Perhaps we need not go as far as even outside our very own campus to find that intellectual thirst-quenching artistic inspiration. The artist residency program titled Endless Road is on its way to invite and accommodate three artists to our campus and encourage, as well as support, their artistic and creative activities, be it music, literature, scenario writing, cartoon drawing, and so on. KAIST Public Relations has offered three slots for interested artists and received a whopping pile of 125 applications; The KAIST Herald went to meet the person behind this successful beginning project that aims to promote the active exchange between science and art, Professor Jun Ho Oh.

My name is Jun Ho Oh; I am Vice President for External Affairs and a professor at the Mechanical Engineering Department. I may be better known as the “Hubo Professor” as I head the Hubo Lab. As Vice President for External Affairs, my job is to plan the budget according to the long-term roadmap of the university. One such plan was to refurbish the public image of KAIST; among many things, I thought that KAIST can better show its artistic side to the people outside. I believe it is an important means of public relations to promote our university as an artist-friendly campus, so I proposed the idea of inviting artists here and supporting their artistic activities.

One source of inspiration was the drama titled KAIST which aired on TV in the years 1999 and 2000. I wanted to build a storyline out of the seemingly usual campus life so that even outsiders will come to know KAIST and its members better. Frankly, the public reputation of the university is not far from “a group of smart people doing ‘their own thing.’” I would like to change that, and with KAIST the drama, I first thought of the program called Residence and Write, which you could call a primitive type of plan compared to the Endless Road program. At first, the inception of the idea was that professional writers would be invited to live on-campus and carry on with their writing activities. However, there was no reason to limit the scope of arts to just writing alone. As a result, we extended the genres of professional artists to musicians, cartoonists, photographers, and storytellers.

Well, there are many other existing residency programs, but ours is one-of-a-kind in two aspects: one is that they are limited to a specific form of art – poetry, for example - and the other is that most other residency programs require the participating artists to produce some tangible result or outcome by the end of the program. Our Endless Road program has nothing of that sort. On top of a monthly financial support and an on-campus residence, any type of artist can apply, and there is absolutely no expectation from the participants – except for, of course, a sincere will to commit themselves to whatever art they pursue.

An additional plus of our program is the special geographic and academic advantage of the university. Many artists these days would like to find new nuggets of inspiration from the fields of science and technology, but few know how to acquire the technical expertise or knowledge to begin with. In our program, we offer the participating artists to meet with professors from KAIST and in numerous Daedeok Valley research institutes, as well as arrange special visits to on-campus laboratories to stimulate the artists’ minds.