WEBZINE ACC

Summer is the season of colors—the crystal blue of the sky, the lush green of trees, the rainbow colors of all sorts of flowers in full bloom, and the vivid colors of the light clothes worn by passersby. Life suddenly comes into full force with the endless display of these colors in June. It’s as if every living being has been waiting for this moment to flaunt their colors under the radiant sun. The ACC Cultural Experience Tour is yet another occasion that adds to the liveliness and colorfulness of the season. It is an expansion upon the ACC Special Tour, which was quite popular last year. The new tour program invites international visitors to experience a wide variety of features of Asian cultures with the aid of expert curators. The Asia Culture Center (ACC) is pleased to announce this unique and wide-ranging program to mark the beginning of summer in Korea.

Tourists are given paraphernalia to protect them against the sun and the heat.

Let’s head over to the ACC at 4 p.m., when the scorching heat has begun to subside and the ACC Cultural Experience Tour is about to start. Because much of the program runs outdoors, the program organizers distribute bottles of water, mini-fans, and parasols to participants. The first tour being held today involves enjoying fragrance from the diverse flowering plants and trees across the ACC site with poetry, and creating a personalized fragrance using extracts from flowers specific to Asia.

The tour starts in the lobby of the ACC Theater. The curator starts the tour by reciting a poem indoors before the participants head out. Today’s tour features diverse groups, including friends, families, and lovers. After the curator’s recitation and instruction, participants head out of the lobby to be welcomed by the trees and flowers of the spacious garden radiant with sunlight. The curator then reads Wildflower 2 by Korean poet Na Tae-ju against the backdrop of the beaming garden. The magenta-hued zinnia flowers seem to wave at the participants amid the gentle breeze. Zinnias are known as baegilhong or “100-day-red” in Korean because they keep blooming throughout the summer over a 100-day period. These bright pretty flowers indeed welcome visitors as they walk on the decked steps between the ACC Theater and ACC Creation.

Take the escalator past the zinnias and go up to the rooftop garden to enjoy a whole new view. The first thing you’ll notice on the rooftop will be the Grand Canopy. The current ACC sits on a site that was historically occupied by the Gwangjueupseong Fortress. Throughout the Center and its site, you will therefore find various traces of the fortress as well as modern retakes on the old fortress features. The Grand Canopy, inspired by the shape of rocks that were mounted together to form the old fortress, now serves as a passageway of light throughout the garden. During the day, it shields the rooftop garden against the harsh sunlight by refracting the light off its top. At night, it brings light from the inside of the building out onto the rooftop garden to provide mood lighting.

Another noteworthy feature on the rooftop is a sizable cluster of golden rain trees. Koreans also call the tree the Buddhist rosary tree because its black fruits, which ripen in fall, are a favored material for making Buddhist prayer beads. Yellow flowers cover the entire tree in the middle of summer, which makes the tree look from afar as if it were covered in golden drops of warm rain. Hence its name.

Further in the shade are hydrangeas, the quintessential summer flowers. This particular breed of hydrangeas love shade and brighten the dark spots under trees. Hearing the curator recite another poem by Na entitled The Island Hydrangea, while sniffing a piece of paper sprayed with a hydrangea fragrance, instantly turns the surroundings into a little paradise full of the scent of summer.

Further into the rooftop garden, you will find another unique feature. It is a wall of stones covered in vines and creeping wildflowers. It is actually a relic from the Gwangjueupseong Fortress that shows the characteristics of fortress-building from the Joseon period. The original fortress was demolished when Korea was under Japanese occupation, but this valuable piece remains in place today as a testament to what must have been a formidable structure. The wall of stones will stimulate your imagination about what the ACC site would have looked like seven centuries ago.

A bit further away from the wall of stones is a small pond reflecting the bright sun. It may be small, but it is full of life, covered with water lilies, lotus flowers, and other aquatic plants. The presence of these rare aquatic flowers makes you forget, for the moment, that you are standing in the middle of a big city. The curator will hand you pieces of paper sprayed with water lily and lotus fragrances. How many times have you ever smelled these flowers in your life? It is little touches like these that sparkle our imagination and deepen our appreciation of the program.

Having toured the rooftop garden, let us return back inside. We sit at tables and begin to survey the variety of ingredients for fragrances set before us as our sweat begins to cool. The tour program involves not just sniffing the existing scents of various Asian flowers, but also making your own personalized fragrance with botanical ingredients specific to Asia. With the expert instructor’s help, you will try and look for the scents that you like or that you think describe you. An hour quickly passes as we exchange our scents and opinions with those seated next to us and search for ways to make the best fragrant statements about ourselves. The chatter and happy looks of families seated across from me tell me that this program has been quite a success.

The instructor then places the fragrance each participant has made in a vial. The whole process of trying scents, looking for the ones that best fit me, and combining them together to create a fragrance that has not yet existed is as fun and fascinating as encountering the diverse wildflowers outside. What better way to enjoy a beautiful summer day could be there?

You can take your vial of fragrance home at the end of the program.

The ACC Cultural Experience Tour also offers a broad array of activities other than the flower-and-poetry tour. For example, one tour invites participants to tour Aqua Paradise, an exhibition at the ACC that explores alternative relationships between the aquatic ecosystem and human life, and ends with participants making coasters by recycling used materials, such as socks. This particular tour will be offered on three days, i.e., July 9, July 30, and August 13. There is also the coral-knitting program in which participants, after touring Aqua Paradise, engages in the craft with the artist Eco Orot. This will be offered on two Saturdays, July 16 and 23. The knitting activity will give you a chance to think about the crisis of the marine ecosystem amid climate change.

From Gwangju to Myanmar is another tour, this time focusing on the theme of democratization. Participants will tour ACC Culture Exchange, learning the significance of democratization struggles across Asia and the tragic history of Burmese jade, and end their journey by making “hope bracelets” by tying traditional Korean knots. This tour will be offered from August 27 to October 1. Another tour, entitled Music: Giving Titles to the Untitled, will invite participants to learn about traditional genres of music in Asia, go through curated tours of the ACC and its landmarks, and make lit acryl picture frames using the given templates. This tour will take place from October 29 to November 26.

The ACC Cultural Experience Tour Program offers something for everyone regardless of age, gender, or interest. My own participation in the latest tour certainly raises my expectation for future tour activities. Come out and join the program for a unique opportunity to glimpse into Asian cultures and histories.

Find out more about the ACC Cultural Experience Tour ProgramClick to view.