Yim Hun-young, director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, speaks during an interview at his home in Seocho District, Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Yun Gi-hun

"No matter what kind of writing one does, even a revolution must be stylish and beautiful to succeed," says Yim Hun-young, a literary critic who has spent much of his life fighting for Korea’s historical memory.

The 85-year-old, director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, says beauty is not a luxury or an escape, but rather what allows literature, resistance and even revolution to endure.

That conviction reveals a different side of a figure long associated with activism and historical reckoning. Yim led the Center for Historical Truth and Justice for more than 20 years and helped compile the "Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators," work that hardened his public image as a veteran activist. In an interview at his home in Seoul’s Seocho District on Wednesday, however, he made an unexpected case for beauty.

Yim Hun-young, director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, looks through “The Road of Literature, the Square of History,” an autobiographical record based on conversations with literary critic Yoo Sung-ho, at his home in Seocho District, Seoul, Wednesday. The book traces Yim’s life from childhood through his two imprisonments and his tenure as head of the Center for Historical Truth and Justice. Korea Times photo by Yun Gi-hun

The idea, he said, grew from prison. Yim was jailed twice in the 1970s, experiences that made him realize how urgently human beings need beauty. Behind bars, he found comfort in works he said he would ordinarily have ignored, including aesthetic literature. He read Junichiro Tanizaki, a master of the genre, and Oscar Wilde, who believed beauty was the only value.

"No matter how painful reality was and no matter how hungry I was, I learned then that beauty gives such joy and hope, and how great a comfort it is to human beings," Yim said.

Yim repeatedly returned to one sentence. "Beauty is an eternal truth," he said.

For Yim, that belief does not contradict his lifelong dedication to committed literature and realism.

"Look at Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection 'The Flowers of Evil,'" he said, citing it as an example of how aesthetic vision can feed resistance.

Source: Korea Times News