뉴스레터

One summer, over a decade ago, some Korean scholars, including myself, had a chance to have dinner at a home of a nomad in the Mongolian steppes. The lady of the house quickly lit the stove, kneaded dough, and prepared noodle soup for the unexpected visitors. Mongolian nomads use dried cow dung to light a fire. When the fire weakened, the lady fed the fire with more cow dung and resumed the meal preparation. One of the scholars who had been watching this refused to eat the noodle soup. The reason: the food was made by the same "dirty hands that had touched excrement."

Although much time has passed since, I still cannot forget it. The phrase "dirty hands that had touched excrement" made me realize how even the most familiar activity to one group can take on a whole different meaning with a shift in perspective. From the Mongol viewpoint, well-dried cow dung is something that makes good fire. However, from the point of view of my colleague who refused to eat, dung is dung, whether dried or not, and thus, dirty.

In this way, very different conclusions can be arrived at regarding the same event when there are differences in perspective. Depending on the cultural background of the viewer, an object may appear beautiful or ugly, good or evil. With historical events, too, it is very common for there to be conflicting reactions to and assessments of the same event. One example that pops to mind is AN Jung-geun. Koreans and the Japanese have made completely different assessments of him; Koreans consider him a martyr while the Japanese regard him as a terrorist.

This obviously is not the only example. Behind the many conflicts between people, nations, and countries, there always lie clashing perspectives. Everyone expects others to look at things from his/her point of view. S/he also insists that his/her perspective is the correct one and that everyone else is at fault. However, without a shift in viewpoint, we will not be able to overcome the problems that arise from differing perspectives and no one will be able to see the possibilities that lie beyond our differences.

Martyr versus terrorist and Picasso

In contemplating this issue, I thought of Picasso. He is 20th century's greatest master of the arts, the founder of cubism, and a pioneer of modern painting. Such grand descriptions follow his name because he blazed the trail for a whole new world of painting by overcoming the contradictions and limitations of the existing rules of perspective in art--adhered to as an absolute law until Picasso came along. The traditional linear perspective entails the representation of a subject matter from a single viewpoint. Such a representation hides the back and the sides of the subject, and thus, according to Picasso, is not "complete."

Picasso surmounted the limitations of the linear perspective by adopting a multiple-point perspective. Otherwise put, the subject matter would be looked at from diverse angles, and its representation would become a comprehensive reorganization of what is seen from diverse vantage points. The representation would then include not only the subject's front and the back but also its left and right and top and bottom. In other words, the multiple-point perspective takes into account the views of the subjects from all angles. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, one of Picasso's masterpieces, was the first painting that applied this perspective.

If only the historians of Korea, China, and Japan adopted an "in-the-round" perspective of history... It occurred to me that maybe then, the recurring historical disputes among these three nations may finally come to an end.