SECOND LOOK KOREA
LOCATIONS · 02
SAMPLE COPY Seoul Institute of the Arts is real, and its Ansan campus address is real, public information. That its film program is where Park Jong-hwan trained is documented in a public biography; this piece does not otherwise claim to know anything about his time there beyond that fact. Not published reporting.
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A bare, empty theatre stage lit from above, with no performers or set visible.
A bare stage, photographed at an unrelated venue. Photo: johnkell, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Stand-in for atmosphere, not a photograph of Seoul Institute of the Arts, whose own Ansan campus we could not source an available, clearly-licensed image of at the time of writing.
LOCATIONS · 02
Seoul Institute of the Arts · Ansan, Gyeonggi-do 서울예술대학교

The School, Not the Set 1

By the Second Look Korea editors

Not a filming location: nobody who worked on this issue could confirm where any of Conversation was actually shot. This is the film school where its lead actor studied, instead.

This is not a filming location. Every source available for the companion piece on Conversation (including a dedicated interview with its own director) describes the film's settings without ever naming one of them. Rather than print a guess, we are printing something we could actually confirm: the film school its lead actor, Park Jong-hwan, trained in.

Seoul Institute of the Arts is a private arts college split across two campuses; its film, broadcast and dance programs sit on the Ansan campus, in Gyeonggi-do, southwest of Seoul.2 It is not an unusual school (a long list of working Korean film and television professionals passed through it), which is more or less the point: an ordinary, real place, offered honestly, in place of a guess about a set we have no evidence for.

NO PHOTOGRAPH
Working sketch. This piece names the school; it does not claim to know anything about his specific time there beyond the fact of his major.

Seoul Institute of the Arts is a private institution, but its Ansan campus address is ordinary public information: there is nothing here to withhold the way there would be for a private address. We are printing it because naming an actor's actual film school, rather than leaving his training as a vague line in a bio, is the same instinct that runs through the rest of this magazine.

We do not know what his specific years there were like, who taught him, or what he worked on as a student. The public record gives us the fact of the training, not its texture, and, as with every piece in this issue, we are not going to invent the rest.

For the actor this piece is about, read his profile. For the film that could not tell us where it was shot, read our piece on Conversation.

  1. 1 SAMPLE COPY: preview build, not a published piece. Seoul Institute of the Arts is real, and this piece is assembled from public sources, not a visit. Nobody from Second Look Korea has been to the campus for this story. Not verified reporting until fact and legal review is complete.
  2. 2 Campus location and program layout (film, broadcast and dance programs on the Ansan campus, Danwon-gu, Gyeonggi-do) per the university's own public campus information and aggregated secondary sources describing the same two-campus structure.
The Second Look Korea Editors We write about the people, places, and work Korean stage and screen hasn't gotten around to noticing yet. This piece is a working sample. The real reporting will include a site visit and the production's sign-off before publication.
PLACE
Seoul Institute of the Arts · 서울예술대학교
AREA
Ansan, Gyeonggi-do
ADDRESS
171 Yesuldaehak-ro, Danwon-gu, Ansan, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea (map precision: Neighbourhood only)
APPEARED IN
Issue Three
FIND IT
Google Maps → Naver Map → Kakao Map →
THIS PLACE ELSEWHERE
FEATURED HERE
← Sixty Films In, Still Someone You'd Have to Be Told About