Kang Byoung Yoong was born in 1975 and teaches Korean literature in the Department of Asian Studies in Slovenia’s Ljubljana University. His novels include The Story of an Imaginary Human, A Detailed Report on Mr. Y’s Castration, and Aluminum Cucumber, and his short story collections include Extremely and Kiss and Banana. He has also written a book of literary theory titled A Study on Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and the essay collections Ljubljana, a City that Resembles My Wife and I Love You But I Really Love You. He was supported by the Korea Commission for Culture and the Arts to undertake artist residencies in Russia and England.
Nothing is new under the sun, but make it new! Kang has used imitation and parody to create new forms and unfamiliar discourses. His omnibus-like novel The Story of an Imaginary Human is a human version of Borges’s The Story of Imaginary Animals, and his A Detailed Report on Mr. Y’s Castration, a novel told through sixty fictional newspaper articles, is a take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. His recent short story in Axt is likewise written entirely through newspaper articles. Aluminum Cucumber is also taken from the original Viktor Tsoi to be copied and parodied to suit his own style. It is the merging of an experimental form uncommon in Korean literature with a Western literary sensibility.
