Introducing Korean Popular Culture 1032274050, 9781032274058

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Situating Korean Popular Culture in the Global Culture Landscape
From Cultural Imperialism to Reverse Colonization?
Why Study Popular Culture?
An Invitation to Reflection
References
Part I: K-pop Music
Chapter 1: K-pop in the History of the Korean Wave: A Long Revolution
The Korean Wave and Its Evolution
The Beginning of the Korean Wave in the Late 1990s
The Korean Wave as Asian Pop Culture in the 2000s
The Spread of the Korean Wave across the Globe in the 2010s
The Korean Wave as Global Pop Culture after 2019
Conclusion
References
Chapter 2: Digital K-pop Fan Platforms in a Cosmopolitan World
The Global Fan Café
Selling Access
Virtualization
Financialization
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Chart Manipulation and Fan Labor in the Online Moral Economy of K-pop
Music Charts and Fandom Wars
Music Chart Manipulation by the Industry
Fans’ Surveillance of the Industry’s Music Chart Manipulation
Music Chart Manipulation by Fans
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Celebrity Fashion and Fan Consumption: BTS “Jungkook Hanbok ”
Locating Saenghwal Hanbok in Contemporary South Korea
Hanbok, Fashion and BTS
“I Wanted to Wear One after Seeing Jungkook”
References
Part II: Popular Cinema
Chapter 5: The Rise of New Korean Cinema and  Hallyu
The Early 1990s: Out of Crisis
The Rise of Blockbusters and Hallyu 1.0
Korean Auteurs and International Film Festivals
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Parasite and Snowpiercer as Derivations to  Hallyu : Korean Cinema, Neoliberalism and Semi-Global Exclusivity
Essential Content/Semi-Essential Content: Hallyu and Contemporary Korean Cinema
Korea’s Media Conglomerate Ambitions: Lessons from the Sony Corporation and Local-for-Global Content on Netflix
Korean Neoliberalism and Bong’s Semi-Global Turn in Snowpiercer
Parasite’s Local-to-Global Tropes: Real Estate Speculation, Class Pulverization and an Oscar Win for Korea
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Her Revenge: Low Birthrate Cinema from Lady Vengeance to The Villainess
Remediated Women
Statistical Women
Invisible Labor
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 8: The Climate of Cinema: Gender, Debt and the Future of Labor in Squid Game and Parasite
The Automaton and the Future of Labor
Swamp of Debt, Hell of Debt
Cine-Media Apparatus in the Discursive Realm of Parasite
References
Part III: Television
Chapter 9: The Korean Wave Television: From Winter Sonata to Squid Game
The Soft Power of the Korean Wave Television
Globalization of Korean Television Culture
Digital Fan Culture
Meanings and Significance
References
Chapter 10: Netflix and Korean Drama: Cultural Resonance, Affect and Consumption in Asia
Cultural Resonance, Social Inequality and Affect
Netflix as the Agent of Change
Comparing Squid Game and Boys Over Flowers
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: Gender and the Paradox of Body Politics in Korean Makeover Television
Female Makeover Dramas vs. Male Makeover Dramas
Accidental Pluralism of Body Ideologies in Female Makeover Dramas
Conclusion
References
Chapter 12: Democratization, Social Media and Korean Television in Transition
State Control over Television Broadcasting
The Impact of Social Media on Television
Conclusion
References
Part IV: Web Drama, Webtoon and Animation
Chapter 13: Korean Web Drama on the Rise: The Difference Independent Productions Make
Korean Television and Independent Productions
From SNS Drama to Web Drama
Playlist Studio: The Playlist Universe and Niche Audiences
WhyNot Media: Opportunities for New Talent
Conclusion
References
Chapter 14: Korean Webtoon and Identity Politics in the Digital Age
Defining Synthetic Experiences
Contextualizing Webtoons
Reading Webtoons
Conclusion
References
Chapter 15: Transmediating Tradition: Convergence of Premodern Prose, Webtoons and Audio Comics
Reintroducing Pansori
Shim Cheong as a Transmedia Character
Queering Shim Cheong and Transmedia: Geunyeo eu Shim Cheong ( Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019)
Creating a Pansori Sonic World in Webtoons and Audio Comics
Rebooting Shim Cheong as a Transmedia Character
Conclusion
References
Chapter 16: Cultural Identity in Transnational Korean Animation: The Stateless Fantasy of Ragnarök
National Identity and the History of Popular Korean Animation
The Ragnarok Franchise: Cultureless Media for a Global Audience
The Transnational Circulation of Ragnarok the Animation
Conclusion: Statelessness and Cultural Specificity in Korean Popular Culture
References
Part V: Digital Games and Esports
Chapter 17: The Political Economy of the Digital Game Industry: An Analysis of Transnational Capital
Major Characteristics of the Korean Game Industry
Transnationalization of the Korean Game Industry
The Interplay between the Government and the Local Game Industry
Conclusion
References
Chapter 18: Techno-Orientalism in Global/Korean Esports: “They Play Games Really Well, But It Is Us to Have Them Play”
Sociocultural Aspects of Esports in Korea
Techno-Orientalism: A Western Perspective on Korean Dominance in Esports
Co-Evolution of Esports and Techno-Orientalism
Conclusion
References
Chapter 19: Visualizing the Invisible: Korean Esports and the Representation of Gameplay Skill
Visuality, Physicality and Virtuality
Korean Esports and Visuality
References
Chapter 20: Between Super Players and Mega Fans: The Emergence of Data-Led Gaming Environments in Korean Esports
Technology, Computational Gaming and Esports
Korea’s Data-Led Gaming Environments
(1) Elite Esports Players
(2) Fan Sites
(3) Data Analytics Companies
Conclusion
References
Part VI: Lifestyle Media, Fashion and Food
Chapter 21: South Korean Celebrities and Lifestyle Media
Lifestyle, Identity and Celebrities
Korean Celebrities as Image Commodities
Celebrities in Lifestyle Media and Lifestyles in Celebrity Media
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 22: K-fashion E-tailers and Consumption in the Global Market
Fashion and Popular Culture
K-culture and K-pop Fashion
K-pop Fashion E-tailers
Diffusion of K-Fashion and Challenges in the Global Market
Conclusion
References
Chapter 23: Precarious Eating: Young Koreans’ Digital Practice of Mukbang
Mukbang Goes Global
Evolution of Mukbang
Technological and Sociocultural Factors behind Mukbang Culture
Cultural Politics of Vicarious Eating
Conclusion
References
Part VII: Popular Culture and Nation Branding
Chapter 24: Branding the Sense of Place: Gangnam as the Epicenter of the Korean Wave
Nation- and City-Branding Arrives in Korea
Gangnam’s Sense of Place and Psy’s Irony
Gangnam as the Production Space for Pop Culture Industries
Sex-Beauty-Entertainment Industrial Complex: Gangnam’s Dark Corners
Conclusion: Bad Reputation, Good Business?
References
Chapter 25: First Time in Korea?: The Mediation of Strangeness through Food Practices
Foreigners in Korean Television
Food as a Vehicle for Negotiating Strangeness
Encoding of Reality
Deconstruction of Welcome! First Time in Korea?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 26: The Korean Wave and Mega-Asia: Imagining a Pan-Asian Community
The Korean Wave in Global Political-Economic Contexts
The Korean Wave and Asian Regionalism
Acknowledgments
References
Index

Citation preview

Introducing Korean Popular Culture

This new textbook is a timely and interdisciplinary resource for students looking for an introduction to Korean popular culture, exploring the multifaceted meaning of Korean popular culture at micro and macro levels and the process of cultural production, representation, circulation and consumption in a global context. Drawing on perspectives from the humanities and social sciences, including media and communications, film studies, musicology, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, history and literature, this book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Korean popular culture and its historical underpinnings, changing roles and dynamic meanings in the present moment of the digital social media age. The book’s sections include the following: • • • • • • •

K-pop Music Popular Cinema Television Web Drama, Webtoon and Animation Digital Games and Esports Lifestyle Media, Fashion and Food Nation Branding

An accessible, comprehensive and thought-provoking work, providing historical and contemporary contexts, key issues and debates, this textbook will appeal to students of and providers of courses on popular culture, media studies and Korean culture and society more broadly. Youna Kim is Professor of Global Communications at the American University of Paris, France, joined from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she had taught since 2004, after completing her Ph.D. at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. Her books are Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (Routledge, 2005), Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (Routledge, 2008), Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters (Routledge, 2011), Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global (Routledge, 2013), Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society (Routledge, 2016), Childcare Workers, Global Migration and Digital Media (Routledge, 2017), South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea (Routledge, 2019), The Soft Power of the Korean Wave: Parasite, BTS and Drama (Routledge, 2021) and Media in Asia: Global, Digital, Gendered and Mobile (Routledge, 2022).

Introducing Korean Popular Culture

Edited by Youna Kim

Designed cover image: © Getty First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Youna Kim; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Youna Kim to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 23, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 23 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-27405-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-27408-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29259-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive) Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.

To students

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Situating Korean Popular Culture in the Global Culture Landscape

xi xiii xiv 1

YOUNA KIM

Part I K-pop Music

21

1 K-pop in the History of the Korean Wave: A Long Revolution

23

YOUNGHAN CHO

2 Digital K-pop Fan Platforms in a Cosmopolitan World

33

SARAH KEITH

3 Chart Manipulation and Fan Labor in the Online Moral Economy of K-pop

44

STEPHANIE JIYUN CHOI

4 Celebrity Fashion and Fan Consumption: BTS “Jungkook Hanbok”

53

MYOUNG-SUN SONG

Part II Popular Cinema

63

5 The Rise of New Korean Cinema and Hallyu

65

CHI-YUN SHIN

6 Parasite and Snowpiercer as Derivations to Hallyu: Korean Cinema, Neoliberalism and Semi-Global Exclusivity

74

KEITH B. WAGNER

7 Her Revenge: Low Birthrate Cinema from Lady Vengeance to The Villainess JOSEPH JONGHYUN JEON

84

viii Contents 8 The Climate of Cinema: Gender, Debt and the Future of Labor in Squid Game and Parasite

93

SOYOUNG KIM

PART III

Television

101

9 The Korean Wave Television: From Winter Sonata to Squid Game

103

YOUNA KIM

10 Netflix and Korean Drama: Cultural Resonance, Affect and Consumption in Asia

118

ANTHONY FUNG AND JINDONG LEO-LIU

11 Gender and the Paradox of Body Politics in Korean Makeover Television

126

JI-YOON AN

12 Democratization, Social Media and Korean Television in Transition

137

KI-SUNG KWAK

PART IV

Web Drama, Webtoon and Animation

147

13 Korean Web Drama on the Rise: The Difference Independent Productions Make

149

JENNIFER M. KANG

14 Korean Webtoon and Identity Politics in the Digital Age

157

HYUNG-GU LYNN

15 Transmediating Tradition: Convergence of Premodern Prose, Webtoons and Audio Comics

166

JINA E. KIM

16 Cultural Identity in Transnational Korean Animation: The Stateless Fantasy of Ragnarök

180

DANIEL MARTIN

PART V

Digital Games and Esports

189

17 The Political Economy of the Digital Game Industry: An Analysis of Transnational Capital

191

DAL YONG JIN

Contents  ix 18 Techno-Orientalism in Global/Korean Esports: “They Play Games Really Well, But It Is Us to Have Them Play”

201

TAE-JIN YOON AND KYUNGHYUK LEE

19 Visualizing the Invisible: Korean Esports and the Representation of Gameplay Skill

210

KEUNG YOON BAE

20 Between Super Players and Mega Fans: The Emergence of Data-Led Gaming Environments in Korean Esports

222

PEICHI CHUNG

PART VI

Lifestyle Media, Fashion and Food

233

21 South Korean Celebrities and Lifestyle Media

235

OLGA FEDORENKO

22 K-fashion E-tailers and Consumption in the Global Market

244

EUNSUK HUR

23 Precarious Eating: Young Koreans’ Digital Practice of Mukbang

254

KYONG YOON

PART VII

Popular Culture and Nation Branding

265

24 Branding the Sense of Place: Gangnam as the Epicenter of the Korean Wave

267

PIL HO KIM

25 First Time in Korea? The Mediation of Strangeness through Food Practices

278

JAEHYEON JEONG

26 The Korean Wave and Mega-Asia: Imagining a Pan-Asian Community

289

DOOBO SHIM

Index

298

Illustrations

Figures 11.1 Popular Dramas Featuring Female Makeovers from the 2010s to the Present (Figure Produced by the Author) 11.2 Popular Dramas Featuring Male Makeovers from the 2010s to the Present (Figure Produced by the Author) 15.1 Prologue (Source: Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019) 15.2 Episode 2 (Source: Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019) 15.3 Episode 64 (Source: Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019) 15.4 Episode 27 (Source: Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019) 17.1 Korean Game Industry, 2011–2021 (Unit: million won) (Source: Korea Creative Content Agency, 2021) 17.2 Market Share of Game Genres, 2020 (Unit: %) (Source: Korea Creative Content Agency, 2021) 19.1 A Screenshot of Player ryujehong’s Anubis Ana Play (Source: ryujehong 2017) 19.2 Damwon Kia vs. FunPlus Phoenix Match at the 2021 League of Legends World Championships (Source: LoL Esports VODs and Highlights 2021) 19.3 Chae Gwang-Jin (“Piglet”) in the Promotional Trailer for the 2013–2014 League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) Winter Finals (Source: KaioShin 2014) 19.4 Yang Jin-Mo (“Tobi”) Shown Walking in a Park in the OGN APEX Season 3 Finals Promotional Video (Source: Bloxxom 2017) 19.5 Yang’s Backdrop Replaced with a Virtual Space in the OGN APEX Season 3 Finals Promotional Video (Source: Bloxxom 2017) 19.6 “Viper” in OGN’s 2018 LCK Summer Split Video (Source: kekekev 2018) 19.7 Lee Sang-Hyeok (“Faker”) in the 2018 LCK Season Launch Video (Source: League of Legends Korea 2018) 20.1 Word Cloud Analysis for FMKOREA (Produced by the Author) 20.2 Word Cloud Analysis for REDDIT (Produced by the Author) 24.1 Hwang Mansok, GangNamStyle (2016) near the World Trade Center (Photography by the Author) 24.2 COEX Artium (Source: Public Domain, https://pxhere.com/ko/photo/1343562) 24.3 Newspaper Advertisement of the Opening of the Hotel Riverside on 19 December 1981 (Source: Naver News Library) 24.4 A Street Protest Stage Near the Burning Sun Nightclub Location, 25 May 2019 (Source: Bonnielou 2013 at Wikimedia Commons)

128 129 171 172 173 177 193 194 212 213 217 218 218 219 220 229 230 270 271 272 274

xii Illustrations

Tables 12.1 Traditional Broadcasters’ Channels (News, Current Affairs, Information) on YouTube 141 20.1 Top 20 Highest Earning Esports Players for Korea (Source: Esports Earnings, https://www.esportsearnings.com/countries/kr) 227

Acknowledgments

The global rise of Korean popular culture has been manifested in the visibility of K-drama Squid Game on Netflix, the four Academy Awards of film Parasite and the widespread popularity of K-pop group BTS. Global streaming services, video-sharing websites and social media platforms as well as mobile smartphones have been playing a key role in expanding the culture landscape of Korea offering enormous opportunities and challenges. The field is developing rapidly in today’s digitally connected mobile world. This book is an extension of my previous volumes, The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global (2013, Routledge), South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea (2019, Routledge) and The Soft Power of the Korean Wave: Parasite, BTS and Drama (2021, Routledge). This comprehensive and up-to-date book considers a wide variety of Korean popular culture, not only K-pop music, cinema, television but also webtoon, animation, digital games, esports, the social media, celebrity, fashion, food and lifestyles. Back in the 1990s and the 2000s when I worked in the USA and the UK, not many people recognized Korean popular culture or predicted it would become a truly global cultural force. When I taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, students from China were fascinated with this subject. Today, students from not only Asia and the Middle East but also Europe and Americas talk about Korean popular culture and write essay or research papers about its evolving phenomenon based on their embedded experience and reflexive learning. This book is dedicated to students around the world who are interested in Korean popular culture. My publisher Routledge has been continually co-operative and supportive of all my projects since the 2000s, for which I remain grateful. Among many wonderful collaborators at Routledge, special thanks to Stephanie Rogers for her thoughtful understanding and support in all possible ways. As always, I am grateful to Anthony Giddens for his valuable advice and friendship. I remain appreciative of my colleagues, friends and insightful researchers back in London, now here in Paris and elsewhere, Joaquin Beltran Antolin, Chris Berry, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Michael Delli Carpini, Kathleen Chevalier, Youngmin Choe, Chua Beng Huat, Nick Couldry, James Curran, Jonathan Gray, Dan Hallin, Koichi Iwabuchi, Christian Joppke, Kyung Hyun Kim, John Lie, Sonia Livingstone, Joseph Nye, Kent A. Ono, Terhi Rantanen, Gi-Wook Shin and Daya Thussu, for their inspiring works, kind invitations and teaching opportunities, delightful meals together and encouraging conversations when much needed. Heartfelt thanks also to my PA and friend Diane Willian for her generous assistance, always remembered and appreciated wherever she is. A part of this research project was supported by the 2022 Korean Studies Grant Program of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2022-R-015). I am deeply appreciative of the contributors in this book for collaborating so willingly and delightfully. Thank you all. Youna Kim Paris

Contributors

Ji-yoon An is currently Korea Foundation Visiting Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures. Coming from a background in music and film studies, she is a scholar of Korean studies with interests in popular cultural trends and flows. She holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge, where her thesis examined the family in Korean cinema. Prior to her current position, she was Korea Foundation Visiting Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2021–22 and Visiting Assistant Professor in Korean Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany from 2018 to 2021. Keung Yoon Bae is Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the USA. Her research primarily examines the relationship between media production and the state in South Korea, starting with the regulation of colonial Korean cinema under Japanese imperial rule and continuing into the Cold War with censorship and media control under Park Chung-Hee. She has published works on contemporary Korean digital cultures, such as the Korean esports industry and the advent of Korean webtoons and contemporary cinema. Younghan Cho is Professor of Korean Studies in the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Korea. He has published widely on global sports, fans and celebrity; the Korean Wave and East Asian pop culture; and nationalism and modernity in modern Korea and East Asian society. His research monographs include Global Sports Fandom in South Korea: American Major League Baseball and Its Fans in the Online Community (2020) and The Yellow Pacific: Multiple Modernities and East Asia (2020). He is a founding editor of the Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia. Stephanie Jiyun Choi is Adjunct Assistant Professor in East Asian Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on cultural globalization, gender and labor politics, and the affective economy of Korean popular culture. She is currently working on her first book project that interrogates how global K-pop fans proclaim cultural diversity, post-colonial feminism and anti-racism through digital surveillance, media tribalism and gendered feitshization of K-pop idol bodies. Peichi Chung is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Asian game industries, esports innovation in South Korea and independent game production and conservation in Hong Kong. She is the co-editor of Media Technologies for Work and Play in East Asia: Critical Perspectives on Japan and the Two Koreas (2021). She has published journal articles and book chapters on comparative film and video game cultures in the Asia Pacific.

