Benefit Concert for Stateless Orphans in China

Last Saturday night, January 16th, friend Lauren Walker put together an intimate evening of music at Yogiga Gallery in the Hongdae area of Seoul. Though by “intimate” I do not mean quiet.

“A Night for North Koreans: Stateless Orphan Benefit Concert” raised over 700,000 won (~US$617) for an orphanage in China. Possibly 10,000 or more children of North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers are stateless, because they cannot be registered with the Chinese authorities, lest the mothers be caught and sent back to North Korea. Without proper registration, they can’t go to school. For more on this situation, see here and here.

Headliner Sato Yukie, a Japanese musician who lives in Seoul, immediately caught my attention. I don’t care for most popular Korean music coming out today, but suddenly I’d found a CD worth buying (he sings in Korean, incidently). His first solo album is a bit folk and mostly rock. By the way, he is quite a character — I hope to be able to see more of his shows.

The highlight of the evening for me came when Sato welcomed North Korean escapee Kim Bok Ju on stage to sing while he accompanied her on guitar for three or four numbers. Now I had two CDs I’d be buying before the night was done.

Below are a couple videos I took of parts of songs they performed together (my battery was running low, and I was worried they might not want me to film whole songs anyway — I did later get permission to post these, btw).

Also be sure to watch this wonderful rendition of Imgin River / 임진강, which unfortunately is not on her CD.

More photos and, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story after the break.

The day before at an NKHR conference I’d met a couple really cool guys from Japanese NGOs (one was No Fence) and invited them to drop by the benefit. It just so happens the gentleman (pictured below) from Life Funds for North Korea had attended the same university in the US that organizer Lauren did several years later. She’s always heard from a professor of hers about a former Japanese student who’d been very gungho about human rights. Yup, you guessed it, they met for the first time shortly before the event began and Lauren asked him to speak a bit about Life Funds’ work.

Next Peter Jung, the head of Justice for North Korea, spoke briefly about his work.
Below is a shot from the experimental video & music performance that started the concert. The photo is taken from the press conference in Seoul in December at which several defectors talked before traveling to Europe to present testimony to the ICC. Parts of the video collage were used throughout the evening.

Organizer Lauren. She’s full of great ideas and energy!

The head of Yogiga Gallery and recently named Hongdae Musician of the Year, Lee Hanjoo plays the guitar (below).

The last two acts were solo guitarists, and at the risk of getting their names wrong or flip-flopped, I think immediately below is Nick from Daejeon and below him is Joe. There’s talk of doing a similar benefit in Daejeon.

The flier for the event.