The paucity of entertainment options in the 1970s is difficult to convey to contemporary South Korean youths, for whom a world without readily reproducible movies and music, and without cell phones, computer games, or leisure sports, is simply unimaginable.
— John Lie, K-Pop
In writing of the New Wave in Korean culture in the 2000s, Korean returnee John Lie describes a cultural amnesia—a loss of cultural memory and the erasure of a world of only a generation past. Yet this loss brings into existence new, almost bizarre ways to see Seoul and to imagine its future.
While the destructions of colonialism and war might lie beneath Seoul’s post-1953 profusion of blank boxes and the subsequent and seemingly unending expansion and proliferation of the megalopolis, such conditions can be seen also to have resulted in an episteme—a way of constructing knowledge and understanding of the world—that enables the unprecedented cultural explosion of present Korea. It is the notion of “creative destruction,” perhaps cultural succession, as an enabling condition for new invention. In the economic sphere this has most notably been articulated by Joseph Schumpeter (1950); in the cultural ἀeld, by Walter Benjamin, although it is ultimately to be traced variously to Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.1
The effect of the losses and distortions, together with the extraordinary acceleration of a superἀcial modernization, was to leave a void. The past has either slipped away, to be renounced, or to be imagined now in Disneyἀed simulacra—the reconstructed palaces and their soldierly reenactments being the most dramatic manifestation, but also 198the purchased antiquity of Woninjae Shrine, the Seohojeongsa, and their ilk. This modernization, however, occurred at a singular junction in the transits of the age—in that cusp between an e-economy and age (the electronics boom on which the Korean economic miracle rode), and the emerging k-economy (where the drivers are no longer the media but the contents of those media). Although the period from about 1990 would seem most starkly to mark this metamorphosis, there were certainly earlier foreshadowings. The void is thus not to be ἀlled but rather replaced by another space that is always already empty (cyberspace) and that constantly provokes the creation of contents. The world of remembered images is crosscut by another, of digital imagery and of cyberspace, also of the inἀnite possibilities that can explode to occupy that space.
The previous chapter was preoccupied with blankness, despite that inἀnity of advertisement boards and conical spires and crosses as an appliquéd montage—the eerily “modern” city of seemingly nondescript buildings and surfaces, as well as public spaces that could be found anywhere or nowhere (though often well and professionally designed in a conventional, academic “urban design” sense). The preoccupation that will emerge in the present chapter, however, is with contents. If Korean everyday life increasingly retreats into boxes—apartments in forests of high-rise concrete and glass, with the aged relegated to even meaner boxes, and leisure to the bang—what do Koreans listen to and watch in their reclusion? Equally signiἀcantly, what do other Koreans create as those new contents? The following is in four parts. The ἀrst addresses Seoul’s preoccupation with media and the new contents evoked by media; the second moves on to the phenomenon of Hallyu, the Korean Wave that has risen from that preoccupation. Part 3 turns to the global reach of the Korean Wave and K-pop, as Seoul and Korea metamorphose into an unprecedentedly new form of global hyperspace: the city and urban space are redeἀned. The fourth and ἀnal part of the chapter reprises the discussion of Seoul as assemblage from chapter 4, to consider the implications of a new urban geography.
Part 1
MEDIA AND THEIR CONTENTS
The claim is constantly made that South Korea is “the most wired nation in the world”—also the most wireless (Oh Myung and Larson 2011).2 By 2009, 95 percent of South Korean homes were connected to 199cheap, high-speed broadband Internet; its nearest rival was Singapore, with 88 percent.3 Seoul was the ἀrst city to feature DMB (digital multimedia broadcasting), a digital mobile television technology, and WiBro (wireless broadband), a wireless high-speed mobile Internet service.4 It has had a fast, high-penetration 100-megabits-per-second ἀber-optic broadband network, to be upgraded to 1 gigabit per second by 2012. In June 2011 the Seoul city government announced that it would offer free Wi-Fi in outdoor spaces, providing residents and visitors with Internet access on every street corner. By the end of 2011 all buses, subway trains, and taxis would be equipped to offer wireless Internet to passengers; by 2015 the network would cover 10,430 parks, streets, and other public places.5 An altogether new dimension is added to the realm of communication, in what can be seen as one of the most signiἀcant of all urban transformations—Seoul becomes a new sort of city.
The high concentration of people in tower blocks makes it easy to get ἀber-optic cable to much of the population. High-speed broadband is cheaply and almost universally available; by 2007 nine out of ten residents had mobile phones, and Samsung and LG continue to pump out the gadgetry to a voracious local market. Seoul also pioneered “convergence”: digital multimedia broadcasting was launched in South Korea in 2005. Other Asian cities—Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong—are in pursuit. Singapore leads the challenge, especially on Internet access: in late 2006 the Singapore government said it would roll out free Wi-Fi broadband across the island and that by 2012 it would deliver wired broadband speed of up to 1 gigabit per second. That project continues. The rivalry between Korea and Singapore (and Hong Kong, Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China …) is a theme to which we will return.
Korea is also claimed to have been the ἀrst to succeed in commercializing online games, in the mid-1990s (Yi In-hwa 2006). As Martin Fackler has observed, “[O]nline gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the ‘PC bang,’ dim Internet parlors that sit on practically every street corner.” It is also alleged to be the ἀrst country to have to set up “boot camps” to treat Internet addiction among the young (Fackler 2007; also Song Do-Young 1998; Yi In-hwa 2006). Martin Fackler could report in 2007 that up to 30 percent of South Koreans under eighteen years old, or about 2.4 million people, are estimated to be at risk of Internet addiction; of these, about a quarter million probably show signs of actual addiction (Fackler 2007). To address the problem, a network of 140 Internet addiction counseling centers had been established by the government; treatment programs had been introduced at some one hundred hospitals; then, in 2007, the Internet Rescue Camp program was initiated, 200run on quasimilitary lines, part boot camp and part rehabilitation center. Korea is certainly not unique in having the problem of youth addiction to cyberspace; however, as it is in the vanguard of the problem, so is it apparently pioneering efforts to address it.
A more recent observation of online gaming—as industry, as social and cultural phenomenon, as economic transformation, and ultimately as “empire”—is Jin Dal Yong (2011; also 2010 and 2013). Korean government policies encouraged the development of online gaming both as a cutting-edge business and as a cultural touchstone. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is increasingly identiἀed with online gaming. As an industry, Jin recounts how Korean online gaming is increasingly global in its reach.
Songdo as “new ubiquitous city”
To observe the wired world raised to the next power, one can turn again to New Songdo, introduced in chapter 4 and ἀnely spruiked in the wondrous rhetoric of Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco Systems, the information technology contractor for New Songdo:6
If you’ve been to Songdo in Korea, it’s amazing what is going on there. Every home will have a Telepresence unit built in like a dishwasher. And it’s the developer that is putting those into new apartments as they get built out, because that is how education, health care and government services will be delivered right into the home. It will come to you. You don’t have to go ἀnd it. And that is how they will reduce traffic congestion and pollution in the cities….
[Y]ou can literally sit back on the couch and see your friends and family in life-size, full high deἀnition, right in your living room, and interact with them. It’s not a small computer screen. You get a full view of everyone. (Dignam 2010)
De Beer made this statement in a June 2010 talk at a Bank of America/Merrill Lynch Technology Conference focused, of course, on video, telepresence, and networks. More interesting, however, was the talk’s subtext: what are the social and psychological implications of reality’s replacement with its virtual substitute? De Beer spoke of such “presencing” with one’s banker, lawyer, accountant, tutor, “because now I can interview and hire a tutor that may be in a different city for my kids, and it’s the best possible tutor I can ἀnd.” However, he goes no further. The real effects on the individual, isolated in a world of virtual 201reality, are yet to be observed. Dignam’s comment: Songdo may be able to show us the art of the possible.
Lest the transformative aspects of Songdo overexcite, it must be emphasized that, for Gale, Cisco, and its other proponents, this is an investment, and expected to harvest a rich return. The observation of (New) Songdo in chapter 4 casts some doubt on the richness of that return. So we can observe another, also rhetorical, assessment of the project:
Cisco calls this Smart+Connected Communities initiative a potential $30 billion opportunity, a number based not only on the revenues from installation of the basic infrastructure but also on selling the consumer-facing hardware as well as the services layered on top of that hardware. Picture a Cisco-built digital infrastructure wired to Cisco’s TelePresence videoconferencing screens mounted in every home and office, with engineers listening, learning, and releasing new Cisco-branded bandwidth-hungry services in exchange for modest monthly fees. You’ve heard of software as a service? Well, Cisco intends to offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities—water, power, traffic, telephony—into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident’s bill. (Lindsay 2010)
The ἀnancial model, it seems, is akin to that of ancient rent farming. One must wonder, however, if Cisco picked the right farm, and whether Gangnam or elsewhere in Seoul might not have been a smarter target.
Media and the uncertainties of new invention
There may be a warning for enterprises like Cisco and projects like New Songdo in the uncertainties that accompany the endless proliferation of new media. Although this chapter is more concerned with the contents than with the media conveying them, it is instructive to note the recent dilemmas facing the PC bangs.
Some think that the age of the bang may be passing. Yoon Ja-young (2012) cites a survey of Internet café owners (by the Korean Federation of Small and Medium Business) showing 64.5 percent of them in deἀcit; one in three was barely breaking even, and only 1.8 percent saw a proἀt. Where there were an estimated 24,000 Internet cafés in Korea in the early 2000s, by 2012 the ἀgure was around 15,000. The fall is attributed to the expansion of smart devices as well as to the provision of free Wi-Fi in coffee shops. Accordingly the Internet cafés 202are increasingly relying on online game players, although the games are also making the shift from desktop to mobile devices. Yoon cites a white paper on Games by the Korean Creative Content Agency:7 while Internet cafés took 29 percent of sales in the 2009 games market, that fell to 19 percent in 2011 and was expected to be only 12 percent in 2013; in contrast, as smart devices become smarter, sales of mobile games were projected to have doubled between 2009 and 2013.
The uncertainties of new invention continue: the annual flood of new mobile devices, and of new games to be played on them, has continued to place old technologies and bangs under yet further pressure; so 2016 saw the release of the ἀrst commercially available virtual reality headsets, preἀguring the next wave of both consumer frenzy and youth distraction. Multiplayer games proliferate as evolving technologies enable ever-increasing connectivity between devices, thereby threatening the bangs and accordingly the spaces of the city.
From media to content
Nowhere have the transpositions of reality been more brilliantly manifested than in the extraordinary creativity of Korean electronic art. The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea at the base of Mount Cheonggyesan in suburban Gwacheon, as an example, is in the main a gallery of electronic art and imagery. It is set in a forest in low foothills of the main mountain range and was designed by architect Kim Tai Soo. Though thoroughly modern in its starkly geometric forms, there are apparent references to ancient Chosun-era monuments. The complex might be seen as a ἀne reflection of the quest for a modern Korean identity—and perhaps also as a counter to other expressions of that identity (Gyeongbokgung, Seohojeongsa, the reenactments of Chosun pageantry at the variously restored and reconstructed palaces).8 It is in its electronic art contents that the real challenge to an understanding of Korea is to be found.
In 2001 the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, mounted a major exhibition of Korean art, again digital and diversely electronic, especially celebrating the seminal work of Korean composer and video artist Paik Nam June (1932–2006). From February to April 2000 Paik’s work had similarly dominated the New York Guggenheim (Hanhardt 2000). Paik Nam June is widely considered “the father of video art” (Lee Yongwoo 2006; Kal Hong 2011, 85). The ἀrst phase of Paik’s musical output began in 1947 with conventionally notated works and the Korean-flavored sounds of his youth. The seminal work of Paik grew out of the 1960s flowering of a Korean sense of impending freedom and its potential for a radical break. His ἀrst emblematic work 203was TV Buddha, a TV set and a statue of the Buddha are placed facing each other, as the Buddha contemplates his own image picked up by the video camera placed above the TV set (Lee Yongwoo 2006).9 Both modern electronic technology and ancient Buddhist contemplation are set to deconstruct each other—Korea is itself deconstructed. There is something of a contradiction here, however: while Paik’s work is widely seen as seminal to the direction of modern Korean culture, he spent much of his time from the 1950s on in Germany, the United States, and Japan, and was a founding member of the internationalist Fluxus Group, so that the idea of Korean cultural rebirth falls into the framework of emerging, internationalist, avant-gardist culture.
Paik’s artistic debut was with a solo exhibition in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1963, titled Exposition of Music-Electronic Television. Twelve television sets were scattered through the exhibition space and used to create unexpected effects in the images being received. Paik moved to New York in 1964 and began working with cellist Charlotte Moorman to combine video and performance. In their installation TV Bra for Living Sculpture, television sets were stacked in the shape of a cello; as Moorman bowed the television sets, there were images of her playing, collages of other cellists, and live images of the performance. Paik also incorporated television sets into a series of robots, sometimes built from bits and pieces of wire and metal, and later from vintage radio and television sets. He laid out a large garden in an exhibition space and planted dozens of television sets in it; he also hollowed out a television set and ἀlled it with plants rooted in earth. To this he gave the title TV Plant. The implication seemed to be that, while technology itself was not necessarily of substantive relevance, it could be brought to some organic place in general culture by our contemplating the nexus (or its lack) between technology and nature (Hanhardt 2000; Hanhardt and Hakuta 2012). On New Year’s Day 1984 Paik broadcast, via international satellite, “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” which he had composed in Paris and New York, to negate the pessimism of George Orwell’s (1903–1950) novel 1984, which had warned of the oppressive power of television in a totalitarian state. The show was aired simultaneously in major urban centers, including Seoul (Kal Hong 2011, 140n1). There is no mention of it being aired in Pyongyang.
For the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Paik built a tower from 1,003 monitors, titled ἀ e More the Better;10 it now stands in the center of a spiral ramp in the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. The “1,003” symbolizes October 3, Korea’s National Foundation Day—the foundation of the ancient Gojoseon, the ἀrst Joseon or Chosun. The work is not merely at the center of the Museum of Contemporary Art; the museum is effectively built around it. ἀ e More the Better is now a national monument (ἀgure 5.1) (Kal Hong 2011, 85). 204
FIGURE 5.1 Paik Nam June, The More the Better, 1988. The assembled television sets are from an earlier age and technology—they are no longer manufactured and so cannot be replaced as they fail. The blank screens thereby measure the passing of their age and its technology so that The More the Better will in time become a ruin—a dead, electronic monument to a past time. Photographed 2012.
205Paik was commonly called the founder of video art, philosopher of technology, composer, poet, information artist. Lee Yongwoo notes Paik’s assertion that “the role of the artist was to anticipate the future.11 He believed that when technology could be used like an artist’s brush, technology would be humanized so that it could be applied for the true beneἀt of mankind [sic]” (2006, 39). While he certainly searched widely for Korean subject matter, it would be mistaken to ἀnd nationalism in this quest. Similarly, while it was scarcely coincidental that a Korean artist would be imbued with the excitement of video technology in Korea’s decade of technological embrace in the 1960s, his signiἀcance (as both a Korean and a global artist) was in his turn to the potential content of this new technology—as well as in his turn to philosophical reflection on the relationships of power emerging in the new age.12
Aftermath to Paik Nam June
In Yongin at the southern extension of Seoul, on the Bundang subway line, sits the Nam June Paik Art Center. The idea of an institution dedicated to Paik was discussed with him starting 2001. In 2008 the center was opened to the public.13 Accommodating exhibition halls, creative activity spaces, and archives, it is described as “a space of ‘introspective anarchy of inἀnite light and life,’ … a venue for the ‘escape from enlightenment,’ going beyond enlightenment.” Paik, it is asserted, did not regard video and television as “a means for communicating messages, but as an explosion of time, instead creating a space for mandala-based televisuals, and for participation by the public where ‘consilience’ among heterogeneous ἀelds can take place.”14
There are younger followers in the tradition that Paik pioneered. Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho project video installations in News from Nowhere (2012), retracing William Morris’ 1890 novel that envisioned an agrarian society in which the divisions between art, life, and work were erased. Here, however, the erasure is to be of the borders between science, architecture, product design, engineering, philosophy, and religion in a postapocalyptic future—after the North-South apocalypse.15
The ἀrst generation of Korean modern artists represented by Paik Nam June was followed by a new generation of distinguished artists working in a variety of media. These include Chang Ree-seok, Chang Doo-kun, Paek Young-su, Chun Kyung Ja, Kim Tchang-Yeul, and Suh Se-ok. More recently, the Korean art world is represented by a group 206of painters and sculptors such as Chun Kwang Young, Park Seo-bo, Lee Jongsang, Song Soo-nam, Lee Doo-shik, Lee Wal-jong, Youn Myeungro, Lee Il, Kang Ik-joong, Lim Ok-sang, Kim Young-won, and Choi Jong-tae, all of whom have achieved international recognition.16 Also notable for its urban focus, on North Korea rather than Seoul, is the photography of Back Seung Woo.17 The diffusion both of media and of forms of expression might be linked to the example of Paik’s “exit” from convention, but also to the explosion of art spaces and zones in the city recounted in chapter 4.
