Estranged Modernisms

Stories that explain why the experimental writer Kim Hae-gyeong chose the pen name “Yi Sang” abound. Fellow avant-garde writer Park Taewon claimed that a Japanese supervisor had mistakenly called him “Mr. Lee” (Ri-san in Japanese), and Kim took up the name as a joke. Kwon Youngmin, a scholar of Yi Sang’s works, thinks he took the name in honor of a plumwood brush box his painter friend (and possibly lover) Gu Bon-woong gave him as a gift in college: the characters for “plum box,” 李箱, look like a proper name, Yi Sang. Those syllables are also homophones for the words “strange” (異常), “ideal” (理想), and “more than” (以上). Each origin story suits Yi Sang’s writings differently. His multilingual wordplay and untrammeled experimentation are certainly strange, highly conceptual, and always interested in : more than reality, more than language, more than the present had to offer during his short life and troubled times.