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THERE IS AN ART VILLAGE NEAR the most fortified military line in the world. It is the Heyri Art Valley in Paju, South Korea. Why is it there?
On October 14, 2005, I made a short trip to see the village and meet the person who first conceived the idea of an arts village near the front line in 1994. It was a nostalgic trip to me. I was a young army lieutenant stationed in the area from 1963 to 1965. It was a no-man's-land in the 1960s. Only soldiers, migratory birds, and wild deer in the wilderness were the residents. It was a tense, explosive area of military confrontation between North Korea and South Korea, and it still is. This area was guarded by U.S. soldiers in the 1960s,' when I was a liaison officer between the Korean Army and the U.S. Army.
Antitank barriers on the road, named "Freedom Road," to the north have been removed. It was strange, because I have never seen any newspaper article reporting the removal of these barriers, installed to stop or delay invading North Korean tanks. I was somewhat curious of the removal brought on by the changing political milieu in the Korean Peninsula. But the Imjin River and barbed wire remained the same. Infiltration from North Korean agents may still be possible.
The human settlements to the north have changed the landscape: high-rise apartment buildings have created a new city, Ilsan, north of Seoul, and another city, Paju. I drove for an hour and came across a road sign in the Korean language pointing to the Heyri Art Valley. The village is part of the "Unification Mound," the new frontier in the 1990s designated by the Korea Land Corporation as a gesture of reconciliation toward North Korea. It was easily reachable from the Freedom Road, less than five minutes' distance.
Entering Gate 1, I found the Magazine House, a decent building, on the country road. I parked the car on the curve. A young store manager kindly introduced me to the recently constructed three-story building: the first floor, a magazine store; the second floor, coffee and bagels; and the third floor, the exhibition hall of historical magazines published during Japanese colonial rule (1910-45) and the liberation...