Korean official culture exhibits a wider embrace of the deconstructive power of digitally transmitted content. Sunday 15 April 2012 was the one-hundredth birthday of Kim Il-sung. From its permanent collection, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea reprised a video art installation by William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955), I am not me, the horse is not mine (original 2008). The phrase was commonly a peasant’s insolent reply in Czarist Russia to deny responsibility for actions; it has subsequently become a Russian proverb. The theme of the installation was based on Gogol’s absurdist ἀ e Nose: television screens depict Constructivist cartoons, including a cartooned Stalin, with one screen displaying (in English) the text of the plenum of the Central Committee of 26 February 1937 that condemned Bukharin. The proclaimed purpose of the work is “to lay bare the institutional violence of Stalin’s regime.”18 In Korea it is safe to assume that the conjunction of such a display with Kim Il-sung’s centenary was not coincidental.
It is similarly not coincidental that Korea can be seen as enmeshed in the vanguard of the new cyberpolitics (Lee Eun-Jung 2004). In the context of increasing collusions between the political parties and the formal press (the Third Estate with an increasingly compromised Fourth Estate), there are inserted the ever-more-subversive Internet-based web journals—weblogs, or blogs—claiming the space of the Fifth Estate.19 So the Korean OhMyNews online, an interactive news “paper,” was founded in February 2000 and claims to have been the world’s ἀrst “citizen journalism” outlet. Its motto is “Every Citizen is a Reporter,” and in 2004 it was reported as having a readership of two million, and over 26,000 registered “citizen journalists.” On some accounts it was credited with playing a key role in bringing President Roh Moo-hyun to office in the 2002 elections (StarIn Tech, Malaysia, 23 November 2004 1–3;20 Yun Seongyi 2003; Oh Myung and Larson 2011, 156). Yun Seongyi (2006, 57) elsewhere reports that Roh’s home page was logged on to by more than 300,000 “netizens” every day, and by 860,000 on the day of the election, quoting Britain’s Guardian to the effect that “South Korea will stake a claim to be the most advanced 207online democracy on the planet with the inauguration of a president who styles himself as the ἀrst leader fully in tune with the Internet.” While there are complaints that the Internet is unable to communicate the uplifting policies and messages of the Third Estate, that of course is precisely the point: its character is in its anarchic fragmentation and dissemination, and in its disorder. Its effect rather is “debunking, reinforcing, and cooling” (Yun Young Min 2003). Late modern politics, like late modern Protestantism (chapter 3), “flies apart.”
Cinema
As “debunking” and “flying apart” characterize both modern Korean politics and the trajectory of Korean “high-culture” music and visual arts, so too popular culture—albeit sometimes unintentionally. All arise in the context of an enabling episteme of distortion of memory, reimagining of the past, naturalizing of material culture, and transposition of reality (a theme for chapter 6). Thus, indeed, can one view the extraordinary phenomenon of Hallyu, the “Korean Wave.” Although the term refers to the popularity of South Korean popular culture that swept through East and Southeast Asia around mid-1999, its antecedents go back to the long evolution of the Korean cinema industry.21
There had been a brief Golden Era of Korean silent ἀlms in the years 1926–1930, sparked by the 1926 release and critical success of Na Woon-gyu’s Arirang. Although the ἀlm did not have an explicitly political message (no nationalism, no Japanese bashing), the common use of a live narrator, or byeonsa, at the theater who could inject his own satire and criticism of the occupation, would give it a political subtext invisible to government censors. For all that, Arirang was seen by the police as a blatant attack against Japanese rule and accordingly banned (Eckert et al. 1990, 295).22 More than seventy ἀlms were produced in this time, in a complex and evolving process of interaction between Japanese and Korean ἀlmmakers, whereby “the latter played key roles in the formation of Korean cinema both despite and in conjunction with the heavy-handed influence of Japan’s ἀlmmakers, technology and capital” (Chung Chonghwa 2012, 138).23 After 1930, however, the domestic ἀlm industry was virtually shut down due to censorship and mounting Japanese oppression; from 1938 on, all ἀlmmaking in Korea was done by the Japanese; by 1942 the use of the Korean language in ἀlms was banned (Min Eungjun et al. 2003).
After 1945 there was a brief outburst of production with “freedom,” understandably, as the guiding theme, although this abruptly ended with the 1950–1953 civil war.24 The real rebirth began in 1955, enjoying support from the Syngman Rhee government, and then 208subsequently in 1960–1961, a year of unprecedented freedom in the period between the Rhee and Park administrations. With Park, heavy censorship and regulation returned—“family values” were to be encouraged, while any hint of pro-Communist messages or obscenity was to be purged. Despite the constriction, ἀlm production, ἀlm quality, and audiences increased throughout the 1960s to give Korea a strong cinematic culture; the 1970s, by contrast, marked a period of suppression and decline. “Political correctness” would rule cinema production. This decline was further hastened by “free” trade agreements with the United States that allowed an unrestricted Hollywood flood (Lee Hyangjin 2000; Kim Byeongcheol 2006).25 Steven Chung (2014a) sees Shin Sang-ok (1926–2006) as arguably the most important Korean ἀlmmaker of the postwar era, having directed or produced nearly two hundred ἀlms in a decidedly melodramatic genre. These included the highly regarded A Flower in Hell (1958) and ἀ e Housemaid and My Mother (1961). However, by around 1972 his career was floundering in the wake of the dictatorship’s censorship and the Hollywood flood, only to revive in spectacular fashion after 1978—we resume that story following.
Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann (2005) identify the 1955–1972 period as the “golden age” of South Korean ἀlms and the period of a “ἀrst renaissance” (of that earlier golden era of 1926–1930?).26 The various papers that McHugh and Abelmann bring together focus on a number of intersecting themes: transnational connections (the debt to Hollywood but also to Italian Neorealism, French art, and even Mexican cinema), war and the plight of women (a strong emotional attachment to MGM’s Waterloo Bridge of 1940), the dilemma of syncretization, and the indigenization of Christianity in Korea and its entanglement in the representation of women (McHugh and Abelmann 2005). These are themes that reemerged in the “second renaissance”—the “New Wave” Korean cinema—beginning in the 1990s.27 This latter McHugh and Abelmann identify with tendencies toward both auteurism and melodrama, a critique that is also taken up by Moon Jae-cheol (2006). Where in Western cinema auteurism—the celebration of the author, the director, and originality—took the form of emphasizing ἀlm as art, in Korea the industry took such an idea as the operator for challenging the Korean ἀlm institution. The director and his or her ἀlm would challenge the institution and thereby its protecting, wider society. The strategy of the New Wave was to hybridize the two concepts of auteurism (the art-house cinema that engages the humanist vision of a single writer-director) and realism.28 Hybridity is also emphasized by Kim Kyung Hyun (2011b, 186): “By fully embracing Hollywood, rather than rejecting it, their works display hybridity 209that equally engages national identity and global aesthetics, art and commercialism, conformity and subversion, and narrative coherence and stylistic flair.”29
Moon Jae-cheol further argues that the New Wave’s view of history was melodramatic: “These ἀlms reproduce the past through the lens of nostalgia, thereby emphasizing a sense of loss in the present. As Fredric Jameson said about postmodern ἀlm, there is evidence of a regression that cannot imagine a new history” (Moon Jae-cheol 2006, 44). A melodramatic imagination, following Peter Brooks (1976), would be one that seeks hidden moral values in a world in which values are being destroyed—“primal secrets or essential nature has been suppressed and awaits liberation” (Moon Jae-cheol 2006, 48; on the melodramatic in Korean cinema, see also Lee Young-il and Choe Young-chol 1998).30 Moon goes on, however, to suggest that there was, by 2006, an emerging post–New Wave cinema in which the melodramatic was being supplanted by an ironic imagination and view of history. Irony builds on ambiguity of meaning—rather than look for hidden meaning in history, irony would point to the uncertainty of history by showing that positive truth is not possible.31
If Moon’s observation has validity, then the suggestion would be that there can be detected, in the sensibilities of recent Korean cinema, some shift away from the preoccupation with nostalgia and loss in Korean society that has been a constant theme of chapters 3 and 4. The uneven shifts between nostalgia and irony preoccupy modern Korean literature embedded, as Stephen Epstein (1997) observes, in and reflective of historical context. One might reasonably question: is any such tendency to be observed in uses of the built environment to represent “the Korean condition”—in the neo-Modernist landscape of Cheonggyecheon or perhaps the siting and forms of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, in contrast to the nostalgic (melodramatic) reconstructions of palaces and palace guards? Where the historical reconstructions of Kwanghuamun and Gyeongbokgung Palace might be seen to express a melodramatic imagination, the reinvention of Cheonggyecheon is ironic. Irony also arises in the hyperspatial phantasmagoria—albeit accidental—of New Songdo? Are we likewise seeing a “new wave” urban design? We will return to this question.
The post-1997 explosion in Korean ἀlm production, as well as in both its domestic and international adulation, represents a breakthrough in artistic and marketing terms but is also, however, a phenomenon needing explanation. It might be seen, simplistically, as an issue of quality, as well as the sudden release of previously suppressed ideas and creativity. A partial explanation may also relate to a recurring theme of the Korean people’s suffering as a result of their division 210and the longing for reuniἀcation. Arguably even more signiἀcant has been a hard, uncompromising “values” focus that marks New Wave Korean ἀlms. In writing on the “independent ἀlmmakers,” Park Young-a (2011) has drawn special attention to director Kim Dongwon (b. 1955), whose documentary Sanggyedong Olympics exposed the violence of the “eviction squads,” local gang members hired to clear the slums in preparation for urban beautiἀcation for the 1988 Olympics. Deeply moved by the work of radical Catholic activists among the poor, Kim went on to direct a series of documentaries to unveil the condition of Seoul’s shantytown residents. He went to live among his subjects but in his ἀlms avoided identiἀcation of individuals, instead relying mostly on long shots of groups of residents, to thereby depict the shantytown as “a community with a uniἀed future and hope” (Nam Tae-je and Yi Jin-pil 2003, 35, cited in Park Young-a 2011, 193). Chris Berry (2003) has invoked the idea of a “socially engaged mode” in describing Kim’s and related Koreans’ work as the antithesis of a “commodity mode” of most Western documentary making, directed instead to the construction of a “counterpublic sphere.” The avant-garde Oasis (2002) highlighted the plight of the handicapped and Koreans’ inability to understand and accept them; Oldboy (2003) experimented with themes of psychological madness and sexual distortion; Samaritan Girl (2004) was about a teenage prostitute. My Sassy Girl (2001) was a romantic comedy, signiἀcantly based on a series of blog posts adopted into a ἀctional novel.32 When released throughout East Asia, My Sassy Girl became a megablockbuster in Japan, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; it was also strongly received through Southeast Asia.33
If Shin Sang-ok is seen as Korea’s “most important” ἀlm director of the late 1950s and 1960s, then the “best and most challenging” might be Kim Ki-young (1922–1998), known for his intensely psychosexual and melodramatic horror ἀlms, often focusing on the psychology of their female characters. The most revered of these was ἀ e Housemaid, released in 1960. It was a domestic thriller telling of a family’s destruction through the introduction of a sexually predatory housemaid; it was lurid, expressionistic in contrast to the prevailing realism, set in an eerie house, and preoccupied with sexual obsessions, rats, and murder. ἀe Housemaid was produced in that brief period of relative freedom following the end of the Syngman Rhee regime in 1960 and before the rise of Park Chung-hee in 1961 and new restrictions and censorship. To mark the ἀlm’s fiftieth anniversary, director Im Sang-soo was invited to produce a remake of the original; the result, ἀe Housemaid (2010), seeks to explore the change in Korean society over that time. Like the 1960 version, the 2010 ἀlm is melodramatic, even absurdist, an erotic thriller. In a 2010 interview, Im observed that, despite the obliteration 211of six decades of colonial oppression and the three years of civil war, there had emerged in the late 1950s a new middle class that, “while quite ordinary by Western standards,” could afford to hire uneducated girls from the destitute countryside as housemaids. This had been the economic background to Kim’s masterpiece. By 2010, however, only a limited class of the superrich could afford live-in housemaids in suddenly affluent Korea. The superrich, says Im, “are very separate from normal people, but they rule our society politically and economically from behind the scenes. I want to know who they really are, how they live, what they think. This ἀlm is part of my study of the superrich in Korea.” It is a class that lives isolated, in a cultural vacuum—“they just copy the European traditional rich using new money. But, you know, when you copy someone else’s life, inside there is only emptiness.”34 The 2010 ἀlm is far more than a remake; rather, the two versions are to be seen together, as dialectical images that expose one aspect of the evolution of the Korean class structure. Signiἀcantly, both deconstruct “family values,” a constant preoccupation of the New Wave in Korea.
Bong Joon-ho’s immensely successful ἀ e Host of 2006 presents a very different take on family values and domestic life, here interwoven with the blockbuster–monster–special effects genre: an unremarkable family is thrust into the extraordinary events of a human-consuming monster in Seoul’s Han River.35 The ἀlm becomes a commentary on the implications of America’s military presence in Korea and of the complicity of the Korean political establishment. The monster, we are to assume from the ἀlm’s cues, is linked to American biological experimentation and the aftermath is a tangle of official efforts at disinformation. Bong Joon-ho has rejected any charge of anti-Americanism, however: “In the broad sense, to compress it or simpl[if]y it as an anti-American ἀlm, I think that’s not correct because there’s always a history of political satire in the sci-ἀ genre. If you look in the broad sense, the American satire is just one part of it. There is also the satire against the Korean society and, even further, the whole system that doesn’t protect the weak people. That’s the greater flow of satire in this ἀlm, not that one part of anti-Americanism” (Bong Joon-ho, quoted in Blodrowski 2007). The seeming mirage of anti-Americanism won it the rare distinction, for a South Korean ἀlm, of official North Korean praise. The North Korean pleasure, however, may have derived from a lack of sophistication in reading the satire: the ἀlm is almost exclusively set along the banks of the Han River; the architecture is dark and futuristic; the river—the always feared, forever threatening pathway for that other monster of North Korean invasion—is constantly menacing. Or is there yet another reading of the river? Bong Joon-ho writes, “The Han River: The River has flown with us and around us. 212A fearsome Creature makes a sudden appearance from the depths of this river, so familiar and comfortable for us Seoulites. The riverbanks are constantly plunged into a bloody chaos. The ἀlm begins at the precise moment, in which a space familiar and intimate to us, is suddenly transformed into the stage of an unthinkable disaster and tragedy.”36 Above all else, ἀ e Host may be seen as a commentary on the ambiguity of the Han River in the minds of Seoul people—“familiar and comfortable,” as Bong insists, yet dark and threatening as he depicts it, deἀning the city yet also potentially the city’s path of impending destruction.
