Gwangju’s Emerging Skateboarding Scene

Written by William Urbanski

More people in Korea should skateboard. It puzzles, even perplexes me that so few people take up skateboarding in a place that’s so ideal for it. There’s smooth marble everywhere. The climate is good. People don’t even harass you (that much) for doing it. Maybe it’s the combination of a demanding school system and a preoccupation with staring into glowing rectangles that act as a barrier to more people learning to ollie.

That being said, skateboarding has firmly planted roots in Korea, including Gwangju, and is slowly but surely growing every year. In the past few years, Korea has even become a destination for major international skateboard teams. Major board and shoe brands regularly fly some of the biggest and most-recognized pros in the world to Korea for demos, signings, movie premieres, and filming trips. So, while there’s without question an entrenched skate scene in Korea, considering the overwhelmingly positive aspects of skating here, it seems like there are fewer people doing it than there should be.

Before we get any further, I think it’s necessary to clarify exactly what we’re talking about here. To the untrained eye, it may be difficult to distinguish between skateboarding and longboarding, so I created a helpful infographic (below), a “litmus test” if you will, to help differentiate the two.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can move on to the question at hand: Why don’t more Koreans skateboard, particularly in Gwangju?

Could it be that in an age of quick fixes, easy answers, and instant gratification, skateboarding offers little to those who aren’t willing to make a substantial sacrifice in terms of time and physical effort? Is it just too difficult? Or could it have something to do with the “skateparks” in Gwangju being inexplicably covered with a rubber surface, thereby rendering skateboarding impossible?

Wanting to know more, I spoke with three local Gwangju skateboarders: Park In-ho (who goes by Wam C) and brothers Kim Nam-gil and Kim Mun-seong. Asking them about their experiences and motivations to skateboard in Gwangju provided some counter-intuitive insights. While there was the implicit suggestion that one intimidating aspect of skateboarding was the rigorous physicality demanded, they also asserted unequivocally that skateboarding was, to them, as Thomas Hobbes postulated, a symptom of the universal human need to create an identity in the face of an omnipresent and overwhelmingly authoritarian corporate Leviathan.

Just joking! Here’s what they actually had to say. (Korean responses translated into English.)

William (Will): Why did you start skateboarding?
Mun-seong (MS): I saw a lot of videos and became friends with some of the older guys who were doing it.
Nam-gil (NG): I got inspired by seeing people doing it on the street.
Wam C (WC): It was always interesting to me, then I saw people actually skating and started myself.

Will: What are some difficulties that have come up while skating in Korea?
MS: We’re limited and people sometimes view us negatively.
NG: When security comes, we have to leave. It’s because there are no real facilities, like a public skatepark, around here.
WC: Here at the Asia Culture Center (ACC), security doesn’t really bother us, but before it was built, security at other places used to give us problems.

Will: How do you think these problems could be overcome?
MS: We have to try to spread skating culture to other people so that they can like it, too.
NG: The government should invest in some more facilities.
WC: Because it’s not a mainstream activity in Korea, there are no facilities in Gwangju (like free, quality skateparks). So, there has to be more people doing it.

Will: Why do you think more people in Gwangju don’t skateboard?
MS: At this point, skateboarding culture is just so small – much smaller than in Seoul.
NG: Compared to the capital, Gwangju has a much smaller population. Also, because we’re in a provincial area, people are less open-minded.
WC: We could talk about this all night, but I’ll try to keep my answer short. Koreans in general care quite a bit about what others think. For example, Koreans really try to keep up with fashion. As well, Korea has a collectivist culture. Skateboarding emphasizes individuality, which conflicts with this collectivist culture. From what I see, longboarding is preferable to Korean society at large because it’s more fashionable and more aligned with Korea’s cultural values.

Will: Skateboarding will be included in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Do you think that’ll influence skateboard culture here?
MS: Of course! Because it’s an official game, many people will take an interest in it.
NG: I don’t have any big expectations. If people here see the broadcast, though, there may be an influence.
WC: For sure. In other cultures, I don’t think that skateboarding will be further incorporated into the mainstream culture. But in Korea, the skate scene is so small that the Olympics will have a positive effect.

Some of the difficulties faced by skateboarders in Gwangju, like dealing with security, are universal. But as Mun-seong, Nam-gil, and Wam C pointed out, some of the barriers to growth that skateboarding faces in Gwangju are endemic to, or at the very least, highly pronounced in Korea, such as regionalism and the pressure to participate in more collectivist endeavours.

So, the struggle of skateboarders, a story as old as time itself, continues to play out in the City of Light. If there’s a boom following the Olympics, it’s likely that Gwangju will have to adopt some sort of official stance on skateboarding that could very well be the impetus to invest in a professionally designed skatepark. Or better yet, Gwangju could follow the examples of Copenhagen and Paris, which have incorporated skateable architecture throughout the city. Is the future of skateboarding in Gwangju as bright as the city’s namesake? Only time will tell.

Photograph courtesy of Pho_to_Hyeon

The Author
William Urbanski is from Canada and has lived in Korea for about seven years. He’s married to a wonderful Korean woman and can eat spicy food.