South Korea’s ministry of culture is accused of blacklisting 9,500 artists

“BLACKTENT”, a pop-up citizens’ theatre pitched in January on Gwanghwamun square in central Seoul, invites South Koreans to become “both the protagonist and the audience”. On a recent weekday evening, its 100-odd tickets sold out in minutes. Some of the audience had to sit on the stage to watch “Red Poem”, a play about sexual exploitation.

The head of the theatre troupe that produced it, Lee Hae-sung, is among 9,500 local actors, artists, writers, musicians, film directors and publishers included on an alleged blacklist of artists critical of President Park Geun-hye. Like many others on the list, Mr Lee says he has not received any state funding in recent years. Kim So-yeon, an art critic who helped set up “BlackTent” to protest against the blackballing, says the venue will continue to stage plays by shunned writers until Ms Park is removed from office.

News of the existence of the list—which a former culture minister, Yoo Jin-ryong, said this week was orchestrated by Kim Ki-choon, Ms Park’s former chief of staff and right-hand man—is yet another twist in a sensational influence-peddling scandal that led to Ms Park’s impeachment by parliament in December. That handed the constitutional court the responsibility for deciding whether to end Ms Park’s term early or reinstate her.

On January 21st a special prosecutor investigating the wider scandal arrested Mr Kim and the current culture minister, Cho Yoon-sun, on suspicion of abusing their power by enforcing the blacklist. A version of the list from 2015 is said to include some of the country’s most famous film directors as well as Han Kang, whose latest novel won last year’s Man Booker International Prize. The prosecutor says he has obtained part of the list and enough evidence to implicate Ms Park’s office. (That will have little bearing on the impeachment, which is restricted to other abuses of authority enumerated by parliament in December.)

The ministry of culture apologised this week. Both Mr Kim and Ms Park deny involvement. Ms Park has sued a reporter at the Joongang Ilbo, another daily, for claiming that she ordered the blacklist’s creation in response to mounting criticism after the botched rescue of the Sewol, a ferry that sank in 2014, killing hundreds. (Expressing public support for prominent liberal politicians is also said to have been grounds for inclusion on the list.)

Yet in his daily log, a late aide to Ms Park wrote that Mr Kim had ordered “an aggressive response to schemes by leftists in the arts”. Under Park Chung-hee, Ms Park’s father, who led the country from 1961 to 1979, Mr Kim headed a branch of the spy agency tasked with rooting out communists. He also helped draft the martial law that kept Park in power—and that allowed him to monitor artists and ban subversive works. Park Won-soon, the liberal mayor of Seoul (no relation to the president), says it is a dark reminder of those times, and an “intolerable” attack on South Korea’s vibrant democracy.

Rumours of a modern-day blacklist had been circulating for a while. In 2015 the government stopped support for cinemas screening independent films, giving the money instead to those showing movies recommended by a state-financed film council. Prosecutors say recent patriotic blockbusters by CJ, a food and entertainment conglomerate, were produced under state pressure. Funding for the annual Busan Film Festival was halved after it premiered a controversial documentary on the Sewol in 2014.

Lee Won-jae of Cultural Action, an artists’ collective, says the blacklisting is an instance of “state violence”; they plan to sue the government. Others are protesting with a fresh crop of art. Yeo Tae-myong, a calligrapher on the blacklist, opened the weekly Gwanghwamun Art Protest in late December with a performance project, hanging enormous sheets of his freshly painted calligraphy from police buses. Mr Yeo wants to organise an exhibit of all the art that the protests have produced. Artists not featured on the blacklist are already joking that they feel left out.