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Power of Thinking, Power of Arts And Culture Education (1)

Arts and Culture Education For Young People On GyeongGi Sangsang Campus*

Cultural Policy is a quarterly magazine published by the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation since the summer of 2017 with the purposes of identifying new trends in cultural policies at home and abroad, gathering the opinions of experts in relevant areas, and introducing the directions and contents of diverse cultural policies promoted by Gyeonggi Provincial Government and Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation.


Writer | Kyunghwa Ahn


It is time to emphasize once again the importance of

arts and culture education which strengthens

problem solving, creation and critical thinking on

the basis of creativity and imagination. 



These days, Koreans in their 20’s and 30’s have great difficulty in finding jobs. Reflecting such a situation, not only public institutions in the arts and culture scene but also those in other fields have recently carried out projects linked to policies on job creation for the young. Opened on the site of the old campus of Seoul National University’s College of Agricultural Life Sciences(Suwon City, GyeongGi-do Province) in June 2016, Sangsang Campus was designed to use an unused site to create jobs for young people as part of an urban regeneration and cultural regeneration project. Since the College moved to Seoul in 2003, the site has boasted a natural landscape including its exuberant woods, thus making Sangsang Campus a cultural rest place combining arts, culture and nature. The Campus now has four buildings which were born again through remodeling: Community1980 (previously the building for Dept. of Agricultural and Horticultural Science), Youth1981 (previously that for Dept. of Applied Biology and Chemistry), Factory1967 (previously that for), and Smart Republic of Korea (previously that for Dept. of Agricultural Engineering). GyeongGi Cultural Foundation is running these buildings and woods.  


As GyeongGi Cultural Foundation was established to promote arts and culture in GyeongGi-do Province, the goal of Sangsang Campus run by the Foundation’s Local Intermedia Team is to support young people in creating businesses and providing space where Gyeong- Gi-do’s residents can enjoy culture in their everyday life. On Sangsang Campus, youth-related projects are mostly run by GyeongGi Youth Culture Hub1) and programs improving local residents’ everyday culture belong to GyeongGi Community & Culture Center2) and the Smart Republic of Korea3). Diverse projects run by GyeongGi Youth Culture Hub, GyeongGi Community & Culture Center and the Smart Republic of Korea are planned in line with Sangsang Campus’ mission, “a campus for all where the future is experimented and imagined. A campus of the future.” In this context, the projects’ keywords are as follows: forest, school for everyday life, living lab for creating professions and jobs, interdisciplinary cultural exchange and playground for all.



‘School for everyday life’ means creating an environment for lifelong learning where learning, work and entertainment form a virtuous cycle while all different generations coexist. To enable this, Sangsang Campus would like to create jobs related to the local community’s culture and suggest a model case of arts and culture education. ‘Living lab for creating professions and jobs’ refers to establishing a system supporting young people creating professions and jobs on the basis of arts, technology and labor. To provide the young with opportunities to create professions and jobs, Sangsang Campus selected 24 organizations of young people moving in, for the first time this year.


‘Interdisciplinary cultural exchange’, a term which describes Sangsang Campus’ role, is a multifaceted platform. On this platform, the Campus would like to become a center of international exchange by planning programs sharing new cultural trends in and out of Korea while also presenting different genres of arts and culture works. Meanwhile, the platform also provides projects that involve local residents of all age groups. Lastly, Sangsang Campus is willing to be a ‘playground for all’ by providing a cultural space where everybody can enrich their life with culture and nature. The Campus’ is part of its efforts to form a ‘playground for all.’ This market gathers together art, industry and different regions to form a virtuous cycle of production, consumption and distribution.




Among these five keywords, the one that is closest to arts and culture education is ‘school for everyday life’. This ‘school’ focuses on making use of arts and culture to educate people. In this process, they enrich their experience through trials and errors and build their capacity. This means autonomous lifelong learning. This learning is not confined to acquiring knowledge through textbooks, a method to which most of us were used at school. A 1965 NASA report stated, “Man is the lowestcost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computing system which can be mass produced by unskilled labor.” It is human nature to resist being fully dependent on robots or artificial intelligence. Whatever direction the world may take in this era of the fourth Industrial Revolution, core competitiveness will ultimately be based on people’s ability to think themselves. We hear people predict that the fourth Industrial Revolution will make many jobs disappear. To make this paradigm shift an opportunity, not a crisis, we need a fundamental change from a macro perspective, instead of responding from a micro perspective. Many experts agree that education needs to be at the center of the change.


Arts and culture(the arts in particular) consist in making a new road in the present place where we are used to follow the existing road. Making a new road and following the existing road are totally different. It is very difficult to create a road that hasn’t exist before. Nevertheless, humans have ability to accomplish this difficult mission. That ability is composed of imagination and creativity. Imagination and creativity constitute the human power to make a new road. Under these circumstances, it is time to emphasize once again the importance of arts and culture education which strengthens problem solving, creation and critical thinking on the basis of creativity and imagination. That is because arts and culture education improves humans’ basic mental capacity and helps them respond to dynamic changes actively.


In his book Why Men Fight, philosopher Bertrand Russell elaborates on a driving force making a new road and on the power of thinking to establish a good precedent without just following the existing precedents. What he means is the importance of thinking and education, as he states as follows: “The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women. Among children it is very common, and grows naturally out of the period of make-believe and fancy. It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of well-tried wisdom of the ages … it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”4)



* I summarized “Power of Thinking, Power of Arts and Culture Education,” a presentation I gave at the workshop section “Power of Arts and Culture Education” of InSEA 2017 which was held in Daegu from August 7 to 11.

1) It is a cultural platform where young people use arts and culture to experiment with creating professions and jobs. Equipped with eight labs including the Brewing Lab, Design Lab and Music Lab, it accommodates 24 teams of young people. The Workshop plans and runs diverse programs incubating new businesses.

2) It is a cultural space open to all residents of GyeongGi-do Province. To promote “everyday culture,” it runs diverse programs for different age and target groups including hands-on learning programs, lectures, workshops, craft residency and festivals. “Everyday Culture Center” refers to a space formed through the renovation of the existing cultural facilities and unused space. Supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the Everyday Culture Centers began to be established in 2014. Afterward, Korea came to have 105 Centers nationwide by 2016. The country will have about 20 additional centers in 2017. Each local area’s Everyday Culture Center has become a space of practice and presentation for the performances of local individuals and clubs and a space for the local community.

3) It is run not by GyeongGi Cultural Foundation but by a private institution upon request. Its goal is to realize what is imagined through the convergence of craft (textile, glass and porcelain) and academic fields (design, humanities, literature and arts).

4) Bertrand Russell(1916), Why Men Fight?(London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p.106.


- Series continued -




세부정보

  • Writer/ Ahn Kyunghwa, Chief Curator of Local Intermedia Team at GyeongGi Cultural Foundation

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