Contributors  xv Olga Fedorenko is Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department of Seoul National University. She holds a Ph.D. from the East Asian Studies Department of the University of Toronto and taught at New York University before joining SNU. A scholar of Korean studies and anthropology of media, she has published in City & Society, Interventions, Anthropological Quarterly, Acta Koreana, Feminist Media Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Development & Society, as well as in edited volumes The Korean Popular Culture Reader and Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising. Her monograph Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads (2022) examines contests over advertising freedoms and obligations in post-millennial South Korea. Anthony Fung is Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Professor in the School of Art and Communication at Beijing Normal University. His research and teaching focus on popular culture and cultural studies, popular music, gender and youth identity, cultural industries and policy, and digital media studies. He has published widely in journals and authored and edited more than 20 Chinese and English books. His recent books are Global Game Industries and Cultural Policy (2016), Hong Kong Game Industry, Cultural Policy and East Asian Rivalry (2018) and Made in Hong Kong: Studies in Popular Music (Routledge, 2020). Jindong Leo-Liu, the co-author, is a Ph.D. researcher in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include popular culture, human–machine communication, VR/AR Metaverse, critical analysis and new media. Eunsuk Hur is Lecturer in Fashion Innovation and Marketing in the School of Design at the University of Leeds, the UK. She is a principal investigator for the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account Fund, Interdisciplinary Research and Impact Fund for Culture, and Ignite Fund at the University of Leeds. Her research interests cover bridging design innovation and marketing, ranging from sustainable fashion, cultural studies, circular fashion community activities, collaborative consumption and roles of social media and technology for leveraging social innovation. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon is Director of the Center for Critical Korean Studies and Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century (2019) and Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (2012). Jaehyeon Jeong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah Asia Campus. His research areas include critical cultural studies, media industry studies, global communications, discourse analysis and nationalism. He is the author of Korean Food Television and the Korean Nation (2020) and the co-editor of Communicating Food in Korea (2021). He has published multiple peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on governmental discourses on national cuisine, diasporic identity, the Korean comics industry and webtoons. Dal Yong Jin is Distinguished SFU Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and Global Professor in the School of Media and Communication at Korea University. His research and teaching interests are in digital platforms and digital games, globalization and media, transnational cultural studies and the political economy of media and culture. He has published numerous books, journal articles and book chapters. His books include Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (2010), Digital Platforms, Imperialism and Political Culture (Routledge, 2015), New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social Media (2016), Smartland Korea: Mobile Communication, Culture and Society (2017) and Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Production: Critical Perspectives on Digital Platforms (Routledge, 2021).

xvi Contributors Jennifer M. Kang is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research interests are global media, media industries and television studies, with an emphasis on the South Korean media industry. Her current book project examines how Korean independent producers challenge existing television industry norms through innovative production practices regarding web content production. Her work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies and Celebrity Studies. Sarah Keith is Senior Lecturer in Media and Music at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research areas include popular music studies, East Asian popular culture and the music industries. Recent research has explored digital disruptions in the music industries, intersections of media and technology, Korean popular culture and public diplomacy, and K-pop fandom in Australia. Jina E. Kim is Associate Professor of Korean literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan (2019), a comparative study of modernist literature and culture emerging in Seoul and Taipei during the Japanese colonial era. She is the co-editor of The Journal of Korean Studies special issue on “Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Culture and Film,” a collection of essays showing how the movements across media can open up new ways of engaging in transnational, interdisciplinary work on Korea. Her research areas are in modern Korean literature and cultural history, including comparative colonialisms between Korea and Taiwan, Vietnam and Korean diasporic literatures; intermediality, transmedia storytelling and digital humanities; sound studies; popular fiction and popular culture; and history of technology and literature. Pil Ho Kim is Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at the Ohio State University. He has been studying a wide range of topics related to modern Korea, including popular music, cinema, literature and gentrification. His latest publication is “Songs of the Multitude: The April Revolution, the 6.3 Uprising and South Korea’s Protest Music of the 1960s” (2022). He is currently working on a monograph entitled, Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea, which casts a new light on the global rise of South Korean economy and popular culture by focusing on its geographic symbol, Gangnam. Soyoung Kim is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Korea National University of Arts and Director of the Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute. She is the author of Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Post-Colonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema (2022). She is the editor of History of Korean Cinema (ten volumes, National Research Foundation of Korea) and co-editor of Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology and the Experience of Social Space (2010) with Chris Berry and Lynn Spiegel and Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene (2022) with Shiuhhuah Serena Chou and Rob Wilson. Youna Kim is Professor of Global Communications at the American University of Paris, joined from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she had taught since 2004, after completing her Ph.D. at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. Her books are Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (Routledge, 2005), Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (Routledge, 2008), Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters (Routledge, 2011), Women and the

Contributors  xvii Media in Asia: The Precarious Self (2012), The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global (Routledge, 2013), Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society (Routledge, 2016), Childcare Workers, Global Migration and Digital Media (Routledge, 2017), South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea (Routledge, 2019), The Soft Power of the Korean Wave: Parasite, BTS and Drama (Routledge, 2021) and Media in Asia: Global, Digital, Gendered and Mobile (Routledge, 2022). Ki-Sung Kwak is Associate Professor in the Department of Korean Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has published widely on media policy and regulation, and comparative media in East Asia. His works have been published in journals such as Television and New Media, Gazette: International Journal for Communication Studies and Media International Australia. He is the author of Media and Democratic Transition in South Korea (Routledge, 2012) and Television in Transition in East Asia (Routledge, 2018). Hyung-Gu Lynn is the AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research in the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, and the Editor of the journal Pacific Affairs. His research deals with popular culture, public diplomacy, migration, globalization, development and colonialism in East Asia. Recent publications include “Entanglements of Mobility and Immobility in Eight Documentaries” in Pacific Affairs (2022), “History of Korea 1905– 1945” in Oxford Handbook of Korean Politics (2022), a co-authored chapter “Ethnicity, Nationalism and Migration in China, Korea and Japan” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies (2021), “Japan-South Korea International Relations” in Routledge Handbook of Contemporary South Korea (2021) and “Mobilities and Migrations in Modern East Asia” in Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies (2020). Daniel Martin is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He has previously held posts as lecturer in Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and as honorary researcher at Lancaster University, the UK. He is the author of Extreme Asia: The Rise of Cult Cinema from the Far East (2015) and the co-editor of Korean Horror Cinema (2013) and Hong Kong Horror Cinema (2018). He is currently writing a book for the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series on Kiki’s Delivery Service. Doobo Shim is Professor of Media and Communication at Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul. He conducts research on the media and communication with critical, cultural and historical perspectives. He has co-authored several books in Korean and English and edited Pop Culture Formations across East Asia (2010). His article “Hybridity and the Rise of Korean Popular Culture in Asia” (Media, Culture & Society, 2006) has been translated into French, Chinese and Thai and selected as the most-read article by its publishing journal for about ten years. He has been an editorial board member of journals including Journal of Fandom Studies and Asian Communication Research and served as president at Korea Speech, Media & Communication Association (2016–2017) and research director at the Korean Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (KISEAS) and the Korean Association of Southeast Asian Studies (KASEAS). Chi-Yun Shin is Principal Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, the UK. She is the co-editor of New Korean Cinema (2005) and East Asian Film Noir: Transnational Encounters and Intercultural Dialogue (2015). She has published articles on contemporary East Asian cinema and black diaspora films in Britain in various anthologies and journals, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Transnational

xviii Contributors Cinemas, Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory, Intercultural Screen Adaptation: British and Global Case Studies, Rediscovering Korean Cinema, Korean Screen Culture: Interrogating Cinema, TV, Music and Online Games, Korean Horror Cinema, Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain, Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema and Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema. Her recent research interests include South Korean women’s cinema. Myoung-Sun Song is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the representations of race, gender, sexuality, class and national identity in Korean media and popular culture. She is the author of Hanguk Hip Hop: Global Rap in South Korea (2019), the first scholarly book-length study in English and Korean on the subject of Korean hip-hop. Keith B. Wagner is Visiting Professor at Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul. He was previously director of the Graduate Program in Film and Media Studies at University College London and held a visiting professorship at Seoul National University. He is the co-editor of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (Routledge, 2011), China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty First Century (2014), Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, and Interaction (2020), Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory and Geopolitics in World Cinema (2022) and Global London on Screen: Visitors, Cosmopolitans and Migratory Cinematic Visions of a Superdiverse City (forthcoming). Kyong Yoon is Principal’s Research Chair in Trans-Pacific Digital Platform Studies at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches in the Cultural Studies program. His research interests include South Korean popular culture, digital media, migration and youth culture. He is the author of Digital Mediascapes of Transnational Korean Youth Culture (Routledge, 2020) and Diasporic Hallyu: The Korean Wave in Korean Canadian Youth Culture (2022). He co-authored Transnational Hallyu: The Globalization of Korean Digital and Popular Culture (2021). Tae-Jin Yoon is Professor in the Graduate School of Communication and Arts at Yonsei University, Seoul. He has been teaching and writing on media-related cultural phenomena for more than 20 years. His research focuses on video games, esports, webtoons and the Korean Wave. He has co-edited a book The Korean Wave: Evolution, Fandom and Transnationality (2017) and published a book in Korean Digital Game Culture Research (2015). He runs Yonsei Game and Esports Research Center (YEGER) and collaborates with colleagues and students to carry out game studies. His recent articles include “Convergence of Music and Esports” and “Transversal Korean Waves: A Speculation of the Next Wave with Netflix and Korean Gaming.” Kyunghyuk Lee, the co-author, is a Ph.D. researcher at Yonsei University and the editor-in-chief of Game Generation. He has published books in Korean Game, Another Window into the World (2016), Game Theories (2018) and The Birth of the Payment Play (2022) and worked as an advisor in the production of TV documentaries “The Gamer,” “The Rise of Esports” and “Serious about Games.”

Introduction Situating Korean Popular Culture in the Global Culture Landscape Youna Kim

In 2021, Netflix’s Korean-language drama Squid Game became the platform’s most-watched show of all time, beating high-profile Western productions and winning the hearts of many audiences around the world. It is the first time that a South Korean (hereafter Korean) drama has ever been at the top position of the Netflix charts and has significantly attracted global attention. Made in Korea by Hwang Dong-Hyuk, the nine-episode dystopian thriller presents a social critique of neoliberal capitalism, wealth disparity and the extreme competition of life, which goes beyond the sensation of ultra-violent and visually striking entertainment. Since its release on 17 September 2021, it has instantly created an unexpected global phenomenon and its universal themes have resonated with not only Koreans but also people in Americas, Europe and other places. Within less than a month, it was viewed by 142 million households and became the platform’s highest-ranking show in more than 90 countries including the USA and the UK in the days of post-lockdown pandemic anxiety (Financial Times 2021; Wall Street Journal 2021). The intensity of the interest in Squid Game has generated countless memes across social media, fueling the show’s popularity among younger audiences and participatory play culture. The show has sparked an online embrace of its unique visuals, characters and costumes as well as a global curiosity for the traditional Korean children’s games that featured in the show, such as a dalgona honeycomb challenge. Users of TikTok, Twitter and YouTube have enthusiastically posted about the show, and the viral nature of Squid Game has created a global commercial and cultural impact. Fans replicate some of the events in the episodes, wearing the show’s iconic green tracksuits and playing “red light, green light” and the paper-flipping game ttakji. Netflix has commodified the show’s success and retailers such as Amazon have rushed to sell the show’s signature outfits worn by the masked guards and the numbered players. A Squid Game pop-up store was opened in Paris, attracting unmanageably large crowds to experience the games played in the show. Squid Game has achieved global “mainstream” visibility in a way that arguably no other non-English-language film or television show has ever managed, leaving a question of if it is the beginning of a new age of non-English-language media and cultural ascendency around the world (BBC 2021). Its unprecedented global popularity marks the latest wave in Korean cultural influence that has been felt throughout the world including Europe. Prior to Squid Game, in 2020 the Korean film Parasite won the most awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay – at the Academy Awards. Western critics commented that 92 years of Oscar history were shattered when this Korean film became the first non-English-language film to win the award for Best Picture, indicating that Hollywood’s traditional overreliance on White stories by White powers, American-Eurocentric cinema and gaze, may finally be ebbing (New York Times 2020; Washington Post 2020). Like Squid Game, the black comedy thriller Parasite is a disturbing social satire on the growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots, infinite darkness of capitalism and class warfare. Its dissection of the class division and the deep sense of social inequality DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-1

2  Youna Kim is perceived to be relevant and common on a global scale. The international acclaim for Parasite underscored Korea’s emergence as a global cultural power, affirmation of the popularity and success of Korean cinema in the Anglophone world. The director of Parasite, Bong Joon-Ho, told international audiences: “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films” (BBC 2020). The popularity of Parasite globally generated a self-identifying collective of fandom called #BongHive, which outpoured support for the film and a host of memes on social media throughout the awards season of the Cannes and the Oscars while encouraging people to watch more non-English films. Parasite’s unprecedented historic success has drawn an unfamiliar spotlight on the creative energy and attractive power of Korean culture that was once colonized or overshadowed for centuries by powerful countries (Kim 2021). It has heightened Korea’s visibility around the world and captured the imagination of a new generation in the social media age. As another historic success, the Korean boyband BTS has topped the US Billboard music charts and had sold-out world concerts at the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, the Wembley Stadium in London and so on. Despite the changes to music access in the digital platform age, songs in language other than English rarely chart in Anglophone countries as pop songs lag behind other industries in globalization and diversity (Hawkins and Walsh 2020). BTS’s rapid ascent and widespread appeal is remarkable in its speed and influence, attracting people beyond K-pop’s traditional regionalized constituency. Empowered by one of the most active fan communities in the world, BTS consolidates the cultural power of Korea and remakes the K-pop history (Kim 2021). The septet is the first K-pop group to be named as “Next Generation Leaders” on a TIME magazine cover, to be invited by the White House to discuss racial discrimination, and to speak at the United Nations, helping to launch a UNICEF campaign “Generation Unlimited” that promotes education, employment and empowerment for young people globally (CNN 2018). The UN has stressed the need for the younger generation to get involved, and thus invited this popular K-pop boyband that attracts and influences the 15–25-age global community, coupled with fast-moving digital technologies and networked communications. Digital technologies and popular culture celebrity have ushered in affective politics, the “soft” means of persuasion and mobilization. Transcending the traditional boundary between the world of entertainment and politics, BTS members as celebrity diplomats tell their own stories and the societal pressures placed on the youth, exuding the positive spirit “Love Yourself ” to young people who have no dreams or no plans of their own. The music of BTS, the film Parasite and the drama Squid Game all delve into the dark side of human life, widening social divisions and inequality. Popular culture is a mirror to the society and social realities that are often unspoken. As productive cultural agents, BTS’s devoted fans called ARMY all over the world passionately promote and spread their idols’ stories and values via social media. The power of digital fandom is a driving force behind the success and attractiveness of BTS. Korean popular culture is emerging not only as a core component of the nation’s economic competitiveness but also as a powerful resource for social influence and cultural diplomacy at a global level. Korean entertainment such as K-pop music, K-film and K-drama as well as fashion, beauty, food and more have spread worldwide and made more people interested in Korean language and culture. The visible wave of Korean popular culture has prompted the Oxford English Dictionary to feature the K-prefix and add more than 20 new words of Korean origin to its latest edition in the recognition of a shift in language usage and lexical innovation beyond the English-speaking world (Guardian 2021). The new words include Hallyu (meaning the Korean Wave of popular culture); food-related entries such as bulgogi (thin beef slices that are marinated and grilled or stir-fried), banchan (a small side dish of vegetables), chimaek (Korean-style fried chicken and beer) and mukbang (livestreams of people eating extraordinary amounts of food and

Introduction  3 talking to online audiences); traditional culture represented by hanbok (the traditional Korean costume) and Hangeul (the Korean alphabet); new formations of existing English words such as skinship (a hybridization of the English words “skin” and “kinship” to express affectionate physical touching between significant others); and aegyo (a type of cuteness or charm considered characteristically Korean), which is often manifested in trendy K-drama and K-pop celebrity. Young people around the world learn the Korean language to sing along with their favorite K-pop such as BTS, to better understand K-drama narrative in its original, or to develop fluid forms of linguistic expression as a part of the social media lexicon. Today, what foreign audiences learn and know about Korea, Korean values and lifestyles will be filtered through the representations of Korean popular culture in this globalizing platform age in which transnational media industries circulate popular imagery. Korean popular culture has become a mediating pedagogical tool that is subject to polysemic interpretation, dominant ideology and negotiated reading. The growing interest in Korean popular culture has further triggered the mobility of foreign students and tourists visiting Korea, facilitating the diverse flows of people, capital, commodities, ideas and desires. Popular culture is a complex and dynamic resource through which mundane and vernacular forms of pop cosmopolitanism are developing, albeit more conspicuous as consumer subjectivity and possibly limited within the realm of global consumer culture (Kim 2011, 2013, 2021). Younger generations – who were born into the digital netizen era and have grown up with smartphones, YouTube, social media and Netflix – may have developed a differentiating marker of identity through an open and cosmopolitan consumption practice transcending different languages and cultural prejudices. Pop cosmopolitans’ embrace of transnational popular culture and of cultural difference represents an escape route out of the parochialism of their local communities in order to enter a broader sphere of cultural experience, articulate social reality in question, and imagine sociocultural and political transformation. They may look for a relevance to their life experience, desires and aspirations that are not being met by Euro-American popular imagery. The rise of social media-oriented, individualized, mobile-yet-networked generations creates a diverse, outward-looking, eclectic and distinguishable taste for transnational popular culture, deliberately disembedding themselves from the local cultural conventions of previous generations. In the past, the representation of Korea in the Western popular imagination was a very minor player stuck between the powerful USA, Japan and China and known predominantly for the Korean War history of the 1950s and the timeless backward Other, or for the modern export of the “hard” of cars and electronics products. National images of Korea were negatively associated with the demilitarized zone, division and political disturbances, but today such images are gradually giving way to the vitality of trendy, transnational entertainers, cutting-edge digital technology and the cool image of Korean popular culture. Historically, since the late 1990s Korea has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational popular culture, referred to as the “Korean Wave” or “Hallyu.” Initiated by the export of television drama, it has expanded to a wide range of cultural products encompassing K-pop music, film, webtoon, animation, digital games, esports, smartphones, fashion, cosmetics, food and lifestyles. While its popularity was mainly concentrated in neighboring Asian markets in the past, today it is winning the hearts of people in Americas, the Middle East and, most recently, Europe. This is the first instance of a major global circulation of Korean popular culture in history (Kim 2013, 2021). The emergence of spreadable social media and streaming services such as Netflix has extended the reach of Korean trends, creating new realms for cultural disposition in the evolving entertainment landscape. The global circulation of Korean popular culture is not simply a planned flow that originates from Korea and transnational corporations, but more by accident it is a multi-directional flow and a highly interactive collaborative process that is created, and possibly sustained, by digitally empowered fan communities.

4  Youna Kim Its success can be partly attributed to the digital fans’ participatory culture and affective labor in instant uploading, remixing, translating or sharing with wider audiences, while influencing the (re)production, circulation and reception of Korean popular culture. Transformative fans of younger generations are the mediating contributors to the shaping of de-Westernizing cultural flows and the Korean Wave’s sustainable power in the affective economy of neoliberal capitalism. Playful digital leisure, with the Internet’s simultaneous place as playground and factory (Scholz 2013), has changed the way people consume popular culture and construct its communicative meaning for themselves, while bypassing traditional arbiters of taste such as Western corporations, governments and professional critics and leading to an anarchic democracy of free choice (Spracklen 2015). New media technologies are more widely available to audiences than traditional forms, operating within the popular realm and providing unpredictable opportunities for radical transition and innovation in the new era of the postcolonial (Atia and Houlden 2019). The globalization of media content from once-subalternized or peripheral nations is a facet of de-centralizing multiplicity of global cultural flows today. The highly mobile and complex nature of Korean popular culture as a postcolonial subversive power is now a potent global force providing significant underpinning for the generation of high value and meaning for the nation. The Korean government sees this unexpected global phenomenon as a rare opportunity to embrace a cultural weapon and reinforce the nation through pop nationalism. As a pronounced example of the crossover of culture, economy and politics, the Korean Wave is seen to be an integral resource for the creation of a dynamic image of the nation through soft power (Kim 2013, 2019, 2021). In international politics, soft power is defined as the ability to attract and influence international audiences without coercion (Nye 2004, 2008). Although cultural power may be “soft,” popular culture can make a difference and can affect the relations of power in all spheres. Although the links between popular culture and politics are sometimes dismissed or casually mocked, popular culture has emerged as an important site for the articulation and exploration of politics in the world (Street et al. 2013). Korea serves as an interesting case for exploration of how the serious world of politics and the commercially produced, popular cultural entertainment intersect in the cultural lives of people today. As a part of the country’s statecraft, the Korean Wave celebrities are appropriated by the government to play a supporting role in a realm of diplomacy among world leaders and are appointed as honorary ambassadors for the country to use their brand power in cultural promotion abroad. Possessing multifaceted celebrity capital, they help the state to soften diplomatic tensions, refashion and rebrand the once-colonized nation as a “cool Korea” brand for the global public. Celebrity diplomats combine the assertive individualism characteristic of the West with an appreciation of universal or cosmopolitan values, and the mode of operation is decidedly populist (Cooper 2016). In the social media age, collaborative creativity “from above” (nation-state, institutions, media industries) and “from below” (digital fans as grassroots intermediaries, producers-consumers, ­publics) – albeit the intersections of the two forces are unpredictable – can appropriate popular culture to make its origin nation, language and culture attractive to international audiences and open possibilities for soft power. Not only the top-down approach but also the bottom-up, voluntary and affective participation play a significant role in spreading popular culture and mediating soft power, although the bottom-up actors or their natural, horizontal, cultural influence do not necessarily operate coherently with the top-down governmental or media actors. Rapid cultural globalization and the mundane use of digital technologies and spreadable social media present unprecedented opportunities and challenges in a constant process of formation and transformation of identity at individual, national, regional and global levels. As Korea begins to create a new cultural impact on the world and seeks to boost its soft power, the academy pays serious attention to Korean popular culture and its political, socioeconomic and cultural implications in historical specificity and global configuration of power today.

Introduction  5 What is the unique appeal of Korean popular culture? Indeed, what is “Korean” in Korean popular culture? What has led to the current global wave of Korean trends? What is the place of the popular in the postcolonial? How does popular culture connect to various dimensions of power and identity in society? Why is it crucial to take popular culture seriously in a converging world today? This book considers a wide variety of Korean popular culture and its intersections with the important micro-macro politics of identity in the digital social media age. Considering popular culture as a complex terrain on which the politics of identity is played out, it explores the multifaceted meanings of Korean popular culture at micro-macro levels and the processes of cultural production, representation, circulation and consumption in historical and global contexts. As the book will demonstrate, popular culture is an integral resource for the creation of new and complex spaces of identity, social meanings and imaginations deeply embedded in the fabric of society. More than merely distractive, trivializing, playful culture unworthy of serious studies, popular culture interacts with the profound dimensions and politics of identity encompassing gender, sexuality, class, age, race, nation and so on, as a shared constant battlefield in which power, difference, resistance and negotiation take place (Storey 1997; Kim 2005, 2008, 2019, 2021, 2022; Brandt and Clare 2018). Popular culture amounts to something more than mass-produced capitalistic entertainment and leisure activity, since relations of power/ politics are inescapably intersected with the culture/ideology landscape that is always subject to negotiation, contestation and tension. The patterns and structures of power in society, and how these are constituted, accepted or resisted, are reflected in popular culture and the way it is made sense of by people in everyday life. The speed and volume of popular culture today is closely bound up with the wider structures of political-economic power of the transnational media, digital platforms and neoliberal capitalism. While not denying the obvious imperialist power of Western, particularly American, infrastructures and dominance over the global culture landscape and the continuing significance of Western media imperialism, this book draws attention to a forgotten understudy by exploring the dynamic role and place of Korean popular culture in the intertwined contexts of globalization, digitalization, social inequalities and uneven power structures. What can be learned from Korean popular culture?

