The nights were tough for the resident painters and writers during the early days of the Heyri Art Village, a collection of futuristic homes, expensive cafes and upmarket galleries built within mortar range of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between South and North Korea. No man's land, the newly arrived artists quickly realised, never slept.
'The propaganda announcements from the armies of the North and South kept me awake,' says Kim Eoun-ho, a founding member of the village who arrived in the 1990s. A former newspaper journalist - he was fired in the 1970s after his work upset the government - Kim runs a gallery, bookstore, cafe and Italian restaurant that are all located in the Hangil Book House, one of many culture venues in the village, an hour north of Seoul in the lush valleys of Gyeonggi province.