Kim Kyung Hyun suggests an explicitly architectural reading of ἀ e Host. Bong is seen to be preoccupied with an evolving landscape “mauled by the hurried pace of industrialization and modernization.” “Bong’s depictions of landscape often show nature beyond repair. Countryside towns and farms are invaded …; a wide-open vision of green forest is obstructed by rows of apartment buildings, which are ubiquitous in Korea …; the Han River is inhabited by a monster and threatened by the sprawling cityscape …; and a mountain is razed by miners and builders who extract rocks from it to make cement and other construction materials” (Kim Kyung Hyun 2011b, 190).37
Bong’s ἀlms are seen as depicting “the global metropolis that is Seoul’s parasitical dependence on nature and its destruction of ecological harmony…. [T]hese ruined landscapes are exploited as both the generic ingredients for his crime mystery, horror, and comedy, and the effective sites of new virtual realities” (Kim Kyung Hyun 2011b, 191).38 ἀ e Host portrays a virtual city drained of its crowds. The dense masses of people who will occasionally occupy the riverbanks are absent. The absence, however, does not restore nature but instead places the viewer in a phantasmagoric state—a “perversion” of the landscape. Only when the city becomes virtual—reimagined as a barren, abandoned landscape—“does the presence of flâneurs (city strollers) and nomads become conspicuous” (compare this with my own flâneur-like stroll through the empty, abandoned streets of New Songdo, also drained of crowds, phantasmagoric, in chapter 4). Kim invokes ideas from Deleuze and Guattari (1987): vagabonds, whose “dwelling is subordinated to the journey” and here occupy “the striated spaces of sewers, tunnels and concrete holes,” become crucial. In ἀ e Host, spaces of everyday urban life—convenience stores, corporate high-rises, gigantic parking garages, sewers—become what Deleuze and Guattari call the “operation of the line of flight,” delineating a movement along which both deterritorialization and reterritorialization must occur. Such spaces in Seoul are constantly invoked as “lines of flight” (Kim Kyung Hyun 2011b, 196–197). 213
It is not difficult to ἀnd dark images of real (surreal?) Seoul that match the dark vision of ἀ e Host—the winter snow, the ice, and the mists ensure that. Observe ἀgure 3.9 in chapter 3. A more sundrenched, spring-blossomed image can be more suggestive: Digital Media City, some seven kilometers west of the old city, is yet one more of the futuristic “new cities” that inhabit some imagined, dreamed vision of a future Korea.39 There are the majestic mountains and the small stream of the Bulwongcheon River that old villages would have lined and that the mean, brown-brick, 1960s and 1970s modernity would have supplanted. Then, behind this brown-brick, boxland Seoul and blocking out the majesty of the green mountains and the reminders of mountain temples and shamanic retreats are now the walls of Seoul’s ubiquitous high-rise apartment towers. Older aerial photographs reveal the stream as a drainage line—anecdotally polluted with industrial waste, an example of Bong’s “nature beyond repair.” Yet, look again: a 2012 image reveals new landscaping of the stream.40 The new plantings, sculptured banks, stepping-stones, waterside pathways, benches, and exercise equipment (a constant preoccupation) are part of a wider program to “bring nature back”—likewise the Cheonggyecheon reconstruction, as well as the vast Hangang riverside parks (ἀgure 5.2).
The expressed artiἀciality of these landscape reconstructions, sculptural rather than fake-naturalistic, puts them in the same dramaturgical realm as Bong’s deconstructive vision in ἀ e Host. They present for the most part a hard, unromantic nature, evoking an ironic rather than a melodramatic imagination, in the sense argued by Peter Brooks, above.41
Neo-Seoul
There is another apocalyptic vision of a future Seoul, also negotiating that dialectic of the melodramatic and the ironic and to be set against its engagement in ἀe Host. It emerges as one of many layers of Cloud Atlas (2004), a novel by English author David Mitchell, subsequently adapted to a German American ἀlm (2012).42 Nea So Copros is an immense, economically powerful, corporate nation centered on a uniἀed Korea, where Korean-style neocapitalism has run amok in seemingly the world’s last bastion of “civilization,” albeit ambiguously deἀned. Its capital is Neo-Seoul. “Nea So Copros” is a corruption of “New East Asian (Sphere of) Co-Prosperity”—the imperial Japanese vision is ἀnally achieved, albeit with a Korean hegemony. The land in Nea So Copros is mostly uninhabitable, rendered toxic by industrial waste and nuclear accidents (Fukushima multiplied). Society is strati-ἀed in a Confucianist apotheosis, ranging from Xecutives who appear 214to control Nea So Copros as part of the juche (a reference to the philosophy of the Syngman Rhee regime, also to that of present North Korea) to consumers to the relict poor and down to genomed clones known as “fabricants,” manufactured for speciἀc tasks, such as serving food and cleaning up radioactive water, but kept from intellectual development.
FIGURE 5.2 Digital Media City, 2012. This image effectively summarizes the city: the mountains had restricted the city’s development to the small valleys in the era of the “Miracle on the Han” (the dreary boxlike buildings along the stream); the later, wall-like arrays of apartment towers engulf the lower slopes; most recently, the stream itself is transformed from industrial drain to overdesigned, landscaped, recreational walkway. Digital Media City claims to be the generator of an entirely new, digitally enabled age.
It is Neo-Seoul and its ἀlmic graphics that especially challenge any reading of the present city.43 The year is 2144, and the levee walls and floodgates erected to protect Seoul from the rising sea levels have long since failed. Old Seoul has been submerged, and the abandoned metropolis is now a slum megasociety with shack dwellings growing up like a coral reef on the levee walls and immense shantytown flotillas built on and around the half-sunken skyscrapers bridged by salvaged 215steelwork from ancient, wrecked oil rigs. Here reside the poor, servicing the glittering Neo-Seoul sprawling up and between the mountainsides above. Even in the murk of the world’s industrially destroyed atmosphere, Neo-Seoul shines brilliantly, amid holographic building “skins” and illuminated freeway ribbons; there are factory ships manufacturing fabricants, and others industrially slaughtering them to produce food for new fabricants.
Mitchell’s novel has been much acclaimed; the ἀlm and its graphics have been more controversial. It has been observed that the depicted skyscrapers of Old Seoul seem more Hong Kong than Seoul; Shanghai and Midtown Manhattan also seem to be represented. Neo-Seoul is also derivative of Blade Runner (whose implication seems to have been that civilization had run out of new ideas and could now only pillage its past—again, an ironic comment on “old” Seoul).44 Nea So Copros is a corporate state, and Neo-Seoul is festooned with the advertising that similarly decorates Old Seoul of the present. The advertising is in Korean, though mostly upside-down.
Two concluding points can be drawn from the fable of Neo-Seoul. First, it might usefully be read as an ironic metaphor on the debates of present Korean historiography: the colonial era returns, but it is now Korea colonizing a devastated Japan; neoliberalism has gone berserk; there is democracy, but only corporations have the vote; Confucian hierarchy reigns. The upside-down script is appropriate for an inverted history. Second, this is a parable of Seoul and Seoulites, but it has been told by an English author and German ἀlmmakers, albeit with Korean (and American) actors. The cultural colonization might bemuse the culturally colonized (as might that represented in the present book), yet it also highlights Seoul’s global appropriation, always reciprocal. The intrusion of skyscrapers from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and elsewhere is itself metaphoric of the hybridizing force of globalization.
Inescapable discursus (1): Dark passages
The dark undertones running through ἀ e Host will draw unwelcome attention to another, darker space of Seoul, of subterranean or submarine passages of inἀltration, invasion, “lines of flight,” and, indeed, the terror of the next erasure. The Han River is the ever-threatening passage for feared North Korean frogmen or midget submarines. A further recurring feature of Seoulites’ forebodings are the “water panics”: the ἀrst was in 1986, when it was discovered that North Korea was building massive dams on the Imjin River, a tributary of the Han, giving it the potential to release massive walls of water into the Han and thereby to flood Seoul. In September 2009, floods were suddenly sent, 216without warning, toward Seoul (Choe Sang-hun 2009). The image of a flooded “old” Seoul in Cloud Atlas may express yet another level of modern Seoulite paranoia.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) presents other darkly threatening passages in the form of the North Korean tunnels. The ἀrst of the inἀltration tunnels was discovered in November 1974, a second in March 1975, and a third in October 1978—it is estimated that there may have been a total of seventeen tunnels. In March 1980, North Korean inἀltrators were killed trying to enter via the Han River estuary; in October 1995 inἀltrators were intercepted attempting to enter at the Imjin River, presumably thence down the Han River. Even the Seoul subway system is feared as a potential network for the dispersal of an invading force through (under) the city.
There was one (melo)dramatic moment that materialized these fears. On 21 January 1968, an elite North Korean commando unit launched the “Blue House Raid,” in an attempt to assassinate President Park Chung-hee. They got within one hundred meters of the Blue House before being thwarted. They had inἀltrated the DMZ by simply cutting through fencing, crossing the Imjin River, and entering Seoul, where they launched their attack. Having been defeated, they then attempted to disappear into Seoul’s mountains, with their informal settlements—other dark places.45
So much for the subliminal messages of ἀ e Host. One might also suspect that there are other messages to be read in the New Wave and in the culture more widely. Are the retreat to the goodness of “family values”—even in such terrifying portrayals as ἀe Housemaid—and the unquestionably devout turn to Christianity also to be seen as normal quests for reassuring certainties in an age of uncertainty?
Another cinema
There is another Korean cinema, with another great ἀgure behind it. In September 1967, twenty-six-year-old ἀlm buff Kim Jong-il was appointed cultural arts director of North Korea’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. Hollywood was young Kim’s envied realm of dreams, and it was Hollywood’s blockbusters that he would emulate as he took control of the cinema industry.46 Among his oeuvre are a bloody and sentimental three-hour-long adaptation of Sea of Blood about the Japanese occupation of Korea, and North Korea’s Gone with the Wind. Sensing, however, that all his achievements were trash alongside their American models, Kim conceived an extraordinary plan to bring real quality into his work. In 1978 his agents kidnapped renowned South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his onetime wife, 217admired leading lady Choi Eun-hee. They were kept apart for four years, and then on 6 March 1983 reunited in a Kim-hosted banquet and “invited” to join him to collaborate on a new series of “quality” blockbusters.47
They made seven ἀlms together. There were typical nationalist melodramas, a light romance titled Love, Love, My Love, and the globally praised social-realist tragedy Salt (1985). Then there was the wonderfully ridiculous Pulgasari (1985), a Godzilla rip-off but presenting a terrifying monster with noble socialist sentiments. All were domestic hits beyond Kim’s expectations. Shin and Choi ἀnally escaped during a visit to Vienna in 1986; however, their subsequent careers were less stellar than Kim’s.48
Part 2
THE KOREAN WAVE
The New Wave South Korean ἀlms are distinguished by high production values that, signiἀcantly, were transferred into the realm of Korean television. Equally signiἀcantly, Korean ἀlms were characterized by their exploration of domestic social issues, their frequent concern with family-centered values, and their often unpredictable plotting. In all these ways they presented as “Asian” and “un-Hollywood” and came to foreshadow the Korean Wave.
The Korean Wave, also called Hallyu, from the Korean pronunciation of the term, allegedly began with the export of Korean TV dramas in the 1990s, which many Asian television companies purchased because they were impressive looking but cheap. As their exposure increased, the dramas resonated with audiences, and their popularity increased. By 2000 the Korean Wave was in full swing, and soon reinforced by iconic programs such as Jewel in the Palace and Winter Sonata. Although TV dramas dominated the “wave” and accounted for the vastly greater part of its earnings, the dramas were quickly matched in the ἀelds of cinema (the “New Wave” alluded to above) and popular music.49 The “wave” can be seen as a function of Korea’s sudden leadership in digital technology, where content—building on the long history of the struggle for freedom of expression in the cinema ἀeld—equally suddenly seized the opportunity to “ἀll” the new digital media. It was also a consequence of the realization of globalization and its corollary in Asian regionalism that hit Asia following the 1997 IMF crisis. 218
As Cho Hae-Joang (2005, 147) observes, “The global technology revolution and global capitalism prepared the system for the manufacture of cultural products and circulation within Asia, and formed the coeval space of capitalist Asia.” “Korea mania” initially hit China around mid-1999; Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore soon followed. By 2001 the phenomenon was receiving increasing critical attention and discursive engagement.
In view of the seminal role of the TV dramas in the rise and spread of the wave, these need some explanation. The sixty-six-episode TV drama First Love had been produced in 1996 and was aired between September 1996 and January 1997. It has been ranked the highest-rated of all Korean dramas to that time. This and a variety of other drama series from the 1990s provided a platform for yet higher production values but also contributed to the gathering myth of Korean sophistication in media content.
Winter Sonata was the second part of the TV drama series Endless Love, directed by Yoon Seok-Ho and reprising the lead actors from the earlier First Love. The series comprised four parts: Autumn in My Heart (2000), Winter Sonata (2002), Summer Scent (2003), and Spring Waltz (2006).50 This second installment, in twenty episodes, originally aired from 14 January to 19 March 2002. The setting is the present day and the theme is the interplay of present-day Korean values. As the story alternates between Korea and the United States, however, there is an additional subtext of the nuanced differences between Korean and American values. While not reaching the domestic adulation of First Love, Winter Sonata’s appeal beyond Korea was certainly greater. The greatest international impact, however, came with Jewel in the Palace.
Dae Jang Geum, literally “The Great Jang Geum” but aired in the West as Jewel in the Palace, is a historical drama series set in Chosun Korea in the reigns of Kings Seongjong (r. 1457–1494), Yeonsan-gun (r. 1494–1506), and Jungjong (r. 1506–1544). It focuses on Jang-geum, the ἀrst female royal physician in the Chosun era, and stresses diverse themes of perseverance, the portrayal of traditional Korean culture, royal court cuisine, cultural practices, and traditional medicine. As in the tradition of Korean cinema, the presentation is characterized by high production values and the story by unpredictable twists of plot. The series was ἀlmed in ἀfty-four one-hour episodes and ἀrst shown on MBC channel from 15 September 2003 to 30 March 2004. It was reputedly the highest-rating TV series in Korean history. In May 2004 it began airing in Taiwan; in September 2005, in Hong Kong and China; in October 2005, in Japan; and subsequently throughout Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the United States, and Europe. 219It received high ratings throughout Asia and critical acclaim virtually everywhere.51
The Korean Wave is not all success. Kim Seong-kon has observed that there is a signiἀcant gap between the Korean Wave—more speciἀcally, K-pop—and Korean literature. The success of Shin Kyung-Sook’s novel Please Take Care of Mom (2009) stands out from a ἀeld of otherwise internationally unrecognized work. It is noteworthy that this novel is a story of family values, woman-centeredness, and motherhood—themes that elsewhere elevated the drama series to international acclaim. Kim Seong-kon’s suggestion is simple but debatable: this is no longer the age of translated texts; it is now the age of the TV series.52 This gap between genres would seem to have been tested in Shin’s next novel, I’ll Be Right ἀ ere (2014), in which the foreign and the esoteric are made familiar to each other, as the interpreter of emotion and experience is led to bridge any gaps between East and West.
ἀ e Korean Wave and architecture
If we see the Korean Wave as a fusion of international appropriation (a Koreanization of American and Japanese culture) with more indigenous Korean themes and practices, then we might well ask if any similar fusion is to be observed in present Korean architecture and in a reading of Seoul urban space. While such a hybridization might well be seen to have run through the second and third periods of Kim Swoo Geun’s work, reviewed in chapter 3, that was from an earlier time. So, what of the 2000s? Especially useful sources on recent Korean architecture and its provoked reactions are publications that have emerged from periodic exhibitions—notable are John Hong and Park Jinhee (2012), based on an exhibition at Harvard, and Caroline Maniaque-Benton and Jung Inha (2014), based on a small show at Malaquais School of Architecture (École nationale supérieure d’architecture Malaquais) in Paris53—as well as Kim Sung Hong and Peter Schmal (2008).