From Cultural Imperialism to Reverse Colonization? Popular culture as dominantly Western and more specifically American culture, with the assumption of its homogenizing influence and standardization, has a long history within the theoretical mapping of media and cultural globalization. Globalization has been influenced above all by developments in systems of communication and media, dating back to the late 1960s, and many of the most visible cultural expressions of globalization were American (Giddens 1999). Reflecting the mark of old imperial connections, the “media imperialism” theory was mainly fashioned by communication and media scholars in the 1960s and 1970s – a period when the US and Soviet superpowers battled for supremacy while the postcolonial non-aligned movement struggled for the New World Information and Communication Order – and an important factor was the combination of the global power of the USA and the imperial legacy of Britain, which effectively make English the global “second” language, if not the language of choice (Schiller 1976; Herman and McChesney 1997; Boyd-Barrett and Mirrlees 2020). During this time, the commercial media moved across nations and began to consolidate and establish empires across formerly distinct media industries, and media imperialism was primarily applied to the media power and influence of the American electronic empire, with a dominant economic, cultural and military position in the global order. Limited in the sole application of military force by countervailing power and confronting multiplying challenges, American imperialism developed complementary strategies and

6  Youna Kim instrumentation for safeguarding its global position, in which the ideological sphere and the cultural-communications sources of power received ever more attention (Schiller 1976). Sophisticated techniques of persuasion and cultural penetration became more important and more deliberate in the exercise of American power, by globally selling ideas, tastes, preferences and beliefs. The theory of media imperialism was deployed in studies of the considerable influence of US-based media corporations in and on the media systems and cultures of weaker nations, especially those in the Global South. The popular media were taken to be a key instrument of cultural domination and reflected unequal power relationships between countries that dominate the production and dissemination of global popular culture and those that import it without proportionate reciprocation. The global spread of popular culture was perceived to be highly uneven in its consequences. Global media-cultural power of the USA, and the West more generally, over the rest of the world was presented in the “cultural imperialism” theory reminding the ongoing links between present domination and a colonial past. The great majority of discourses of cultural imperialism placed the media – including popular film, music, television, advertising and the news – at the center of debates and considered the discursive power of the media in multifaceted spheres of life. Although the media may be analytically separable from other aspects of culture, the media are intimately connected with these other aspects in terms of people’s lived experience and have a significant mediating effect (Tomlinson 1991). Cultural imperialism construed the spread of Western imagery and culture as a new form of imperialism, which was more insidious and more effective in cementing the dependency of the postcolonial periphery than the fiscal crudities of earlier decades (Golding and Harris 1997). It was invoked to mean that center dominated periphery, imperialists held domination over dependencies, and especially the appeal of the Western media was a significant vehicle for economic and cultural influence in other countries. Popular media culture became an integral part of the US system of global political and social control and corresponded to the interests of other powerful capitalist societies. “Media imperialism” and “cultural imperialism,” the terms often used interchangeably, acknowledged how the phenomena of imperialism extended well beyond media industries and popular cultural products to encompass economic models, patterns of governance, education systems, languages, norms and values – whole ways of life (Boyd-Barrett and Mirrlees 2020). Made-inAmerica imagery, messages and lifestyles were globally circulated and imitated, while defining social reality and thus influencing the basic social arrangements of living, including the organization of work, the use of “free” time and the creation and extension of consumer society (Schiller 1976). Since the 1980s there has been a dramatic restructuring of national media culture industries, along with a wave of global liberalization and the emergence of a genuinely global commercial market accelerated and dominated by mostly US-based transnational media conglomerates functioning as the new missionaries of corporate capitalism (Herman and McChesney 1997). The broader effect of thoroughgoing commercialization is the rapid dissemination of the popular culture developed in the dominant commercial centers to the far corners of the globe. Partially hidden in the messages of television drama, film and music lyrics, for example, popular imperialism carries across borders some of the fundamental values of the West, such as individualism, consumerism, modernity and the meaning of development itself, democracy, skepticism of authority and the rights of women and minorities, to a degree. Audiences living under authoritarian regimes or repressive traditional rules can interpret the incoming foreign messages according to their socioeconomic and political conditions and can question and negotiate the given ideological order of their society. What is “foreign” in imported popular culture is not only always a question of national difference but also equally a question of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, generation or any other marker of social difference; moreover, the imported

Introduction  7 foreign may be less foreign than differences already established by class or generation in the local (Storey 2014). The imported foreign may be seen as a force of liberation and may be used against the prevailing unequal power relations of the local. The global dissemination of popular culture promotes American capitalist values and interests in a process of popular imperialism. Cultural domination by advanced Western, particularly American, capitalist societies is perceived to be pervasive around the world and leading to the homogenization of global culture and a corresponding diminution in the vitality and standing of local languages, traditions and national identities (Miller 2015). The concern with cultural imperialism and its dominant value system has resonated in recipient countries’ nationalistic media and heritage, cultural policy, anti-Americanism and everyday talk among local populations. The concern is not only about the imposition of supposedly “American” values on local populations but also about the consequence that corporate-produced mass entertainment will ultimately move everyone’s values toward those associated with mass consumer capitalism. The dramatic expansion in the global dissemination of American popular culture and its capacity for cultural imperialism reveal that the interaction of different cultures will inevitably be conflictual, which might occur through resistance and outright violence or by undermining the foreign culture and installing a new, dominant culture in its place (Crothers 2013). As an externally deterministic theory, cultural imperialism has tended to overlook the internal dynamics and tensions within recipient nations, the agency of active and critical audiences and the local and oppositional creativity consequently emerging as a defensive counter-force. The structural focus of the theory does not adequately reflect the complexity of intercultural interactions and is no longer tenable in the emerging alternative cultural flows against the US-led global flows and hegemony. Since the 1990s, the media and cultural imperialism theory has been significantly challenged by the multi-directional contra-flows of media culture originating from once-subalternized or peripheral countries and serving the cultural priorities of people in rapidly expanding regional or geo-linguistic markets, such as South Asia, East Asia and South America. Global influence is more diffuse as global cultural flows are not necessarily one-way from the media-rich core to the media-poor periphery, due to the increasing contra-flows from India, Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Brazil, Mexico and so on. The movement of people across national borders and in-between cross-cultural experiences have also facilitated, and have been facilitated by, the new flows of media culture. New cultural flows are apt to be heterogeneous, multi-directional and unpredictable, creating temporary portals or contact zones between geographically dispersed cultures in an age of media convergence (Jenkins 2006). In the multi-vocal global media sphere, power may not just be concentrated in one center but distributed among many mini-centers, and the global circulation of non-Western popular culture can contribute to a more cosmopolitan culture and in the long run perhaps affect national, regional and global political dynamics (Thussu 2007). These changes by much more direct involvement of non-Western countries point to a curious situation of “reverse colonization” (Giddens 1999: 16), meaning that non-Western countries influence developments in the West in the era of globalization. Reverse colonization suggests that globalization today is only partly Westernization and is becoming increasingly decentered in a runaway world and that its effects are felt as much in Western countries as elsewhere. The concept of globalization, featuring in the 1990s and focusing on interdependencies, networks and transformations of space and time, appears to stand in opposition to the discourses of Western-centric cultural imperialism. Considering the major and more recent competitors of the global neoliberal media, the study of media and cultural imperialism has focused on the whole gamut of media culture in the context of the many dimensions of variant imperialisms – old, new and emerging (Boyd-Barrett and Mirrlees 2020). The proliferation of the transnational media, satellite and cable television, the Internet, online networks and mediated relationships, enabled by sophisticated digital technologies and

8  Youna Kim the deregulation and privatization of the media, has rapidly created new culture landscapes offering enormous challenges and opportunities. The social media and digital platforms are viewed as a new force for radical change and shifts. The amateurized media universe (MotrescuMayes and Aasman 2019), digital co-creation and spreadability play a key role in enabling the shifts. Audiences, not simply as consumers of preconstructed content but as co-creative grassroots participants, are playing an active role in shaping the flows of media culture for their own purposes in an increasingly networked culture of spreadable media (Jenkins et al. 2013). Media cultural content does not remain in fixed borders but circulates in unpredicted and often unpredictable directions, through the bottom-up disruptive practice of creative digital labor, both material and immaterial, which encourages new users to participate in transnationally imagined communities. The pace of change in global media and culture has accelerated today, and some of the most significant and far-reaching changes in the commercially driven, consumer-oriented global environment over the past two decades have been the rise of Asia and the Asian media sphere. Asia, with some of the most wired populations on the globe, is at the very forefront of the consumption, circulation and production of new media culture in the neoliberal era of networked entertainment (Kim 2022). Social media entertainment constitutes a more radical cultural and content challenge to the established media and regulatory regimes, informing a qualitatively different globalization dynamic that has scaled with great velocity (Cunningham and Craig 2019). The diverse borderless media have penetrated the emerging and lucrative markets of Asia, capturing the imaginations of people who were once accustomed to national media culture under government controls. Although the power of Western cultural content and infrastructures can still be felt globally, East Asia is already a productive network of media capitals challenging West-centered popular culture (Iwabuchi et al. 2017). The extraordinary growth of popular media exports from Korea, known as the Korean Wave or Hallyu, is a key example of the de-centralizing multiplicity of global cultural flows today (Kim 2007, 2013, 2021). Korean popular culture can be viewed as a counterweight to Western cultural influence, or a postcolonial, alternative and competing power. The concept of soft power, originated from the field of international politics, has become a significant marker of popular culture not only in Korea but also across Asia. Attractive culture is one of soft power resources creating general influence and long-term diffuse effects in international relations (Nye 2004, 2008). In today’s digitally connected mobile world marked by the expansion of markets, networks, consumers and plurality of cultures, transnational popular culture can be an important resource for soft power – a cultural weapon to entice, attract and influence people without the use of violence, military or economic force in order to obtain preferred outcomes. The creative culture industry has taken center stage in Asia, with an increased recognition that the transnational spread of popular culture not only boosts the economy but also potentially creates a nation’s dynamic image and soft power. Popular culture as a soft power resource in light of the digital evolution has been recognized in Korea (Kim 2013, 2019, 2021), India (Thussu 2013), Japan (Iwabuchi 2015) and China (Voci and Hui 2018) as the media capitals of these countries have created visible, regional and global flows of pop music, television drama, film, animation and digital games increasingly challenging the power of Western popular culture. The globalization of cultural content from Asia has emerged as subversive soft power resources that challenge the Western hegemony of dominant ideas, values and ways of life. But at the same time, numerous and diverse forms of popular culture in Asia are those mainly connected to global production, and many hybrid forms that lie in between the continuum of global-local production and circulation networks (Fung 2013). With no clearly defined center or periphery, but often through Western transnational corporations and digital platforms such as Netflix, Asia’s highly popular culture is being connected and reconnected to the rest of the world, indicating

Introduction  9 the enduring continuity of Western political-economic and cultural influence. The imaginary Asia is a key mediating site for the forces and movements of de-colonization and de-imperialization, especially in the domains of culture, subjectivity and knowledge production, confronting the legacies and continuing tensions of imperialism (Chen 2010). While Western and primarily American hegemony is increasingly disputed, especially in the formerly colonized countries, and the dominated are gradually recognizing the importance of cultural independence, the popular culture of Asia has also embraced, rather than rejected, Western aesthetics, models, capital and universal formula of success, and hybridization of cultural forms has become inevitably common. Korea, a once-colonized nation, is not an exception in the historical formation of cultural hybridization. Historically, Korea faced Japanese colonialism (1910–1945), the arbitrary division by the United States and the Soviet Union into opposed states, North and South (1948), the Korean War (1950–1953), and the military rule and successive authoritarian regimes (1961–1993) with dual processes of modernization and democratization that involved infringements of freedom in political and artistic expression. In the Japanese colonial era, the phenomenon of the popular emerged with the complex forms of a unique colonial modernity and hegemony, as modern technologies and institutions provided multiple possibilities for increased political and cultural oppression or governmentality by the colonial state while simultaneously creating new oppositional spaces for political resistance, cultural expression and nationalism (Robinson 1994; Shin and Robinson 1999). Modern education, increased literacy, transnational influences and the emergence of the media, such as print, radio broadcasts and cinema, and their dissemination of a modern popular culture interacted to create, transform and maintain colonial hegemony. In the postwar era, the national – whether cinema, culture or identity – was formed in the global flow of images, capital and discourse, and particularly by the wealth of the neocolonialist American influence and popular media that inundated Korea after 1953 (Chung 2014). As in non-Western and postcolonial societies, Korea’s experience of popular culture was not as an organically developed set of cultural aesthetics and practices, but as a hybrid form that was mediated by a foreign political presence. Anticolonial nationalist ideology was deeply embedded in postcolonial society and cultural productions that transcoded the dominant, nationalist view of history into accessible narrative and imagery for Korean viewers (An 2018). Korea’s struggle over cultural hegemony and ambivalent sense of identity, the self and the Other, nationalism and modernity have been articulated, challenged and contested through popular media culture in light of the postcolonial. The dark age of Korean popular culture from the 1970s under the authoritarian regimes experienced two decades of increased censorship fueled by heightened Cold War ideology, anti-Communism and state-led developmentalist modernization. Popular culture during much of the 1970s was reduced to sanitary forms of entertainment that were sanctioned by the oppressive state, and cultural studies eventually emerged in the late 1980s, when cultural politics gained ground in the movement for social democracy and Korea’s remarkable economic development facilitated the newfound freedom to produce and disseminate a cast of cultural output (Kim and Choe 2014). In the late 1990s, the Korean culture industry was developed as a national project competing within globalization, not against it, for socioeconomic, cultural and political reasons (Kim 2007, 2013). Globalization had long been accompanied by the fear of Western and Japanese cultural invasion, but the sense of postcolonial anxieties coming from the opening of the market to the West and Japan has rather strengthened and benefited the Korean culture industry. Since the 1997 IMF financial crisis, the Korean government has thoroughly re-examined the process of modernization and targeted the export of popular media culture as a new economic initiative, one of the major sources of foreign revenue vital for the country’s economic survival and advancement. Korea, with limited natural resources, sought to reduce its

10  Youna Kim dependence on a manufacturing base under competitive threat from China and promote a chimney-less industry. Trade experts called for the nation to shift its key development strategy to fostering overseas marketing for culture, digital technology and services, including films, television programs, popular music, digital games and distribution services. The government has striven to capitalize on Korean popular culture and given the same national support in export promotion that was once provided to electronics and cars. The Korean Wave started from the efforts of private sectors, but state-led developmentalist nationalism has played a key role in the speed of growth. Systematic operation by the governmentality of the developmentalist state and institutional strategies by the industry have combined to produce the condition for the rise of the Korean Wave. The Korean Wave embedded in K-pop music, films, dramas, digital games and so on is in essence all things hybrid – a fusion of local, regional and Western cultures, forms, styles, genres, narratives or identities – in part accelerated by digital technologies and social media, yet without necessarily eliminating the best of Korea’s distinctive traditional values, emotional aesthetics and expressive performances (Kim 2013). Having accommodated foreign cultures from China, Japan and America for a long period of time, Koreans have historically acquired experience of embracing, appropriating and reinventing cultures into their own flair at a conscious and a subconscious level. Such a process can create a new, dialogical space where intercultural practices, discourses and representations are variously articulated and continuously negotiated in tensions and interactions of differential power. Korean cinema, for example, is one of the most successful commercial cinemas operating now outside Hollywood. The Korean Wave films appear to constitute a counter-cinema that seeks to resist the global cultural standardization by Hollywood power and create a unique space. But at the same time, many Korean filmmakers have blended Hollywood styles and genres with characteristically Korean stories and themes, such as the division of the nation, the Korean War, Confucian values and struggles in extraordinarily compressed modernity, which uniquely appeal to international audiences. By embracing Hollywood, rather than rejecting it, successful transnational Korean films display hybridity. Bong Joon-Ho, the director of Parasite, has a peculiar way of hybridizing the familiar Hollywood conventions with distinctively Korean sociopolitical realities that often deny the reassurances of the happy Hollywood ending (Lee 2020). K-pop music is perhaps the most hybridized cosmopolitan consumerist form of the Korean Wave, or a futuristic pastiche that sounds like a utopian blending of all contemporary musical genres (Kim 2013, 2021). Its intertextuality, fusion, mutation and transformation in specific Korean contexts make K-pop a distinctive site of global cultural flows (Song 2019; Anderson 2020). K-pop’s development into a globally recognized culture owes much to the historical and cultural contexts from which it emerged (Fuhr 2016). The phenomenon of K-pop invites insights into contemporary Korea with the terrain of the past – traditional Korean music, colonial and postcolonial Japanese influence and the impact of American popular music (Lie 2015). K-pop is characterized by the transcultural hybridity of popular culture. It is common to see the linguistic hybridization, inserting English titles and phrases and easily switching between Korean and English, which may enable wider audiences around the world to sing along without knowing the Korean language and without having a sense of the depth of Korean culture. K-pop’s global popularity has relatively little to do with the aesthetic cultural values that can be identified as uniquely Korean, although K-pop’s representative stars and the Korean Wave are treasured national sources of soft power promoted by the nation and cultural nationalism (Kim 2013). The popularity of K-drama is becoming a global phenomenon beyond an Asian regional cultural economy, and Western streaming services such as Netflix are playing a key role in K-drama’s global ascension (Kim 2021). Morphed from a national media company to an international one between 2010 and 2016, the Internetdistributed television service Netflix is significantly changing the spatial dynamics of global

Introduction  11 television distribution and the fundamental logics through which television travels, introducing new mobilities into the system, and challenging the power of international conglomerates (Lobato 2019). Netflix fuels and is fueled by audience desire for nostalgic content, as both a platform for audiences to rewatch beloved content from the past and a creator of original content with nostalgic impulses, while simultaneously connecting audiences to issues of diversity (Pallister 2019). As a part of diverse representation, Korean drama becomes both a unique producer of modernity and nostalgia and an emotional access point for self-reflexive and nostalgic responses. The successful manifestation of K-drama includes the dystopian modern critique Squid Game (2021) and the historical supernatural thriller Kingdom (2019, 2020) co-produced and distributed by Netflix. Complex hybrid formations demonstrate the ongoing play of Western, and more accurately American, power in a postcolonial world in its contemporary manifestations. Even the processes of successful contra-flows today, such as the Korean Wave, are multiply structured, mutually reinforcing and sometimes conflicting, while reconfiguring the asymmetrical relations of power within hybridization processes (Kim 2013). Hybridity captures the spirit of the contemporary times with its obligatory celebration of cultural difference, cultural pluralism and fusion, but it can be complicit with structures of inequality and uneven development within and across societies; thus, the relationship between hybridity and power should be critically interrogated in the analysis of popular culture (Kraidy 2005). Although cultural hybridization is the inherent end of globalization, it does not always lead to equal cultural exchange but to new systems of power and the continuing influence of stronger global imperial powers such as the USA. Today’s cultural flows and activities may be increasingly multi-directional but are still very unequal in the digital age, in which giant communications and media corporations own the legacy, popular and digital media, and social media interaction is integral to and compelled by the business model of platform imperialism (Boyd-Barrett and Mirrlees 2020). Despite the emergence of little cultural imperialisms spread from non-Western countries including Korea that evince considerable impact within a given geo-cultural zone and worldwide, they are themselves structurally weaker than and shaped by stronger global imperial powers with entrenched capital, production facilities and delivery mechanisms. Cultural identity in the precariousness of the Korean Wave’s unexpected success is an ambiguous signifier, increasingly facing a dilemma in reconciling issues around the construction of national and local identities, while simultaneously trying to sustain a viable and popular culture industry in the face of competition from, and collaboration with, Western productions, capitalism and neoliberalism (Kim 2013, 2021). The Korean Wave, with the hybrid nature of cultural products, flows, audiences and identities, ineluctably poses a question: Precisely, whose culture is represented? What is “Korean” in the Korean Wave? Korean popular culture is not really Korean in the sense that it has not evolved from Korean traditional values but is a mixture of diverse cultural influences. In the context of hybridization, the very idea of Korean-ness, lesser Korean or un-Korean, is a floating signifier whose meaning is contingent upon the appropriation and negotiation by global forces and people, with intended or unintended consequences. What Korean-ness signifies or what meanings are represented in the Korean Wave, and how far these representations map on to established and dominant cultural formations, have to be decided by the indeterminacy and fluidity of meaning-making by people in various contexts in the processes of global cultural change. Hybridization of culture can be appropriated by cultural agents, subaltern people or minorities as “new spaces and resources” (Bhabha 1994) through which they construct spaces of identity, reflexive narratives and subcultures, or ironically rediscover the past and the present that they have forgotten or neglected, as much as the future of the “becoming of self in the continuous play of history, culture and power” (Hall 1990) in a de-territorialized, cosmopolitan world of popular culture. Today, popular culture is

12  Youna Kim ever more complex, more interactive, more hybrid and more commodified in the unevenly interconnected world of the digital social media. The significance of new media technology lies in its capacity to create and spread meanings, with the power to create both identification and difference. Popular and oppositional use of technology such as the Internet can be an agent of cultural change and another battleground through which ongoing struggles over meaning, pleasure, knowledge and power are conducted (Fiske 2010). Popular culture is communicative in nature, as it is not only about artifacts or consuming but also about intimate relationships with the artifacts, experiencing, feeling and sharing the experience with others (Herrmann and Herbig 2016). The discursive relationship between popular culture, power and identity deserves macro-micro exploration in political, economic and cultural conditions influencing individual lives and experiences within and across societies.

