Oh Kyu Won (1941 – 2007) was a South Korean poet.
1. Life
Oh Kyu Won was born Oh Kyu Ok in Miryang, South Gyeongsang Province. He attended Busan Teachers' College before graduating from the law department of Dong-a University. Oh made his literary debut publishing three poems in Hyundae Munhak upon the recommendation of the poet Kim Hyunseung: "Gyeoul nageune" (겨울 나그네 Winter Wanderer) in 1965, "Ugyeui si" (우계의 시 Rainy Season Poem) in 1967, and "Myeot gaeui hyeonsang" (몇 개의 현상 Certain Phenomena) in 1968. His first collection of poetry, Bunmyeonghan sageon (분명한 사건 Absolute Event), was published in 1971.
In 1979 he quit his job in advertising at AmorePacific to start the publishing company Munjang, publishing some 50 books including the collected works of Kim Chunsu and Yi Sang. In 1983 he became a professor of creative writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts, where he taught such writers as Kyung-Sook Shin, Jang Seoknam, and Ha Seong-nan. Over his career, Oh published nine collections of poetry, including Sullye (순례 Piligrimage), Sarangui gigyo (사랑의 기교 Love's Artifice), Sarangui gamok (사랑의 감옥 Love's Prison), and numerous volumes of essays and criticism. A posthumous collection of his poems, Dudu (두두 All Objects), was published in 2008.
2. Writing
Oh Kyu Won's early poems use witty, sparkling, and ironic language in an effort to destroy established forms and provide a critique of the baseness and emptiness of capitalist consumer culture. Through the process of the endless deconstruction and regeneration of his poetic material, he refashioned everyday words and recognizable images in order to produce the “unconsciousness of modernity,” capturing particular features of our mental landscape that are generally passed by unnoticed. His poems thus derive strength from the quotidian, but only by recreating and reconceptualizing it.
Irony is another of Oh's techniques adopted to criticize a false and fetishistic ideal world. By thus lifting aspects of the mundane and banal up to his scrutinizing eye, out of the fabric of our “modern unconsciousness,” he captures the contradictory and complex features of the modern petit bourgeois and helps us to rediscover our own lives. Oh's poems also demonstrate the influence of the fable and his fascination with the most common of words, which often serve him as elements of parody and ironic critique.
Oh Kyu Won's work has attempted to demolish old conceptual frames and stale assumptions and to look at the world in its naked reality. In order to do this, Oh frequently uses the technique of reversal.
His work has been recognized with such prizes as the Hyundae Munhak Literary Award, the Yeonam Literature Prize, the Korea Culture and Arts Prize for Literature, and the I-San Literary Award.
