The Red Lamp — From Then to Now
A critic’s eye on Hugo J. Smal’s work: from the stripped poems of The Red Lamp
(Rotterdam, 1985) — city, body, fury — to present-day prose that keeps its edge and moves with intent. The early voice witnesses cold and distance; the later voice sets a course and holds it.
Language: poems appear in the original Dutch with an English rendering beside them; stories are published in English only.
Poetry — Lines that burn
The Red Lamp began as a compact pressure chamber. Short lines, little ornament, a temperature that lives just under the skin. These poems refuse the balm of explanation; they stand as witness. Their materials are the hard facts of a northern city — wind across stone, money in short supply, faces that avert — and the soft facts that persist regardless: need, touch, the wish for a second voice. If the early refrain is a curse — let the world burn — the deeper movement is toward attention: to burn away what is idle so that what is necessary can remain.
Time distinguishes the poems from the new prose. The verses carry the weather of the mid-1980s and keep it intact; their grain is historical as well as personal. Yet they read without patina. The diction is economical, the syntax direct, the line breaks exact. Read them as field notes taken under pressure: minimal language, maximal charge. They are the backbone of the project, the place where the tone was set and the constraints were chosen — a self-imposed narrow corridor through which the later work would also pass.
Stories — Lines that travel
The prose is recent. It keeps the early severity but moves outward — across streets, borders, and rooms — to the friction of encounter. Where the poems compress, the stories expand; where the poems witness, the stories work. They treat labour, ritual, and ordinary time with the same seriousness once reserved for crisis. The sentence lengthens, the lens widens, but the discipline remains: no sentimentality, no soft focus, no ornament that does not carry weight. The result is a line that can travel — between people, into institutions, through days — and come back with something exact.
- Under the Red Shade (1985)
- Jijang’s Fractal
- Bogwangsa — A Pilgrimage in Five (and One) Stories
- The Koreans and I
- My Korean Journey
Contemporary Stories — a current liturgy of small acts
Three strands define this current phase. Jijang’s Fractal uses a recurring frame to test what attention can do: return to the same shape, find a different truth. Bogwangsa collects work and worship on temple ground — sweeping, ringing, carrying — as a liturgy of small acts. Koreans and I brings faces into focus at close range, without exoticism, allowing language, food, and misstep to do their plain work. Alongside them run the koi pieces: pond prose about care, water, patience, and loss — not idylls, but studies in responsibility.
Why it holds
What remains constant is economy of diction and the refusal of easy light. What has changed is purpose. The early work burns to clear a space; the later work uses that cleared space to build connections — with places, with tasks, with others. The Red Lamp is not a relic but a standard: keep the words few, keep the heat high, keep the aim steady.
Temporary pause on koi exports — healing park in development
International koi exports are currently on hold. Meanwhile, we are laying the foundations for a nature-driven healing park in Goyang that blends koi culture, art, and quiet craftsmanship. For updates or collaboration, feel free to get in touch.
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