Kiwan Sung

Sung was born in 1967 in Seoul, where he grew up.[1] His father is Chan Kyung Sung, a poet and professor of English literature, whose 'willingness to experiment to the extreme' influenced him greatly.[2] He inherited from his father his enthusiasm towards strange and convoluted experiment on language that goes beyond the realm of a poetic style.

He entered the Department of French Language and Literature, Seoul National University in 1986, and finished his doctor's degree there in 1996.

His career as a poet began after his poems were published in the 1994 fall edition of the quarterly Segyeui Munhak.

Since then he has been writing poetry, but also working in the music industry. He served as the music director of many TV series and films, including the MBC series Do It Your Way, and as the host of the EBS radio program Kiwan Sung's Journey into Music from 2005 to 2008. Sung was the leader of the band 3rd Line Butterfly and recorded many solo albums, such as Namuga doeneun beob (나무가 되는 법, How to Become a Tree) that came out in 1999 and Dangsinui norae (당신의 노래, Your Songs) in 2008. After leaving 3rd Line Butterfly, he has joined the group AASSA, short for Afro Asian SSound Act, and the sound archiving project group SSAP, Seoul Sound Archive Project.

Sung has been working as a popular music critic, as well. He was an editor of the culture magazine/book Ida (이다, Ida).[3] His literary and musical works so far seem to "belong to nothing."[4] In 2007, he became the director of the multi-cultural space Moonji Cultural Institute, Saii, and gave lectures for the general public titled Creative Listening, which incorporated a variety of genres like Korean traditional poetry, French poetry, and Korean popular music.[5] Sung participated in the Residence Program for Writers in Sweden[6] and many other literary events in 2008, which include the Seoul Young Writers' Festival.[7] He is currently teaching sound art as the professor of the Department of Intermedia Art, Kaywon University of Art and Design.

Sung's poetry is considered an innovative experiment that breaks taboos. His poems disregard the conventional poetry style and show such unique arrangements of words: for example, one of his poems reminds its readers of online chats. The poet intentionally juxtaposes words that have no relations to one another, defying common sense. His viewpoint is that noise and music are not different, so he focuses on the raw material and noise, or noise poetry, which means a poetry which comes from noise, completed through making fragmentary sounds.[8]

His first poetry collection, Shoping gatda osimnigga (쇼핑 갔다 오십니까, Did You Go Shopping), published in 1998, deals with the features of the digital age like the internet. In the poem "A, B, C, D, E, F, geurigo X ui norae (A, B, C, D, E, F, 그리고 X의 노래, The song of A, B, C, D, E, F, and X)," digital signals wipe out the specific realities of individuals and refer to them by symbols. As the digital age reincarnates them as symbols instead of alienating them, it is not wasteful but productive.[9]

The three main words of his second poetry collection, Yuri iyagi (유리 이야기, Story of Glass), published in 2003, are 'green rubber monster,' 'glass,' and 'me.' They all represent the poet, his divided selves. 48 poems with a series of numbers as titles—63 stories including the epilogue—are dreamy and fantastic. All the poems are not finished; however, when regarding all the 63 poems as one story, they become a sort of novel. The purpose of such organization is to create a whole new rhythm for the poems and this poetry collection, which is totally different from the rhythm of any preexisting poetry.[10]

Dangsinui tekseuteu (당신의 텍스트, Your Text), his third poetry collection published in 2008, is mostly made up of noise. The poet explains that, when paying attention to noise with senses other than the sense of hearing, one can enjoy it as music. The title poem "Dangsinui tekseuteu," by repeating the words "your text" and "me," separates the relationship between 'you' and the 'text' and 'me.' In the poem "Hwanghon, myeokrasu (황혼, 멱라수, Dusk, the River of Mishui)," the narrator is woman, unlike Sung's other poems, and she talks about the love that has no answers, the love of the body.[11]

His fourth poetry collection Rieul, published in 2012, is only composed of sounds. This work is based on sound art, which is the creative activity that uses sound without any limits. It was published with an album of two CDs entitled Sonicwallpaper4poetrybook. The album is for the book and vice versa, but they can be enjoyed in both independent and interrelated ways. The aim of the work is to ruminate over the meaning of the frivolous noise and music in daily life, and to give a new meaning to the sounds that have been considered noise and kitsch, such as sign boards, daily conversations, tweets , and commercials.[12]

• The Fifth Baum Literary Work Award (제5회 바움작품상, 2013)[13]
• The First Kim Hyeon Literature Prize (제1회 김현문학패, 2015)[14]