So while I was in Seoul, I saw an art/design show sponsored by KT, formerly Korea Telecom, at the Kumho Art Museum (금호미술관). KT is a large communications and telecommunications company in Korea. The main reason why I know about them is b/c they have the strangest commercials on television. They've adopted a logo/slogan, "olleh," the misspelled version of the Spanish, "olé." Please watch the commercials below.
It's funny, b/c Koreans are always like, "Yes, olleh is hello backwards." I don't know what to make of it sometimes. I try to tell them that they actually spelled the Spanish incorrectly, but it's sort of fruitless.
Ok, so as for the art part, they sponsored a show, to promote creativity or something, but it had to use the company's slogan/logo, "olleh." It was definitely interesting. Below are some photos from the show. I recommend clicking on them so that you can get a closer view of the imagery.
In this piece, a red picture frame was hanging by a string in the middle of the floor, the Korean on the floor basically says, look at the chair through the picture frame.
Oh the awkward Engrish! So this says, "Fanimals - ... That's when the RED and BLUE were greeting me at the door. I saw the HAPPY GREEN was typing musically while the HOPPING HARE graciously flew over the YELLOW BEAST from the across."
Though while I was viewing the show, some person accidentally took what looked like a pamphlet, though was actually a part of the piece of work. So one of the gallery people was running around frantically trying to find the person. And also while I was there, I made my first attempt at conversing with one of the gallery sitters, in a mix of English and Korean. Baby steps, baby steps....
Syntax is so hard to explain to people who have a strong sense of their own language to the exclusion of others. I had such a hard time wrapping my brain around syntax for Czech and Russian! My brain kept trying to treat syntax in translation as analogous rather than a complete systemic rearrangement. English is too strong in me. And when Czech friends would mistranslate syntax, their first inclination was to disagree with me when I rearranged it based on their sense of meaning. Even though their syntax was incorrect, the meaning of the sentence to their "eye" was correct. When I corrected the syntax, they saw the sentence or phrase as having incorrect meaning as compared to what the phrase meant in Czech. A veritable tower of Babel.
ReplyDeleteThe same thing happens to me in English. The English teachers will ask me if a given sentence is correct and I sometimes have to say no, you're actually saying something else. Then they look at me with distrust and say, ok..., but I don't agree. And I'm just thinking, but I'M the native English speaker! Gahhhh!
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, trying to wrap my brain around Korean is totally giving me a headache, hehe. Not only is the grammatical structure completely reversed, but even word choice for specific situations is reversed as well.
For instance, in English, if you're on your way to meet a friend, you would tell them, "I'm coming." But in Korean you would use the equivalent of "I'm going." And this whole reversed business is even carried into the point of reference for social interactions. It becomes very confusing...