Yien, a fusion gukak or traditional Korean music group, is often called the ‘Girls’ Generation’ of gukak.

It is comprised of seven young women in their mid-20s—five performers plus an in-house director and producer, most of whom were at the same class at Gukak National High School.

The five artists each play haegeum; gayageum; piri and taepyeongso; daegeum and sogeum; and janggu, kkwaenggwari and percussions, while the director and producer manage the band’s other affairs.

Yien started off in 2003 as a workshop of ambitious college freshmen who wanted to try something new and branch out from traditional gukak.

“We wanted to do something to overcome gukak’s image of being lyrical and quiet all the time. But it does not mean we do not respect it. Having received formal education for more than 10 years, everything we do is based on gukak,” said Nam Kyung-min, who plays the gayageum.

Yien is one of the few independent gukak bands that are not under any label or management. From programming to performing, the seven members of the band work together in expressing their own style.

While creating their own songs, Yen has been fusing their performances with dance, theatre and art. Through their 2007 concert, in which the band added electronic instruments, the group started to gain interest from young music fans.

This is probably why Yien was finally able to release their first album after six years of field experience, said its producer Kim Mi-so.

“It took us six years, which is quite a long time, for us to find our own style and colours. The first album reflects them well,” Kim said.

The band, according to Nam, tried a variety of experiments, especially collaborating with other art genres, under their motto of being “kinetic”.

Incorporating from tap dancing to theatrical factors to their performances, Yien was more of a “performing” group at first, rather than a music band.

However, after years of trials and errors, Yien members said that they finally realised they wanted to focus more on music, which is aimed at expressing the sentiments of young people these days.

It was a club concert they gave around Chuseok in 2007 when Yien got an idea of how to do that, according to Kim.

“The performance—especially the DJ we worked with—inspired us in many ways and we decided to go for music that fuses gukak with electronic sounds and DJ-ing from then,” she said.

Members not only loved the familiar electronic sound mixed with the band’s acoustics, but also the atmosphere of performing at a club. The lounge-like venues created a mood for audiences to enjoy and more importantly, communicate with them, they said.

“We want to draw more younger audiences to concerts at places like Hongdae clubs,” Kim said, adding that their Hongdae concert earlier this month went better than expected.

Kim, meanwhile, said Yien no longer wishes to care too much about the controversy that has been following them for not pursuing orthodox gukak. Rather, the group will try to translate gukak into one that embraces contemporary emotions, she said.

The band also finished their first-ever tour abroad in South America last summer, performing in countries like Peru and Bolivia. The band described the experience as tough, but said that members learned a lot communicating with local audiences.

So far, the biggest trouble being an independent band naturally lies in the funding, although the situation has gotten much better than before when they were totally self-supported.

Yien is currently funded by the Korea Foundation and Arts Council Korea, being chosen one of the most promising young bands here.

“But since we spend most of such funding on our concerts and album, we hardly get paid for what we do. Most of us still even have side jobs like private lessons,” Kim said.

Despite efforts at securing fans in and outside its homeland, gukak continues to struggle against the stereotype that it is outdated.

But Yien’s efforts have not been in vain.

Their performances in Latin America are proof that they are getting somewhere.

Instead of choosing Korean artists’ usually favoured world tour venues like other Asian countries or the United States, the group took a chance to select the relatively unfamiliar continent.

The group just wanted to introduce traditional Korean music to a region where it is likely to be least known, said Kim. (By Koh Young-aah in Seoul/ The Korea Herald/ Asia News Network)