A VIEW OF KOREA: SOUTHEAST ART PROFESSOR'S LIFE AND WORK TIED TO ASIA

Ronald Clayton has a room with a view of Korea, and it's in Cape Girardeau.

Actually, Clayton, who has taught drawing and painting at Southeast Missouri State University since 1988, has several rooms and several views. He recreated these in paintings from more than 1,000 slides of South Korean countryside he has photographed in the past two years.

Clayton originally went to Korea in 1965 with the U.S. Army. During his four years stationed on the border separating North and South Korea, he gained an appreciation for the Korean countryside.

"At that time, it impressed me as mostly a rural farming culture," he said.

It was 30 years before he went back.

"I had promised my wife that we'd return, and we had planned on it," said Clayton. "But then I'd changed jobs, and later a baby was born. Something always prevented us."

But about five years ago, the idea of establishing a relationship between Southeast and a Korean university was raised by some faculty members. Clayton gravitated toward the idea. He was allowed to participate in a professor exchange, with a business instructor coming to Southeast from Kunsan National University.

So in the fall of 1998, Clayton and his wife, Yong Ja, a native of Korea, returned.

"As I returned, I wanted to see how they had reconciled their love of nature with their staggering economic growth," he said.

Clayton saw a compromise achieved by most Koreans living in small apartments stacked one upon another in skyscrapers, reminiscent of United States public housing projects, he said.

During weekdays, Clayton worked as the school of art's artist in residence, painting in a studio, consulting with students and speaking at other universities.

Taking long weekends, Clayton traveled with his wife around the country exploring historic sites and revisiting familiar ones.

"With the trains, you can get just about anywhere in the country within three hours," he said.

Yong Ja was able to reacquaint herself with relatives she hadn't known were still living.

"It was as if all of a sudden I have in-laws," Clayton said.

Clayton took as many slide photographs as he could, with the intention of incorporating them into his paintings.

Using a modernist style, Clayton paints scenes of seemingly abandoned construction, with windows opening out onto views of almost photographic natural scenery. This exemplifies his love of graphic arts, nature and the philosophy that paintings should be two-dimensional.

"In my paintings, the architecture is metaphoric," he said. "It represents what we build up around ourselves to make ourselves comfortable."

The fall semester went by quickly, and Clayton left without finding and photographing all the landscapes he wanted. But before leaving, he got hope of a chance to return. He received a response from the Korea Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that funds research for sociologists and historians.

"They had never funded an artist before," Clayton said.

The foundation was supposed to be a funding source for Clayton's 1998 trip, he said. Since they were still offering him the money, Clayton worked out an arrangement to return to Korea in the summer of 1999 with the foundation's support.

"I was looking primarily for pure, undisturbed landscapes," he said. "My project was to find a place that looked just like it did 20,000 years ago."

The best locations were along the DMZ, or demilitarized zone, where Clayton was stationed in the Army.

"The landscape has pretty much been left alone," he said.

As he flips through slides showing the world's oldest Buddhist temples and deep river valleys, everything appears to be surrounded by mountains that stretch up at angles like one wall lying against another.

"Korea is a very rugged place," Clayton said. "There are only a couple plains in the whole country where rice can be grown."

Several slides depict the ruins of a Communist administration building in the Chorwan Valley, near where Mrs. Clayton was raised. The city where the building is was once part of North Korea, but now lies just inside South Korea's border. The roof of the building is gone, leaving bare concrete walls and large, empty squares where windows and doors had been.

"I felt like I walked into one of my own paintings," Clayton said.

Clayton tried to photograph what is known as White Horse Mountain, inside the North Korea border, but border guards didn't allow him to get close enough. The mountain appears in much Korean history and in many traditions, all noting it looks like a horse kneeling. Much of what made it a horse has been destroyed by bombing, Clayton said.

Clayton hopes to return to Korea at some point to show his paintings.

For now, he and his family keep in touch with newly discovered friends and relatives by e-mail and maintain a sense of Korean traditions in their Cape Girardeau home.

Most of the western side of their residence is Korean in art and decor. Two examples of calligraphy, Korean wedding scrolls, hang in the dining room. Clayton's wife has interpreted them for him.

"Mine says something about wishing joy and prosperity, very standard," he said. "But my wife's describes her as having a bamboo heart."

This is a high compliment in Korea, Clayton said, as a bamboo heart, like the wood, should bend but not break.

"I think she made a very good impression on the calligrapher," Clayton said.