Foreign-born artists: fugitives from the law?

I had originally planned for this week’s column to delve into the mysterious world of English teachers’ extracurricular pursuits in the underground artistic scene in Seoul.
I’m not talking about the alleged activities that cause uproars in the local media, but actual artistic output. Unfortunately, at the last minute, paranoia set in on my musical interviewee and she backed out.
She was worried about the fact that it is illegal under E-2 visa rules to regularly do anything outside of your official English-teaching gig. Clearly, many choose to ignore this stipulation, but talking about their under-the-radar pursuits in a newspaper is another matter entirely.
Yes, those D.J.s spinning in small Itaewon clubs or that woegook band that you saw in Hongdae last Friday night may, in fact, be fugitives from Korean law.
In the e-mail I received yesterday, my would-be interviewee spoke of horror stories about “friends on E-2s who have been deported for such activities.”
She added that acquaintances in the know believe speaking to the media about their pursuits “to be visa suicide.”
English teachers suffer from much negative attention in the Korean media, focusing on things like Western-based perception of drug use or criminal records.
The most recent Internet firestorm was lit by a teacher who posted pictures of himself draped with three Asian girls on the Web, as reported on The Marmot’s Hole blog and www.dailian.co.kr.
Whether this negative coverage is a result of the knee-jerk insular tendencies of this little peninsula or the behavior of some expats who live here, I’ll leave to you to decide.
But aside from all that, hagwon-dwellers are often talented musicians or artists wishing to enrich the local cultural scene.
Of course, if they achieve any degree of success in those pursuits, i.e. they start making money, their hobbies become illegal under local law.
Now all this makes things difficult for, say, someone writing a newspaper column exploring the different facets of expat life, as little-read as that column may be.
People aren’t going to put their names under a photo in a paper if it could get them shipped back home.
As one of the world’s most homogenous nations, with a long history of closed borders, Korea is struggling to open up to the world in a real sense. The current mass hysteria over mad cow disease illustrates this point well.
There has been a stream of government propaganda promising to make life easier for foreigners who wish to come in and contribute to Korean society, but that has not necessarily translated into actual progress on the ground.
The reluctance of many expatriates to bother learning the local language doesn’t make things any easier.
But for Korea to become a truly global nation, an oft-professed goal that is vital for such an export-based economy, allowing foreigners living here to contribute to the cultural scene is an important step.
Let’s hope that sometime in the near future, local artists who happen to have been born elsewhere won’t be afraid to have their names printed in the paper.

By Richard Scott-Ashe Contributing Reporter [richard@joongang.co.kr]