With four suicides, K-Arts students discuss artists’ difficulties

Posted on : 2011-10-08 11:48 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Students and professors have pointed to isolated study and uncertain futures in difficult arts careers
 Oct. 6.
(Photo by Choi Woo-ri)
Oct. 6. (Photo by Choi Woo-ri)

By Choi Woo-ri

“Your pain knows my pain. So it knows the sadness I am feeling now.”

Four students at Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts) have committed suicide over the last five months. The students’ passion for the arts has stifled by the uncertain future that lay before them, and they are wrought with guilt at having failed to look after their lonely friends. Students and professors who have lost friends and students have broken their silence and begun publicly discussing their sadness.

On Thursday, the atmosphere at the K-Arts campus in the Seokgwan neighborhood of Seongbuk District, was as heavy as the blue-black autumn night sky. Students revealed a deep sense of loss at the recent string of four suicides. From 7 p.m., students who had been enduring their pain in silence held a “memorial service for college friends who passed away first” at the square in front of the campus’s Headquarters building, performing traditional salpuri dance to wash away evil spirits and funeral marches. More than 200 students laid flowers and paid tribute to the dead beneath a painting by Animation Professor Park Jae-dong, which had been hung there instead of funeral portraits.

The college and its students said little about their deaths.

“It can’t only be K-Arts that is in a situation like this. The media attention is a burden,” said one fourth-year art student who wished to remain anonymous.

According to statements by police officials, two second-year students from the School of Visual Arts and two fourth-year students from the School of Film, TV and Multimedia took their lives between May and the end of September this year, for reasons including failure in job examinations, inability to adapt to university life and conflict with parents. Reportedly, three of them left messages to their families and acquaintances saying that they wanted to die before taking their lives, while two of them were taking antidepressants.

Unlike other universities, K-Arts, which was founded in 1993 with the aim of providing professional education in artistic skills and has 3,000 students, faces the simultaneous burdens of youth unemployment and survival in society as an artist. Students that experienced the deaths of their friends guardedly said that they died as a result of the solitude of being artists and of fear regarding uncertain futures.

“When you first start there are intensive initiation classes, and in the third and fourth years you have classes face to face with professors and large amounts of time with other people, but in the second year you spend a lot of time alone and it is easy to lose direction and feel empty,” said School of Visual Arts Student Union President Son Ji-hun, 24, commenting on the fact that both of the dead students from his school had been in their second year. “They probably felt the loneliness of studying alone.”

One student from the School of Film, TV and Multimedia who wished to remain anonymous said, “When you get to the fourth year, you can’t help but get scared at having to direct your graduation work and about the path you’ll take in the future. The psychological burden gets greater every day and it’s just as if there’s no way of beating it.”

Professors take the same view. K-Arts’ faculty association issued a statement on Oct. 5 asserting, “We must understand the agony felt by young students who, in uncertain circumstances without any prospects, never know when they will come up against the temptation of death as they silently walk the hard path of the artist. This is an emergency that cannot be solved through simplistic measures such as increases in counselling personnel.”

“Arts students, the most sensitive of all, are learning for themselves the sadness and tragedy of the age of neoliberalism,” said Professor Jeon Gyu-chan of the Department of Broadcasting. He urged the people of the world not to regard the pain of young artists as restricted to just one university.

“Since Oct. 4 we have been introducing emergency measures such as increasing the number of professional counsellors and have been gathering opinions from professors and students in each school,” said one official from K-Arts’ student department.

On October 12, the first meeting of an emergency committee on “student accidents on campus,” in which the school management, students and faculty association will take part, is due to be held.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]