Why Study Popular Culture? There is no universally accepted definition of popular culture, but some of the key characteristics and approaches comprise and define popular culture (Storey 1997; Delaney and Madigan 2016; Waskul and Vannini 2016). Popular culture is generally recognized as the vernacular or people’s culture that is widely favored or meaningful for society at a given point in time. As the culture of the people, popular culture both constitutes and is constituted by people’s everyday experiences and practices. Popular culture is saturated in the mundane doings of people, and it is also rooted in commonplace rituals that are informed by habits, routines, loosely scripted customs and informal social and cultural performances (Waskul and Vannini 2016). Because of its commonality, quotidian experiences and practices, popular culture both reflects and articulates people’s everyday life, or a particular way of life. In a broader sense, popular culture may refer to the discursive forms of expression and identity that forge a sense of belonging, community or differentiation, and that are characteristic of a particular society at a given time. Today’s popular culture is often influenced and visibly manifested by the mass media and the proliferating forms of entertainment, such as popular music, film, television, webtoon, digital games, esports, live streaming social media and the Internet. As a dynamic and unstable field, popular culture is often subject to rapid change, especially in a highly technological, mobile and connected world in which people can transcend but also reinforce national and cultural boundaries by the pervasive entertainment, social media and smartphones. The study of popular culture has adopted a critical approach that focuses on the political economy of the culture industries and the production, representation and circulation of media and entertainment commodities. This approach also focuses on signifying practices and the production of meaning, including dominant ideology that carries the interests of the economically and politically powerful, and that works in the maintenance of the status quo in society. Ideology is a crucial concept in the study of popular culture; all texts are ultimately political, as they offer competing ideological significations of the way the world is or should be (Storey 1997). By attempting to win people to particular ways of seeing the world, the dominant ideology of popular culture works to reproduce the social conditions and relations necessary for the economic conditions and relations of capitalism to continue. Because of its industrial link to standardized production, commodification and consumerist capitalism, popular culture is generally perceived as a disposable, superficial and inferior kind of work, especially compared to the assumed authenticity and sophistication of high culture. The term “popular culture” is used to describe mass-produced cultural products or media “distractions,” and popular culture is always defined, implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to high culture, and thus viewed as a residual category, texts and practices that fail to meet the standards to qualify as high culture. In this largely negative sense, popular culture is presumed to function as an ideological route to false consciousness, mere escapism,

Introduction  13 popular pleasure or cultural opium diverting the subordinated groups of people, particularly in terms of social class, gender and race, from recognizing the structural causes of their oppression and disempowerment in society. On the other hand, the study of popular culture has adopted an equally critical approach that focuses on the processes and consequences of consumption – how people actually consume, appropriate, make sense of media and entertainment commodities, or make them habitable in their everyday life. Of course, popular culture is produced by the culture industries, but what they produce are a repertoire of products and services that can, or cannot, “become” popular culture. In this perspective, popular culture can be defined as the “art of making do” or poplar “tactics” (de Certeau 1984) for multifaceted purposes, such as the gratification of unmet needs and desires, the construction of new cultural identities, social distinction, negotiation and symbolic resistance to control by the power and tastes of the dominant. Notions of media dominance and audience activity are mutually complementary rather than exclusive because politico-economic structure and sociocultural agency round each other off (Kraidy 2005). The commercially popular need not be synonymous with the passively and hopelessly conformist; but often extremely commodified postcolonial outputs can also be a site for experimentation, contestation and resistance (Atia and Houlden 2019). Popular culture is a site of struggle as well as domination, functioning as an integral resource that can be mobilized as a part of the practices of everyday life. It is deeply embedded in the multiple discourses of everyday life, power and identity. With a certain obscurity, everyday life has replaced popular culture as a primary concept in cultural studies (Storey 2014). From a symbolic interactionist perspective, popular culture and everyday life are inseparable and impossible to understand unless analyzed in relation to one another, since popular culture as an assemblage of ideas, practices, experiences, representations, material objects and other “things” and phenomena permeates everyday life, the day-to-day existence of people (Waskul and Vannini 2016). It is in the everyday that the functional and the cultural dimensions of the popular media are worked through, by various ways in which people engage with and incorporate the popular media into the familiar, ordinary and more or less secure routines of their everyday life, while constructing relationships and meanings within it (Kim 2005, 2008, 2011, 2012). The unique character and significance of popular culture can be understood within the everyday social context in which engagement and meaning take place. New media technologies such as the Internet use are continuous with and embedded in other social spaces, not just happening within a virtual world that is somehow disconnected from the everyday, but happening within mundane social structures and relations that they may transform but cannot escape (Miller and Slater 2000). Four dimensions, at least, can be highlighted concerning the significance of popular culture and its relationship to everyday life (Kim 2005, 2008). First, everyday life is the domain where economic and material as well as cultural and symbolic resources are made available or not in order to engage meaningfully with the surrounding world. It is the ordinariness of the everyday where the different portions of power and resources, their presence or absence, and the significance of such difference and inequality largely determined by social structure are most keenly felt in its invisibility. Everyday life is thus a site of struggle. The trivial and petty side of life, the humble and disappointing aspects of social praxis, and the suffering and the “misery of everyday life” (Lefebvre 1971: 35) are a battleground in which a dialectical relationship between the dominating and the dominated is displayed in tension. This tension is inevitable in struggling to manage the unwanted influence of domination, in making meaning and order as well as pleasure of everyday life. Second, however, it is also the domain of everyday life where the individual and collective capacities of people to create their own life world are realized and achieved through everyday practices, albeit with different power and resources. It is in everyday life that genuine

14  Youna Kim “creations” are achieved, those creations that people produce as part of the process of becoming human; the human life world that is not defined simply by historical, ideological and political super-structures, by totality or society as a whole, but defined by this intermediate and mediating level of everyday life or the “power of everyday life” (Lefebvre 1971: 37). Everyday life is both structured and structuring, making and remaking meaning, while acknowledging its dynamics and possibilities for transformation. Everyday life becomes the site for, and the product of, the working out of significance (Silverstone 1994). Popular culture is among sources of the creations, the working out of significance in everyday practices. It gives shape to the social and cultural environments of everyday life and provides a framework for making sense of the world; herein lies the possibility of a multitude of meanings to emerge and circulate. The circulation and movement of meaning, or mediation (MartinBarbero 1993), involves a constant yet dialectical transformation of meaning with consequences, whether intended or unintended, significant or insignificant. The significance of cultural consumption practices can be understood as a creative, dynamic and transformative process, often involving active and intended engagement. The capacity to make sense of the world, create everyday life and sustain as well as challenge its meaning has become dependent on the mediation which is increasingly present in the daily exigencies of people and integrated into ongoing ways of living and being. Third, in the sphere of everyday life people create and sustain their own experiences, both lived and mediated, in many different and specific ways. Popular culture is central to contemporary everyday experience – as a mediating, not determining, process through which people constitute and reconstitute experiences in their distinctiveness within a shared yet contested and highly differentiated social space governed by different power, resources and constraints. This often-invisible and taken-for-granted category of experience should be made visible and confronted to understand how subjects are constituted as different, how they operate differently and how they contest the workings of given ideological systems, in other words to politically rework the “project of making experience visible” (Scott 1992). The purpose of this project is to manifest this easily ignored hidden world that has been suppressed and to open new possibilities of the challenges of the experiences and activities in the ordinariness of the world. Finally, in the sphere of everyday life ordinary and taken-for-granted experiences and activities emerge as a significant and defining characteristic of what takes place in society as a whole, its social transformations. The society and its structure or macro-processes of structuration are reproduced within the micro-operation of everyday interaction of individual subjects (Giddens 1984). What takes place in the everyday life of people within society is a crucial determinant of what makes the society as a whole, which leads to an understanding of what lies behind cultural change, the cause and consequence of this progressive, or possibly regressive, mediation of everyday life (Silverstone 1994). To understand a contested process of cultural change and a fundamental characterization of the nature of such change, it is necessary to look at and understand what people are doing in their everyday lives and in their relationships to popular c­ ulture – where and how meanings are created and contested, structures are accepted and challenged, and the possibility of change emerging in that tension. The everyday is a site for significant action, and cultural consumption is seen to be at the heart of the “politics of everyday life” (de Certeau 1984) through its poaching, tireless, invisible, quiet but potentially transformative activity. Although cultural consumption may not lead to dramatic social or political change in the short run, and although the importance of the transformations generated by popular culture in the long run are problematically obscured by the attention to short-run immediate effects, people’s mundane changes, imagination and critical reflection triggered by popular culture and expressed in the practices of everyday life can be the basis of social constitution or political

Introduction  15 subjects (Kim 2005, 2008, 2013, 2019). Social transformations become possible through reflexivity, the capacity for rethinking, rearticulating and revising of the givens of prevailing dimensions of social construction, which emerges through the dynamics of everyday practices and the realization of their otherwise denied potential in an increasingly mediated world of popular culture.

An Invitation to Reflection Increased flows of media and popular culture can be seen as important resources for the triggering and operating of everyday reflexivity (Kim 2005, 2008, 2013, 2019). The popular media are central to everyday reflexivity – the capacity to monitor action and its contexts to keep in touch with the grounds of everyday life, self-confront uncertainties and understand the relationships between cause and effect yet never quite control the complex dynamics of everyday life. Reflexivity is an everyday practice. It is intrinsic to human activity, since human beings routinely keep in touch with the grounds of what they do, what they think and what they feel as a circular feedback mechanism. But there is a different and significant process in contemporary everyday life, which has changed the very nature of reflexivity by providing conditions for increased capacities for reflexivity “in the light of new information or knowledge” (Giddens 1991). This reflexivity involves the routine incorporation of new information or knowledge into environments of action that are thereby reconstituted or reorganized. Everyday people have the ability to reflect on the social conditions of their existence and to change them accordingly, going beyond traditional markers and the givens of social order (Beck et al. 1994). Of course, this reflexivity is experienced differently by different social subjects in different social locations, defining those societies as distinctive. Reflexivity need not be understood as a universal capacity of subjects or a “generalized experience that cuts across social divides” (Beck 1998), but to be understood in specific lifeworld contexts where reflexivity arises unevenly and often ambiguously with competing reflexivities. There is a need to recognize situated reflexivity, specifying the different experiences of reflexivity situated within different social spaces. With the increased capacity for reflexivity, it is also necessary to recognize the partial nature of reflexivity in relation to the relative openness of the social world and the different restraints on agency in contemporary societies. The degrees of reflexivity and its particular character and content may differ in societies – stronger and weaker, emotional and rational, positive and negative in its implications – since it is mediated by a remarkably high level of education in a Confucian society such as Korea (Kim 2005, 2008, 2016). Often, younger generations in such a society have a set of competing values and reflexivities – simultaneously modern and traditional – the strong desire to choose individualized lifestyles and new life politics, but at the same time a respect for elders and the importance of family ties which might clash with their lifestyle choice and individual freedom (Kim 2011, 2012). Reflexive modernities coexist with reflexive traditions, not mutually exclusive but intertwined and competing at various times during the life of an individual. The popular media are not the only contributor to the process of reflexivity, but the degree of the media’s contribution depends on what other sources of reflexivity might or might not be available and who can access and utilize them as meaningful resources. When other sources such as psychotherapy and self-help expertise are not readily available in the actual circumstances of day-to-day life, transnational popular culture and online discussions and narratives generated by viewers can be appropriated for self-analysis and self-discovery in light of conflictual issues of gender, generation and class, for example. It simply cannot be assumed any more that information or knowledge from books and higher education is the best or main route to everyday reflexivity in today’s primarily visual, electronic media-dominated cultures

16  Youna Kim (Couldry 2000). It is not just media culture’s ubiquity in everyday life, but its unique and plausibly powerful capacity to affect the meaning making of everyday life experience, its capacity to trigger a heightened reflexive awareness of the world, which is arguably a key cultural dynamic and challenge. Popular culture – such as television, the social media and the Internet, accessible and understood by laypeople – has become not just the site where such reflexivity takes place, but actually provides the specific terms and forms of everyday talk and practice in the light of incoming knowledge. Often, when local media productions largely fail to respond to the changing socioeconomic status and desire of women and youth in a transitional society, it is transnational popular culture that is instead appropriated for making contact with the diverse formations of culture and for talking about everyday issues, unresolved concerns and anxieties (Kim 2005, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2019). It is via the increased exposure to Others and reflexive capacities that people make sense of life conditions which differ from their own and come to realize problems of their society, critically questioning the taken-for-granted social order. Significantly, what is emerging here is the problematization of society itself, the increasing awareness of its structural rigidity and discontents as well as the interrogatory attitude toward the surrounding world. Engagement with transnational popular culture constitutes a heightened awareness vis-à-vis gender, generation, sexuality, race, class, social mobility and so on – not only the familiar form of “national differences” but many “different forms of cultural difference” (Pieterse 2004). Such changes in awareness, knowledge and the questioning attitude toward the world may not always lead to social transformation in the short run, but new possibilities may arise from this heightened capacity for critical reflection and questioning which is the basis for agency – the socially constituted and differentially produced capacity of human beings to engage in action. Reflexivity could make a difference when the forms of talk and thought are translated into action, individual or collective (Chan 2005). The consequences of action prompted by posttext encounter or engagement with transnational popular culture are not limited only to micro-social settings but can trigger broader transformations in postcolonial politics. This evolving reflexive project is not just a direct cause and effect in the speed of social and cultural change but an increasingly insistent and intense process of mediation. Reflexivity is a multiple, ambivalent and dialectical process through which tension, conflict and contestation arise with complicated implications for the construction of identity, how to act and who to be. Identity is in the process of being redefined and reconstituted through the everyday reflexivity, and the popular media are central to the ongoing identity project. Identity can be seen as a “reflexively organized symbolic project” (Thompson 1995) in which individuals appropriate their own resources available in order to construct a meaningful, provisionally stable identity in an otherwise uncertain world. The globalization of media and popular culture needs to be recognized as a proliferating, indispensable, yet highly complex and contradictory resource for the construction of identity within the lived experience of everyday life (Kim 2005, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2022). For instance, young people are seen to be shifting their identities, which sometimes offers resistance, sometimes compliance and at other times are left open to ambiguity between the global and the local particular identities. The proliferation of mediated social interaction and the reflexive identity project enable possibilities for the construction of multiple identities that can be creative and emancipatory but also contradictory and conflictual in their consequences. Tensions arise in the dynamics between freely chosen identity and social validation and acceptance. Identity may appear to be a repertoire of choices to be made, or a mobile, free-floating, personal project; however, identity is also a “social, other-related, mutual recognition” (Kellner 1992). One’s identity is dependent upon recognition from others, always through

Introduction  17 the eyes of others, combined with self-validation of this recognition. There is still a traditional structure of interaction with socially defined roles, moralities and obligations among which one is expected to choose and appropriate in order to gain identity in a complex process of mutual recognition. Traditional identity markers, especially the bodily attributes of age, gender and sexuality, are fundamental in a hierarchically ordered society such as Korea and contesting in tension with the openness of global processes. Contestation of meaning has always been played out between authoritarian regimes and cultural warriors across Asia (Erni and Chua 2005). Cultural spaces become the very arena in which identity is contested over, with multiple reasons and motives enmeshed in neglected historical experiences and “long-standing battles for recognition and struggles for power” (Martin-Barbero 2002) which are contained in a highly diverse configuration of the consequences of media cultural globalization. This book invites readers, especially students, to reflect on the complex and profound role of popular culture in relation to identity, society and the operation of power. Fans of different generation, gender, sexuality, class and race may use Korean popular culture to form and imagine communities, mark cultural distinctions and construct their own identities under specific conditions. As a shared communicative point, popular culture provides a fluid means of understanding the surrounding environment and discussing issues otherwise difficult to express in public and private spheres. Television shows, movies, music and many other forms of popular culture are rife with messages about all sorts of social issues concerning racial inequality, sexism, bullying, violence, poverty and so on, which helps to direct readers to look at and respond in a variety of ways to these social problems emerging in particular social and historical contexts (Maratea and Monahan 2016). The study of popular culture can be fun, playful and serious at the same time, as it critically explores the complex entanglement of social trends, everyday lives, identities, politics and social change. Because of the secular, market-driven nature of popular culture’s creation and consumption, some may hold a myopic view of popular culture as having no innate value beyond the pleasure it brings to those who consume it; however, popular culture provides a way for researchers to learn about the social and political meanings, concerns and standards by which different communities of people live within and among societies (Crothers 2013). The world of popular culture not only entertains readers and reflects cultural values and norms, but it also offers valuable life lessons, both individually and collectively (Delaney and Madigan 2016). Most of the academic discourse on media globalization and popular culture has focused on the features of the Western world and the Western or global impacts predominantly more than the non-Western world and non-Western experiences in non-central contexts. The growing visibility of Korean popular culture is one of the creative and important interventions and contributions to a broadening of understanding that variously considers the experience and culture of society outside the Euro-American world. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from the humanities and social sciences, including media and communications, film studies, musicology, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, history and literature, this book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Korean popular culture and its historical underpinnings, changing roles and dynamic meanings in the present moment of the digital social media age. This lively discussion of Korean popular culture explores in depth a wide variety of topics, such as K-pop music, cinema, television, webtoon, animation, digital games, esports, the social media, celebrity, fashion, food and lifestyles. Rich and accessible, this book can be used like a “palette of paints” (Curran and Park 2000) from which readers can choose and mix their own colors, depending on their intellectual interests, situated experiences and pleasures in the process of reflexive learning.

18  Youna Kim

References An, J. (2018) Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representation in South Korean Cinema, Oakland: University of California Press. Anderson, C. (2020) Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Atia, N. and Houlden, K. (2019) Popular Postcolonialisms: Discourses of Empire and Popular Culture, New York: Routledge. BBC (2020) “Parasite: What the Oscar Win Means for Korean Cinema,” 11 February. BBC (2021) “Is Squid Game the Dawn of a TV Revolution?” 7 December. Beck, U. (1998) World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge: Polity. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Boyd-Barrett, O. and Mirrlees, T. (2020) Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Brandt, J. and Clare, C. (2018) An Introduction to Popular Culture in the US: People, Politics and Power, New York: Bloomsbury. Chan, J. M. (2005) “Global Media and the Dialectics of the Global,” Global Media and Communication, 1(1): 24–8. Chen, K.-H. (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Durham: Duke University Press. Chung, S. (2014) Split Screen Korea, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. CNN (2018) “K-Pop Band BTS Tells World Youth to ‘Speak Yourself ’ at UN,” 25 September. Cooper, A. (2016) Celebrity Diplomacy, London: Routledge. Couldry, N. (2000) Inside Culture: Reimagining the Method of Cultural Studies, London: SAGE. Crothers, L. (2013) Globalization and American Popular Culture, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Cunningham, S. and Craig, D. (2019) Social Media Entertainment, New York: New York University Press. Curran, J. and Park, M.-J. (2000) De-Westernizing Media Studies, London: Routledge. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Delaney, T. and Madigan, T. (2016) Lessons Learned from Popular Culture, Albany: State University of New York Press. Erni, J. and Chua, S. K. (2005) Asian Media Studies, Malden: Blackwell. Financial Times (2021) “We Need to Talk about Squid Game,” 6 October. Fiske, J. (2010) Understanding Popular Culture, London: Routledge. Fuhr, M. (2016) Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea, London: Routledge. Fung, A. (2013) Asian Popular Culture: The Global (Dis)continuity, London: Routledge. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A. (1999) Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives, London: Profile Books. Golding, P. and Harris, P. (1997) Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Globalization, Communication and the New International Order, London: SAGE. Guardian (2021) “K-beauty, Hallyu and Mukbang: Dozens of Korean Words Added to Oxford English Dictionary,” 5 October. Hall, S. (1990) “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in J. Rutherford (ed) Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hawkins, J. and Walsh, M. (2020) “BTS Are Winning Hearts the World Over,” Conversation, 10 February. Herman, E. and McChesney, R. (1997) The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism, London: Continuum. Herrmann, A. and Herbig, A. (2016) Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture, Lanham: Lexington Books. Iwabuchi, K. (2015) “Pop-culture Diplomacy in Japan,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21(4): 419–32.

Introduction  19 Iwabuchi, K., Tsai, E. and Berry, C. (2017) Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, London: Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2006) Fans, Bloggers and Gamers, New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, H., Ford, S. and Green, J. (2013) Spreadable Media, New York: New York University Press. Kellner, D. (1992) “Popular Culture and the Construction of Postmodern Identities,” in S. Lash and J. Friedman (eds) Modernity and Identity, Oxford: Blackwell. Kim, K.H. and Choe, Y. (2014) The Korean Popular Culture Reader, Durham: Duke University Press. Kim, Y. (2005) Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope, London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2007) “The Rising East Asian Wave: Korean Media Go Global,” in D. Thussu (ed) Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow, London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2008) Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia, London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2011) Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters, London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2012) Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kim, Y. (2013) The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global, London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2016) Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society, London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2019) South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea, London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2021) The Soft Power of the Korean Wave: Parasite, BTS and Drama, London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2022) Media in Asia: Global, Digital, Gendered and Mobile, London: Routledge. Kraidy, M. (2005) Hybridity, Or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lee, N. (2020) Films of Bong Joon Ho, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1971) Everyday Life in the Modern World, London: Penguin. Lie, J. (2015) K-pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea, Oakland: University of California Press. Lobato, R. (2019) Netflix Nations, New York: New York University Press. Maratea, R. and Monahan, B. (2016) Social Problems in Popular Culture, Bristol: Policy Press. Martin-Barbero, J. (1993) Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, London: SAGE. Martin-Barbero, J. (2002) “Identities: Traditions and New Communities,” Media, Culture & Society, 24(5): 621–41. Miller, D. and Slater, D. (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, Oxford: Berg. Miller, T. (2015) The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture, New York: Routledge. Motrescu-Mayes, A. and Aasman, S. (2019) Amateur Media and Participatory Cultures, London: Routledge. New York Times (2020) “Parasite Earns Best-Picture Oscar, First for a Movie Not in English,” 9 February. Nye, J. (2004) Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, New York: PublicAffairs. Nye, J. (2008) The Powers to Lead, New York: Oxford University Press. Pallister, K. (2019) Netflix Nostalgia, Lanham: Lexington Books. Pieterse, J.N. (2004) Globalization and Culture: Global Melange, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Robinson, M. (1994) “Mass Media and Popular Culture in 1930s Korea: Cultural Control, Identity and Colonial Hegemony,” in D.-S. Suh (ed) Korean Studies: New Pacific Currents, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Schiller, H. (1976) Communication and Cultural Domination, London: Routledge. Scholz, T. (2013) Digital Labor, New York: Routledge. Scott, J. (1992) “Experience,” in J. Butler and J. Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge. Shin, G.-W. and Robinson, M. (1999) Colonial Modernity in Korea, Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Song, M. (2019) Hanguk Hip Hop, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Spracklen, K. (2015) Digital Leisure, the Internet and Popular Culture: Communities and Identities in a Digital Age, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Storey, J. (1997) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, London: Routledge.

20  Youna Kim Storey, J. (2014) From Popular Culture to Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Street, J., Inthorn, S. and Scott, M. (2013) From Entertainment to Citizenship: Politics and Popular Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thompson, J. (1995) The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media, Cambridge: Polity. Thussu, D. (2007) Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-flow, London: Routledge. Thussu, D. (2013) Communicating India’s Soft Power, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tomlinson, J. (1991) Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction, London: Continuum. Voci, P. and Hui, L. (2018) Screening China’s Soft Power, London: Routledge. Wall Street Journal (2021) “Netflix’s Squid Game is the Dystopian Hit No One Wanted – Until Everyone Did,” 4 October. Washington Post (2020) “Parasite, Bong Joon-Ho and the Golden Age of Korean Cinema,” 13 February. Waskul, D. and Vannini, P. (2016) Popular Culture as Everyday Life, New York: Routledge.

