Choi Ihn Suk
최인석
From the time he first started writing in 1986 and until now (2017), Choi Ihn Suk is a writer who is a significant figure in Korean Realism. At times with the eyes of Charles Dickens who sharply dissects the backstreets of London as if with a scalpel, at time with the methods of Gabriel Garcia Marquez who actively uses fantasy and nightmare, Choi Ihn Suk is recreating a place of desire called Korea. Choi Ihn Suk was a playwright and a screenwriter at the beginning, but he felt limited within the domain of the performing arts which was not free from censorship. So began writing fiction. Choi Ihn Suk says the following. “At the time, there was censorship. If you finished writing a script, you had to submit it to the Performing Arts Committee before putting on the show. Then the committee would read the script. They’d cross out certain sections with red lines, demanding an edit, and in the worst case the show couldn’t happen. You could only put up a show once you passed through censorship. Fiction or poetry would get censored afterwards, but performances would get censored beforehand. Due to such conditions of the time, it was difficult to write a script and put up a play. So I began writing fiction.”
As a writer who began writing fiction to find literary freedom, Choi Ihn Suk is a writer who expands his literary scope by repeated change. Gangcheolmujigae (강철무지개 Iron Rainbow), a novel published in 2015, is a science fiction story about Korea after 2100. In Gangcheolmujigae (강철무지개 Iron Rainbow), the value of labor in Korea has fallen, and nuclear waste has been spilled over the Yellow Sea, turning it into a sea of death. Society is controlled by a totalitarian regime, and other than the fact that there has been reunification, it is a place of darkness. Upon such imagination of science fiction, Choi Ihn Suk throw a question of realism regarding reality.
