Fish Story. Allan Sekula

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      45The LNG carrier Hyundai Utopia, designed to transport liqufied natural gas from Indonesia to South Korea, nearing completion. Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard, Ulsan.

      46Model of ironclad “turtle ship” used by Admiral Yi Sun-Sin to defeat invading Japanese fleet in 1592. Hyundai shipyard headquarters.

      47Finishing propeller shaft in the engine shop. Hyundai shipyard.

      48Company golf course reserved for visiting shipowners. Hyundai shipyard.

      49–50Cutting steel in the plate and sub-assembly shop. Hyundai shipyard.

      51Mother and child. Ilsan fishing village adjacent to the Hyundai shipyard.

      52Billboard announcing plans for an amusement park on the site of Ilsan fishing village.

      53Kim Kyung-Seok, a fisherman for thirteen years, now a factory worker in a Hyundai subsidiary. Ilsan fishing village.

      54–55Doomed fishing village of Ilsan.

      56Morning rush hour outside Hyundai shipyard. Ulsan,

      57Hyundai company housing for shipyard workers. Mural based on a painting by the eighteenth-century Yi dynasty artist Sin Yun-Bok. Ulsan.

      58–59Girl with family car. Insa-dong district, Seoul.

      60Korean War Museum. Yeoi-do district, Seoul.

      61Outer perimeter of monument to Hyundai construction workers killed building the Kyung-bu Highway from Seoul to Pusan. Keumkang rest stop.

      62Worker installing hand-painted billboard for American movie. Seoul.

      63Fugitive eel. Chagalchi fish market. Pusan.

       South Korea. September 1993.

      Seventy years in Europe is equal to seven years in Korea.

      Saying among left-wing South Korean intellectuals.

      COMPANY TOWN

      In Ulsan, once a mere fishing village on Mipo Bay, it is possible to stay in a Hyundai-owned hotel, schedule appointments by Hyundai cellular telephone, shop for a bottle of Scotch whiskey or soju or a packaged snack of dried squid at the Hyundai department store, and travel in a Hyundai automobile–manufactured just down the street–to meetings with the officials of the world’s largest shipyard, a division of Hyundai Heavy Industries. This situation provokes paranoid speculation. A visiting shipowner soliciting competing bids from the shipbuilding divisions of two transnational conglomerates, the Mitsubishi zaibatsu in Japan and the Hyundai chaebol in Korea, might have reason to be nervous when telephoning headquarters in Piraeus or New York from the company hotel.

      The overt appearance of a purely “national” industry obscures more complicated lineages and patterns of investment. Hyundai propaganda strives to keep the story simple: the historical origins of Korean shipbuilding are traced to the ironclad “turtle ship” used by Admiral Yi Sun-Sin to defeat Japanese invaders in sea battles of 1592, battles won in a war that was lost. This legend of national metallurgical precocity conveniently forgets the prehistory of Koreans as a paleolithic fishing people, and ignores the subsequent and more systematic transition from wooden to iron ships in the deforested Britain of the nineteenth century. By looking backward only to look forward, this legend of a ferocious Korean ur-battleship strips iron plate away from its once inescapable resemblance to the scales of a fish or the shell of a turtle. If the turtle ship has lost contact with the sea’s archive of primal organic structures, these equivalences are revived in less “heavy” industrial contexts: in the ponderous and cynical “fish-buildings” of the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry or in the mournful and delicate clothing of the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake.

      In a similarly nationalist vein, the Hyundai housing blocks are decorated with large reproductions of female figures from eighteenth-century genre paintings by Sin Yun-Bok. Nonetheless, the name Hyundai is given in Chinese characters, a mark of traditional authority and status affixed to buildings previously reserved only for managers until workers, hard-pressed by the boomtown housing shortage of the late 1980s, demanded apartments of their own. The reassuring domestic diligence of the pictured women suggests a comforting barrier between the factory and the home, while masking the fact that it is women who also perform the most menial jobs in the shipyard.