not Two: Stillness and Digital Life at a Korean Monastery

Pico Iyer has a lovely article out in the latest New York Times focusing on "The Joy of Quiet".  It’s a great read and has a few lovely gems: In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — [...]

Harvest Celebrations and Back in Beijing

Back in Beijing after nearly a month in Korea. Left Seoul just as they began celebrating Chuseok, which friends translated as “Korean Thanksgiving.” And then I arrived in Beijing for Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiu Jie: 中秋节), where we drank, sang songs and ate mooncakes. It’s interesting to think about the many harvest-themed festivals in the industrialized [...]

Greetings from Gwangju, Korea

Despite being only about 1000 kilometers (~600 miles) by the way the crow flies, the journey from Beijing, China to Gwangju, Korea requires nearly a 12 hour odyssey. Early wake-up in Beijing, cab ride in the morning sun to Beijing Capital International Airport, land in Seoul Gimpo International Airport (lovely, by the way–much faster and [...]

Images from Gwangju Biennale 2010

In between my growing list of adventures here in Beijing, I’ve been steadily working on the Gwangju Design Biennale. The event, which alternates each year with the art-focused Gwangju Biennale, is coming up fast. And yet, although it’s known as Asia’s premiere biennial, Gwangju can be a tricky town to reach even from the continent. [...]

More on phones

What you’re looking at here is not a phone: it’s a computer. I noticed this phone parked at a number of Korean colleagues’ desks at the studio, and I finally asked them what it was. Designed to look like a cordless phone, it’s actually a computer that taps into any wifi network.  Once connected, it [...]