Han Kang’s creative capability is demonstrated in her literary themes, formal experimentation and aesthetic style. In regard to her themes, Han’s novels boldly address the rights of women, the dignity of nature and life, and tragic episodes in Korea’s modern history while seeking to remember and heal that pain and those wounds. She tackles weighty and heavy themes in society and history in such works as “The Vegetarian,” which fuses feminism and ecologism in the body of a woman who dreams of becoming a tree as a way of resisting tradition and patriarchy. Similar characteristics are exhibited in “Human Acts” and “We Do Not Part,” two novels that adopt the language of pain to ease the trauma engendered by the tragedies of the Jeju April 3 Incident and the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement. What sets Han apart as a writer is that she moves beyond the surface level of political and ethical discourse to delve into her characters’ interiority. In so doing, she confronts the violence and barbarism that are part of our human heritage, sublimating those themes into existential questions about the soul and body, love and pain, life and death, and life and the universe.
In terms of formal experimentation, Han’s novels step away from the representational methods of traditional realism and employ a range of aesthetic modes. “The Vegetarian” ventures into a mythical and primeval domain, a kind of fantastical realism that blurs the boundaries of reality and fantasy. The book epitomizes an aesthetic of the grotesque, consisting of shocking characters and unconventional incidents. “Human Acts” adopts a multifaceted perspective that scrutinizes a tragic incident from the perspective of various characters. “We Do Not Part” sets the main character as the observer while fleshing out the story through several connected characters.
As for Han’s aesthetics, her novels have a distinctive poetic style that is at once gentle and placid, yet compact and muscular, with the power to suck readers into the story. Before releasing any fiction, Han had debuted as a poet, publishing a volume of poetry called “I Put the Evening in the Drawer.” That poetic background helps explain the delicate lyricism of her writing. These three disparate elements of theme, form and style collided and combined to bring Han Kang her stunning literary achievement. That achievement is aptly summarized in the Swedish Academy’s statement that it awarded Han with the Nobel Prize “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”