Isang Yun was born 17th September 1917 near the port town of Tong Yong in South Korea and moved to Berlin in 1964. From 1933 to 1944, he studied music in Korea and Japan. He participated in Korea's struggle for independence and, resisting Japanese rule, lived in hiding before being arrested and kept as a political prisoner. Between 1945 and 1956, he worked in a range of occupations, as a social worker, orphanage director, school music teacher and foreign-language assistant at the University of Seoul. In 1955 he received the South Korean Prize for Culture. From 1956 until 1959, he studied in Paris and Berlin, under Boris Blacher and Josef Rufer among others, and participated in the courses at Darmstadt.
In 1967, he was kidnapped in Berlin by the
South Korean secret services. After being held a prisoner by Park's regime, he was freed in 1969 further to protests from international public opinion. He then taught composition at the Hannover conservatory in 1969/70 and became a professor at the Hochschule Berlin from 1970 to 1985. He obtained German nationality in 1971 and as of 1973 took part in numerous demonstrations by exiled South Koreans in the United States and Japan in the context of international socialism, declaring himself in favour of the democratization of South Korea and the country's reunification. Yun was a member of the Academy of Fine Art of both Hamburg and Berlin and awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Tübingen in 1985.
He died 3rd November 1995 in his adopted homeland.