The reimagining (reinvention) of the culture is identiἀable in both the historical dramas and the historical reconstructions in the space of the city—the rebuilding of Gyeongbokgung Palace as its most dramatic element, but also the Chosun-clad guards and reenactments at the main palaces and other sites. The hordes of children who daily visit those sites on school excursions and photograph the brilliantly colored guards and each other in these settings will be mentally rehearsing stories from both the historical dramas and their school history lessons that would seek a continuity with Chosun, thereby to erase those earlier erasures from colonization and dictatorship—to reconstruct 220(reinvent) memory. Thus the nostalgic aspect of the Korean Wave ἀnds a place in a deeper historical reconstruction that is reinforced in both architecture and daily theatrical performance, as in the television dramas.
Todd Henry (2014, 217) suggests an interesting caution: by redirecting both Korean and international attention to the reimagined glories of a united peninsula under Chosun monarchs, the period immediately preceding Japanese rule, a periodization of history based on Japanese imperialist rule is privileged. The centrality of that rule and its postcolonial heritage is asserted.
There is also, however, that myth of national elegance that runs through the Korean Wave and its marketing. To walk the streets of Myeong-dong, Insadong, or Gangnam, or to visit the ἀner hotels, coffee shops, or tourist locales, is to have the myth conἀrmed—it is a city of the young, the tall, and the display of “style.” (By contrast, the markets, the myriad noncentral business districts, and the subway reveal an older, shorter, clearly poorer population—relicts from those hard times of the dictatorship and the still-only-incipient economic miracle; on the Seoul Station Plaza and at many other locations, there are the homeless, seemingly always sleeping, huddled in old coats and blankets, faceless.) Architecture again reinforces the Hallyu myth: Insadong and Gangnam in particular present brilliant displays of urban elegance. It is urban design at the highest level of competence. Much of this design ἀnesse is linked to the new precision and inventiveness that have been enabled by the computer—examples abound in the Seoul region.
In any ἀnal analysis, however, this display of “style” and elegance may carry Korean characteristics but is ultimately internationalist. Elegant young Koreans might dress in black and white more than young people elsewhere, yet such display is not uniquely Korean, nor can its genealogy point back to Korea. The power of digital technology in enabling a “more liberated” design culture, which may have been taken up vigorously in digitally focused Korea, yet its genealogy is overwhelmingly North American (most famously, architect Frank Gehry and the immense shock of Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, venue for Paik Nam June’s 2001 further shock on modernist sensibilities). In Seoul, Dongdaemun Design Plaza is the most insistent and arguably the most distinguished demonstration of the genre, albeit by Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-British architect.
The people on the street (some streets) reinforce the Korean Wave myth. The architectural culture can do so only incidentally. There is, however, a different dimension to this culture that is certainly “Korean”—Seoul is preeminently the city of architectural “pop,” to be 221read not so much against the force of the Korean Wave as its linked movement of K-pop.
K-pop
K-pop (Korean popular music) is commonly referred to in Korean as inky gayo (popular music) or simply as gayo (music).54 It is a musical genre comprising elements of electronic, hip-hop, pop, rock, and R&B (rhythm and blues) music originating in the early 1990s. A turning point for Korean music was the 1992 launching of the group Seo Tai-ji and Boys. Also important was the establishment of Korea’s largest talent agency, SM Entertainment.
Lee Soo-man graduated from Seoul National University in the early 1970s and pursued a career as a singer, then, in the 1990s, surveyed teenage girls on what they wanted to see in music groups. He turned music entrepreneur and founded SM Entertainment in 1989, and in 1995 the company became a public company. Lee started the boy band HOT (“High-ἀve Of Teenagers”) and girl group SES; both became successful in the late 1990s. By that time other talent agencies had also entered the market and were producing performers as fast as the public could consume them. Notable were YG Entertainment, DSP Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment (Russell 2008).
As with Korean cinema and TV, it is production values and sheer professionalism that lift K-pop above other pop movements in Asia. The talent agencies adopt a strategy of apprenticeship: solo artists, girl groups, and boy bands will be recruited, nurtured at the agencies’ expense, and prepared for the opportune moment for their release. The apprenticeship might last for two years or more as trainees hone their voices, learn choreography, shape their bodies through exercise, and study multiple languages—all the while still attending school (Kim Ji-eon 2010).
The professionalism, however, has also masked exploitation, and SM Entertainment in particular became embroiled in the attendant controversies.55 At the height of their popularity, boy band HOT came to realize that their royalties were far below industry standards. After fruitless negotiations with Lee Soo-man, three of the group’s ἀve members left the company in 2001, to the dismay of millions of teenage fans. SES disbanded a year later, in 2002, then in 2003 the very successful Shinhwa moved away from SM to new management. In 2009 the Korea Fair Trade Commission was called on to probe allegations that naïve young singers, desperate for fame, were being locked into unfair “slave contracts” that enriched their managers while the stars were left in relative penury.56 By 2009 a variety of law cases and controversies 222had overtaken SM; in 2017 they continue.57 In 2016 the Chinese Alibaba Group acquired a controlling stake in SM Entertainment.
Despite its contractual travails, SM Entertainment has subsequently thrived and diversiἀed. SM Entertainment Japan was established in 2001. Together with SM Japan, SM Entertainment then moved to establish headquarters in both Beijing and Hong Kong. Not surprisingly, SM Entertainment located its Korean headquarters in Gangnam-gu, the upmarket neighborhood of Apgujeong-dong, then moved in 2012 to Cheongdam-dong, with its American headquarters on Los Angeles’ Wilshire Boulevard. JYP Entertainment is likewise located in the area, but with its American base in New York City. Cube Entertainment is similarly in Cheongdam-dong. YG Entertainment, by contrast, declares no location (although it has headquarters in Hongdae), seeing itself instead as virtual and ubiquitous, characterized by the constant mobility of both its sponsored performances and its auditions.58 The sites for the consumption of Seoul “cool” similarly include Gangnam and Apgujeong, as well as Samcheong and, notably, Hongdae (Russell 2014, 10).59
Ma Sheng-mei sees an underlying subtext of the terror of national preservation and survival—a racial substratum and the terror of “bastardy”—in the Korean Wave and its K-pop sibling. There is “a wave of nostalgia for an essentialized tradition”; tradition lives in the fear of the symbolic “bastards” who might usurp power, perhaps through contamination of the bloodline through incest. So, in the context of foreign invasions and suffering, the hermit kingdom resembles a circle that tries to keep itself intact, impervious to outside forces. Translated into the Korean Wave’s TV dramas, this drive inward might turn into the tease of forbidden love, usually between lovers who mistake themselves for half-siblings, as in Winter Sonata. Many television dramas revolve around protagonists of lowly origin caught in the hierarchies of premodern Korea, in which the story line swings between tradition and bastardy. Even the tease of incest and bastardy, which causes pain in the Korean consciousness, Ma suggests, is not demonized as the Other. Rather, it is internalized in contrast to the Western tendency, as this duality of tradition and bastardy in the Korean Wave attracts wider Asian audiences, who ἀnd themselves ambivalently wedged between a lost tradition and a modernity of the Other (Ma Sheng-mei 2006, 132).
Park Gil-Sung (2013) offers a distinctively different critique of K-pop. While the global rise of K-pop might be attributed to the passionate support of inter-Asian audiences, its actual production, performance, and dissemination have had little to do with an Asian pop-culture system. Its dissemination has been made possible only 223through global social network services such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, none of which is owned or operated by Asians—despite Korea’s place in the global e-economy and culture. Park suggests that the “manufacturing of creativity in non-Western music,” as in the case of Hallyu, involves three stages: globalization of creativity, localization of musical contents and performers, and global dissemination of musical contents through social media. The salience of the ἀrst of Park’s stages reflects a general debate on the importance of inter-Asian cultural connections and hybridizations (riding on the backs of Japanese, Chinese, or Indian popular music!) in explaining K-pop’s ascendance (reviewed, for example, in Iwabuchi 2013). It is an argument rejected by Park for its inability to account for K-pop’s simultaneous success in Japan, China, India, Europe, and the United States, something never achieved by Indian, Chinese, or Japanese pop music. Simply, it is creativity that is globalized in cultural production, not contents.60
K-pop and Gangnam style
The emblematic space of Korean modernity is Gangnam; it is also the symbolic home of K-pop in both its production and its consumption. In 2012 a quite extraordinary collision of Gangnam and K-pop threw the ambivalences of Korean urban modernity into especially high relief. Park Jaesang is a Korean musician who goes by the pseudonym Psy, for psycho. His career in the K-pop scene had been relatively undistinguished, perhaps complicated by his being a Kim Jong-un look-alike and by a stage persona as a fool and court jester (Fisher 2012). On 15 July 2012 he issued a K-pop single titled “Gangnam Style.” It featured quirky, absurdist, rap dancing, equally quirky music, and somewhat inane lyrics—mostly an endlessly repeated “Oppan Gangnam Style,” which might be freely translated as “[I am] Big Brother Gangnam Style”—oppa being an expression used by Korean women to refer to an older male friend or an older brother, while “Gangnam Style” would refer to the lavish lifestyles associated with Seoul’s Gangnam District (chapter 4).
Psy succeeded where the K-pop entertainment-industrial-complex and its superstars had failed: the clip broke into the American and wider global markets. By mid-September “Gangnam Style” had topped the iTunes Charts in thirty-one countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. By 20 September it was recognized by Guinness World Records as the “Most ‘Liked’ Video in YouTube History.” By 25 September it had been viewed over 280 million times on YouTube; by early October it had been viewed 400 million times. On 21 December 2012 views reached one billion; 224by late 2013 views were over 1.8 billion. Then, in December 2014 viewing hit (crashed through) a digital brick wall: YouTube had been designed with a counter using a computer integer that could count to 2,147,483,647, as it was unimaginable that counting would go beyond that point. “Gangnam Style,” however, broke through, and YouTube (Google) had to be redesigned. By April 2017 the count was over 2.8 billion.
Psy would be an unlikely candidate for making such an impact. He is not the superbeautiful superstar favored in K-pop; at thirty-four he was relatively ancient for the genre and, unlike other performers, he writes his own music and choreographs his own videos. “Gangnam Style” was composed by Psy and Yoo Gun-hyung, a well-known producer in Seoul who had also previously collaborated with Psy. Yoo arranged the song, and Psy wrote the lyrics.
With its almost inept dance moves, seemingly meaningless lyrics, and ridiculous settings and imagery, the clip is extremely funny—albeit, in the ἀrst few seconds, it might seem so for all the wrong reasons. Yet its core is satire, as it parodies popular imaginings of the high-class, consumption-focused, swinging lifestyles of Gangnam; both Gangnam’s self-important, ostentatious denizens and its envious wannabes are lampooned. Satire, however, is unusual in K-pop, which is mostly dominated by “teen” or “bubblegum” pop; hence, vacuous bubblegum pop is also lampooned—Psy’s dream girl is played by Kim Hyun-a, at twenty a grand old lady of teen K-pop.61 The video has Psy appearing in unexpected places in the Gangnam District, although, it should be noted, only two of the scenes are actually ἀlmed in Gangnam, while the others are ἀlmed in various places in Gyeonggi Province and in Incheon—most notably New Songdo. So, Psy appears in hedonistic relaxation on a fancy beach, which is revealed to be a children’s playground sandbox; he visits a sauna not with bigtime businessmen but with mobsters; he dances not in a nightclub but on a bus full of middle-aged tourists; he ἀrst meets his love interest (Hyun-a) in the subway; he struts with two models not down a red carpet but in a parking garage, trash and snow flying at them.
Max Fisher (2012) cites Adrian Hong’s reaction to “Gangnam Style” and its ironic take on conspicuous consumption: important to the video’s subtext, claims Hong, is South Korea’s credit card debt rate. In 2010 the average household carried credit card debt of 155 percent of their disposable income (the US average just prior to the subprime crisis was 138 percent); in Korea there are nearly ἀve credit cards for every adult. Gangnam is home to some of Korea’s biggest brands (Samsung, for instance) as well as US$84 billion of its wealth or 7 percent of the entire country’s GDP. Quoting Hong, “The neighborhood 225in Gangnam is not just a nice town or nice neighborhood. The kids that he’s talking about are not Silicon Valley self-made millionaires. They’re overwhelmingly trust-fund babies and princelings” (Fisher 2012). Fisher also quotes blogger Jea Kim: the video is “a satire about Gangnam itself but also it’s about how people outside Gangnam pursue their dream to be one of those Gangnam residents without even realizing what it really means.” However, Kim opines, that feeling is changing, and “Gangnam Style” captures people’s ambivalence—the uncertainties and insecurities of the age.
So “Gangnam Style” can also be seen as a critique of the place of fashion in Seoul society and of the mechanism whereby the pressure of envious, aspiring outsiders pushes the privileged insiders to new plateaus of fashion. To quote Fernand Braudel (1992, 324), “I have always thought that fashion resulted to a large extent from the desire of the privileged to distinguish themselves, whatever the cost, from the masses that followed; to set up a barrier…. Pressure from followers and imitators obviously made the pace quicken. And if this was the case, it was because prosperity granted privileges to a certain number of nouveau riches and pushed them to the fore.” Thus, indeed, Korea.
The immense popularity of what is really very sharp satire can be attributed in part to the video’s lack of aggression and its humorous edge; also in part to Psy’s ordinariness of persona. Overwhelmingly, however, it is the jerky rhythm and the dance moves. The song’s ubiquity has triggered numerous flash mobs in many countries, as well as a turn to “Psy-inspired clothing.” In Bangkok, a clash between rival flash mobs led to massive gunἀre. As the video was not copyrighted, it was inevitable that it would spawn imitations, restylings, and parodies (albeit of a parody), the earliest appearing on 23 July, only eight days after the original’s release.62 Many of these were surprising, and some offensive—“Jewish Style” in Israel, for instance. There was also “Gangnam Style Hitler.”63
The North Korean government released their own homage to “Gangnam Style” with their “I’m Yusin Style!,” a nonhumorous parody of presidential candidate Park Geun-hye, mocking her as a devoted admirer of the Yusin system of her father, Park Chung-hee.64 While the DPRK elite might express fear and loathing of the South and attempt to block its cultural impact, they clearly pay some attention to K-pop. Although “Gangnam Style” went viral in mid-August 2012, and despite Psy’s unfortunate resemblance to Kim Jong-un and, more distantly, his father, it took more than a month for a “Kim Jong Style” parody to surface.65 Here Psy dances, sings, and shakes his ἀnger, and his people do his bidding; there are lines such as “The national pastime of the people is to be oppressed” and “work, work, work, then sleep … torture.” 226
Innovate or imitate: K-pop and Samsung
The ambivalence that Ma Sheng-mei sees highlighted by the Korean Wave, and more speciἀcally K-pop, referred to above, raises the question of sources; it also reprises the story of Samsung, from chapter 3. “To South Koreans, the legal battles the two giants [Samsung and Apple] are waging across continents have highlighted both the biggest strength and worst weakness of Samsung in particular and of their economy in general” (Choe Sang-hun 2012). A California court had imposed damages of US$1.05 billion on Samsung for violating Apple’s patents for the iPhone and iPad. Choe Sang-hun quoted James Song of KDB Daewoo Securities to the effect that the ruling labels Samsung a “copycat” but also reflects on the brilliance of Samsung’s move—companies such as Nokia, Motorola, and Blackberry, which did not do as Samsung did, drastically lost market shares.
Where Apple is seen as the great innovator and the world’s number one company by value, pro tempore, Samsung presents as the brilliant strategist, albeit largely an imitator, and the largest technology company by sales. Samsung is seen as the quintessential, representative Korean icon. So Choe also quotes Anthony Michell (2010) on Samsung: “Koreans do things quicker than almost anyone. This allows them to change models, go from design to production faster than anyone at the present time.” (It is an alacrity also mirrored in the architecture of the city.) The strategy has been to build something similar to another company’s product but make it better, faster, and at lower cost; it would pounce, flooding the market with a wide range of models that would be constantly upgraded with incremental improvements that rivals could not match. In effect, the strategy was the innovation.
