Ko Un

Ko Un (born 1 August 1933) is a South Korean poet whose works have been translated and published in more than fifteen countries. He had been imprisoned many times due to his role in the campaign for Korean democracy. Ko is routinely mentioned in Korea as one of the front runners for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Life

Ko Un, born Ko Untae in 1933, was the first child of a peasant family living in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province. During a time when the national culture was being suppressed under the Japanese occupation, his grandfather taught him to read and write in Korean. He had also learned Chinese by the age of 8. When he was 12, he found by chance a book of poems by Han Ha-un, a nomadic Korean poet with leprosy, and was so impressed that he began writing himself.

Ko was still a teenager studying at Gunsan Middle School when the Korean War broke out in 1950. Many of his relatives and friends died and during it he was forced to work as a grave digger. He became so traumatized that he even poured acid into his ear to shut out the war’s noise, leaving him deaf in one ear. Then in 1952 Ko decided to become a Buddhist monk. After a decade of this life, during which he published his first collection of poems, Otherworld Sensibility (Pian Kamsang, 1960), and his first novel, Cherry Tree in Another World (Pain Aeng, 1961), he chose to return to the lay life. From 1963 to 1966 he lived on the remote island of Jeju-do, where he set up a charity school, and then moved back to Seoul. However, dependent on alcohol and not at peace, he attempted to poison himself in 1970.

Gong Yoo

Gong Ji-chul (Hangul: 공지철; born July 10, 1979), better known by his stage name Gong Yoo (Hangul: 공유), is a South Korean actor.

Career

Gong graduated with B.A. Theater degree at Kyung Hee University. He started his showbusiness career with small parts in dramas and films. He landed his first lead role in Biscuit Teacher and Star Candy in 2005. His acting talent caught the attention of casting directors and audiences and he has become an actor to watch. His role as Choi Han-Kyul in the MBC romantic comedy The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince solidified his status as a leading man. The popularity of the drama made it one of Korea's most watched dramas of 2007, and made Gong Yoo a hallyu star.

The actor finished his mandatory service in the Korean Armed Forces, which started on January 14, 2008 and ended on December 8, 2009.

Gong Yoo initiated and pursued production of a theatrical adaptation ofGong Ji-young's novel The Crucible, a gift from his senior as congratulation for his promotion during enlistment. This movie was internationally released under the title Silenced. The film sparked public outrage upon its release on September 22, 2011. This led to a reopening of the investigations into the incidents on which the novel and film are based. Public demand for legislative reform reached the National Assembly, where a revised bill to target sex crimes against minors and the disabled, dubbed the Dogani Bill after the Korean title of the film, was successfully passed in late October 2011.

A Muse

A Muse (Hangul: 은교; RR: Eun-gyo) is a 2012 South Korean film adaptation of celebrated author Park Bum-shin's novel Eun-gyo. A meditation on aging, art, and loneliness, it follows a 70-year-old poet who falls in love with a high school girl and is inspired to write a short story about her. But his star student, who is jealous of the relationship, steals his literary work.

Plot

Lee Jeok-yo (Park Hae-il) is a highly respected national poet in his 70s. His thirtysomething assistant Seo Ji-woo (Kim Mu-yeol) has recently published his first book, described as a genre novel with psychological insight, and it has shot to the top of the bestseller lists. Only later will it be clear how great his debt is to the poet laureate. On finding a young high school girl, Eun-gyo (Kim Go-eun), asleep on a chair on his porch, Jeok-yo is instantly enamored and rather than chastising her for breaking into his property, he subsequently agrees to give her a part-time job cleaning his home. As Jeok-yo spends more time in Eun-gyo's company, long-lost feelings are awakened within him, and her exuberance, lust for life, sense of fun and genuine warmth towards him quickly strip the years away in his mind: he increasingly sees himself as the young man he used to be—his love and need for her growing not only because he finds her incredibly beautiful but also as a direct result of how she makes him feel. Deeply smitten, Jeok-yo begins to write a short story about his imagined sexual relationship with the effervescent young woman. However, as the two get ever closer, Ji-woo finds it impossible to hold back from vocalizing his opposition to what he deems to be an inappropriate and wholly repugnant relationship and, on finding Jeok-yo's manuscript, his abhorrence (and jealousy of both Jeok-yo and Eun-gyo's relationship and the beauty of Jeok-yo's writing) boils over and he decides to steal the short story to publish under his own name.