Kookmin University (President Jeong Seung-ryul) invited film director Jeon Hoo-seok as the speaker for the 640th Kookmin University Thursday Special Lecture at the Kookmin University Academic Conference Hall on the afternoon of Thursday, April 10. Under the theme of “Diaspora is the Future of the Korean Peninsula,” Director Jeon Hoo-seok told the story of his reflections on identity and coexistence through the lives of overseas Koreans living in various countries.

The former director began his lecture by recalling Professor Valery Khan, a third-generation Korean from Uzbekistan, who posed the question, “Will the Korean diaspora eventually disappear?” at a Zoom meeting five years ago, which was dominated by Koreans.

He said that this question made him think more about how to understand the complexity and depth of the identity of the diaspora, or people who live in another country away from their home country. And he explained that this thinking eventually led to understanding the issues of diversity and coexistence that our society is facing today. Director Jeon, who was born in the United States but spent his childhood and adolescence in Korea, said that he first began to think about who he was and where he belonged when he returned to the United States as a member of a minority group in high school. Through this, he said he came to understand that the diaspora is not simply people who have left their home country and migrated, but people who create new cultures in their own way.

In particular, while meeting Koreans in Cuba and working on a film about them, the director explained that the diaspora has evolved from a simple noun referring to overseas Koreans to a verb that “allows us to see the world from more than one perspective and recognize those on the periphery.” In other words, I asked myself if the attitude of trying to stand on the border rather than the center, and the attitude of looking at the world with a new perspective without settling for comfort, are not the philosophical and ethical discourses that are needed in the Korean Peninsula today.

Kookmin University's Thursday Special Lecture, which has been the first university in Korea to offer regular courses with weekly lectures by external speakers for the longest period of time, has hosted former President Roh Moo-hyun for the past 30 years. About 640 speakers from all walks of life in the fields of politics, society, science, and culture, including the late Cardinal Kim Su-hwan, writer Yu Si-min, film director Park Chan-wook, National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun, and U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert, took the podium.