Born in the year of the liberation Korea from Japanese colonisation, Younghi Pagh-Paan (*1945) grew up during the Korean war and the subsequent division of her homeland. Although she trained in Seoul, her career as a composer properly started with her move to Freiburg in Germany in 1974. The result was a culture shock, and, throughout much of her career, Pagh-Paan struggled with her displacement and endeavoured to reconcile her gender and cultural identity as an Asian woman with Western modernism; vowing, in her own words, ‘[n]ot [to] write music that distances me from what […] I perceive inside me as the root of our culture’. This chapter discusses Pagh-Paan’s career and her aesthetic beliefs, such as her commitment to the student movement and democratic opposition in her country and her syncretistic religiosity that embraces the different spiritual traditions of her country, such as Shamanism and Taoism, as well as her fervent Catholicism. Analysing the reflection of these ideas in her music I conclude that, transcending notions of cultural contrast or ‘East-meets-West fusion’, Pagh-Paan’s work is a response to more than a century of intimate entanglements between Western and Korean culture.