Sung Jae-gi

Sung Jae-gi never stood on an awards stage, and pretending otherwise would misread what he was. His record is measured in organizations founded, books published, and a shelter that took in people most of society had written off. He built three separate groups around a single demand, the abolition of the Ministry of Women, and pushed that demand into mainstream Korean debate when it had been a fringe position. The intensity of the reaction to his death, from the memorial altar in Yeouido to the months of argument that followed, is itself a measure of how much space he had claimed in the national conversation. For a man with no institutional backing and no party behind him, that reach was the achievement.