Part I

K-pop Music

1 K-pop in the History of the Korean Wave A Long Revolution Younghan Cho

This chapter provides the historical mapping of the Korean Wave, or Hallyu, with a particular focus on K-pop. After it was first recognized in East Asia in the late 1990s, the Korean Wave has become truly globalized since the end of the 2010s. Its longevity as well as the global geography of its fandom have elicited substantial academic attention and research, which makes it possible and opportune to historicize the Korean Wave. This chapter situates K-pop within the historical development of the Korean Wave by articulating four different periods of the Korean Wave. Each period can be highlighted in order as the beginning of the Korean Wave, the Korean Wave as Asian pop culture, the Korean Wave as an emerging flow around the globe, and the Korean Wave as another global pop culture. The diverse routes and evolving characteristics of its stages lead to varying significances of the Korean Wave in local, regional and global contexts. This chapter will suggest that the evolution of K-pop in this historic narrative symbolizes a long revolution in the field of pop culture (and its studies) in which a cultural flow from South Korea or the East can be expanded, embraced and recognized as global pop culture.

The Korean Wave and Its Evolution In 2022, it is no longer an exaggeration to say that the Korean Wave has become one of the latest major trends in global pop culture. Nonetheless, the paths that the Korean Wave has trodden since its start in the late 1990s are full of unexpected and projected events, procedures and outcomes. The Korean Wave, both as an extension and as the transnational flows of South Korean (hereafter Korean) pop culture and its industry, has continued to be consumed, circulated and reproduced both regionally and globally as one of the mainstream pop cultures. In a nutshell, the Korean Wave has demonstrated its evolution from local to regional and, then, to global pop culture. As academic research and journalistic attention have recently skyrocketed (Hong et al. 2019), this chapter provides the historical mapping of the Korean Wave with a particular focus on K-pop within its general development and emerging features. For this task, it is necessary and important to reconsider and ultimately overcome the routine and stereotypical questions such as whether the Korean Wave is a new or unprecedented phenomenon or a simple repetition or copy of American pop culture. One serious pitfall of such habitual questions is to apply a dichotomous approach such as local vs. global and East vs. West when accounting for the Korean Wave. Furthermore, such a dichotomous approach conjures up another frame such as a hybrid or glocalized thesis which tends to situate the West as a reference and, consequently, to reinforce Euro-American centrism (Dirlik 2000). Instead, this chapter posits that the Korean Wave is a cultural phenomenon that is simultaneously local/ national, regional and global. In other words, the Korean Wave is local/national in that it is a series of transnational flows that originates by and large from Korean pop culture; the Korean Wave is regional in that it constitutes the seminal iteration of East Asian pop culture; and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-3

24  Younghan Cho Korean Wave is global in that American pop culture has been internal to or interiorized by Korean and Asian pop cultures since the early 20th century (Chen 2001; Yoshimi 2003). When it comes to the latter aspect, American pop culture, which has been circulated and appropriated in Asia, needs to be reframed as one of the iterating flows that constitutes East Asian pop culture (Chua and Cho 2012). As much as Korean pop culture is not identical with the Korean Wave (as a series of transnational flows), American pop culture in Asia is not or should not be regarded as American pop culture itself. As there exist different versions, connotations and implications of the Korean Wave depending on its contexts, American pop cultures should also be understood as multiple versions which vary depending on the changing times and diverse places of their contexts. Such a reconceptualization of American pop culture is also useful for understanding the changing characteristics of the Korean Wave in its various periods as well as its malleable definitions in different temporalities and diverse spatialities (Cho 2011). As a way of narrating the history of the Korean Wave, this chapter articulates its four different periods: The characteristics of each period are specified in order as the beginning of the Korean Wave, the Korean Wave as Asian pop culture, the Korean Wave as an emerging flow around the globe, and the Korean Wave as another global pop culture. This chapter discusses the continuous and emerging features of K-pop in the general history of the Korean Wave. The periodization of pop culture and its flows is neither an easy nor an ideal task because the assessment and categorization of the periods can be diverse. So far, such efforts are made more often by the government or by mass media rather than in the academic field, in which the main genres, audiences (divided either by geography or by age groups) and roles of the governments are considered major elements of the Korean Wave ( Jin 2022). However, the periodization of the Korean Wave can be useful for providing a brief contextual background for its new researchers and audiences, and, furthermore, the historicization of the Korean Wave is now possible and imperative due to its continued trajectories, accumulated practices and potential influences all over the globe. Ultimately, this chapter will be beneficial not only for understanding the transformation of the popularity of Korean pop culture but also for expanding our understanding of potential significances and emerging influences of the Korean Wave in the realm of global pop culture.

The Beginning of the Korean Wave in the Late 1990s Many journalists and researchers commonly identify the late 1990s as the period of the beginning of the Korean Wave, and some documents even point out 1997 as the starting year of the Korean Wave (Kim 2021). Their observation is based on the popularity of one Korean drama titled What is Love? (1991–1992, MBC) in China, where, in 1997, the drama was broadcast nationally via China Central Television (CCTV) and elicited a good rating and a wave of popularity across China. Since then, the term Korean Wave, or Hallyu, was picked up and deployed widely and conventionally to describe overseas popularity of Korean popular culture. Nonetheless, it seems too simplistic to claim that a cultural phenomenon, in this case the Korean Wave, was brought about by a single event – CCTV’s broadcasting of one Korean drama. It is fair to assess that the Korean Wave was the outcome of individual and collective cultural phenomena as well as their collateral influences in Asia. Besides What is Love?, several dramas such as Star in My Heart (1997, MBC), Medical Brothers (1997, MBC) and Autumn Tale (2000, KBS) also had consecutive success in China, Taiwan and Vietnam. In the early period, it was TV dramas that led the force of the Korean Wave (H. Kim 2005). In popular music, boy bands such as H.O.T. (1996, SM) and CLON (1996, Media Line), which were popular and held concerts in both Taiwan and China in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were regarded as part of the first wave of the Korean Wave. In 2001, BoA (2000, SM), a female solo singer, also

K-pop in the History of the Korean Wave  25 debuted successfully in Japan after her earlier debut in Korea in 2000. In films, several Korean blockbusters such as Shiri (1999, Dir. Kang Je-Gyu) and Joint Security Area (2000, Dir. Park Chan-Wook) had significant box office openings in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. As collective and repeating events in many metropolitan cities in Asia, the term Korean Wave took root in the beginning of the new millennium. Even in its beginning, the closely connected but distinct relation between the Korean Wave and Korean popular culture was worth further discussion. To put it bluntly, the Korean Wave is not the same as but rather an extension of Korean popular culture as a transnational or border-crossing flow. As a matter of fact, the terms Korean Wave and, later, K-pop were invented outside of Korea first, before they were widely used inside of Korea. Such a relation was easily discerned in the first flows of the Korean Wave: Most of the pioneers in each genre were prepared and produced for a Korean market and Korean fans only. For instance, dance groups such as H.O.T., CLON and Baby V.O.X (1997, DR music) first enjoyed their domestic popularity, until, without much preparation, they came to be popular overseas. Such unexpected and unintended success of Korean pop music was made possible by the transformation of pop music fields in Korea. While Western and specifically American pop songs were the mainstream genres in the 1970s and 1980s, Korean pop music in the 1990s came to dominate broadcasting circles and the music industry, which also led to heightened competition and much enlarged markets and fandoms in Korea. In particular, the debut of the boy band Seo Tai-Ji and Boys in 1992 marked a milestone, which not only sparked mass popularity and fandom activity from the young generation, but also led to a burgeoning of the next generation of dance groups. While Seo Tai-Ji and Boys and other dance groups that came together in the 1990s were not counted as main figures in the Korean Wave, their influence on later K-pop in terms of styles, performances as well as ways of managing their fandom cannot be underestimated. Like pop songs, many hit dramas in Asia mentioned above were no exception to this: They were produced for Korean audiences first and then came to be circulated and popularized in Asia. The growth of broadcasting industries and the development of telecommunication technologies in Asia also played substantial roles in the spread of the Korean Wave. Since the 1980s, regional pop flows were widely circulated and consumed among various cities and countries in East Asia, which paved the way of constituting seminal cultural flows such as Hong Kong films and J-pop as East Asian pop culture (Iwabuchi 2002; Hu 2005; Cho 2011). The exposure to and increased consumption of other regional cultural products led regional people to becoming familiar with the Korean Wave. The year 1997 also coincided with the economic crisis that swept across not only Korea but also several other Asian countries. While the economic crisis resulted in structural restructuring in many business sectors and mass layoffs, it also pushed Korean broadcasting and entertainment industries to search for international markets and audiences. By following and partially replacing Japanese pop culture in Asia, some of the competitive contents and items of Korean pop culture successfully reached regional audiences and fans (Chua 2012; Iwabuchi 2014). Inside Korea, the Korean Wave was a complete but pleasant surprise to the Korean government, society and people because it was an unprecedented phenomenon to them, having been accustomed to importing pop cultures, not exporting them. Because there existed a concern that the Korean Wave would be a bubble that might pop too easily and soon, efforts were made to solidify and continue the Korean Wave further and longer, which were based on nationalistic and commercial interests (Cho 2005). From the beginning, various versions of hearsay about the Korean Wave crisis were repeated in every period, and for that reason its continuous and diverse trajectories and settlements over the globe require us to pay attention to its historic narrative.

26  Younghan Cho

The Korean Wave as Asian Pop Culture in the 2000s In the early 2000s, the Korean Wave was firmly recognized as a significant and influential stream of Asian pop cultures. While a couple of iconic dramas also led the way, K-pop emerged as a pivotal genre for transforming the Korean Wave. In this period, both mass media and the Internet played a role in spreading its popularity in Asia in related but distinct ways. In the early history of the Korean Wave, the two dramas Winter Sonata (2002, KBS) and Jewel in the Palace (2003–2004, MBC) were vital and incomparable. Winter Sonata is a typical melodrama that includes themes such as pure and predestined love, secrets in birth and tragic accidents or illnesses, which are often regarded as seminal elements of Korean dramas. After its initial success in Korea, the drama was broadcast several times in Japan between 2003 and 2004 by NHK, a Japanese national broadcast station, with huge success. Along with the drama’s enormous popularity, Bae Yong-Joon, its main actor, became a huge celebrity whose popularity and fandom were named as “the Yon-sama syndrome,” a combination of his name and the Japanese honorific sama. Winter Sonata and Bae appealed to middle-aged female audiences and fans as both the drama and the actor invoked nostalgic desires for the ideal man in the past, which had been lost and no longer existed in contemporary Japan (Jung 2011). Jewel in the Palace is a historic drama about a legendary female figure and her adventurous life in the 16th century during the Joseon dynasty. It became a mega-hit in China, where it was broadcast by Hunan Television, and among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and, then, the drama’s popularity spread even to Middle and South Asia (Kim 2009). While Korean television dramas continued to gain popularity in Asia, it was K-pop that emerged as the most distinctive force in the late 2000s. As the many dance groups enjoyed their heyday in Korea after the 1990s, many of them were also successful at gaining popularity across Asia: Some of the most popular were TVXQ (2003, SM), BigBang (2006, YG), Girls’ Generation (2007, SM), Wonder Girls (2007, JYP), SHINee (2008, SM), 2PM (2008, JYP), 2NE1 (2009, YG) and more. Thus, the term K-pop, which was firstly coined outside of Korea, began to be widely utilized for representing Korean pop music in the Korean Wave, and its distinct styles have been established. K-pop is characterized by synchronized dance moves, catchy beats, hook refrains and group performances, and its lyrics are mainly in Korean with additions of English words or phrases. Also, the term “idol” is widely used for referring to members and their fandom in K-pop groups. Similar to the Korean Wave, K-pop has a dual relation with Korean pop music because K-pop is intrinsically connected with Korea (it is based on Korean pop music) while also being necessarily transnational. Such duality has gotten more complicated since it has been circulated and consumed by more diverse peoples and in different places across the globe. In its multiplicity of fandom both in different geographies and in its varying age groups, a fever for girl groups was notable in Japan. In the late 2010s, girl groups such as Girls’ Generation and KARA (2007, DSP) elicited huge popularity from Japanese youth, both male and female. Contrary to the Yon-sama fandom, which was mostly made up of middle-aged women and thus regarded as not-so-mainstream, this trend of girl groups becoming popular was regarded as K-pop entering into the mainstream as these girl groups were featured in major television shows in Japan and also in commercials both on television and in print media. From Korea’s perspective, the Japanese mainstream market has long been regarded as the gateway to the global market, so the success of K-pop in Japan also seemed to signal rosy prospects for the global expansion of K-pop. As a matter of fact, several K-pop stars such as Rain (2002, JYP) and the girl group Wonder Girls tried to advance into the US market during their heyday in the late 2000s, but they did not succeed. Another notable establishment in this stage was the development of the entertainment ­companies and their trainee systems. The most representative companies of K-pop are SM

K-pop in the History of the Korean Wave  27 entertainment, YG and JYP, which were founded respectively in 1995, 1996 and 1997. Their founders are also former Korean pop singers: For instance, Yang Hyun-Seok, the founding CEO of YG, was one of the members of Seo Tai-Ji and Boys in the 1990s. The trainee systems are known for combining talent and hard work: Each trainee, generally a teenager or younger, is selected by in-house auditions, and, then, selected trainees undergo several years of training, including vocal, dance, language and social etiquette lessons, as well as body profiles (Lie 2015). Such long-term central training was effective for the success of many idol stars, but it also caused serious issues such as surplus labor and conveyer-belt training as well as human rights issues concerning the trainees’ and stars’ private lives and financial compensation. Also, this training system seems to epitomize an outdated Korean model akin to the government’s centralized economic planning and development in the 1960s and 1970s, so K-pop and its production field are often labeled the latest export item (after electronic appliances and semiconductors) and even criticized for repeating a factory along with criticism that “there is almost nothing ‘Korean’ about K-pop” (Lie 2012: 360). The latter criticism arose mainly from scholars located in Western universities, many of whom based their discourse on a dichotomous approach to K-pop in which Korea and Korean-ness are situated against the West, where the latter “has been the indispensable measuring rod for reaffirming” the former (Furuya 2006: 192). Both mass media and the Internet collectively contributed to constituting the Korean Wave as a salient stream of Asian pop flows. Public and regional broadcasting companies initiated its popularity by airing Korean dramas, television series and pop music shows to a large audience. Meanwhile, the Internet was also important in spreading dramas and television series by enabling the sharing of clips, images and gossip surrounding the programs as well as by allowing viewers to actively upload translated subtitles or even video files online. The Internet is regarded as the pivotal tool for spreading K-pop with various people of diverse places, but the mass media – satellite broadcasting such as Arirang – and local/national radio and television stations in Asian countries also contributed to increasing the fandom in various parts of Asia. As much as new technologies and media platforms are increasingly influential concerning the Korean Wave and K-pop, it is also people’s creativity and active participation that play crucial roles in establishing the Korean Wave as Asian pop culture.

The Spread of the Korean Wave across the Globe in the 2010s In 2010, the Korean Wave entered another stage by expanding its popularity across the globe. In the process of globalizing the Korean Wave, new digital technologies were particularly effective at capturing new fans and creating participatory fandoms. As the Korean Wave was still active and vibrant in Asia, the national discourses of Korea paid attention to its expanding fields including a national brand, Korean language learning and additional economic effects. It was K-pop that made the Korean Wave a truly global phenomenon in the mid-2010s. In 2012, the song “Gangnam Style” by Psy became a global sensation via YouTube, through which his music video went viral. Parodies of his “horse dance” swept across the world: Not only did many celebrities and YouTubers record themselves performing the dance, but flash mobs were also organized. Psy and his songs are not typical in terms of K-pop, and are different from the emblematic music performed by idols: As a solo singer and rapper, Psy had been by and large popular in Korean pop music since 2001. Nonetheless, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” signaled the full-scale global entrance of K-pop, which was perfect timing along with the continuous and increasing influence and expansion of K-pop across Asia and beyond for the past decade. In the 2010s, popular idol groups such as EXO (2012, SM), BTS (2013, Big Hit), Red Velvet (2014, SM), TWICE (2015, JYP) and Blackpink (2016, YG) debuted and continued to expand the

28  Younghan Cho K-pop fandom across Asia and into other parts of the world. Many successful idols that had debuted in the 2000s still performed as well, and, in particular, BigBang successfully completed their world tours in 2015 and 2016, performing in many Asian and North American cities. Prior to this stage, most K-pop concerts had been held in collaboration with several groups, organized either by big entertainment companies such as SM and YG or by Korean public and commercial broadcasting companies such as KBS or M-net. While group concerts under the name of K-pop, which are still being held, are one of the typical trends of K-pop, such a solo concert by a specific idol group not only in Asia but also in the US and Europe indicated another stage of K-pop. The significance of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” can be discussed with how it utilized the Internet and digital technologies: Its ways of attracting global interest exemplified the conventional routes of popularizing and advertising K-pop idols and their activities across the world (Jung and Shim 2014; Khoo 2015). In so doing, the Internet, and particularly new trending social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram served as very effective and useful tools for both the K-pop entertainment business and K-pop fans (Y. Kim 2013; Jin and Yoon 2016). Most of the K-pop idols and their entertainment companies target social media and other Internet venues as their most important channels for advertising their songs and activities and spreading their names and fame to global fans. By uploading K-pop idols’ official activities and performances as well as their lives off the stage, K-pop idols nurture their intimate relationships with fans and their enthusiastic and organized fandom. Many fans and fandoms of K-pop actively participated in sharing their favorite idols and their music, and furthermore, some of them produced their own ways of consuming, enjoying and appropriating K-pop. The latter was particularly popular on YouTube, where some K-pop fans gained recognition and even their own fandoms by reviewing and discussing K-pop and vlogging about their own lives, earning them the status of influencers or micro-celebrities. Reactionary videos to K-pop music videos and K-pop cover dances, performed both individually and collectively, are the most representative cases of their creative and participatory fandom (D.C. Oh 2017; C. Oh 2022). Such micro-celebrities were not always limited to the arena of K-pop, and some came to mediate Korean society and culture to global audiences along with expediting global attention to the Korean Wave and Korea in general (Lee and Cho 2021). The invention of smartphones enabled Korean Wave fans to engage with their stars and to share their news and contents with other fans instantly. Along with digital developments and their diffusion, active fans and cultural prosumers play crucial and new roles in spreading the Korean Wave across the globe more quickly and widely. From the side of Korea, the continuous success of the Korean Wave instigated the Korean government and business sectors to expand the definitions of the Korean Wave into diverse cultures, practices and institutes beyond just pop culture. These agents habitually added the letter “K” to such practices and deployed the term “K-culture” in the areas of travel, food, fashion, cosmetics, language, education and so on. In so doing, the Korean Wave substantially helped the national effort of globalizing the Korean language and Korean Studies over the world: Government institutes such as Korea Foundation, the King Sejong Institute and the Academy of Korean Studies were either launched or renewed to provide language education as well as to garner positive responses from the world (Kim and Cho 2022). In addition, the Korean government attempted to utilize the Korean Wave for upgrading its reputation, popularity and brand value, and, therefore, invested their energies and plans into making the best use of the Korean Wave for public diplomacy and soft power. Such intentions and investment of the Korean government are often evaluated as the grounds for the success of the Korean Wave. While the Korean government played a central

K-pop in the History of the Korean Wave  29 role in the economy during its developmental stages between 1960s and 1980s, another stereotypical gaze (from the West) tried to find the success of the Korean Wave in the government’s support and engagement. It is true that the Korean government still tries to maximize economic profit and soft power by riding on the Korean Wave (Shim 2008). However, it needs to be noted that such trials of the Korean government were not always effective or useful for the Korean Wave. As mentioned earlier, the beginning of the Korean Wave was a surprise to its industry and the government because it was an unintended success. Also, Korean cultural industries complained that the Korean government’s support was sometimes ineffective or irrelevant to the Korean Wave, which does not mean that they no longer wanted governmental support but that they requested more useful support and incentives. Such complaints signal the uneasy and double-sided relations with the government’ involvement in pop culture.

The Korean Wave as Global Pop Culture after 2019 As of 2022, the latest stage of the Korean Wave is still in progress, so this stage needs to be treated as past, present and future at the same time. This period – estimated to have begun at the end of the 2010s, or in 2019 specifically – can be characterized as the entrance of the Korean Wave into the mainstream of global pop culture. The US markets, award ceremonies and digital platforms are helping the Korean Wave attain global impact and cultural authority. Since the end of the 2010s, the Korean Wave has been circulated as a cultural flood in global pop culture: Various genres such as K-pop, dramas and films had success in the US. While the global success of BTS can be regarded as the epitome of the Korean Wave, other idol groups such as Blackpink, Stray Kids (2018, JYP), ITZY (2019, JYP), Aespa (2020, SM) and NewJeans (2022, HYBE) also make global impacts and boast fandoms in various parts of the world. On the one hand, these idols repeat as well as construct the similar patterns and characteristics of previous K-pop groups: Under the trainee systems, they are trained rigorously for a long time, including lessons to enhance their musical potential such as writing lyrics, composing and even producing, and make great use out of the Internet and new digital platforms. On the other hand, K-pop is now recognized as part of global pop culture as it has been embraced by US mainstream media. While K-pop came to be globalized after 2010, it was then considered as minor or a subculture, or it was treated as less sophisticated music in many parts of the world. Therefore, avid fans of K-pop and their fandoms strived to attain cultural approval from general audiences and the majority. For instance, they put advertisements of their idols in public spaces, participated in social issues and relief work in the names of their idols, and organized campaigns for airing K-pop music in national broadcasts and mass media. Meanwhile, Korean dramas and films gained momentum by earning global popularity and recognition. Between 2019 and 2020, the Korean film Parasite (2019, Dir. Bong Joon-Ho) won many international awards, and two of the most representative ones were the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film grossed more than $250 million around the world. Korean dramas are also increasingly becoming popular among global audiences. Netflix, which provides a global streaming service for a wide variety of TV shows, movies and documentaries, is playing a particularly crucial role in the instant global circulation of Korean dramas. Not only Netflix originals such as Squid Game (2021), Kingdom (2019–2021) and Space Sweepers (2021) but also Korean dramas that were broadcast simultaneously by Korean broadcasting companies and Netflix such as Crash Landing on You (2019, tvN), Hometown Cha-ChaCha (2021, tvN) and Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022, ENA) had high ratings and popularity. Korean dramas also come in a wide variety of genres: Some are trendy melodramas (this style is

30  Younghan Cho regarded as the typical K-drama genre), some are epic fantasies and some look like an extreme movie (this is considered a typical Asian film genre). In this stage, the global recognition and cultural authority of the Korean Wave is partly attributable to the power and hegemony of the US in pop culture. The Korean Wave not only entered the major markets in the US, but its contents and performers also came to attain positive reviews and eventually be nominated or win many American media awards such as the Academy Awards, American Music Awards, Golden Globe Awards, Grammys and Emmy Awards, which are also globally renowned. In turn, such commercial success and positive reputation from the US market grant the Korean Wave high global recognition and appreciation. In other words, the global rise of the Korean Wave is made possible by its changing status in, and its appropriation of, US pop culture. This procedure can be heuristically named as “America as method,” in which the Korean Wave uses and remakes American pop culture as a tool for transforming itself into global pop culture (Chen 2010; Cho 2022). Given this transformation of the Korean Wave, the impact and role of the global streaming platforms are also worth considering. As mentioned, Netflix is a global streaming platform that has not only enjoyed global success in its subscription model but also invests significantly in Korean pop culture industries. With Netflix’s capacity of reaching global audiences instantly, many of the Korean pop cultures are able to appeal to global audiences and make impacts on various groups in diverse places. Because of this, regional and global magazines and newspapers are paying attention to the Korean Wave as a new and influential trend in their own countries. On the other hand, there have been some critiques saying that it was global streaming platforms that would benefit the most from the success of the Korean Wave, which may render the Korean pop culture industry as another subcontractor that would only provide labor and products to global conglomerates. Such debates remind us that the hegemony of the US market will not be easily overcome, even as it has been substantially challenged and its unilateral status is no longer maintained. In Korea, the trend of K-culture persists, along with often-feverish nationalist sentiment among the public. While the continuous success of the Korean Wave is enough to charge Korean society and people with nationalistic attitudes, Korea’s successful process of handling COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021 provided its people with another source of national pride, which may hint at overcoming Euro-American centrism or its superiority. However, such nationalist sentiment and collective feelings have another effect: They also provoke cultural conflicts with neighboring countries over debates on the origins of certain cultural practices, which often deteriorate into banal racism against other minor groups and their cultures in Korea.