The story of Samsung and Apple raises the broader issue of innovation versus imitation in Korea’s modern cultural history. The reconstructed palaces are simulacra, Hallyu is periodically accused of building on Japanese and American popular culture (with the Japanese, in turn, also mimicking America), and K-pop looks back to American “bubblegum pop” of the 1960s and 1970s.66 However, cultures—including industrial cultures—are never isolated; the question is how ideas, irrespective of lineage, transform as they pass through different cultures, markets, and traditions. Modern minimalist architecture passes through the prism of Seoul back-street, boxland visual cacophony to yield the display of Paju Book City or a few of the more assured elements of Hongdae; K-pop passes through the mind of Psy to be displayed in the conἀdence and originality of “Gangnam Style,” transforming K-pop into something seemingly extraordinary and indigenous. 227
K-pop and architecture
The sorts of traits running through K-pop can also be read analogously in the architecture of the city. Seoul might well be read as the city of “pop” architecture—an over-the-top architecture of signage, emblems, logos, and kitsch, albeit montaged onto the blank space of the ubiquitous boxlands, ever-changing with the changes of fashion and products. At a somewhat superἀcial level this manifests in places like Seoul’s Lotte World, although this is no more than a children’s theme park in the style of Disneyland; the earlier Songdo Resort is also in this undistinguished category. More important is the more indigenous, even vernacular evolution of a wild and distinctive visual, architectural culture. Indeed we are concerned here with nothing less than the evolution of a new vernacular; it is for the most part a story of the power of graphic design (and in sharp contrast with the ubiquitous presence of “Hello Kitty”—Japanese rather then Korean—and all its standardized marketing in Seoul space).
There is, of course, another Seoul vernacular scarcely surviving in the spaces of the city and best represented in historic enclaves such as Bukchon, Seongbuk-dong, and, more intermittently, in areas such as Insadong. Traditional houses, or hanok, discussed previously, are built of earth, stone, and wood, with curved black-tile roofs, mostly dating from the city’s densiἀcation of the early twentieth century.67 However, that bland housing from the 1960s and its constant elaboration in the present time is no less a vernacular and no less worthy of reflective observation.
The hard times and their austere urban fabric of the 1960s are now, in much of inner Seoul, swept away in the rush of later development or else cloaked in the skills of the graphic designer (Insadong as its paradigmatic, transforming manifestation, as in ἀgures 4.4 and 4.5; also Itaewon in ἀgure 4.13, and Hongdae in ἀgure 4.15). However, these grinding, mean times are clearly represented in later districts, most typically along the Korail commuter Line 1 to Incheon (chapter 4); Bupyeong may be later, but it is clearly still in a world of “hard times” (see ἀgure 4.23). This is typical Seoul boxland, adorned for the most part with standardized graphics and advertising logos, signage, and similar devices. At an even meaner level are the small establishments on “the wrong side of the expressway” in Chamwon-dong (Gangnam) (see ἀgure 4.16).
The tiny shops that proliferate in the back streets and alleys are, in their “style,” survivals from that earlier, harder age (even though many are of more recent provenance). They are akin, in some sense, to the endless stalls and street markets and underground galleries. They 228proclaim their presence with signage,—perhaps signboards, decoration, or emblems—or simply by the display of their merchandise. This is still the character of the establishments behind Jogno. The decoration might become more inventive and there will be conscious design. It is still, however, to be seen as “folk” (as in Insadong and Hongdae).
A zone like Gangnam is at an altogether higher level of affluence and entrepreneurial sophistication: Teheranno and its back streets, while evidencing the same proliferation of very small establishments, is both in competition with other entertainment zones and manifesting vigorous competition within its own economic community. While the graphics might be less standardized, frequently inventive, and often outlandish, this is still a graphic designer’s architecture—it is just that the boxes are adorned more imaginatively and the effect is more spectacular.
At Hongdae, the design inventiveness becomes even more the game: proprietors, marketers, and designers take these local, “indigenous” forms and images—the boxes and their marketing adornment—and transform them into a competition for “artistic” notoriety in what would proclaim to be an artistic community. The design inventiveness becomes more self-conscious, but in a way that is far more linked to the folk origin of the genre than are the adorned boxes of Insadong, where ideas of “international” elegance are more likely to inform the competition (witness the façade war of Insadonggil, in ἀgure 4.5).
It is good to recall the seminal Learning from Las Vegas: ἀ e Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form of Robert Venturi, Steve Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown (1977) and its designation of the predominant forms of iconography in architecture as the “Duck” and the “Decorated Shed,” a gentle but telling subversion of modernism in architecture.68 Some buildings are what they are—the ducks; others are only what they appear to be—decorated sheds. The Kim Swoo Geun searches for identity would be ducks, likewise the Zaha Hadid building’s claim for universality and a small number of other monuments—they seek distinction through their own unique forms. Much of the rest—numbered towers, back-street boxlands, Hongdae, Paju Book City—present as decorated sheds. This is not a judgment, the Venturis would insist, just an observation of the modern world we exist in. In the case of Seoul, the task of architectural interpretation might be twofold: what might the decoration of the shed attempt to communicate (alternatively, to mask)? And how might the decoration be placed on some dimension of folk-to-sophisticated?
At one level, Hongdae, Itaewon, and, to a lesser extent, Gangnam are globalist—they become part of Seoul’s attempt at distinctiveness 229to compete in the “hyperspace” by elevating the local to the level of pastiche, a caricature of itself. This is still distinctively “Seoul,” however—it is decidedly not Beverley Hills and Rodeo Drive nor anything in Bangkok, Singapore, or elsewhere, although it competes with many such places.
To understand something of the logic underlying the production of places such as Hongdae or the Teheranno back streets—indeed of Seoul “back-street” space generally—one can turn again to the idea of assemblage and its logic, introduced at the end of chapter 4. In A ἀ ousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) present the rhizome as a spatial model of logic and the acquisition of knowledge; a rhizome is described as being noncentered, ahistorical, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying, and without organizing memory or central automation. The rhizome system is made only of lines—lines that segment and stratify—as its dimensions. It breaks from the old model of logic/thought, having no beginning or end; it is coming and going rather than starting and ending (Berger 2004)—the state of metamorphosis itself.
Although Deleuze and Guattari are describing a system of logic, they employ a spatial metaphor. One can reverse that method in order to interrogate the ever-shifting state of chaotic, back-street Seoul. The rhizome system is made up of “plateaus” that are always in the middle; there is constant multiplication; it is a “multiple,” an “origami” universe of constant folding, unfolding, refolding. The back street, the city, the ecosystem, the universe, cannot be reduced to some totality—these, rather, are to be conceptualized as “assemblage.” The same can be said for “Gangnam Style”—an assemblage of bits, each of which somehow belongs to something (somewhere) else. The reality of the assemblage is only in its components, each of which is itself always part of some other assemblage, elsewhere (DeLanda 2006; Dovey 2011; McFarlane 2011). Because the city, the state, the culture, and society are assemblages, there are interstices between ever-multiplying elements; the destabilizing, subversive, dissenting, rhizomic inἀltrations into these interstices are the mechanisms of metamorphosis. The inἀltrations, in the case of back-street Seoul (Itaewon, Hongdae, even rariἀed Insadong), are new ideas or a new, radical, destabilizing image, from whatever source.
Where the logic of New Songdo space is in the mind of its willful creator (who is likely to be a committee more than a person), that of Hongdae or Gangnam back streets is the logic of an assemblage. Although individual designers will design speciἀc components of that space—often very large components—it is still the product of chance activities. The urban planners/designers ultimately have very 230little power to “order” the disorder. There is, however, a measure of self-control—increasingly, “good taste,” self-discipline, and style will be demonstrated, albeit in the name of good marketing. Yet then the rhizome inserts: the brilliant designer (graphic, architectural, urban), or even the recalcitrant marketer, disrupts what might seem to be an agreed or perhaps accidentally emerging order, and a new trajectory for the competition of ideas and images is set.
The back streets do not have the ordering attempts of the planner nor even the self-control of the well-mannered designer demonstrating a place in a global order. Here, rather, the objective of each innovative entrepreneur is to break any rules that can be identiἀed.
The roots of this assemblage of back-street Seoul space (or frontstreet Itaewon, Hongdae, and so on) may be in the peculiar characteristics of Seoul’s survival, both culturally and economically. Economic survival was necessarily fought for, in the Japanese era then in the 1950s and 1960s, in a world of grinding hardship and periodic destruction, though it was always aided by speciἀc aspects of the survival of cultural practices. Despite the colonial-era obliteration and then the destruction of the Korean War, it was mostly “high culture” that languished. Everyday practices simply continued on, albeit “modernizing” with new technologies and new imposed institutions throughout the Japanese, Korean War, and postwar dictatorship eras. People still went to the market, worked at their small-scale production, and exercised some necessary entrepreneurial spirit. As people negotiated life in a world of disorder, they demonstrated the “Asian disorder” that stood powerfully against the order of the developmental state. It is in these dimensions of cultural survival that the distinctiveness of Seoul noncorporate space and its vernacular practices and architecture emerges.
This may be the mechanism whereby new, “modern” vernaculars arise. True vernaculars are never static. There are no master designers or key innovators—the logic of this production is that of assemblage. The force of “Gangnam Style” may be in its assembling of bits and pieces of the culture (both high and K-pop) and of the city (faux Gangnam) and reflecting them back at both the Korean and the international observer.
Vernacular as the naturalization of disorder
There is another conceptual lens through which the rise of a vernacular can be viewed. There is an interesting introduction, from Niall Kirkwood, chair of landscape architecture at the Harvard Design School, to the work of Kim Jungyoon and Park Yoonjin: 231
There has been recent expressions [sic] of interest in the phenomenon of the “Korean Wave.” This term or its translation “Hallyu” references a surge of interest in Korean popular culture among other Asian popular cultures and beyond, particularly through television programs, music, movies, fashion, foods and what is identiἀed as teen culture. This explosion of popular culture is being exported across the globe…. But can we attempt to place landscape architecture and site design and in particular the work of Park Kim within this cultural movement. Does the “landscape” stand timeless, removed from popular culture…. Some clues are offered in a recent chapter written by [Kim and Park] in the book Asian Alterity edited by William S. W. Lim based on a workshop held in Singapore in 2007. Entitled The Experience of Nature without Parks: Gangnam Alternative Nature they focus on the particular local outlook of the cultural sphere of alternative nature and detachment of experience through 5 lenses—nature revealed, spot nature, nature memory, distancing nature and interiorized nature? all of which have allowed for the absence of matching past and present, of skipping reinterpretation and producing an urbanity that is pragmatic, non-nostalgic and grounded in a contemporary set of environmental conditions—a very Korean condition.69
Leaving aside the inescapable rhetoric typically associated with an introductory address, the point of the observation is that the discordant, disordered, even transgressive confrontations of the everyday become naturalized—natural, part of a “new” nature—in the extraordinarily rapid transformation from one age to another. We return to the ideas of Walter Benjamin and “new nature.” Benjamin was preoccupied with the now-possible relationships and responsibilities to external phenomena and technology that thereby enable the actualization of inner nature (culture—the eruption of the Korean Wave). This “new nature,” however, is either idealized—seen as a new utopia—or else cloaked in archaic forms (nostalgia, melodrama, the reimagined palaces and Chosun-garbed guards) (Buck-Morss 1991, 116). Lionel March, writing in 1970, could observe that the existing city is mostly the shell of historic urban life (albeit very recent history in Seoul’s case), but that we “fail to see the new patterns of urbanization as positive forms in their own right because we attempt to construe them in terms of our habitual assumptions derived from the past” (March 1981, 202–203).
This seems to be the point of Kirkwood’s comment above. The Seoul back streets are the landscape and the architecture of the Korean Wave, even while it is the “front streets” that the wave (“Gangnam 232Style”) would parody; this is that “other space” that complements the regimented arrays of the residential towers. It becomes “natural” and thereby a new vernacular—the “new nature” that architects and landscape architects must now address through design. The ironic imagination can present images (designs, also “Gangnam Style”) to be held up as mirrors to the urban society, thereby questioning held assumptions about the society and its urban space. Some of the more reflectively designed architectural projects considered above, and certainly the landscape designs of Park and Kim, as well as Paik Nam June Media Bridge, and including Bulwongcheon, Cheonggyecheon, and some of the other waterway projects, come some way in this.70
In the context of such an understanding of “new nature,” there is the problem of determining what might be the task of landscape architecture in a society like Korea’s that fails to recognize even such an activity and profession.
Part 3
THE KOREAN WAVE AS CULTURAL COLONIZATION
Korean pop music, especially dance music, began to gain popularity among Chinese teenagers after it was introduced in 1997 through a radio program called “Seoul Music Room” broadcast from Beijing. The decisive moment in igniting K-pop fever in China was the concert held at the Beijing Workers’ Gymnasium in February 2000, featuring Korean boy band HOT. Korean news reports of the event used the term Hallyu for “Korean Wave” seemingly for the ἀrst time. The term, acknowledged in an article in Beijing Youth Daily as early as November 1999, began to be recognized by Koreans themselves from this point onward.71
Kim Hyun Mee writes of the wave’s impact in Taiwan, which has led Taiwanese to view Korea “as a country of modern and urban elegance, and woman-centredness” (Kim Hyun Mee 2005, 183).72 Kim Youna (2011) suggests that the wave’s broader impact in Asia is linked to three main factors. First is emotional intensity: the Chinese, in particular, embrace the Korean ability to express emotions freely, seeing this as some manifestation of “democracy” and again of “woman-centredness.”73 Second is a sense of reflexive modernity: Korean dramas can portray an urban middle-class modernity that is accessible to an Asian imagination. While “American” things can be dreamed of and yearned for, “Korean” things—culture, language, fashion—present 233as an “accessible future,” to be reflected upon and understood. The third factor is family: the television dramas in particular dramatize “Asian sensibilities,” most notably family values. The viewer is presented with the vision of a country that has modernized yet retained its traditions—in some sense there has been no erasure.74
The Korean Wave is additionally seen to satisfy the tastes of the video generation by embracing creative visual imagery. Just as the Korean Wave is itself a ἀltering (hybridizing?) of American and Japanese popular culture—through a Korean episteme, as it were—so the wave is transformed as it weaves through other, recipient cultures. The case of Singapore may be illustrative: “[The Korean Wave in Singapore has] reinforced local ‘parochial’ identities structured on rigid ideas of ethnicity and race. Aside from the apparent physiological familiarities of Koreans with Chinese to Singaporean audiences, the Sinicization [naturalization] of K-pop [in Singapore] becomes evident when their products are distributed through the networks of Mandarin/Chinese based distributors, retailers, and media networks in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore” (Yin and Liew 2005, 228). In the case of Singapore, packaging takes a form of Sinicization, as “Korea” slips into a global hyperspace of cultural appropriation and consumption. Yin and Liew see Korea intersecting with and challenging the predominance of “Chinese”-based popular culture in Singapore while remaining very much a form of Chinese consumption.75
Especially interesting has been the wave’s reception in erstwhile colonizer Japan. Lee Soobum and Ju Hyejung (2011) observe that the Korean drama series have uniquely broken the effective barrier against foreign television imports, starting with Winter Sonata in 2003;76 by 2008 there were ten new Korean dramas airing daily on Japanese television. They suggest that this in part relates to the tendency of younger Japanese to identify with the situations of Korean people: traditional values are strongly portrayed, family dignity is extolled, the stories do not depend on ethnic hybridity (Japanese, like Koreans, portray themselves as “pure”),77 and there is a “pleasant nostalgia” that can resonate with the Japanese postcolonial experience. Their conclusion is that there may be some consequent transformation under way: “Behind the scenes of Hallyu in Japan, sensitive tensions between Korea and Japan, caused by their shared colonial history, are enormous obstacles to increasing mutual openness to media and popular culture…. Although the Hallyu phenomenon is not a foreign cultural ‘invasion’ in Japan, its visible influence on Japanese society cannot be ignored” (198–199). Furthermore, the opening of Japan to Korea, however ambivalently, has also had some effect in diminishing Japan’s cultural barriers to other Asian media production, with a new sense 234of an “Asian” identity that is in sharp contrast with the Orientalist/anti-Asian sentiment of its colonizing age, recounted earlier.
