Reborn Rich | Sejong Center for the Performing Arts — Where Jin Do-jun Met the Family

A boy stands in front of a family that owns a significant fraction of the country, and only he knows he has already died once. Yoon Hyun-woo, the secretary shot and dumped for knowing too much, wakes up as Jin Do-jun and is presented to the Soonyang clan for the first time. The Korea Tourism Organization places that introduction here, at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts.

The choice is not decoration. A chaebol family does not gather in a living room; it gathers at a gala, in a foyer with a ceiling high enough to make everyone look small except the man at the centre. Sejong Center gives you that in one shot — the long colonnade of squared concrete pillars, the wide flight of steps, and Sejong-daero eight lanes wide in front of it.

It opened in 1978 and Korean performers still treat a booking here as the summit of a career. The main hall seats over three thousand. The columns are meant to read as bamboo and the profile as a hanok eave abstracted into concrete, which is why the building looks stern from across the road and softens as you climb the steps.

You do not need a ticket to stand in the plaza. Gwanghwamun Station Exit 1 or 8 puts you out beside it, King Sejong's statue is a two-minute walk, and free lunchtime performances run in the Chamber Hall through much of the year.

Go up the steps and turn around before you go in. That view down the colonnade to the boulevard is the one the camera wanted: a family arriving somewhere that is already theirs.

Cover photo: by YellowTurtle9, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.