Something was missing from Koreatown’s walls. This artist is trying to bring it back

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Murals depicting Korean drummers, dancers and historical figures were a large part of Dave Young Kim’s childhood in Koreatown.

At the time, the Korean American artist didn’t know what all of the imagery meant, but it left a lasting impression on him.

“We don’t learn culture via formal education. It’s all gleaned,” Kim said. “It’s just what we sense, and we feel a connection to it without actually knowing anything about it. It belongs to us, and it feels very familiar.”

Many of the murals Kim remembers from his childhood have since disappeared. With his latest mural at the Korean Resource Center, Kim hopes to bring some of that visual imagery back to the neighborhood.

Completed this summer, the mural is Kim’s first in Koreatown.

The mural shows a group of traditional Korean drummers moving beneath sweeping ribbons of color, with plum blossoms blooming across the bottom of the wall. Faint outlines of traditional Korean architecture appear in the background.

At the center of the mural is 풍물놀이 (pungmulnori), a traditional Korean folk performance that combines drumming, dance and acrobatics and has long been part of village festivals and celebrations.

A close-up view of artist Dave Young Kim’s mural at the Korean Resource Center in Koreatown. The work depicts traditional Korean drummers.

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Courtesy Dave Young Kim

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For Kim, the project was a chance to reconnect the neighborhood with the kind of cultural imagery he says shaped his own understanding of identity growing up.

“It was important to me growing up, and for me to see myself through very purposeful art, very intentional art,” he said. “For my own formation and identity, I think it was very important. I’d like to do that for future generations.”

Kim, 46, who was born and raised in Koreatown, said the project felt different from his other murals because it was rooted in the community where he spent his childhood.

“The formative years of my life are here,” he said.

The project grew out of the Abbey Mural Prize, a national grant program that supports community-based public mural projects.

As part of the project, Kim partnered with the Koreatown Storytelling Program, which trains youth to interview community elders. Students interviewed residents at Durae Crenshaw House, an affordable senior housing complex and home to the Korean Resource Center, and shared transcripts with Kim as he developed the mural.

The architecture in the mural reflects the idea of home that emerged repeatedly in interviews with elders, Kim said.

“There were a lot of iterations of the mockups. The very initial ones were very, very, very rooted in the stories, the narratives from the elders,” Kim said.

The interviews also left an impression on Daisy Yeon, 17, one of the students who conducted them. She said participating in the project changed the way she thinks about Koreatown and its history.

Yeon said she believes traditional Korean imagery still has a place in a neighborhood that has changed rapidly in recent years.

“Personally, the way Koreatown has evolved in these few last years from the pandemic and the shift where people move into other Korean enclaves like Buena Park and Torrance, Koreatown is partly becoming a place of pop-up matcha spots, for example,” she said. “So I think it’s important for tradition to still be here.”

Seeing the finished mural was “a full-circle moment,” she said, after spending months interviewing elders whose stories became part of the artwork.

While researching Koreatown’s public art history, Kim learned many of the murals he saw as a kid grew out of cultural initiatives and public funding that no longer exist. He also discovered an earlier generation of Korean American muralists whose work once covered parts of Koreatown.

In 1993, artist Dong-In Park completed a mural of traditional Korean farmers’ dance in the Korean Community Center at 981 S. Western Ave.

He told the Los Angeles Times he hoped “the 1.5- and second-generation Korean kids” would not forget their language and history. Park, along with artists including Sonia Hahn and Kuk Chol Han, helped establish a tradition of public art celebrating Korean culture during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

An undated photo of Dong-In Park’s mural depicting a farmers band playing music and dancing to provide entertainment for Korea’s largely agricultural population. The mural was previously located at 981 Western Avenue in Koreatown.

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Courtesy Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles

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Kim wants his mural to carry that tradition forward while also reflecting the history of the community it was created for.

The Korean Resource Center, founded by South Korean democracy activist Yoon Han-bong, has long organized around immigrant rights, workers’ rights and civic engagement. During the project, Kim learned that traditional Korean drumming has long played a role in the organization’s activism.

In the mural, an older drummer who immigrated from Korea leads the group, followed by a middle-aged performer who learned from him and younger drummers wearing sneakers, modeled after college students who continue the tradition today.

“Where we landed was very much to the core of what KRC is,” Kim said. “They are very activist and progressive.”

The Koreatown of today is filled with Korean-owned businesses and Korean-language signs, Kim said, but far fewer public murals reflecting Korean culture.

His latest mural isn’t about recreating the past so much as restoring something he believes has faded from the neighborhood.

As an artist, Kim said, public art has the power to shape how people experience a place.

“There’s something about the everyday landscape that you kind of are forced to take in,” he said, “and then as an artist, having the ability to shape what that might be.”