Kim Ji-myung (2012) has commented on the impact of Hallyu on young girls in the Arab world: they are reported to retire to a friend’s home, remove their hijab, then sing and dance to their favorite K-pop bands. Kim warns, however, that the issue is complex: when this simple, research-based observation was put to a conference on international exchange, Middle Eastern men became very uncomfortable; cultural sensitivities were at stake. While the Hallyu penetration was reported to be virtually global now, it is with the Arab Middle East that Koreans observe the vastest “mountain of misunderstanding.” The mind turns to that isolation of the Itaewon mosque and the reported attacks on it. At something of a further extreme, Hallyu chic even undermines French chic: a poll by Korea Tourism Organization’s Paris branch had more than 90 percent of 3,775 young respondents wanting to visit Korea and 76 percent declaring an intention to do so (though only 5 percent had already done so)—a tour with K-pop concerts ranking highest, followed by a tour to Hallyu drama-related sites.78
Various authors in Berry, Liscutin, and Mackintosh (2009) argue that K-pop and its inevitable impregnation of pop culture more widely has facilitated the formation of a new cultural region, focused on Seoul, effectively cutting across—perhaps even undermining—processes of globalization. By the mid-2000s the wave’s impact had become so great that people from around that region were traveling to Seoul to have plastic surgery to make themselves look more like Koreans.79 K-pop was alleged to be the main motivator for young people to learn the Korean language.80
Rise or fall?
In the 2010 collection Pop Culture Formations across East Asia are essays that suggest that the Korean Wave is now in decline (Shim, Heryanto, and Ubonrat 2010). Shim Doobo’s essay, “Whither the Korean Media,” suggests that overseas sales of Korean cultural products (ἀlms, TV dramas, and pop music) had been disappointing, despite the power of foreign fandom for Korean popular culture. Explanations were sought in internal factors in South Korean media industries contributing to a ἀnancial crisis in TV drama production. Ko Jeongmin examined the influence of the Korean Wave in regions such as Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and the United States. However, in a review of these essays, Brenda Chan (2011) comments that both Shim and Ko mostly focus on TV dramas and on statistics and media reports relating to them, whereas they ignore the latest trend whereby 235Korean pop music (K-pop), with its boy bands and girl groups, has now replaced K-dramas at the forefront of the Korean Wave.
K-pop now reigns: Charlene Chua (2011) observes that K-pop idols attract megacrowds of besotted fans when they perform in Singapore and that many students will turn up at local auditions held by Korean talent scouts, hoping to make a name in the K-pop industry—and all that pre–“Gangnam Style.” In 2011, Singapore-based StarHub TV launched two Korean channels for the burgeoning Singaporean fans—a Korean drama channel in April and a K-pop channel in October. CTC Travel organizes Korean Hallyu Dream Tours for Singaporeans to travel to Korea for K-pop concerts. It is a lucrative market and, in late 2011, two other Singapore travel agencies also announced plans to introduce tours to K-pop concerts in Seoul (Gwee 2011). Anecdotal evidence is that the wave continues to surge.81 As Choe Youngmin (2016) argues, international tourists increasingly focus on Hallyu movie sets, ἀlming sites, and theme parks, reinforcing the wave’s sense of transnational collaboration and the region’s evolving transnational politics.
While K-pop might indeed thrive, there are certainly signs of competition in the TV drama ἀeld. Although Ubonrat Siriyuvasak (in Shim, Heryanto, and Ubonrat 2010, 174), refers to the “‘weaker’ cultural economy in Southeast Asia” compared to that of the Northeast, she suggests that this might be changing. In 2008 the Thai TV drama series Lued Kattiya (The Princess) attracted a wide audience in mainland China; in 2009 the series Battle of Angels, also Thai, was aired in China to favorable ratings and spurring a craze for such Thai material and online fan communities for Thai actors (Parinyaporn 2011).
Parinyaporn Pajee observes, however, that the fan-favored Thai actors are mostly part-Chinese and look Chinese (likewise, one could add, the Korean pop idols). She also suggests, “In some ways, China and Thailand share a similar culture and lifestyle, so it’s easy for Chinese fans to associate with the story.” There are inhibitors, however: there is an ambivalence toward gender issues in Thai culture; there will be gay characters and girl-ἀght scenes, all anathema to the Chinese censors, and there will be much editing. K-drama is seen as more wholesome, family-focused, and the subversion will be more subliminal.
Various explanations are offered for the popularity of the Korean Wave. Cho Uhn has suggested that it is to be seen in the nexus between the rush of globalization and a Korean turn to localization, as “a transnational culture flow that challenged Western cultural hegemony in Asia, though in different terms … hybrid culture that blurred the boundaries between national/indigenous and global cultures … the coexistence of local power, regionalization, and globalization” (Cho Uhn 2005, 144). 236
Cho Hae-Joang is more speciἀc in suggesting the role of globalization: “The global technology revolution and global capitalism prepared the system for the manufacture of cultural products and circulation within Asia, and formed the coeval space of capitalist Asia” (Cho Uhn 2005, 147). The Korean Wave can be seen in part as a response to the sudden and brutal realization of globalization that came with the 1997–1998 Asian ἀnancial crisis and the humiliation of the IMF bailout. It is instructive to observe the switching of both public and corporate investment into cultural production at that time on the grounds of its high value-added nature.
At the sociocultural level, Cho suggests three “takes” often invoked to explain aspects of the wave. First, “What is Korean is international.” This, however, might well be dismissed as a local delusion (Cho Hae-Joang 2005, 153). The second relates to the tension between the media culture of violence and the culture of familism—the widespread belief that Korean culture is ἀltered through “family values and a Confucian sensibility” to produce “a common ‘Asian culture’” (154). The third popular argument is that “Anti-Japanese sentiment has helped,” to which one might add anti-American sentiment in which China in particular is seen as ideologically opposed to the United States and Japan and thereby attuned to the sorts of anti-Japanese and anti-American values that might be imagined to imbue the wave. This, however, can be dismissed as a projection of Korean nationalism (155–156).82 There is also something of a fourth “take” on the wave that is also implied in Cho’s discussion: that Korea is becoming a cultural center in a globalized world, marking the retrenchment of American culture in East Asia. This too may be a delusion: Cho cites Im Jin-mo to the effect that Korean pop culture is still only a “copy” of—reflection of—US and Japanese pop culture, as observed above in the discussion of Samsung: “In fact, there are signs of East Asia becoming nothing more than a production centre and subcontracting base for Europe and America—a cultural colony. No East Asian country has been able to successfully export its culture to America or Europe” (157)—that judgment, incidentally, despite the singular success of Jewel in the Palace, and more recently of “Gangnam Style” and other isolated products. Yet, note: the animation for the emblematic American ἀ e Simpsons is sourced from Korea.
There are certainly other factors involved in the wave. With the destruction of the past, nostalgia comes in to replace lost memory (Ma Sheng-mei 2006); furthermore, South Korea is now a major economy, and its media companies are able to ἀnance output with much higher production values than in other Asian countries. I would also argue that the long “epistemic break” of colonialism and civil war, 237followed by the long suppression of an avant-garde in the era of military dictatorship, and then the later flowering of video and cyber avant-gardism represented in the generation of the likes of Paik Nam June and composer Kang Sukhi, were crucial to the “enabling conditions” of the explosion. Linked to the globalization and “explosion” argument is also Jin Dal Yong’s (2016) observation of the new, enabling forces of social media.
We can turn again to Nederveen Pieterse’s observation of globalization’s effect in increasing the available modes of organization and the hybridization of those modes consequent on the “speeding-up” of the age: “Furthermore, not only these modes of organization are important but also the informal spaces that are created in between, in the interstices. Inhabited by diasporas, migrants, exiles, refugees, nomads, these are sites of what Michael Mann … calls ‘interstitial emergence’ and identiἀes as important sources of social renewal” (Nederveen Pieterse 1997, 51). The interstitial nature of Korean creativity returns the attention to both the subversive effect of the Fifth Estate and the wildly dissident civil society that goes back to the student uprisings of the 1980s democratization, the minjung revision of history, anti-Japanese resistance, and the anarchism of the Donghak Rebellion (Abelmann 1996). Korea seems to ἀnd itself in the interstices between economies, epistemes, and ages. The manifestations of its social renewal include the outbursts of cyberart, the Fifth Estate in the political arena, and the Korean Wave, but also the threats that other Asian societies seem to perceive in the uncontrollable proliferation of “Korea” (to be explored below).
Meanwhile, within Korea itself, the “new Korea” may also be deeply subversive. Nancy Abelmann and colleagues have used an ethnographic study of contemporary Korean college students to observe how all aspire to and accept the burden of managing their personal formation in a changing world in ways that are quite new and resonant with discussions of neoliberal subjectivity. They conclude that neoliberal subjectivity, highlighting personal ability, style, and responsibility, works to obscure escalating structural inequality in urban society and in Korea more widely (Abelmann et al. 1999)—it is something of a turn back to neo-Confucianism, and to the Protestant work ethic. Within the colleges and universities, neoliberalism is expressed in the system’s newfound addiction to its own assessment of itself. While the assessment system was founded on the solid ground of accelerating competition among universities and professors, it has become narrowly focused on measures and testing. The real problems of the sector—allegedly irregularity, immorality, intellectual dishonesty, and low productivity—remain unaddressed and, indeed, unable to be assailed in a neoliberal paradigm (Hong Duck-Ryul 2009).83 238
ἀ e postnation hyperspace
Jan Nederveen Pieterse draws attention to James N. Rosenau’s (1990) idea of the structures of “post-international politics,” “made up of two interactive worlds with overlapping memberships: a state-centric world, in which the primary actors are national, and a multi-centric world of diverse actors such as corporations, international organizations, ethnic groups, churches” (Nederveen Pieterse 1997, 50)—and, one must add, the chaebol. Whereas the political sphere implodes from the ἀrst (state-centric) world to the second (beyond the control of the state though still within its spatial borders), the religious (Protestant) sphere explodes, into the households/Internet cafés of China, beyond the control of either the Korean or the Chinese state: “Today, in China, South Korean missionaries are bringing Christianity with an Asian face. South Korean movies and dramas about urban professionals in Seoul, though not overtly political, present images of modern lives centering on individual happiness and sophisticated consumerism” (Onishi 2006). The fragmented, out-of-control nature of this export harkens back to the tradition of wild, antigovernment action, a dissident politics, and the fragmentation of Korean society in Donghak, as well as to the linked minjung culture movement of the 1970s as a rereading of history to bring hitherto marginalized people to the center of history and to become agents of history (Choi Chungmoo 1995; Wells 1995; Lee Sang Taek 1996). It is worth noting again, however, that within Korea a “citizens’ movement” (simin undong) emerged as an alternative to the more radical and militarist minjung, in some response to the collapse of state socialism in Europe and to the gathering success of democratization in Korea (Shin Kwang-Yeong 2006, 6).
The Korean non-state invasion of China is far more than religious and explicitly ideological, however. Rather, it rides on the Korean Wave, thereby in large measure eluding the restrictions and the censors of the Chinese state. Kim Jeong-Nam and Ni Lan (2011) have looked at the nexus between Hallyu and soft power, arguing that the wave has been actively “used” in cultural public diplomacy—to sell Korea and to enhance the nation’s weight in international affairs.84 That may indeed be so; however, the wave is no more under control or direction of the Korean state than it is under the Chinese. As I have argued above, the logic to explain it is that of an assemblage: noncentered, ahistorical, nonhierarchical actions—albeit frequently reflecting political agendas—accumulate outside the consciously coordinating role of either state or capital, unable to be reduced to some totality. Korean Wave cultural production, K-pop insinuation, and the emerging Korean modern-vernacular architecture and urbanism follow similar logics. 239
Fredric Jameson (1991) has written of “the postmodern hyperspace,” introduced in the preface to the present book—the stretching of space and time to accommodate the multinational global space of late capitalism—international networks of capital, communications (the Internet, the cellular phone), and travel; undifferentiated airports, hotels, and office parks; globalist products and their logos and franchises. The preἀx “post-” in relation to Korea, however, must seem misplaced, for here the headlong leap into this space of the global has been in the context of the most frenetic of modernization, as well as in the context of the simultaneous and equally frenetic leap to reimagine antiquity. Each leap would seem to compel the other.
The hyperspace depends, as if by deἀnition, on the local—on “hypertraditions” of exaggerated city and national identity—to differentiate the undifferentiated, as its wandering denizens seek ever-new difference and stimulation. In Korea’s case, however, the traditions (milieux de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s terms) are in crucial ways erased, replaced by museums, re-created set pieces, and dark memories (lieux de mémoire). Instead we now confront an electronic hypertraditionalism, always unstable, ephemeral, and globally disseminating (the Korean Wave, its nostalgia, and “family values” being one of its manifestations). So Korea evokes a hyperspace in which old ideas of the nation and of national culture no longer hold in ways that might still operate—in this brief historical moment—for other nation-states. We seem to face, instead, a postnation hyperspace. It is that wild profusion of the advertisement-adorned boxes and the forest of conical spires and crosses—the new vernacular suggested above—that most indelibly deἀnes the local, far more than the reimagined palaces and their costumed guards.
Korean formal (state, corporate) space is quintessentially the hyperspace. So the National Assembly Building, by lacking speciἀc cultural references, becomes “placeless nationalism”—a contradiction, and an expression of the demise of the salience of the nation itself, torn between “universal civilization and [the dream of] national cultures” (Ricoeur 1965). Benedict Anderson has argued that the quintessential enabling condition for the rise of nationalism was print capitalism, and that the novel is the analogue and contemporaneous parallel of the nation. Korea, however, arises in a later era of capitalist history, effectively in the postprint age, and the analogue of the nation is no longer the novel but the blog and the transpositions of video art (the cloudbursts of modern advertising, the phantasmagoria of Neo-Seoul). So while the search for an identity may be through the routinized practices of “the nation,” the reality of that identity may be more in the selective imagining of a surface antiquity (nostalgia, no depth, reconstructed palaces, Jewel in the Palace), and in the actuality of an irresistible hyperspace. 240
The rise of the non-state “second world” in the sense argued by Rosenau (1990) is not unique to Korea. Witness also China or Malaysia (King 2008). What is distinctive is that Korea can rise in the vacuum of previous destruction and that it arises at a speed at which the (reimagined) past is still surviving in the present—it is “a new state with old traditions, torn between two modes of thought” (Choi Chungmoo 1997b, 27).85 It is surprising in its absence of epistemic constraints—we see the power of erasure.
Inescapable discursus (2): ἀ e North
There is a most serious omission from the account above. There is another Korea, north of the Demilitarized Zone.86 Kim Suk-Young (2010) has recently recounted that there, too, the media and their linked performative arts are thriving, also in the vacuum created from systemic erasure. No state is more theatrical, nor does any nation stage massive parades and collective performances on the scale of North Korea.87 Even in the midst of chronic political and economic crises and ἀnancial collapse, massive resources are invested to sponsor overwhelming displays of patriotism and to glorify the country’s leaders and the history of magniἀcent revolutionary struggle through state rituals that can involve hundreds of thousands of performers. Kim Suk-Young explores how sixty years of state-directed propaganda performances—public spectacles, theater, ἀlm, posters—shape everyday practices in education, the mobilization of labor, the gendering of social interactions, the organization of the national space, tourism, and human rights.88
In sharp contrast to the serendipitous, subversive explosion of the media in the South, the North’s visual culture and performing arts were manipulated to set the course for the formation of a distinctive national identity and state legitimacy—for what Kim Suk-Young terms an “illusive utopia.” Nothing to Envy, the title of Barbara Demick’s interview-based book on “ordinary lives” in North Korea, describes one condition of possibility of North Korea’s success: the utopia to be conveyed by the media is one of national glory and wonderful leaders beyond which nothing could possibly be wished—the summit of human aspirations.89 Demick cites the ubiquitous red-lettered banners:
Long Live Kim Il-Sung
Kim Jong-Il, Sun of the 21st century
Let’s live our own way
We will do as the party tells us
We have nothing to envy in the world.90
241The passing of Kim Jong-il in December 2011 and the inauguration of the third reign changed the banners but not the message. There is no distracting communication of base, desirable commodities, possessions, or of dehumanizing social difference. Everyone is equal. There is indeed no one and nothing to be envied (Demick 2010).91 This is the perfect, ultimate society. Then from the third reign and the continuing happiness there is a new uplifting slogan, “without you, there is no us.”92
The perfection, however, is assailed: elsewhere Kim Suk-Young recounts the story of the popular South Korean drama Boys over Flowers of 2009 and its hedonistic appeal to high school girls with enticing images of beautiful boys, romance, and consumerism. Defectors reported the drama’s special allure in North Korea. How, then, to account for the success of a program “known for championing consumerism and hedonistic cultivation of bodily beauty … in a country that still, albeit nominally, opposes the decadent culture of the open market while upholding the ideals of classless society” (Kim Suk-Young 2013, 94)? There is also an industry of book publishing on great escapes from North Korea—the literature on the Shin and Choi story recounted above comes within this genre, as do Kang Hyok (2005); Kang Chol-hwan and Rigoulot (2005); Ling and Ling (2010); Kirkpatrick (2015); Harden (2012; 2015); and Park Yeonmi (2015).
