Though most widely known by his pen name, Yi Sang was born in Seoul, Korea, as Kim Hae-gyeong on September 14, 1910, in Seoul. He graduated from Sinmyeong School and then entered the Donggwang School. In 1922 he was admitted to . In 1929 he graduated from Gyeongseong Engineering High School with training as an architect and for a time was employed as a draftsman in the public works department of the Governor-General of Korea. In December 1929 he won first and third prizes in a design contest for the cover of Korea and Architecture, and the journal of the Korean Architecture Society, respectively. Most of his works were produced during the 1930s. In 1934 he joined the Circle of Nine, whose core members included Kim Girim, Lee Taejun, and Jung Jiyong. In 1936 Lee began to edit the Circle of Nine journal, Siwa soseol, published by Changmunsa under the aegis of Koo Bonung. Several of his works were published in this journal, including his poems “Paper gravestone”, “Street exterior, street passage”, and “Condition serious” and the stories “Meeting of a spider and a pig”, “Wings”, “Meetings and Farewells”, and “Children's Skulls”. His short story “Diary Before Death” and his personal memoir “Monotony” were published posthumously in Tokyo. In November 1936 he went to Japan, where he was arrested by Japanese police the following year. He was released on bail and admitted to Tokyo University Hospital, where he died on April 17, 1937.
Work
Yi was perhaps the most famous avant-garde writer of the colonial era. In his work he experimented with language, interiority, separation from inside one's self as well as the outer world. His poems, particularly, were influenced by Western literary concepts including Dadaism and Surrealism. Yi's history in architecture influenced his work, which often included the languages of mathematics and architecture including, lines, dots, number systems, equations and diagrams. His literary legacy is punctuated by his modernist tendencies evinced throughout his oeuvre. His poems reveal the desolate internal landscape of modern humanity and, as in “Crow's eye view poem”, utilize an anti-realist technique to condense the themes of anxiety and fear. His stories disjoint the form of traditional fiction to show the conditions of the lives of modern people. “Wings”, for example, utilizes a stream-of-consciousness technique to express these conditions in terms of the alienation of modern people, who are fragmented commodities unable to relate to quotidian realities. Yi Sang never received much recognition for his writing during his lifetime, but his works began to be reprinted in the 1950s. In the 1970s his reputation soared, and in 1977 the Yi Sang Literary Award was established. In 2007, he was listed by the Korean Poets' Association among the ten most important modern Korean poets. His most famous short story is "The Wings", and his poem "Crow's-Eye View" is also well-known.
