In Korea, villas are not country houses. They are three to five storey apartment buildings, functional in design, which is another way of saying fairly ugly, stacked into the hillside neighbourhoods of Seoul. This one, where the party was, fell somewhere in the middle range — not the kind that had a doorman, not the…

Everything that came after started on a snowy Saturday morning in Paris in January 2013, when a Korean friend called and asked if I wanted to go to the library to see an ancient book.  I almost said no. I was halfway through an MBA in Arts and Culture Management, it was cold, and the…

Won Jin moved without hurry. That was the first thing I noticed about him. He disappeared into his bedroom and returned carrying a box smaller than a shoebox, wrapped in celadon green cloth — the colour no other nation could replicate. He set it on the low wooden table between us, smoothed the cloth once…