Art or porn?
The adage that one person's art is another person's pornography has been demonstrated yet again by a South Korean court. After a legal tussle of 21/2 years, the Supreme Court has found a former art teacher guilty of obscenity for posting photographs of nude people on the internet, including one of himself and his wife.
Art teacher Kim In-kyu made national headlines and scandalised parents throughout the country four years ago when he posted the photos on his personal website, for all his students to see. He was suspended from work and charged with disseminating pornography. Two lower courts bought his argument that the photos were artistic expression.
But that did not fly with the top judges in the land, who overturned the rulings this week. They declared that the artist's motivation was not important: what counted was the impact of the work on the audience. The judges wrote: 'The reactions of those who see the material, and social norms, should govern the material. We decided that Mr Kim's sexual pictures and drawings could offend those who see them.'
Three of the six pictures up for judgment were deemed to be obscene. One showed the teacher and his pregnant wife, both nude. The other two works depicted close-ups of male and female genitals.
The top court took as its legal precedent a 10-year-old obscenity case about the novel Happy Sarah, written by literature professor Ma Kwang-soo. It centred on a sexually liberated young woman characterised by manicured fingernails, daring clothes and frequent changes of lovers. The book created a sensation in this conservative country because of its explicit descriptions of sex and for depicting a woman with a sexual appetite.
The sexual freedom that Sarah enjoys was a metaphor for the freedom and democracy that South Koreans were bidding for after years of military dictatorship. But that did not matter: the author was convicted of obscenity, and jailed.
His defenders said his sin was being ahead of his time. A decade on, how the times have changed. Professor Ma has been resurrected and now writes a weekly newspaper column, Ma Kwang-soo's Sextory.
Today, Sarah's sexuality and the author's near-fetishistic concentration on her long, manicured fingernails is far less shocking in a country where hair dying and body piercing have recently become widespread, and even the existence of wife-swapping is acknowledged.
Still, as the court case over Kim's pictures illustrates, change has its limits. Happy Sarah remains a banned book.