Conclusion The historical mapping of the Korean Wave demonstrates that the Korean Wave has been undergoing different stages in which not only the government, entertainment businesses and broadcasting industries but also individual agents such as producers, performers and consumers/ fans in national, regional and global dimensions contribute to its unexpected and continuous success. In so doing, the Korean Wave has been transformed from the extension of national (e.g. Korean pop culture) to regional flows (e.g. Asian pop culture) and global pop culture (e.g. mediated by the power of the US pop landscape). Such a global transformation does not necessarily mean that the Korean Wave is no longer grounded in Korea or Korean pop culture or no longer meaningful for Asian audiences and markets. It can be suggested that the historical evolution of K-pop embodies the significance of the Korean Wave in global pop culture, which can be described as a transformation from localized global pop culture to globalized regional pop culture. This transformation signifies that the Korean Wave as global pop culture is

K-pop in the History of the Korean Wave  31 simultaneously local/national, regional and global. This perspective may avoid a hybrid approach in understanding the historical development of the Korean Wave and its evolution in pop culture. As some contend, the hybrid theory that has been widely adopted for explicating the Korean Wave and K-pop may not provide any interpretive novelty (Choi and Maliangkay 2015) and may unwittingly reproduce racial prejudice or Orientalism by guaranteeing the West’s authenticity dominantly (Oh 2022). Furthermore, this transformation of the Korean Wave also signals that other local or regional cultural flows that do not originate from the US or the West can be globally circulated and consumed, making global impacts and influencing other global pop cultures, markets and audiences. This does not naively assume that the transformation of the Korean Wave demonstrates its global dominance or the simple reversal of the global hegemony in pop culture between the US and Korea, or between the West and the East. Rather, it can be suggested that the Korean Wave in this historic transformation is leaving a substantial impact on global pop culture by disrupting the unilateral hegemony of American pop culture and by symbolizing multiple origins and routes for becoming and constructing global pop culture. In the past, the global pop culture had often been identified as something from the US and the West, and, therefore, any local and regional pop cultures that were not from the US and the West were treated as marginal, subordinate or less qualified. Today, the history of the Korean Wave demonstrates that a local pop flow that started in Korea can be successful and influential with regional and global audiences. The Korean Wave is now consumed and embraced as one of the substantial and meaningful cultural flows that contribute to the multiplicity and polyphony of global culture. Just as Bong Joon-Ho, the director of Parasite, described the Oscars as “very local” (Tang 2020), the cultural impacts of the Korean Wave have contributed to “provincializing Euro-American pop culture” to a certain degree (Chakrabarty 2000). Following Williams’ (1961) term, “a long revolution,” to describe gradual changes in culture, this chapter finally suggests that the transformation of the Korean Wave epitomizes another long revolution in global pop culture. It is deemed a (neither easy nor easily expected) revolution not only because a cultural flow from Korea, a country of the East, is now recognized as one of the salient streams of global pop culture but also because this historic narrative enables us to “imagine” more scenarios in which other local and regional pop cultures contribute to overcoming the universality of Western modern culture.

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32  Younghan Cho Dirlik, A. (2000) Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Furuya, J. (2006) “Japanese Intellectuals Define America, from the 1920 through World War II,” in M. Kazin and J. McCartin (eds) Americanism: New Perspective on the History of an Ideal, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Hong, S., Park, S., Park, D. and Oh, S. (2019) “Geography of Hallyu Studies: Analysis of Academic Discourse on Hallyu in International Research,” Korea Journal, 59(2): 111–43. Hu, K. (2005) “The Power of Circulation: Digital Technologies and the Online Chinese Fans of Japanese TV Drama,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6(2): 171–86. Iwabuchi, K. (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Iwabuchi, K. (2014) “De-Westernization, Inter-Asian Referencing and Beyond,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 17(1): 44–57. Jin, D.Y. and Yoon, K. (2016) “The Social Mediascape of Transnational Korean Pop Culture: Hallyu 2.0 as Spreadable Media Practice,” New Media & Society, 18(7): 1277–92. Jin, D.Y. (2022) Ten Debates on the Korean Wave Myth[in Korean], Paju: Hanul Academy. Jung, S. (2011) Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-pop Idols. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Jung, S. and Shim, D. (2014) “Social Distribution: K-pop Fan Practices in Indonesia and the ‘Gangnam Style’ Phenomenon,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 17(5): 485–501. Kim, C. (2021) History of Korean Popular Culture [in Korean], Paju: Hanul Academy. Kim, H.M. (2005) “Korean TV Dramas in Taiwan: With an Emphasis on the Localization Process,” Korean Journal, Winter: 183–205. Kim, S. and Cho, Y. (2022) “Complicit Mobility: Southeast Asian Students in Korean Studies and Their Inter-Asian Knowledge Migrations,” Globalisation, Societies and Education, published online on 3 July. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2022.2095502 Kim, S.-J. (2009) “Interpreting Transnational Cultural Practices: Social Discourses on a Korean Drama in Japan, Hong Kong and China,” Cultural Studies, 23(5–6): 736–55. Kim, Y. (2013) “Introduction: Korean Media in a Digital Cosmopolitan World,” in Y. Kim (ed) The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global, London: Routledge. Khoo, G.C. (2015) “We Keep It Local – Malaysianising ‘Gangnam Style’: A Question of Place and Identity,” in J. Choi and R. Maliangkay (eds) K-pop – The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry, New York: Routledge. Lee, M. and Cho, Y. (2021) “Banal Orientalism on YouTube: ‘Eat Your Kimchi’ as a New Cultural Intermediary and Its Representation of South Korea,” Asia Communication Research, 18(2): 69–88. Lie, J. (2012) “What is the K in K-pop? South Korean Popular Music, the Culture Industry, and National Identity,” Korea Observer, 43(3): 339–63. Lie, J. (2015) K-pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia and Economic Innovation in South Korea, Berkeley: University of California Press. Oh, C. (2022) K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media, New York: Routledge. Oh, D.C. (2017) “K-pop Fans React: Hybridity and the White Celebrity-Fan on YouTube,” International Journal of Communication, 11: 2270–87. Shim, D. (2008) “The Growth of Korean Cultural Industries and the Korean Wave,” in B.H. Chua and K. Iwabuchi (eds) East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Tang, E. (2020) “I’m Not Going to Miss Awards Season, But I Will Miss Bong Joon-Ho,” Vogue, 10 February. Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution, Cardigan: Parthian Books. Yoshimi, S. (2003) “America as Desire and Violence: Americanization in Postwar Japan and Asia During the Cold War,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4(3): 433–50.

2 Digital K-pop Fan Platforms in a Cosmopolitan World Sarah Keith

K-pop fandom has proven to be a compelling topic of study for many academic disciplines. Its primary attraction is its inherent cosmopolitanism, wherein fans are participants in global civil society, agents within networks of solidarity and self-determined individuals. These fans, as “citizens of the world,” demonstrate new modes of identity formation, creativity and community that challenge established social, geographical and cultural boundaries. Building on theoretical work by Nussbaum (1994), Giddens (1999) and Beck (2002), cosmopolitanism has been used as a framework for discussing multiple aspects of global Korean pop culture fandom, including how fans negotiate globalization, identity and modernity (Kim 2016), explore gendered desires (Oh 2015) and organize travel and social practices (Kim et al. 2013). Cosmopolitan fandom, and particularly global K-pop fandom, has been accelerated by digital media and the Internet. In particular, the preponderance of streaming services has facilitated the global availability of K-pop and its related contents. Platforms such as Spotify and YouTube are worldwide content distribution mechanisms for K-pop entertainment agencies, while social networks and third-party services integrating streaming and media sharing functionality, such as Instagram and Twitter, are important portals for artist-to-fan communication, as well as fan-to-fan networks and organization (Galantowicz 2021). Simultaneously, the global popular music industries are increasingly focused on fandom itself as a profit-generating enterprise. Mulligan (2020) points out that, while the first phase of digital music transformation concerned monetizing recorded products, “phase two will be about monetizing fandom.” While Korean entertainment agencies, like music labels worldwide, have actively pursued a B2B relationship with media-technology conglomerates such as YouTube over the past decade (Oh and Park 2012), capitalizing on fandom entails dealing more directly with fans themselves as a source of revenue. As such, the past few years have seen the proliferation of start-ups and digital platforms connecting agencies and artists directly to fans, including (but not limited to) virtual environments and global fan cafés (e.g. VLive, Weverse, Youniverse and Lysn), digital K-pop goods (e.g. non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and mobile games leveraging artist IP) and financialization (e.g. the IPO of BTS agency HYBE Corporation). These products and services promise to manage and centralize a global K-pop fanbase, facilitating the monetization of fandom. Yet the growing interest in platform studies, as a related field to fan studies, identifies the inherent tension between fans’ communal and social practices and the platform as a for-profit technology (Alberto 2020). How does the commodification of fandom fit with the cosmopolitan desires of global K-pop fans? As Morris (2017: 358) writes, music platforms are “literally coded to mine and make use of specific fan practices while downplaying others that are less actionable or monetizable.” Meanwhile, contemporary cosmopolitan predispositions and practices, according to Szerszynski and Urry (2002: 470), include extensive mobility, curiosity, risk-taking, semiotic skills and “openness to other peoples and cultures and a willingness/ability to appreciate some elements DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-4

34  Sarah Keith of the language/culture of the ‘other’.” Cosmopolitanism, practiced by individuals as they navigate a globalized cultural landscape, entails the development of cultural symbolic competencies, such as code-switching, cultural knowledge and intercultural mastery (Woodward and Skrbis 2012: 128). Put simply, global K-pop fans are individuals who have deliberately sought novelty outside of their own countries’ hegemonic popular culture; their cosmopolitan capital consists of the distinction, learning and difference produced by actively transcending boundaries. As Lynch (2020: 111) outlines, the ability to traverse linguistic, geographic and cultural barriers is a powerful form of social capital within Western and Anglophone K-pop fandom. Moreover, multiple scholars have examined K-pop as an organizing phenomenon for progressive causes, political activism and marginalized groups (Phoborisut 2020; Lee and Kao 2021; Käng 2014). As such, global K-pop cosmopolitanism overlaps with both artistic critiques (demands for liberation and authenticity) and social critiques (denouncements of exploitation and inequality) of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2017: 393). Can the corporate-led cultivation of the global K-pop audience as a consumer sector be reconciled with global K-pop fans’ fluid, mobile and hybrid cosmopolitan identities? This chapter examines new virtual fandom platforms and products designed for global K-pop fans and addresses the sociocultural and economic logics of this phase of the Korean Wave’s growth. In particular, it critically addresses the following related subjects in relation to cosmopolitanism – the global fan café, selling access, virtualization and financialization.

The Global Fan Café There are several international/English fancafes that are pretty big… but it’s usually the Korean fancafes that are the most personal, up-to-date and resourceful. (A Reddit user, 2016) The academic study of fandom within the social sciences conceives audiences as participants in meaning-making (Ang 2013), collective creativity and identity formation (Jenkins 1992; Hills 2002), usually around popular culture media or products. Meanwhile, for fans themselves, fandom may be defined variously as a collection of practices, participation in rhizomatic communities, patterns of consumption or a statement or feeling of belonging (Duffett 2013). Yet for producers of culture – including artists, practitioners, managers and relevant business stakeholders such as investors, agencies, copyright holders and labels – fandom is necessarily entangled with consumption, consumer marketing, branding and related economic concerns. The fan club, as a centrally administered members’ organization, has a long history. Théberge (2005: 491) traces fan-run clubs for popular entertainers back to the mid-1930s; these provided a medium of communication between fans, produced newsletters and other publications, and acted as “conduits for the circulation of memorabilia.” “Official” fan clubs, administered by the artist’s management or label, were well established by the 1950s. These subscription-based membership organizations offered exclusive benefits such as quarterly magazines and limited edition recordings produced for fan club members, as Paglia (2016) describes. In the Internet era, social networks such as Twitter have blended official and fan-run communities; these platforms are used for direct public messaging by artists and management using official accounts, but also allow fan-to-fan communication and networking. While social media and SNS platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Weibo are certainly well-used tools for artist-fan communication, and have been instrumental in growing the global popularity of K-pop, recent years have also seen a proliferation of dedicated platforms, spaces and portals for global K-pop fans including Weverse/VLive, Lysn/Bubble, Youniverse and UNIVERSE. Korean (and Korean-literate) fans are accustomed to long-established fan cafés on platforms

Digital K-pop Fan Platforms in a Cosmopolitan World  35 such as Daum and Kakao, which provide a dedicated space for discussion and interaction officially sanctioned by artists and their management; however, these spaces are difficult to access for international fans due to language and practical barriers, such as required provision of a national identity number for certain fan cafés. There are several likely reasons for this shift toward new and more specialized platforms for global fans. First, and perhaps most obviously, by using in-house platforms – for instance, HYBE Corporation is the parent company of both Weverse/VLive and K-pop group BTS – agencies can maintain ownership of content and develop more favorable revenue models than to third-party services, via subscriptions, sales or advertising revenue. Likewise, by developing bespoke K-pop fan platforms, agencies can develop new types of services, integrations, products and interactions for users. Ownership of platforms also provides greater and more direct oversight, and control, of audience data. Furthermore, as Wright and Smith (2021: 433) assert, niche fan spaces and outlets encourage “brand” loyalty to a particular artist. To attract fans to these platforms, media content – often in the form of exclusive images, messages and so on – has been used as “an inducement (gift, bribe or ‘free lunch’) to recruit potential members of the audience and to maintain their loyal attention” (Smythe 1977: 5). In developing global services for K-pop fans, agencies and labels are faced with the task of balancing corporate interests – reputation management, marketing and commodification – with benefits for fans who are encultured to the unpredictability, openness and discursive nature of social media platforms. Tensions between official (e.g. label-managed) online fan clubs and the fan community have been recognized in media scholarship since the early 2000s. As Kibby (2000: 99) notes, the label’s interest is essentially commercial; fan-to-fan communication (such as a chat room) “increases visits to the site, boosts customer goodwill, allows customers to create ‘content’ in line with their current interests, and increases the ‘information’ available on the site.” Fans also enjoy the “aura” of a concrete link to the artist, particularly relevant in global industrialized music production where opportunities to connect directly with an artist are few (ibid.: 100). Official fan clubs typically integrate a merchandise portal, catering to the “fan as collector” and selling special and limited edition products (Thèberge 2005). Yet the potential for off-topic, controversial or antisocial interactions constitutes an ongoing risk, requiring moderators to maintain social dynamics (Kibby 2000: 97). K-pop fan cafés on platforms such as Daum enforce rigorous registration and moderation processes to manage this risk, including detailed rules for acceptable nicknames and behavior and bureaucratic promotion processes to “level up” and unlock further functionality, such as the ability to create new discussions. Although these fan cafés cater primarily for Korean K-pop fans, they are also frequented by some global K-pop fans. Numerous online tutorials explain how to join and navigate Korean fan cafés, illustrating global K-pop fans’ cosmopolitan desires. Global fans aspire to join Korean fan cafés not only for access to exclusive content, but as a means of cosmopolitan self-actualization. For instance, the Filipino creator of the English-language fan café tutorial webpage ­daumfancafe.tumblr.com provides a “Frequently Asked Questions” list, not only including fan café-related questions but also suggesting resources for Korean learners. By joining Korean fan cafés, global K-pop fans enact the cosmopolitan desire to, as Hannerz (1990: 240–1) puts it, “immerse themselves in other cultures,” exhibiting “an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity” (ibid.: 239). The challenges of joining a Korean fan café are in themselves an opportunity for cosmopolitan mastery. Moreover, the networks of knowledge required to effectively compile and share these tutorials – entailing translation, video/image production and promotion/publication on relevant social media and webpages – demonstrate the creative and collaborative aspects of global K-pop fandom that define its participatory culture. For example, one Ateez fan site, www.ateezsupportdirectory.com, describes itself as “a place where ALL Atiny can

36  Sarah Keith collaborate and share ideas for how our fandom can better work together to support Ateez!,” collating multiple fan-written guides (in English and Spanish) to using Naver, Daum and fan voting apps relevant to the group (Ateez Support Directory, 2022). In comparison, platforms designed for global K-pop fans provide fewer opportunities for cosmopolitan self-actualization and participation. For instance, the VLive platform (developed by Naver and subsequently acquired by HYBE Corporation) provides a channel for artists or agencies, integrating a homepage, store, schedule, chat, artist discussion board and fan discussion board. A fan entering the chat is presented with a real-time feed of all chat participants; in one chat I observed, 95 fans were sending messages in languages including English, Korean, Spanish, Indonesian and Arabic. The rate of messages, single channel of communication and vast number of participants renders fan-to-fan discussion difficult, if not impossible. Participants are unable to create separate chat rooms or discussion boards for different topics, or languageor country-specific chat rooms. Fans instead use the single chat and discussion board as a oneway medium, posting greetings to the artist, messages of support, requests to come to their country, and memes, fan art and emoji. The need for Korean language competence is minimal; both the site itself and all posts from artists themselves are automatically translated into multiple languages, while artists’ videos are subtitled by volunteers using the platform’s Fansubs functionality. While effective as a one-way communication mechanism between artists and fans, there are limited means for fans to meaningfully communicate with each other. Yet fans themselves produce valuable user data, in the form of “information about their uploaded data, social networks, their interests, demographic data, their browsing and interaction behavior” (Fuchs 2012: 704). Although self-described as “a community where stars and fans connect” (VLive 2022), VLive is more accurately understood as a broadcasting platform that seeks to create an audience commodity (after Smythe 1977). The platform illustrates a significant shift in the cultural industries from content production, to capturing and cultivating fandom by developing fan spaces, fan products and fan platforms. Simultaneously, agency-controlled fan spaces are invested in protecting their property (e.g. artists and related content) and minimizing unpredictable or controversial fan behavior. What is offered through VLive and related platforms is not cosmopolitan fandom but global consumer culture; a space where difference is eliminated through a flattening of the fan experience, where content is easily accessible and available in all languages. While the platform certainly has utility value (e.g. in consolidating artist schedules, web store and video exclusives), it highlights the ontological differences between fandom as community and fandom as commodity.

Selling Access Them seeing your post is literally like a needle in a haystack, its merely by luck for the most part. (A Quora user, 2021) A founding principle of “official” music fan clubs is the promise of exclusive access to artists and content, and other rewards. The K-pop fan club model – which, until recently, has been targeted toward Korean fans only – sells annual fan club membership with benefits including limited edition merchandise, access to members-only forums or online spaces and priority access to live events such as music show performances and fan meetings. Extending this trajectory of accessibility, online fandom platforms offer not only exclusive artist content (at either free or paid levels) but also the chance that individual fans’ posts will be “liked” or answered by artists themselves.

