Presented by Victoria Ten, Independent scholar
The event will take place at 18:30 - 20:00 London Time, 19:30 - 21:00 Central Europe Time.
Individual Zoom link will be sent after registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcscOGsqD4iE9UjvOtBvljBERE4DoUCGECW
Should we consider ki suryŏn (氣修練 training related to ki-life energy) in South Korea as a New Age phenomenon? What is New Age in Korean context? Focusing on GiCheon (氣天), one of the first ki suryŏn groups established in South Korea in the early 1970s, we will look at ki suryŏn as a contemporary urban practice, which, like Chinese qigong and Indian yoga, is reinvented in modernity based upon ancient Asian traditions, thousands years old. Since the early days of research on New Age, an element of personal transformation which leads to the transformation of the society and humanity in general has been emphasized as central to New Age. This transformation was often linked to healing the self, society and environment. Ki suryŏn can be defined as culture of self-cultivation (a world-wide phenomenon), or as a Korean variant of East Asian ki practices. We will talk about the complex relationship between the culture of self-cultivation as a concept, New Age culture as originating in Europe, and old and new East Asian ki practices. French philosopher Michel Foucault proposed helpful tools for conceptualizing self-cultivation as technologies of self, based on epimeleia heautou ‘care of the self’, the theme appearing clearly in Greek philosophy, both Hellenistic and Roman, in the 5th century BCE and continuing until the 4-5th century AD. Foucault determines a 17th century ‘Cartesian moment’ within narratives of Western subjectivity, when the ideas of self-cultivation were relegated to the periphery of Western intellect, where they survived in the occult realm. The period of the 1960s -1980s was when Michel Foucault was most active as a scholar. In the world surrounding Foucault, waves of what later was termed ‘New Age’ swept the globe. As a means to challenge conventional Euro-American conceptions of medicine, health and illness, many European New Age movements have drawn upon East Asian ideas of self-cultivation for inspiration, and some of them embraced Western occultism.
About the Presenter: I was born in Soviet Russia to an ethnically Jewish mother and an ethnically Korean father, both anti-communist intellectuals. Since a young age I heard a lot about magic and mysticism, particularly from my mother, who studied Burmese shamanism, but also from my older brother, interested East Asian ki practices. When I was thirteen, at the outbreak of perestroika, I learned Chinese kung-fu from Chinese masters visiting Russia. Since the age of 15 and moving to Israel, I embraced the Jewish orthodox way of life for about 10 years, including the practice of Kabbalah, a branch of Jewish mysticism. In the late 1990s I had a chance to experience a number of New Age practices, which were then booming in Israel. After moving to Korea in the early 2000s, I started practicing GiCheon, a Korean mind-body discipline, and have been teaching it in Korea, Russia and Europe ever since. My PhD thesis, defended in 2017 at Leiden University, is anthropological research into GiCheon. I published extensively on ki suryŏn, contemporary Korean society, and psycho-physical culture in East Asia. My recent publications include a book Body and Ki in GiCheon: Practices of Self-Cultivation in Contemporary Korea (2020) and a book chapter “Transforming the Self in Contemporary Korean Ki Suryŏn (氣修練): Water, Wood, and Stone in Two GiCheon (氣天) DVDs” (2020, in Contemporary Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self). I currently work as a Solicitor for Fidux Trust Company Limited in London, UK.