One might be entitled to ask if the erosion of the individual in the brainwashing propaganda of the North is more or less destructive than the addictive online games, the PC bangs, and the gadgetry fetish of the South. In one, the manipulated are the victims of the state and there is no choice; in the other, they are victims of capital (of the chaebols, of “progress”), and, in one sense, the servitude is chosen—there is a choice, and many have escaped, to produce a society and culture of extraordinary creativity and diversity.
Part 4
SEOUL AS ASSEMBLAGE REVISITED
Returning to a theme from chapter 4, Todd Henry (2014, 52) cites an exhortatory text from Sakai Kenjiro, who was head of the colonial urban planning division in 1926: an organic metaphor is invoked to describe Seoul as analogous to the human body—with a heart, skeleton, and blood—and each component of the city is to be seen as having a meaningful existence only as part of some greater whole. Similar thinking persisted into postcolonial planning. Yet the Kenjiro text 242also implied a more syncretizing mode of thought that could almost preἀgure late-twentieth-century discourse on the city.93 For Gilles Deleuze and his followers, the assemblage becomes the favored mode for thinking about the city—rather than the network or the collage of fragments, it is the idea of multiplicity and the processes of assembling and of breaking apart (fragmenting) that best help make sense of the structure of the city.94
The idea of assemblage can enable the mind to grapple with the reality that the city’s assembling and disassembling fragments make no sense outside the context of its cultural multiplicity—New York makes no sense outside the context of its ethnicities and their cultures; Los Angeles is incomprehensible without Hollywood and its multiple representations. Likewise, modern Seoul makes no sense if divorced from the realities of the wave, K-pop, and their representations of that city, variously melodramatic, ironic, amusing, and outrageous.
There are four levels at which assemblage thinking can be invoked to make sense of Seoul in the Korean Wave, and thereby of Seoul as a new form of city.
Assemblage as folding
The Korean Wave can be viewed somewhat simplistically as one assemblage of many interlinked parts, like the metro subway system or a chaebol. This, however, does not tell us very much, for the wave’s salient characteristics are its multiplicity, immanence, and instability—coming apart and reassembling, constant becoming. In Deleuze’s sense, it constantly folds, unfolds, refolds—boy groups and girl bands break up (unfold) and regroup, and identities shift with a new song or a new exploiting entrepreneur, new locations emerge, new images and new competitors enter into the assemblage, albeit negatively, although also potentially provoking new invention, as well as a new audience. Deleuze’s notion of “the fold” is ambiguity-ridden—it is Deleuze’s own thought folding, or doubling, into the thought of another;95 it can also be understood as the name of one’s relation to oneself; it is the self-production of one’s own subjectivity. Thought, too, is a kind of fold, an instance of the “forces of the outside” that fold the inside (Deleuze 1993).
Thus Im Sang-soo produces ἀe Housemaid (of 2010), folding in and out of ἀe Housemaid (of 1960) and the imagination of Kim Ki-young. Im’s thought doubles (folds) into that of Kim, identities and times become unstable. The eradication of the colonial memory can interweave in the viewer’s imagination with the eradication of the memory of the dictatorship; the melodramatic imagination of elitist 243reality (ἀ e Housemaid of 2010) can suddenly be thrown into absurdist relief by Psy’s (2012) ironic vision of a (dreamed, wannabe) reality in “Gangnam Style”; the subjectivity of the viewer (listener) enfolds new “forces of the outside.”
There is another sense in which Deleuze invokes the idea of the fold. It is in the context of a critique of the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) that he presents the idea of the “Baroque moment.” “Baroque” here refers not to the so-called European Baroque era, roughly of Leibniz’s time, but to “identical traits existing as constants within the most diverse environments and periods of time” (Focillon 1942, 15). Henri Focillon wrote of culture as composed of differently paced but intermingling phases: an “experimental” beginning, looking for solutions to problems that a “classical” moment then exploits, followed by a “radiating” period of increasing reἀnement, and then a “baroque” phase that sums up, contorts, inverts, and narrates the formulas of all the others (Conley 1993, x). It is in this sense that Deleuze sees difference coming together, “enfolding,” yet without contradiction—“the criterion or operative concept of the Baroque is the Fold, everything that it includes, and in all its extensiveness” (1993, 33). The Baroque would “enfold” all the other moments that it might reflect upon—in the present instance, the Korean Wave is to be seen as a “Baroque moment.” All will be swept into the cauldron: Chosun, dark memories, melodrama, and irony; Japanese manga are appropriated and transformed, as are Japanese pop music, American bubblegum pop, pop-art imagery, elegant minimalism, and over-thetop excess. There is no Korean Wave “style,” only multiplicity. Neo-Seoul might well be viewed as the apotheosis of the baroque—all will be enfolded.
Brett Nicholls (2010, 146) observes that, in his work on Leibnitz, Deleuze is concerned with “a point upon which series converge…. An identity emerges in and through the convergence of a series of singularities.” New possibilities are affirmed. Such indeed is the case with the Wave.
Assemblage and place
At this ἀrst level, above, assemblage thinking would seem to present as unproblematic—ideas, people, images, products, imaginings, and songs all assemble, come apart, and reassemble in both reality and the mind (thought, subjectivity). At a second, more geographical level, all these things happen in the space of the city; they assemble with places—a street, a studio, a coffee shop, a music stage, a Hongdae venue, an audition space, or a corporate boardroom. 244
Manuel Tironi (2010) has drawn attention to an urban space that is in some sense commensurable with aspects of Seoul space. In Santiago, Chile, there is a relatively cohesive group of young people doing avant-garde music and constituting an experimental music “scene.” This comprises a variety of musical projects, from electronic to folk, musique concrète to hip-hop, and is seen as characterized by three main principles: hybridity, nonconventional procedures (creativity), and commercial marginalization—the ἀrst two might also describe the Korean Wave, but the third is more complex. In Korea there is more of a tension—articulation, hybridization—between inventive isolation and commercial exploitation. Tironi’s most interesting assertion, however, is that the link between the stability of such a scene with its urban spaces and knowledge hinges on the concept of cluster, manifesting features such as value-added creation, economic spillovers, and horizontal/vertical linkages. Cluster theory assumes the existence of a bounded space—a deἀnite and ontologically closed territory.
In the case of the Santiago music scene, however, this territory seems characterized more by dispersal than centrality or closure. Its participants appear as nomads, and there is constant territorializing and deterritorializing; clusters will momentarily “gel,” then momentarily come apart again. So, suggests Tironi, the space of Santiago is “gelable.” Seoul likewise manifests nomadism; it is a city of a plethora of “creative districts,” where anecdotal evidence will refer to clustering as something passing—ephemeral. In Seoul, however, there are the territorializing forces of institutional attraction (Hongdae in the thrall of Hongik University) and capital (Gangnam and K-pop, and Heyri Art Village as a focus for ἀlm production).
Place is to be understood as assemblage—streets, buildings, monuments, and memories, but also the ebbs and flows of creativity, clustering and dispersal, territorializing forces and deterritorializing forces.
Assemblage and rhizome
There is a third and far more complex way in which the Korean Wave is to be seen as geographic—not so much “occupying” places and thereby in part deἀning them, however fleetingly, as destabilizing their meanings and the ideas that attach to them. The Hangang River in ἀ e Host is dark and forever threatening. It enters like a rhizome into other imaginings of the river.
The visitor in Gyeongbokgung Palace confronts, at the simplest level, a physical assemblage of pavilions, axes, spaces, and pathways. In the memory and imagination, however, all this flies apart: this is all simulacra, the imagination sweeps it away, and it is all empty, a tabula 245rasa and a seemingly obligated forgetting of the Japanese; imagining further, it is all back again, and we are in the time of King Kojong or perhaps Sejong the Great, except that, in that distant time, this is a forbidden place and we are not there, we are excluded. Other imaginings insert themselves into the reverie. There is Jewel in the Palace, and suddenly we are there, no longer excluded. The television series completes the destruction of the magic and mystery that the Japanese opening of the palace had begun. The Korean Wave again enters rhizomatically into the imaginary construction of place.
The wholesomeness of “family values”—and therefore of Confucian values—is destabilized by ἀe Housemaid’s insertion into the socially desired space of the superrich. Psy’s absurdist send-up of “Gangnam Style” destabilizes the illusion of the dreamed world of the rich and famous. The motivations that might be seen to underlie the drive of middle-class effort begin to appear as chimera.
Assemblage and the crossroads
Finally, at a fourth level, the relations of exteriority of the multiplicity that is Seoul and its culture break free of all geographic speciἀcity, though they are still geographic—in space—whether physical, imagined, or cyberspace, or some space of the memory or perhaps of compelled forgetting. The Korean Wave enters rhizomatically into wider Asian space. Not only are “Korean values” now inserted into the imaginings of Chinese, Japanese, Singaporean, Thai, or Taiwanese, but images of the physical and social spaces of Seoul also enter those imaginings.
Such intrusions, certainly, are not novel. Hollywood long ago entered the space of Japan, Taiwan, and most likely all other national spaces—Tokyo or Beijing will be read against an imagined New York or Los Angeles. What is new here is that the intruding assemblage of images, sounds, ideas, stories, and values relates to Seoul, an Asian city. The impact of the Korean Wave is geopolitical, as Beijing and Seoul (Tokyo or Osaka and Seoul, Taipei and Seoul, Singapore and Seoul) fold into each other. Might not the imagining of Seoul be able to insinuate itself into Beijing—be acceptable to a Chinese sensibility in ways that will always be closed to alien America?
AbdouMaliq Simone (2010), in bringing an assemblage perspective to the consideration of a selection of Asian and African cities, subtitled his account Movements at the Crossroads; it is a further metaphor for the phenomena that “assemblage” would attempt to theorize. The Korean Wave can be seen in one sense as arising at a crossroads of Japan and America, albeit in Korean cultural space. Similarly, 246we can now witness Seoul and Beijing intersecting. Similar thinking runs through Marina Warner’s Fantastic Metamorphoses: Other Worlds: “[T]ales of metamorphosis often arise in spaces (temporal, geographical, and mental) that were crossroads, crosscultural zones, points of interchange on the intricate connective tissue of communications between cultures…. in transitional places and at the confluence of traditions and civilizations” (Warner 2004, 17–18). Warner speculates on transformations and the underlying energies and processes whereby one motif, representation, or idea generates another. She concludes that, on the evidence of history, the transformations that mark great creativity and leaps to new modes of thought and life will most likely occur in those places and times where different cultures collide and all ideas of immutable identity come apart. Metamorphosis, or life-as-change, runs counter to any idea of the unique, singular nature of identity and its defense. Seoul as crossroads of America and Japan seems to have been a condition of possibility of Park’s “invention” of modern Korea; then the intersection of that brutal vision with the dissonance and disorder of a surviving, informal, subsistence economy may be seen as a condition of possibility for the subsequent explosion of Korean creativity. The Korean Wave, in turn, arises at a multiple crossroads—popular cultures of Japan and America, the great creativity, democracy, new prosperity—the release of the spring that is perhaps symbolized in “spring” at the Cheonggyecheon.
So the question is: at the new crossroads of Seoul-Beijing (Seoul-Tokyo, Seoul-Taipei, and so on), what new transformations and energies are we to expect?
NOTES
Epigraph: Lie 2014, 166–167n1.
1. While Marx theorized the processes of accumulation and annihilation of wealth under capitalism, the “gale of creative destruction” is mostly identiἀed with Austrian American economist Joseph Schumpeter. The notion has run through previous chapters and, following Lie (2014), will be applied in the present chapter in the ἀeld of popular culture. Also on applications in the social sciences, see Berman (1988).
2. Oh Myung held a pivotal role in the development of Korea’s ICT sector as vice minister and minister of the Ministry of Information and Communication, and later as deputy prime minister. On the Oh and Larson text, see Kim Sung-Young (2014).
3. A source on broadband penetration is the annual “OECD broadband statistics update.” The 2009 survey found that, with 95 percent of homes having full broadband (voice and data), South Korea ranked number one, followed by Singapore (88 percent), the Netherlands (85), Denmark (82), and Taiwan and Hong Kong (both 81). The 1917 survey revealed Korea as still being number one (109 percent), although when data-only subscriptions are added in, Japan was number one. Korea’s highly urbanized population and its government’s vigorous e-economy policy are to be seen as determining factors. “OECD broadband statistics update,” www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/broadband-statistics-update.htm, accessed 28 April 2017.
4. “Tech Capitals of the World,” Age (Melbourne), 18 June 2007, http://www.theage.com.au, accessed 25 June 2011.
5. “South Korea: Wiἀ All Over Capital,” Age (Melbourne), 16 June 2011, 12. This and other items attributed to the Age were displayed in many newspapers globally; my reading of them, however, was from the Age.
6. The term “new ubiquitous city,” for New Songdo, is used by Oh Myung and Larson (2011: 120–123).
7. The Korean Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) is an agency of the Korean government established in 2009 to support the growth of the cultural industry. It brought together a number of separate agencies previously focusing on speciἀc creative sectors.
8. An account of architect Kim Tai Soo and the design process for the National Museum of Contemporary Art is Jung Inha (2013, 116–118).
9. Although TV Buddha was replicated many times in Paik’s exhibitions, thereby demonstrating Baudrillard’s (1994b) idea of the simulacrum, its ἀrst presentation would seem to have been in 1974. Also see “Nam June Paik ‘TV-Buddha,’” Media Art Net, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de, accessed 14 August 2015.
10. “Famous Video Artist Nam June Paik Dies at 74,” Pravda, 30 January 2006, http://newsfromrussia.com, accessed 30 March 1007.
11. Paik’s own description of his program: “Marcel Duchamp achieved everything in every ἀeld except for video art. He created a large entrance and an extremely small exit. The small exit is video art. When we take the exit, we are out of the scope of influence of Marcel Duchamp.” Paik’s “exit” from Duchamp’s aesthetic 286world was by “combining electronic music and happenings.” Korea Tourism Organization, “Gyeonggi-do—Yongin-si—NJP Art Centre,” http://english.visitkorea.or.kr, accessed 14 August 2015.
12. Paik is generally attributed with coining the term “information superhighway”; subsequently, in 1974, he used the slightly different term “electronic super highway” (Paik Nam June, 1974).
13. See “NJP ArtCenter,” http://njpac-en.ggcf.kr, accessed 14 August 2015.
14. “Gyeonggi-do—Yongin-si—NJP Art Centre.”
15. See http://www.saic.edu; see also School of the Art Institute, “News from Nowhere: Chicago Laboratory, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, 2013,” 2014, http://vimeo.com, accessed 26 October 2013.
16. “Hallyu (Korean Wave),” Korea.net, http://www.korea.net, accessed 2 August 2015.