Digital K-pop Fan Platforms in a Cosmopolitan World  37 The sharing of personal and supposedly unmediated images, video and other content is a well-established artist management strategy across the entertainment industries. As Wright and Smith (2021: 434) note in their study of fan magazines, the “illusion of intimacy, authenticity and shared experience with the star reassured fans that despite their idol’s glamorous, hectic lifestyle, they were still similar to them.” Fan platform Weverse (developed by HYBE Corporation, owner of BTS’ agency BigHit Entertainment) leverages behind-the-scenes access in its model; one subscription plan, called “Behind,” offers “never-before-seen photos and videos” (Benjamin 2020) for a small monthly fee, while video episodes can be purchased at a one-off cost. As well as offering exclusive content – mainly artist selfies (selca) and other candid images – these platforms further emphasize shared experience and intimacy by promising access to artists that is both individualized and real time. For example, the BTS community on Weverse features artist accounts for each member, in contrast to their Twitter presence which consolidates content from individual members and their management under a single account (BTS_ twt). Similarly, while members have individual accounts on Instagram, images are predominantly of, not by, artists, demonstrating what Edlom (2020: 141) terms “created authenticity”: “a strategic tool, controlled mostly by a manager, marketers and music companies.” The images members provide on Weverse, meanwhile, are predominantly selfies, often in mundane ­settings – a car, a stylist’s chair, a recording studio – or of daily activities, generally conveying a (contrived or genuine) sense of informality and spontaneity. The most notable aspect of Weverse is the facility for artists to like and reply to posts made by fans (“Wevers,” according to the platform terminology). Numerous forums discuss strategies for attracting attention on Weverse, including when to post, content that seems favored by artists, and how to post in Korean. The fan capital associated with “being noticed” transforms the artist’s Weverse feed into a competitive space where fans jostle for attention and plead for “cheers,” a “like” analogue which, according to many Wevers, increases the chance of being noticed. As a Quora user explains, “If you have very high cheers, then you have higher chance that they will see it and respond… I see so many Army’s begging for cheers, so BTS can see it… Som [sic] Army’s even comment on my posts to get more cheers… It’s weird” (Quora user, Murgatroy 2020). While inter-fandom rivalries are common in K-pop (manifesting, for example, as organized strategies for competition voting and chart manipulation), hustling for the finite resource of artists’ attention introduces direct competition into the fandom community itself. This competition destabilizes the communal and affective aspects of fandom, producing the above user’s “weird” experience. Affinity and friendship are core tenets of fandom; as Jenkins (2006: 41) suggests, one becomes a fan not by being a regular viewer of a particular program but by translating that viewing into some type of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the program content with friends, by joining a community of other fans who share common interests. These community practices are particularly relevant in transnational and cosmopolitan fandom, where participation entails the mutually beneficial production, and sharing, of transcultural resources and competencies. Conversely, Weverse offers an individualized experience based on market logic; as McCourt and Burkart (2007: 270) discuss in their exploration of digital music streaming, such services “create ‘audiences’ by isolating their users and reaggregating them into a manufactured community of atomized streamers and downloaders.” Although Weverse is, according to its own description, an “official fan community where fans and artists interact” (Weverse 2022), the meaning and value of “community” or “interaction” within a user base that can number in the millions is uncertain. In promising a direct connection to artists and providing a single worldwide access point between artist and fan, individual experience becomes simultaneously more individualized, more homogenized and more competitive.

38  Sarah Keith

Virtualization I would also personally get rid of the speech from artist and animated characters (in my opinion, it is really creepy and gateways some fans into becoming serious sasaengs). (An App store reviewer, 2021) A further development in K-pop fandom capitalization is the emergence of “virtual idol” products and services. In one sense, this can be considered part of the broader context of expanding IP across multiple platforms and types of merchandise, such as digital goods (e.g. SNS stickers), toys and official lightsticks. K-pop IP has been mobilized in interactive media, such as the SuperStar rhythm game series produced by Dalcomsoft. Virtual reality has also been trialed as a concept for K-pop group aespa, where each member is linked with a digital avatar, and multi-national K-pop group K/DA, who promote the online game League of Legends and are depicted as in-game characters. However, a distinct recent innovation is technologies that use artificial intelligence to create virtual artist experiences, including direct chat, synthesized voices and digital avatars. These virtual idol technologies include Supertone, an AI firm that clones artists’ voices, which received investment from BTS agency BigHit entertainment (Stassen 2021); UNIVERSE, a fan platform similar to Weverse developed by games company NCSoft, which has trialed synthesized artist voices and interactive CGI idols; and Bubble, a subscription service providing fans with personalized messages from their selected artists. Like hologram idol performance and IP expansion more generally, virtualization addresses the problem of scarce resources (artists’ limited time and availability) and increasing demand (the growing global K-pop fanbase). As Supertone’s COO explains, “BTS is really busy these days, and it’d be unfortunate if they can’t participate in content due to lack of time. [Using] our technology when making games or audiobooks or dubbing an animation, for instance, they wouldn’t necessarily have to record in person” (Bae 2021). Unlike hologram idol performance however, virtual idol technologies deliver an experience that is profoundly individualized. These technologies endeavor to simulate an artist’s appearance, personality and voice, replicating the artist’s “aura” and amplifying fan-artist intimacy through technological means, without the artist themself being at the center of the experience. Furthermore, they typically provide a multiplicity of possibilities, meaning that fans do not share the same experience; as interactive applications designed predominantly for mobile consumption, virtual idol content is customized for delivery to individual users. These technologies also promise a new kind of relationship between fan and artist. On launch, UNIVERSE describes itself as “a place that connects fans with their Artists”; this phrasing – where artists are positioned as a property of the fan, instead of the other way around – neatly describes how the platform provides personalized, on-demand artist experiences to users. Several types of virtualized fan services have been launched, with many available on a paid subscription basis, charged by the number of artists the user wishes to interact with. This personalization of artist-fan communication is a key selling point, and differentiates these platforms from artists’ social media feeds and other fan-exclusive platforms such as Weverse; as Bubble’s app store information declares, “Receive a special everyday message from the artist who calls your name.” Bubble, developed by DearU (a subsidiary of SM Entertainment), provides customized artist-to-fan communication in automatically translated text format; its model uses generic messages sent by artists, which are personalized by inserting the user’s name where relevant. The fundamentally one-way and generic aspects of the service are glossed over, with the service’s FAQ stating, “Yes! Bubble messages are sent directly by the artist” and “The replies

Digital K-pop Fan Platforms in a Cosmopolitan World  39 sent by fans are stored in the artist’s reply inbox without any notice to the artist” (Lysn 2019). Other services have been trialed and discontinued; for instance, UNIVERSE initially offered a “Studio” feature allowing users to pose and dress avatars of selected artists; however, it received criticism related to potential exploitation, sexualization and misuse (Boson 2021) and the feature was swiftly removed several months after the platform launched. Likewise, fans have expressed concern over UNIVERSE’s “private call” function, which simulates voice “calls” from selected artists. This function uses AI to synthesize a spoken message – personalized with the user’s name – in an artist’s voice, using a prewritten script, e.g. “, how are you today? Have you eaten?”. Global fans’ reception to this service was mixed; it has been called “uncomfortable” and “problematic” (Daly 2021). One app review commented, “Please remove the private call with AI voice feature. This provides a vulnerability toward the idols to harmful abuse of content” (Palmon40 2021). This last point reveals a fundamental tension between cosmopolitan fandom and the audience commodity. Cosmopolitanism’s alignment with “ethics, justice [and] social responsibility… within social conditions of complex globality” (Inglis 2012: 11) produces global K-pop fans invested in artist welfare, sustainability and responsible conduct by fans and K-pop agencies. As such, perceived exploitation of artists, or production of unhealthy fan-artist relationships, is regarded unfavorably by cosmopolitan fans. Another issue in play is the individualization of fans within virtual idol experiences. In many ways, the virtual idol can be considered an evolved form of the hologram idol; both represent the convergence of Korea’s ICT and cultural industries. As Kim (2018: 45) points out, holographic idol performance is the product of an enduring connection between the communication, media and entertainment industries, visible in the synergies between K-pop and mobile phones, software platforms and telecommunications networks. Hologram performance emerged as a solution to servicing the increasing demand for live experiences, especially from overseas fans (ibid.: 161). Likewise, entertainment agencies have enthusiastically explored livestreamed and prerecorded concerts, shown in cinemas and on global video streaming platforms, as a means of meeting the growing global appetite for live K-pop events. These “virtual live” events have become increasingly important during and following the global COVID-19 pandemic, which reduced opportunities for live events including concerts, music shows and fan meetings. Similarly, many music awards shows and television competitions – such as MNet’s Queendom, a reality competition television program featuring female artists – now allow global fans to participate by voting. While global fans participate in each of these events as individuals (in terms of single tickets and votes), the discursive structures around these events are inherently social. This social aspect is lacking in the profoundly individualized and on-demand ecosystem of virtual idol services. Live events, whether performed in real time, recorded, online or offline, transmit an artist’s presence and the construct audience community (Keith et al. 2014). As Hesmondhalgh (2013: 2) notes, the feelings of community evoked in physical live performances are “just as possible when seeing someone perform on television or on YouTube” (ibid.: 2). In other words, virtual live events afford opportunities and spaces for communal (and cosmopolitan) fandom, whether watching a livestreamed event, discussing a new music video on social media or collectively mobilizing to support an artist through voting. Conversely, virtual idols that “personally” communicate with fans, on-demand and through opaque technological processes, offer a much more solitary experience that destabilizes the “imagined community” fundamental to cosmopolitanism itself.

Financialization #YG announces its partnership with @Binance. Please look forward to our various trendy attempts to interact with our fans! (Twitter post by YG Entertainment 2022)

40  Sarah Keith The core business of the music industry, throughout most of its existence, has been the sale and licensing of recorded music. Associated revenue streams – live performance, sponsorships and endorsements, merchandise and related IP licensing – have become increasingly important over the last few decades, as streaming has diminished revenue from recordings. As Negus (2019: 375) describes, this has produced a landscape in which “it is more advantageous to focus efforts on analyzing and targeting the activities of the dedicated aficionados, those who invest time and money on recordings (digital and physical), artefacts, merchandise and concert tickets” than the greater number of casual listeners who are monetized via streaming revenues. In the global K-pop ecosystem, these “aficionados” might purchase official lightsticks, photobooks and CDs, buy an official fan club membership, and pay for exclusive content on platforms such as Weverse. Value is also extracted from fans through other means; online music fans may participate in “co-creative” labor (Banks and Deuze 2009: 422) in which economic profit flows to the artist while “a range of other rewards in terms of meaning and experience… govern [fans’] contributions” (Morris 2014: 282). For cosmopolitan K-pop fans, this labor might entail voting for artists in awards shows, supporting artists by repeatedly streaming music, or promoting an artist on social media; rewards include participation in a community of like-minded fans, and social capital within the defined fan group. The final recent development in K-pop, and in music more generally, to be discussed here is the financialization of fandom; “aficionado” fans are no longer monetized just through their purchase of products or services, but via their formal financial investment in the artist or their agency itself. Financialization as a concept refers to the increasing involvement of financial markets in all spheres of daily activity; as Aitken (2007: 13) outlines, the prevalent “finance culture” produces entrepreneurial individuals who are “investing” subjects, who “treat their life as an enterprise [and] assert personal control over various aspects of risk in a direct manner.” This financialization manifests in the creation of artist-related investment assets – as public offering of company shares, sale of rights shares or sale of NFTs – as a revenue-generating activity. In turn, this conscripts invested fans into promotional activities, turning co-creative labor into (speculative) paid labor. Relevant examples are the aforementioned public offering of BTS agency HYBE Corporation in 2020; multiple agencies and artists’ announcements of NFTs and metaverse-related projects, including both SM (Stassen 2022) and YG Entertainment’s partnership with cryptocurrency exchange Binance; and Musicow, a Korean music rights auction platform where “fans, listeners and investors can contribute to the ecosystem by owning piece of royalty rights” (Musicow 2022). There are two main points to discuss regarding financialization and its reception and effect among cosmopolitan fans. The first is the transparent valuation of artists, IP and agency futures as financial assets, completely separate from (but reliant on) the intangible value that fans derive and contribute to them. While fans may be investors, investors are not necessarily fans, and vice versa. As such, fans sit uneasily alongside market speculators; the value each derives from K-pop is completely different. Fan investors must attempt to reconcile economic and personal decisions: What if a fan likes an artist but they are an unsound investment? Does sentimentality outweigh financial risk? And does selling shares (or NFTs) for a profit, or loss, constitute a betrayal or sound judgment? Fans may be driven to buy shares or NFTs to support artists, much like they would merchandise; however, their purpose as financial instruments and investment assets, rather than collectibles, is entirely different. It remains to be seen how, or whether, fans negotiate this distinction. The second is the uneasy fit between NFTs and other digital music commodities, and cosmopolitan fans’ tendency toward social justice, including concerns related to the environment and sustainability. Henn et al. (2022: 720) find that, among millennials, there is a significant overlap between cosmopolitanism and environmentalism as well as postmaterialism and left-wing attitudes generally. While many artists and their agencies actively

Digital K-pop Fan Platforms in a Cosmopolitan World  41 promote social responsibility (in the form of public charitable donations, and pro-social messages in their music), environmental sustainability has been less addressed. The environmental impact of NFTs and other blockchain-reliant digital assets such as cryptocurrencies has been widely discussed, with prominent critics arguing that the energy-intensive computations required to mint and transact these assets contribute to carbon emissions and, therefore, to climate change (Kolbert 2021). Several K-pop agencies and artists have recently announced NFTs and blockchain-related products, or hinted at future production. In 2021, both HYBE and JYP Entertainment announced NFT collaborations with blockchain company Dunamu, although JYP terminated this partnership the following year. The response from global fans was swift and predominantly negative; on Twitter, hashtags such as #BoycottHYBENFT and #ARMYsAgainstNFT showed that many fans condemned this partnership, predominantly on environmental grounds. HYBE CEO Bang Si-Hyuk later cautiously walked back the company’s NFT partnership, stating, “When we said we were going to pursue an NFT exchange, the market reacted with enthusiastic welcome, but fans showed concern and at times aggressive feedback… As of now, we haven’t announced anything” (Bruner 2022). Tellingly, Bang identifies fans and the market as entities that are not only separate but opposed. In all, financialization attempts to define K-pop fandom in terms of a simple market according to the logics of technology and capital; however, young people’s postmaterialist values, cosmopolitanism and youth environmental politics (Henn et al., 2022), which are particularly pronounced among global K-pop fans, resist this definition.

Conclusion This chapter does not intend to argue that the abovementioned platforms, services and commodities are unsuccessful, or universally disdained by global K-pop fans. Rather, it has highlighted disjunctures between network logics of technology and capital, and fans’ cosmopolitan identities. These innovations – the global fan café, selling access, virtualization and financialization – are, foremost, technocratic efforts to extract value from K-pop’s global fanbase. Each conceives of fans as standardized consumer-participants in global cultural and economic flows, transcending linguistic and geographic boundaries to engage in various financial and symbolic transactions administered by agencies through specialized online platforms. On the one hand, these are rational solutions to significant challenges and changes in the music and entertainment industries, including the shift toward digital and streaming modes of consumption, declining revenues from physical media and merchandise, and the limitations of live physical performances and appearances in meeting global demand. However, returning to Szerszynski and Urry’s definition, cosmopolitanism is defined by extensive mobility, curiosity, risk-taking, semiotic skills and “openness to other peoples and cultures and a willingness/ability to appreciate some elements of the language/culture of the ‘other’” (2002: 470). While the aforementioned commodities and services provide easily accessible content portals for global fans, they may eliminate or override the cosmopolitan self-actualization entailed by navigating communities, practices, language and boundaries. As such, these “fandom platforms” are so named for their aspirations toward capturing fans as consumers, rather than their integration of fans’ complex and critical perspectives.

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3 Chart Manipulation and Fan Labor in the Online Moral Economy of K-pop Stephanie Jiyun Choi

Fans are inseparable from consumption. They are often deemed to be specialist consumers with certain ideological orientations and activities (Cavicchi 1998; Hills 2002; Crawford 2004). However, as Mel Stanfill (2019) points out, consumption carries negative connotations, such as waste or destruction, natural or uncivilized, personal, private, irrational, emotional and thus “feminine” (Veblen 1899/2000; Baudrillard 2000; Campbell 2000; Hebdige 2000; Arvidsson 2005; Sandvoss 2005; Rafferty 2011; Sandlin and Maudlin 2012; quoted in Stanfill 2019: 77). As a way of normalizing fans and their activities, Henry Jenkins (1992) and Kurt Lancaster (2001) reinterpreted fans as performative consumers who also “produce” and “create,” rejecting the idea of fans as passive receivers of popular culture. If fan production activities – such as fan fiction, fan-made videos and fan art – have been considered as a conventional form of fan labor, K-pop fans further claim their consumption activities as fan labor, a type of labor they provide often for free for the pleasure of other fans and their idols’ publicity. Particularly, music chart manipulation, a collective action of tens of thousands of fans putting their idol’s song at the top of a music chart by purchasing the album and streaming the song multiple times during the promotion period, is one example of fan labor performed through consumption activities. Because it can be achieved only through consumption, fans have surveilled and problematized entertainment companies that secretly buy a huge number of albums or stream their artists’ songs, claiming that such consumption activities should be performed only by “fans.” By investigating the case of music chart manipulation in K-pop, this chapter discusses new forms of social relations, capital and networks in the moral economy of K-pop in which individual and corporate actors create and impose new types of social norms and ethics in digital media. The idea of moral economy has been widely discussed, circulated and applied in other contexts after E.P. Thompson (1971) brought attention to the concept in his analysis on the 18th-century English crowd’s direct popular action of market control. In Thompson’s context of moral economy (ibid.: 78–9), the peasants’ food riots were “supported by the wider consensus of the community” that was often sanctioned by the paternalist authorities who were “in some measure, the prisoners of the people.” Thompson explains that the officers’ reluctance to punish the rioters or employ military force in suppressing riots derives from their relationship with the peasants as local members whose (im)mobility is bounded to the agricultural community. In fandom studies, Henry Jenkins (1992) applied the concept in his work on Star Trek fans, or “Trekkers,” as “poachers of textual meanings” who would add personal meanings and pleasure by rereading and rewriting the media text of Star Trek. Although these fans seem to freely appropriate the characters of Star Trek, they create and observe their own norms to guarantee a “reasonable degree of conformity” to the original narrative so that they could keep Star Trek “alive in the face of network indifference and studio incompetence” ( Jenkins 1992: 99–100). DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-5

Chart Manipulation and Fan Labor in the Online Moral Economy of K-pop  45 Later, Jenkins (2006: 38) notes that “At the present moment [in 2006], that moral economy is frayed because of the hostile rhetoric and practices of media companies eager to regulate peerto-peer culture.” In Spreadable Media, Jenkins, Ford and Green (2013: 56–8) discuss how media companies respond to file sharing and piracy by taking legal action or adopting “stickiness” model, while fans whose free labor is exploited by the companies demand better compensation individually or express their opinions through protests. This chapter presents the opposite case of fans censoring and regulating the media industry through fan labor as a way of maintaining the moral economy of K-pop. By discussing the history of music chart manipulation and related legislation, it aims to explore how fans have gained their status not simply as eager promotors of their favorite singers but also as investigators who monitor suspicious media manipulations conducted by rival companies. If the 18th-century peasants conducted collective practices such as uprising to practically maintain their subsistence and morally defend traditional rights and customs, K-pop fans investigate and report suspicious media manipulation acts to practically secure their fandom while morally keep the mutual fidelity with their idols. Fans make their financial support indispensable in an idol’s career and maintain their dominance over the industry by policing and legally reporting rival companies’ chart manipulation. This study is based on my ethnographic research in person and on social media platforms from 2015 to 2021. Due to the sensitivity of the topic, the interviewees will remain anonymous.

Music Charts and Fandom Wars Idol A seemed upset and anxious. He smoked a cigarette for a moment and said, “Okay, I forgive my company.” “What happened?” I asked. There was a negotiation between him and Group D – another idol group in his company – over their album releases: I was supposed to release my single on Monday, but then Group also wanted to release their album on the same day. So, I changed my release date for them. But then something happened to them and they had to change it again to Wednesday. The outcome of accumulated streaming and album sales are drastically different when [you release new music] on Monday or Wednesday. It greatly affects the chart on the following week. But now Group D wants to release their album on Wednesday, so they want me to postpone mine to Thursday. Then I’ll be wasting four days on that week. Also, there are rapid changes on the chart from Thursday once music chart programs start broadcasting their shows. So, Thursday is somewhat dangerous [to release a single]. (Idol A, personal conversation, 1 October 2015) As Idol A explains, a company with multiple artists must consider the schedules of its artists so that it can effectively distribute its workforce for each artist and maximize its profit by ensuring that all artists will rank on the top of the music charts. Ranks are important especially for idols who wish to secure their opportunities for their next solo album, because companies do not fully support solo albums compared to that of a group due to their low album sales. In Idol A’s case, Group D was planning to release its group album on the same day Idol A was going to release his single, and the company determined to concentrate on Group D’s promotion, expecting to gain more profit from it. As a result, Idol A was assigned with a less-profitable date for his single release. Because the first week’s album sales reflect the popularity of the artist, both his company and fans will promote Idol A’s album in various ways particularly around this period. Idol A will promote his album by performing at music chart shows for one to two weeks. Meanwhile, his fans will participate in the music chart shows as audience members to

46  Stephanie Jiyun Choi support Idol A, stream the song online, watch the music video multiple times on his official YouTube channel and buy physical album copies. The Circle Chart (former Gaon Chart) and the Hanteo Chart are two major sales-tracking systems that track sales of music and music video products in South Korea. Both charts provide sales sources for the television music chart shows, such as Inkigayo, Music Bank, Show! Champion and M Countdown, and fans will make a group order from the stores affiliated with either the Hanteo or the Circle Chart so that the album sales are accurately counted. The ranks on the music chart shows are determined by various factors, such as online streaming, physical album sales, view counts of official YouTube music videos, fan votes via smartphone apps, the amount television and radio airplay of the song, and real-time voting during the show time. Music charts in South Korea are not a mere barometer of a public trend or general popularity of an artist. They are the outcome of harsh competitions among fans. A higher ranking on music charts allows idols to gain more media exposure, publicity and profits, although surviving in the K-pop market has not been easy for idol groups with small budgets. In 2015, for instance, 60 groups of 324 idols made their debuts among millions of aspiring idols, and less than 10 groups among them gained profitable results (S.G. Lee 2018b). As a way of securing their favorite idol group’s survival in the market, fans must actively consume their music while surveilling “unusual” album sales of other idol groups.

