The wonderful Jeju Island artist Koh Gilchun has fallen down with a cerebral hemorrhage on the last day of the March for Life and Peace on August 3. I was shocked to learn this news and my heart is heavy. We all should pray for him.
I briefly met Gilchun while on Jeju but really had the chance to get to know him better last year at the end of my month long west coast trip that ended in Seattle. On my last day there Leonard Eiger organized a protest at the South Korean consulate in downtown Seattle and Gilchun was there. He had been doing an art show at a gallery in Seattle. A more dear man you will never meet.
Gilchun was instrumental in getting Noam Chomsky into the Jeju issue and is the featured artist at the April 3, 1948 museum on Jeju that tells the story of the 60,000 islanders massacred under the direction of the US military following the ouster of Japan from Korea. In the new documentary The Ghosts of Jeju much of Gilchun's work from the museum is featured.
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