17. On Back’s Blow Up series in particular, see Lee Sohl (2014).
18. The installation is also based on Shostakovich’s satirical opera ἀ e Nose, which also derives from Gogol and which Kentridge directed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
19. Kern and Nam Sang-hui (2011, 178) observe that Korea’s extraordinarily active citizen journalism movement was especially enabled by the move from narrow band to broadband Internet, which had been a singular policy of the Kim Dae-jung government; also see Oh Myung and Larson (2011, 66).
20. StarIn Tech was a Monday section of the Star daily tabloid newspaper, Malaysia. It has subsequently been renamed StarBytz.
21. On Korean cinema and its evolution generally, see Lee Hyangjin (2001); James and Kim (2001); Min Eung-jin et al. (2003); Kim Kyung Hyun (2004); and Shin Chi-Yun and Stringer (2005). More recent is the volume edited by Kim Do Kyun and Kim Min-Sun (2011).
22. Atkins recounts how “Arirang,” a song associated with the ἀlm and “oozing with indignation towards Japanese,” became a “huge hit in Japan” (Atkins 2010, 2).
23. Chung Chonghwa (2012) provides a ἀnely detailed account of the emergence of the Korean ἀlm industry during colonial rule, in particular criticizing the staunch right-wing historiography that would deny any creative effect of the need for Korean ἀlmmakers to negotiate with the hegemonic Japanese.
24. Theodore Hughes (2014) has argued that this early Cold War era cinema in Korea was in many ways a continuation of the war-interrupted cultural production of the colonial era. On ἀlm and fashion cultures in the 1950s, see Steven Chung (2014b).
25. Kim Byeongcheol’s paper is part of a special issue of Korea Journal on contemporary Korean cinema.
26. Also on the “Golden Age,” Kelly Jeong (2014) draws attention to the actor Kim Sung-ho as the “patriarch” of that time.
27. On such transcultural (transnational) “genre flows,” see Chung Hye Seung and Diffrient (2015).
28. An extensive and wide-ranging debate on Moon’s article can be followed on the blog Korean Cinema, 29 July 2009, http://kcinemaclass.blogspot.com, accessed 9 July 2011.
29. Kim Kyung Hyun has written further on Korean cinema especially in relation to the Korean Wave in Kim Kyung Hyun (2011a). With Choe Youngmin, Kim has also edited ἀ e Korean Popular Culture Reader (Kim Kyung Hyun and Choe Youngmin 2014).
30. Lee and Choe (1998) is especially valuable for presenting Korean cinema work chronologically through to the late 1980s. The early periods are covered in detail, together with the melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the artistic extravaganzas of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
31. Ironic imagination is akin to the notion of dialectic image introduced in chapter 4. 287
32. The source of the story for Sassy Girl was the ancient and subversive pansori (song drama) Chunhyangga (Song of Chunhyang); see chapter 2.
33. On the New Wave Korean cinema generally, see Gateward (2007); and Choi Jinhee (2010). Choi in particular stresses the role of corporate and venture capital support in enabling the renaissance since around 1999. Similarly, Choe Youngmin (2014, ix–x) points to the 1997 ἀnancial crisis and the IMF’s consequent advocacy of cultural liberalization policies that were implemented in 1998. Also in the context of the New Wave, one needs to consider the persisting theme of what Daniel Martin (2014) calls “South Korean cinema’s postwar pain,” the continuing thread of gender and national division in ἀlms stretching from the 1950s to the 2000s.
34. Stephanie Bunbury, “Revealing the Seoul of desperate housemaids,” Age (Melbourne), 19 July 2010, 18.
35. On both the market and the critical impacts of ἀ e Host, see Jin Dal Yong (2013).
36. Bong Joon-ho (2011).
37. Naksan, the “Left Blue Dragon” of Seoul’s sacred, geomantic topography, had in fact been mined (obliterated) during the Japanese colonial period in the sense referred to by Bong.
38. Also on Bong Joon-ho, particularly his fourth feature, Mother of 2009, see Michelle Cho (2014).
39. The 2002 Nanji Waste Dump Rehabilitation provided for both the World Cup Park and Digital Media City (Kim Dongyun 2015).
40. The Bulwongcheon reconstruction preceded the Cheonggyecheon reconstruction and is reported to have been used to develop the techniques and technologies then adopted for the latter; likewise approaches used in the development of Digital Media City are reported to have been subsequently adopted in aspects of New Songdo (Kim Donyun, pers. comm., 27 August 2015).
41. Landscape architects Park Yoonjin and Kim Jungyoon, practicing under the name PARKKIM, have since 2004 provided various signiἀcant examples, both as constructed and as competition entries, of landscape projects to reflect on Korean urban landscapes. The aesthetic is decidedly deconstructive (ironic) rather than nostalgic (melodramatic).
42. See D. Mitchell (2004); on the book’s translation to cinema, see D. Mitchell (2012).
43. The ἀlm was directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, and featured American and Korean actors. On the ἀlm’s graphics, see Anders (2012).
44. For this comment comparing Neo-Seoul with Blade Runner, see critic “falseprophet” in Anders (2012).
45. Thanatourism, or “dark tourism,” refers to tourism to places of death, danger, and disaster—where murders, wars, battles, and atrocities have occurred. The DMZ is a very popular site of such tourism. It is also a place for nature tourism, as it presents a vast terrain that has not been disturbed for sixty years. See Bigley et al. (2010). On tourism to “dark” North Korea, see Buda and Shim (2014).
46. On the counterthread of social-realist aesthetics running through North Korean Hollywood-envy cinema, see Workman (2014).
47. This improbable story is recounted in Paul Fischer’s (2015) A Kim Jong-il Production, in which Kim’s well-known intoxication with American cinema culture is also well documented. It is based on Shin and Choi’s own accounts of this story; Fischer explicitly deals with the skepticism that has long greeted those accounts (Fischer 2015, 333–337): were they kidnapped, or did they defect? For Kim Jong-il’s own account of his cinematic career, see Kim Jong-il (2001a; 2001b).
48. Fischer’s overdramatized 2015 book can be read as one tome in the substantial great-North-Korea-escape genre. Therefore, also see Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee (1988; 2001); Kang Chol-hwan and Rigoulot (2005); Shin Sang-Ok 288(2007); Harden (2013; 2015); Jang Jin-sung (2015); Boynton (2016); and Kim Eunsun (2016).
49. The term “Korean Wave” is a Chinese pun that translates directly into Korean but not English: the Chinese for both “cold current” and “Korean Wave” are translated han-liu in Chinese, hallyu in Korean.
50. On Autumn in My Heart and the melodramatic form, see Baldacchino (2014).
51. My own viewing of Jewel in the Palace, admittedly intermittent, was via one of its seemingly endless repeats on Thailand’s television. I also catch up on other Korean historical dramas during frequent visits to Bangkok, as well as Seoul.
52. Kim Seong-kon (2013).
53. For a review of these exhibitions and their publications, see Szacka (2014).
54. On the K-pop scene in general, see Russell (2008; 2014). Korea Journal 53, no. 4 (Winter 2013) was devoted to papers on K-pop. Also see Chua Beng Huat and Iwabuchi (2008); Kim Do Kyun and Kim Min-Sun (2011); Kim Youna (2013); Lie (2014); Hong Euny (2014); Choi JungBong and Maliangkay (2014); Tudor (2014); Lee Sangjoon and Nornes (2015); and Jin Dal Yong (2016). For an attempt to place the movement in a broader history of Korea, see Kim Do Kyun and Kim Se-Jin (2011). Shin Hyunjoon and Kim Pil Ho (2014) trace origins back to Korean groups on the entertainment circuit of US military clubs in the 1960s.
55. On K-pop and gendered disempowerment, see Epstein and Turnbull (2014).
56. “Show Me the Money: Are Pop Stars Underpaid?,” Time Asia, http://205.188.238.181/time/asia/covers/110120729/money.html, accessed 22 May 2011.
57. “SM Entertainment Announces Lawsuit against TVXQ Trio,” allkpop, 13 April 2010; http://www.allkpop.com, accessed 22 May 2011.
58. Reprising a previous point, Kim Seong-kon (2013) has articulated an often-heard regret: that K-pop thrives globally while Korean literature languishes. Despite the success of Shin Kyung-Sook’s Please Take Care of Mom, Korean novels have few international translations and have had little impact.
59. Russell (2014) is also a useful source of information on the geography of K-pop—where produced, where consumed; the nightspots, theaters, clubs; the ambience of different locales. A wider context for its production and consumption is developed in several papers in Kuwahara (2014).
60. It is worth noting that there had been an earlier flowering of popular culture in Japan in the 1970s, represented, for example, in the manga Showa Genroku tradition and leading in the present day into the TV anime explosion. Both the Japanese and the Korean movements can be seen as having been enabled by a confluence of new prosperity, together with new sentiments of national freedom and achievement.
61. This is also a story about K-pop. Hyun-a (b. 1992) made her debut as the main rapper of the Wonder Girls, a girl group managed by JYP Entertainment. She was also a television cohost until she left Wonder Girls in July 2007 (at the age of fifteen). In 2008 she transferred to Cube Entertainment, joining the girl group 4Minute. She has subsequently released a number of singles, attracting some controversy—her 2010 single “Change” received a 19-plus rating, to be watched only by 19+ viewers (Hyun-a was seventeen at the time), due to her provocative dancing. Her ἀrst mini-album, Bubble Pop!, was released in 2011, and was also flagged for racy content. In March 2012 it was announced that Hyun-a would be launching her own fashion brand, Hyuna x SPICYCOLOR. On 14 August 2012, Psy released a female version of “Gangnam Style” titled “Oppa Is Just My Style,” with additional vocals by Hyun-a.
62. On the speed of Singapore’s take-up of “Gangnam Style” and its transit to local parody—to “Singaporean Style” and performative acts of broader social critique—see Liew Kai Khiun (2013, 177–178). Liew also covers Singapore’s abject succumbing to the onslaught of K-pop more broadly. 289
63. See Josh Wolford, “Gangnam Style Hitler Is the Viral Hit’s Logical Conclusion,” Web Pro News, 18 September 2012, http://www.webpronews.com, accessed 29 September 2012.
64. See http://www.uriminzokkiri.com, DPRK government website, accessed 29 September 2012.
65. Todd Wasserman, “Gangnam Style Goes North as Kim Jong Style,” 24 September 2012, http://mashable.com, accessed 26 September 2012.
66. The “looking back” has been problematic. While Korean popular culture can readily be viewed as building on what was seen in Japanese popular culture, Roald Maliangkay (2014, 296) reminds the reader that ἀrst steps toward democratic election began in 1987, but the various ethics committees of the dictatorship era did not loosen their grip for another decade, especially in their censorship of any Japanese influence. Maliangkay cites Mun Okpae (2004).
67. Sand (2013) provides an interesting account of similarly dual vernaculars in present Tokyo and the rediscovery of their importance in the context of that city’s politics. A ἀnely illustrated presentation of hanok is Park Nani and Pouser (2015).
68. Robert Venturi and his future wife and architectural partner, Denise Scott Brown, were among my colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. I remain indebted to their insights. Also see Venturi (1966).
69. “Eight Years Later: Park/Kim,” introduction to lecture at Harvard Design School, 16 September 2008, http://www.parkkim.net.
70. On Paik Nam June Media Bridge, see “Paik Nam June Media Bridge by Planning Korea,” de zeen magazine, 27 October 2010, http://www.dezeen.com, accessed 10 November 2015.
71. “Hallyu (Korean Wave).”
72. While it may be a “woman-centered” society, in Korea the reality of women’s emancipation is somewhat challenged by Laurel Kendall’s analysis of the still-Confucian-informed restriction on women when it comes to marriage, at a “crossroads” between tradition and modernity (Kendall 1996). Similarly, Moon Seungsook (2005) sees Korean citizenship as “gendered,” consequent on its modern transformation into an industrialized and militarized nation. Also see various papers in Kim and Chungmoo (1998), notably those of Choi Chungmoo and Moon Seungsook; also see Kim Youna (2005).
73. On the wave’s underground penetration of China, see Maliankay (2010).
74. Also on the wave’s wider impact in Asia, see Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi (2008); Kim Do Kyun and Kim Min-Sun (2011); and Marinescu (2014).
75. For an analysis of Korean and Japanese pop culture and its impact on a wider, multicentered Chinese world, albeit with Singapore as the study’s principal locus and a theoretical focus on the idea of soft power, see Chua Beng Huat (2012).
76. See also Atkins (2010, 1–2).
77. Contrast this, however, with the reality of Japan’s history of variously colonizing and assimilating the diverse ethnicities of its own archipelago, recounted in chapter 2.
78. “9 out of 10 French Hallyu Fans Want to Visit Korea,” Korea Times, 7 April 2012.
79. Louisa Lim, “South Korean Culture Wave Spreads across Asia,” 26 March 2006, http://www.npr.org, accessed 30 March 2007.
80. Nearly 60 percent of 524 Korean language learners from sixty-ἀve nations declared that K-pop inspired them to learn the language, according to a survey by Kyung Hee University’s Institute of International Education. Yi Whan-woo, “K-pop Motivates Foreigners to Learn Korean,” Korea Times, 4 April 2012. Similarly, Noh Hyun-gi reports on the case of Sohn Ho-min, professor of Korean language at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa: of 480 students enrolled in Korean in fall semester 2011, only one had a Korean heritage; the rest gave love of K-pop as their reason for enrolling; Korea Times, 20 December 2011. 290
81. One sign of the K-pop surge is the emergence of a series of K-pop dictionaries, such as Fandom Media (2016a; 2016b).
82. Note Son Min-jung (2014) to the effect that Koreans’ adoption of Western popular music in the 1930s is to be seen as resistance to Japanese-inserted culture and to still-thriving Confucianism.
83. This is a constant complaint against narrowly focused, measurement-preoccupied evaluation of academic “quality” in Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.
84. Also on soft power and the Korean Wave, see Nye and Kim Youna (2013). On K-Pop and globalization, see Fuhr (2016).
85. Also on this point, see Kim Kwang-Ok (1994); Kendall (1996, 72–73); and Bell (2004).
86. North Korea and North Koreans, however, constitute a persisting theme in Korean Hallyu cinema. See Lee Jong Hwa and Han Min Wha (2011).
87. On the continuity in policies and ideologies of the successive reigns of the Kim dynasty in North Korea, see Park Yong Soo (2014). Furthermore, on the translation of those ideologies into North Korean cinema, see Workman (2014).
88. See also “Illusive Utopia,” University of Michigan Press, http://press.umich.edu, accessed 29 June 2011. On wider issues of North Korean economic and political developments, one could very usefully turn to the work of Ian Jeffries (Jeffries 2006; 2010). On the North-South divide, see Robinson (2007b); Oberdorfer and Carlin (2013); and Armstrong (2014).
89. For another take on the happiness of the perfect society, see The Great North Korean Picture Show, http://www.nfsa.gov.au, accessed 27 August 2013; see also “Hollywood Kim Jong-il Style,” The Great North Korean Picture Show, http://www.thegreatnorthkoreanpictureshow.com, accessed 24 October 2013.
90. See excerpt of Nothing to Envy at http://nothingtoenvy.com, accessed 1 July 2011.
91. On ways in which to view North Korean culture in the context of its responses to its international environment, see Ryang (2009).
92. Without You, ἀere Is No Us is the title of Kim Suki’s book of 2014.
93. A central moment in this discourse was Christopher Alexander’s immensely influential 1965 essay “A City Is Not a Tree.” A more powerful analogy is the net, a realm of connections. Initially published in Architectural Forum, Alexander’s essay was often republished in the 1960s and subsequently more widely in anthologies and edited works. Michael Dear (2000, 157–159), in the context of “Keno capitalism,” sees the modern city as fragmented parcels coming together, seemingly randomly—“collage” might be the appropriate metaphor.
94. Deleuzean thought on the assemblage is most notably developed in Deleuze and Guattari (1987); Deleuze (1991); and Deleuze and Parnet (2002).
95. In this instance, it is Deleuze’s thinking doubling into the thinking of Leibniz and Foucault (O’Sullivan 2010, 107).