Stories from My College Days

 

Making prints in the darkroom, I pulled photographs with the fierce belief that no one worked harder than I did. As a result, I swept unprecedented awards, drowned in scholarships, and broke out on my own. Back then, I didn’t even know what kind of family background I had; the world of photography was my entire universe. I had no idea how rich my mother was. I didn’t even grasp what being rich meant. Just photography!

Feeling the limitations of still photography, I grew interested in cinema and chose the University of Southern California. Back then, USC was the undisputed powerhouse in film, and they offered me a massive scholarship.

Now that I was on my own, putting food on the table became the bottom line, so I drew a salary from a graphic studio and took night classes. Those were fun times. I learned to drink, learned about women...

Cinema offered an entirely different vision. A photograph is a single frame, but cinema hinges on movement. The learning process was endlessly fascinating. And yet, frustration crept in. In several classes, it wasn't the professors teaching—it was juniors and seniors running the room, wasn't it???

Now that I teach, I can understand where that came from, but to my young mind back then, it was simply infuriating.

I said screw it all and transferred to Humboldt State University. It was a campus known as a hippie haven. Humboldt County was the territory producing the most expensive weed around. At an airport where only one plane landed a day, during harvest season the runway turned into a parking lot for private planes as people poured in from all over the world. Even the town mayor grew weed—that's how commonplace the trade was. It was an era Koreans couldn't even fathom.

There, I fell under the spell of oil painting and literature. Living in solitude, writing and painting, I lived a life remarkably similar to how I live today.

 

That life was cut short by a single phone call. Someone had defaulted on a debt owed to my mother and surrendered a shop instead; having no one else to manage it, the order came down for me to run it.

With no way out of it, I drove ten-plus hours down the PCH back to LA and looked after the shop.

After two years of running the store and fooling around, a thought suddenly struck me: “Wait, I need to finish college!”

Back then, LA had only one real art school: Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. I whipped up rumors of being the founder of a BMW-driving 'Elitist Group,' palled around with the professors, and cruised easily toward graduation. One professor, who ran his own design firm, scouted me to work for his company. Hurting for cash, the school must have wanted to squeeze more tuition out of me—claiming I was three credits short, they slipped a deficiency notice into my cylinder instead of a diploma. I was just happy to be done with school. What the hell did a piece of paper matter anyway, when I was already working? My best friend had been scouted in our junior year, and forget a diploma, he was already raking in serious cash.

 

2026.

American art schools are intensely pragmatic. Rather than minting starving 'artists,' they teach you how to make a living through art. Koreans are stuck with the ingrained notion that artists are destined to beg for scraps. But times have changed! The avenues to make a living through art are everywhere now. In a world where you have to pop, it's become nearly impossible to survive without an artistic edge.

My college years planted deep roots in me. Though it was nearly forty years ago, that collegiate philosophy still stays with me.

Except now, the time has come to pass it on.