Seoul Is Still Waiting

Seoul is the one city that keeps sitting at the top of the list. I’ve made it to Tokyo, twice. I’ve done the American pilgrimages—New York, LA, the whole Pacific Northwest thing. Canada happened, which is a separate story. But Seoul stays unvisited, a permanent rain check I keep writing myself.

Part of what pulls me there is the density—a country that decided the future should arrive faster and did the engineering to make it happen. Part of it is the geopolitical surreality: this thriving, wired, neon-saturated city existing in permanent proximity to the most militarized border on earth. North Korea doesn’t disappear from consciousness long enough to be forgotten, just long enough to feel abstract, until it makes noise again. There’s something almost hallucinatory about a society that has metabolized that particular existential condition and carried on building semiconductor fabs and releasing K-pop albums without apparent interruption.

Photographer Duran Levinson traveled there recently and spent his time with the subcultures that don’t make it into the export package—the young, the restless, the ones planning some version of an uprising against a system that expects them to study, conform, and disappear into a corporation. South Korea is aging faster than almost anywhere, its birth rate in long freefall, which places its remaining young people under a pressure that’s almost atmospheric. Levinson’s photographs find them looking back at the camera with something between defiance and pure exhaustion—saturated colors, direct faces, nothing remotely aspirational about them in the lifestyle-magazine sense.

I’ll get to Seoul eventually. I’m certain of it the way I’m certain of things that are unresolved rather than impossible.