Music Chart Manipulation by the Industry The history of music charts in South Korea goes back to the 1960s. The first radio DJ Choi Dong-Uk, from the broadcast company DBS, hosted the first music chart radio programs, Donga Best 10 and Gayo Encore for Western pop and Korean pop respectively, from 1963 until the 1970s. Since the 1980s, public television networks have aired music chart shows which have served as one of the important indicators that gauge the popularity of pop songs and artists. KBS had aired Gayo Top10 from February 1981 until it discontinued the show in February 1998 for “inappropriately encouraging entertainment” during the IMF crisis, although it launched the new music chart program Music Bank in June after a pushback from the viewers (S. Kim 2017). MBC (Show Network, 1989–90; Your Pop Songs, 1990–93; Decide the Best Pop Songs, 1993; Inkigayo Best 50, 1995–98; Music Camp, 1998–99; Live Music Camp, 1998–2005; Show! Music Core, 2005–present in 2022) and SBS (Inkigayo, 1991–93; Star Seoul Star, 1993–94; Live TV Pop Songs 20, 1994–98; Inkigayo, 1998–present in 2022) have maintained their own music chart television shows since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Later, cable television networks launched their music shows, such as Show! Champion, The Show and Simply K-pop. While introducing weekly charts, the programs air pop musicians’ live or prerecorded performances for one to two hours. Controversies over the fairness of data calculation have continued since its first broadcast on radio shows in the 1960s. In 1965, Kyunghyang Shinmun released a column entitled “Pop Songs and Broadcast Networks… The Right and Wrong of Popularity Vote” concerning radio stations that received popularity votes for pop songs from its listeners via postcards and played “lowbrow” Korean songs that copied Japanese pop: “[The radio stations] make an impression of the hotbed of lowbrow songs, perhaps because they can put blame on the listeners as the songs are selected by them” (Kyunghyang Shinmun 1965). The discourses on the popularity vote in the 1960s and the 1970s centered around whether radio stations aired “instructive and wholesome” properties of pop songs, although by the 1980s and the 1990s, the concerns shifted to whether the entertainment industry was manipulating the music charts for artists’ publicity. In 1987, the two major national broadcasting networks KBS and MBC changed calculating methods for their popular music awards after they found some singers sending a massive

Chart Manipulation and Fan Labor in the Online Moral Economy of K-pop  47 number of votes by themselves or by asking their fan club members (Donga Ilbo 1987). Journalist Park Chan-Su exposed the corruption within the entertainment industry in the 1990s, reporting that some managers paid about 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 Korean won for their singers to appear on a television show and to play songs on a radio program (Park 1995). A singer’s manager who was under the police investigation allegedly paid 20,000,000 won to a music show producer and spent 400,000,000 won in total, as managers and singers were able to earn more profit from album sales, nightclub performance fees and commercial model fees once they earned more opportunities of media appearance through bribery (ibid.). Some entertainment companies have continued to manipulate music charts after the voting platform moved to the internet. In July 2012, an entertainment news program reported an interview of a broker from a Chinese company that manipulated South Korean music charts by mass-downloading and mass-streaming a particular song upon the order of their customer company in South Korea. The broker explained, “[The manipulation] shouldn’t be noticeable; otherwise, you’ll get caught. Rookies should be exposed within TOP50 for a while, then go up to TOP30 on their next album, and then to TOP20. We coordinate those steps together [with our customers]” (Lee 2012). According to the Korea Creative Content Agency’s 2017 Music Industry White Paper, the market size of South Korean music in 2016 was US$858,000,000, whereas those of Japan and the US were 7 times ($5,996,000,000) and 20 times ($17,219,000,000) bigger than that of South Korea (Korea Creative Content Agency 2018). Because of the small size of the Korean popular music market, it has not been difficult to top the charts by purchasing a few thousands of albums. From the mid-2010s, fans began to surveil “abnormal” tendencies of album sales of their idols’ rival groups.

Fans’ Surveillance of the Industry’s Music Chart Manipulation “Sajaegi” originally refers to a bulk-buying practice, although in the K-pop scene, it refers to the bulk-buying activity specifically conducted by entertainment companies during the promotion period. It is considered a fair game if bulk buying is conducted by fans; it is illegal when a company buys its artists’ albums as a way of achieving a higher rank on music charts. Fans question a company’s sajaegi practice when they find the album sales: (1) exceed the average of previous album sales; (2) drastically increase outside of the aggressive marketing period, i.e., the “fansign event” period; and/or (3) surpasses the album sales of the rival artist who used to be more popular. Once fans find their rival’s album sales anomalous enough to threaten their idol’s ranking, fans question the rival company’s manipulation on album sales and request an explanation from the rival company. Momoland sold 5,000 copies of its new album “Great!” throughout a month in January 2018; however, when the group suddenly sold 8,000 copies within a day on 12 February (Star Today 2018), fandoms of SEVENTEEN, iKON, Red Velvet and other idols, who were on a promotion period at the same time, requested an explanation from Momoland’s company, MLD Entertainment, the then Duble Kick Entertainment. They tweeted the hashtags, #Momoland_sajaegi_pideubaek_yoguhamnida, (Momoland, respond to the bulk buying rumor) and #Dublekick_sajaegi_pideubaek_yoguhamnida (Dublekick, respond to the bulk buying rumor), claiming this tendency to be anomalous as it occurred neither during the fansign event period nor during the first week of the album release but right after SEVENTEEN’s first-week sales ended. Based on the anomaly of Momoland’s album sales, the fans claimed, Duble Kick Entertainment hoarded albums to win the No.1 on music chart shows on the following week when SEVENTEEN, one of the strongest candidates for No.1, finished their promotion (@ Lovingthestar 2018). Duble Kick Entertainment denied its sajaegi practice, stating, “We are also surprised by the surprising amount of sales in a day. There is no reason to do sajaegi and we are not in a [financial] situation to do so” (M. Hwang 2018b).

48  Stephanie Jiyun Choi After 885 more copies were sold on 13 February, the record store Hot Tracks, which owned 23 branches in Seoul, revealed that it only stocked only a few copies of Momoland’s albums. Reporter Hwang Ji-Young (2018a) questioned the viability of selling 9,000 copies in two days, because the Jamsil branch, which had stocked the greatest number among Hot Tracks branches in Seoul, only kept 6 copies, while other branches kept none or 2–3 copies at most. Fans of SEVENTEEN and other idols continued to request Duble Kick’s explanation – ideally, Momoland’s fans are expected to provide their group order receipts; however, none of the fans provided any. In the afternoon, Duble Kick stated that the result was an accumulation of the February order: In fact, the initial stock for Momoland’s album was very little, about 1,000 copies. Then the preorder increased, and including the order from Japan, the total accumulation [of album sales] in February resulted in 8,200 copies – [8,200 copies] were not sold in a day (Herald Pop 2018). This meant that the Hanteo Chart’s album sales record was incorrect. After midnight, the Hanteo Chart’s CEO Kwak Young-Ho responded, stating that the Hanteo Chart’s record of Momoland selling over 8,000 copies in a day on 12 February was not an error. He stated: If the controversial sales of Momoland’s album turns out to reflect a bulk buying from an involved party, not the actual sales, we will take aggressive legal action… According to Article 3, Clause 2 of the Hanteo Chart’s contract with affiliated retailers, the retailers must send us data that satisfy our requirements regarding sales condition. Furthermore, under Article 4, Clause 2, regarding good faith, confidentiality and copyrights, the retailers must not provide fraudulent data to the Hanteo Chart through artificial manipulation… Because providing false data to the Hanteo Chart is considered serious obstruction of business, we have had agreed upon removing the store’s affiliation with us and demanding compensation for damages incurred. (H. Kim 2018a) On the next morning, on 14 February, Duble Kick released another official statement: Hello, this is Momoland’s agency Duble Kick Company. First, we would like to clearly announce that the controversial hoarding of Momoland’s album sale is not true. We would like to inform you that based on the company’s investigation, we found that the current album sales were made through group orders by domestic and international fans via a few retailers. Momoland is planning its Japan promotion from February 28 with the release of Momoland KOREAN Ver. Best Album, however, because the new single “Bbum Bbum” that is on the major Japanese charts is not included in the Japanese album, there were many requests from Japanese and international fans regarding the album that included “Bbum Bbum,” so the company has introduced them how to purchase the album. We consider the upsurge in album sales on the 12th because of Japanese and international fans’ album purchase after the announcement of official Japan promotion. (S.R. Lee 2018d) However, fans of Momoland’s rival groups pointed out: (1) there are no retailers that would stock such a big amount of album copies; (2) international fans usually make group orders via the internet, not by visiting South Korea and purchasing albums in person; (3) it may be bought by Korean fans, although the statistics of Momoland’s fan club members on the official fan club website shows that there was no drastic increase between 1 February to 12 February; (4) when the inventory is not available, fans may preorder the albums, although this was not the case for Momoland, and the Hanteo Chart does not include preorders in the album sales record either;

Chart Manipulation and Fan Labor in the Online Moral Economy of K-pop  49 and (5) a retailer might have purchased the albums, although considering the constant increase of the sales hour by hour, it doesn’t seem like an individual bought all 8,000 copies (Anonymous 2018a; Anonymous 2018c; Jung 2018). A week later, the Hanteo Chart announced that it will file a petition to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism for investigation and claimed that “[Duble Kick] is manipulating the media too much” (Y. Kim 2018). Duble Kick once again asserted its innocence and provided pdf images of the confirmation of album purchase by a retailer, an invoice that a Korean retailer sent to a Japanese buyer, and the payment confirmation from the Japanese buyer. The company further revealed that Momoland’s promotion agency in Japan apparently purchased the albums for its promotion purpose and that it was the Japanese agency’s own decision (J. Lee 2018a). Fans from the rival fandoms, however, claimed: (1) Mihwadang Records, the retailer that sold 8,000 copies to the Japanese agency, was run by Munhwain, the indie label of Loen Entertainment – and Loen Entertainment was the co-publisher of Momoland’s album; (2) Duble Kick forged the invoice, because the bank swift code written on the invoice was changed in January and was unavailable by then; (3) the company also forged the payment confirmation from the Japanese buyer, as the payee’s phone number was apparently the phone number of another entertainment company that was irrelevant to Mihwadang (Anonymous 2018b). Mihwadang apologized and clarified that it was a “mistake,” and the Ministry concluded that Duble Kick did not violate the Music Industry Law Article 26, i.e., “hoarding or bulk buying by an interested party” (S.M. Lee 2018c). Momoland won No.1 at Music Bank a week after the controversy, although the group gained a disparaging nickname, “Sajaegi Land.” In August 2018, the Hanteo Chart announced its new policy of endowing a “Certificate of Physical Album Sales” to those who purchased more than 1,000 physical album copies. Moreover, as international fans participated in the South Korean music chart competition, the Hanteo Chart announced its plan of adding a hologram coupon in the CD that allowed the buyer overseas to certify the purchase via a QR code (H. Kim 2018b). The Circle Chart’s policy board that consisted of six major music streaming and downloading services (i.e. Naver Music, Bugs, Melon, Soribada, Mnet.com and Genie) also determined to suspend real-time charts from 1 am to 7 am to prevent chart manipulations (Ji 2018). This exhaustive dispute among multiple fandoms, Duble Kick Entertainment and the Hanteo Chart, along with their request for the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s intervention, was one of the countless sajaegi controversies in the K-pop market. While the controversies are not new, the range of investigation that fans conduct over the issue and the industry’s immediacy in their responses imply the weight of the issue. While it impacts the credibility of companies and institutions, it also influences fans’ reputation in the K-pop scene.

Music Chart Manipulation by Fans From the early 2000s, global music industries shifted from selling physical albums to digital music forms, such as mp3 downloading, file sharing and, subsequently, online streaming. South Korean music market was one of the frontrunners of this shift. Its digital music revenues have surpassed that of the physical album from 2004. In 2011, South Korea was the only country in which digital track sales surpassed that of physical albums (Korea Creative Content Agency 2018). Global music industries have shown a gradual decrease in physical album sales throughout the 2010s. Drake’s new album “Scorpion,” for example, earned No. 1 on the Billboard 200 Chart, although it was the lowest-selling album that topped the chart in the 27-year history of Nielson Music, selling only 29,000 copies in the US for two weeks (Caulfield 2018b). The only album that sold 2 million copies in the US between 2016 and 2017 was Taylor Swift’s 2017 album, “Reputation,” as 1.216 million copies were sold in the first week (Caulfield 2018a).

50  Stephanie Jiyun Choi It was one of the only two albums that sold more than a million copies in 2017. According to the Billboard Chart’s senior director Keith Caulfield, it shows “a stark contrast to 10 years earlier, when 29 albums sold at least 1 million, with eight of those surpassing 2 million” (ibid.). South Korean music industry’s fast adaptation to digital media technologies and services, however, did not indicate the complete shift from the physical to the digital. The physical album sales in South Korea dropped in the early 2000s, but soon increased from the 2010s onward. Most recently, K-pop group BTS released their new album “Love Yourself: Answer” in 2018 and sold 1,930,000 physical copies on the first eight days, thanks to the industry’s diverse marketing strategies. Entertainment companies produce diverse versions of albums that include different album booklets, photos and other tie-in products with the same music tracks. They would also hold fansign events for those who purchase the album at a designated store on the first one or two weeks – each album serves as a lottery ticket to the fansign event where fans can have one-on-one conversations and autographs from idols. Because only 100 to 200 fans are invited to the fansign event, avid fans would purchase hundreds of physical copies, aiming at a higher chance of the admission. As shown in Momoland’s case, sajaegi by a company or “audio/visual production-associated dealers for the purpose of increasing album sales,” is illegal (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2016). Bulk buying by fans, however, is deemed legitimate by both the K-pop industry and the fans, as it is performed by “real” consumers. There are multiple ways for fans to manipulate the charts. Fans purchase multiple copies of the same album, promote the album via hashtags on social media, stream the songs all day long, type the title of the album so that it could be added to the “most searched word” list on search engines, play the music video multiple times on its official YouTube channel so that the video could become a “trending” video. When streaming songs online, fans strictly observe the “rules” to be counted on the music charts: (1) Make sure to stream the song on the app instead of downloading mp3; (2) never stop or replay a certain part of the song in the middle, because it will not be counted as one stream; (3) using multiple devices will not count if you use the same ID, so make multiple IDs; (4) mute and play the song while you sleep; (5) the streaming service may stop when you stream for a long time, so check it out occasionally; (6) more scores will be added to the music chart if you download each song individually, instead of downloading the album; (7) start downloading the songs 30 minutes after the album is released; and (8) follow the recommended playlist released by the fan club (Anonymous 2017). Fans who voluntarily partake in the streaming labor ask other fans to lend or “donate” streaming website IDs, so that they can collect the IDs and maximize the streaming numbers that will be counted for rankings in music chart shows. Occupying No. 1 on the chart is important also because the general public will listen to pop songs based on the music chart.

Conclusion Album purchase and online streaming are basic consumption activities for popular music fans, and previous fandom studies have viewed these activities as passive reception. K-pop fans, however, claim their consumption activities as part of their fan labor. This fan labor has also endowed them a privilege of manipulating music charts. After raising the sajaegi issue for more than a decade, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism finally announced in 2016 that the new bill that restricts corporate-led chart manipulations had passed (Korean Law Information Center 2016). Music producers or any related personnel and those who are paid by music producers attempt to manipulate music charts, they will be sentenced to less than two years in prison or will pay a fine of 20 million Korean won (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2016). The decade-long controversy surrounding music chart manipulations in the K-pop world not only shows how the moral economy of K-pop is sustained but also complicates the

Chart Manipulation and Fan Labor in the Online Moral Economy of K-pop  51 ways in which fans are perceived. Instead of understanding fans as either passive or productive, K-pop fans’ case suggests how fans can become performative not only through fan production but also through consumption activities.

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4 Celebrity Fashion and Fan Consumption BTS “Jungkook Hanbok” Myoung-Sun Song

On 4 July and 8 July 2019, BTS member Jungkook sported a two-piece saenghwal hanbok (­traditional Korean clothing modified for daily wear) on his way to and back from the “Love Yourself: Speak Yourself ” tour in Osaka, Japan. This outfit, now nicknamed the “Jungkook hanbok,” garnered unprecedented attention from Korean and international youth. Airport ­fashion – in the literal sense, what one wears to the airport during travel – functions as a marketing and sponsorship opportunity for celebrities due to the heightened visibility and circulation of the photos taken as they arrive and depart from airports. Jungkook had personally purchased this outfit – priced modestly at 43,000 Korean won and available in 13 colors and 7 sizes – from the official website of Zijangsa. In other words, it was not his stylist nor a business deal that prompted what he was wearing. Originally a store specializing in Buddhist temple clothing, more than half of Zijangsa’s profits are said to have shifted to the market for young people in their 20s and 30s, after Jungkook made his appearance at the airport. This chapter explores the intersections of celebrity fashion – especially airport fashion – and fan consumption in South Korea. By analyzing “Jungkook hanbok” reviews, the chapter interrogates how Korean youth make new meanings from an outfit that has largely been favored by middle-aged and elder groups.

Locating Saenghwal Hanbok in Contemporary South Korea Hanbok, by definition, means “the clothing of Korea.” While Korean clothing has existed for thousands of years, the name hanbok has only been utilized for a little over a century to distinguish itself from yangbok (Western clothing) (Kim 2020). Similar to the creation of its name, hanbok has been modified to reflect the changing of the times and environment. As such, hanbok is “our [Korean] clothing that communicates with the world” (Kim 2020: 2). The hanbok that is worn today “dates back to the mid and late Joseon Dynasty which was the last dynasty in Korean history (1392–1910)” (Y.R. Lee 2015: 5). As Yunah Lee (2017: 244) explains: Although the forms and shapes of hanbok went through alterations and modernization in response to new ways of life that were introduced through encounters with other cultures, mostly those of Japan and Euro-America, the basic composition of hanbok remained unaltered: for women, a short jacket (jeogori) and a long skirt (chima) and for men, a jacket (jeogori), a pair of trousers (baji) and a long coat (durumagi). One of the most significant features of hanbok is its structurally flat design. In contrast to Western clothing, which achieves dimensionality through straight-lined fabric, hanbok is made with flat fabric in a linear shape that only achieves dimensionality when it is worn on the body. When placed on the human frame, hanbok takes on a life of its own – one that is natural, elegant DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-6

54  Myoung-Sun Song and flowing. In other words, depending on the wearer’s body shape and way of wearing it, the lines and shapes of clothes can vary (Y.R. Lee 2015: 5). This characteristic of hanbok allows the wearer’s body to shape and create new meanings for the clothing as it is being worn. In addition, individuality can be expressed through how the hanbok is styled: “When you wear hanbok, you wear several pieces of clothes in layers, and these natural and voluminous clothes will create your own unique style” (ibid.: 6). The layering of hanbok – in multiple materials, in numerous weavings and in various natural dyes – contributes to the making of personal style. Even in the Joseon era, people layered several items together to make a fashion statement (H. Kim 2020: 3). Although the “Jungkook hanbok” is not traditional hanbok, the analysis below will demonstrate how Korean youth wear saenghwal hanbok in comparable ways by layering and styling. Today, hanbok is generally perceived as something one wears for “special occasions.” This change is reflective of the modernization of Korean society, particularly after the Korean War (1950–1953). Clothing culture experienced a fundamental collapse due to the war, and people were so poor that they resorted to selling the few clothes they had left. As a byproduct of the war, people became more accustomed to Western clothing as they came across military uniforms and relief goods (Seoul Urban Life Museum 2021: 16). For example, Cho and Park (2020) argue that 50% of the articles published on hanbok in Korean newspaper Donga Ilbo during the 1950s contained negative descriptions. During this decade, only 26 articles were published on hanbok compared to approximately 200 articles on Western clothing. The sheer difference in the number of articles confirms the newspaper’s active recommendation of Western clothing in the lives of Koreans, its contribution to the decline of hanbok as daily wear and the repositioning of hanbok as special wear (Cho and Park 2020: 57). This phenomenon catapulted into the 1960s, which saw “the normalization of [Koreans] wearing Western clothing” (Seoul Urban Life Museum 2021: 16). Bae, Lee and Kim (2016: 129) historicize five periods within the development and usage of hanbok in Korean society: (1) 1881–1910: Hanbok as a word is introduced; Korea’s ports are open to the “Western” world. (2) 1910–1984: Gaeryang hanbok is introduced; “Gaeryang” means to improve; traditional hanbok is modified in length and shape for functionality and practicality. (3) 1984–1985: Minjok hanbok is introduced; “Minjok” means ethnic group; Minjok hanbok is utilized in political and activist movements. (4) 1985–2014: Saenghwal hanbok is introduced; “Saenghwal” means life; hanbok’s traditional and modern traits are re-envisioned into something that can be worn easily on a daily basis. (5) 2014–present: Sin hanbok is introduced; “Sin” means new; Sin hanbok is used for the first time by the Hanbok Advancement Center in the launching of their “New Hanbok” project, which aims at promoting hanbok in everyday life. As can be seen with the movements in establishing and naming various styles of hanbok, Koreans have worked to make meaning and, most importantly, to continue wearing hanbok in contemporary life. Within this historical context, this chapter will explore the Jungkook hanbok as both saenghwal hanbok and beopbok (Buddhist temple wear). Saenghwal hanbok is often used interchangeably with gaeryang hanbok, byeonhyeong hanbok (modified hanbok), siryong hanbok (practical hanbok) and so on (Kwak and Nam 2002: 26). Some have argued that the word “gaeryang” implies that something needs to be “improved” or “fixed” and, thus, has an inherent fault or problem, while the word “saenghwal” focuses on the use of hanbok in daily life. Others have explained that while gaeryang focuses on the active, functional and economical aspects of

Celebrity Fashion and Fan Consumption  55 hanbok, saenghwal focuses on the traditional and philosophical aspects of the dress (Chung 2001: 31). For example, Chung notes how saenghwal hanbok – from its beginnings – has regularly been worn with t-shirts and jeans. This reflects the co-existence of tradition/modernity, East/West and Korean/global in saenghwal hanbok (ibid.: 38). Furthermore, while traditional hanbok has differentiation in gender, saenghwal hanbok breaks these boundaries by offering genderless designs and colors (ibid.: 38). As will be illustrated in the analysis below, these attributes will impact how and why youth enjoy the “Jungkook hanbok.” From the mid-1990s, saenghwal hanbok gained prominence as something that could be worn daily. Soh and Shim (2000: 182) trace this development within Korea’s heightened sense of national and cultural pride following the successful hosting of the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The popularity of the saenghwal hanbok escalated in 1996 after the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism proclaimed 21 October as “National Hanbok Day” (ibid.: 183). Moreover, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis impacted Koreans and how they grappled with nationalism, pragmatism and functionality, which are the key values reflected in the saenghwal hanbok (Ahn 2002: 85). In 2014, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism established the Hanbok Advancement Center to promote hanbok not only within Korea but across the globe. Today, Koreans pride that global designer houses such as the 2011 Christian Dior Couture collection, 2015 F/W Dries Van Noten collection and 2016 Chanel Cruise collection introduced elements of hanbok in their designs (Hanbok Advancement Center 2018: 33). Yet, hanbok still remains as something “difficult to wear.” A testament to this, in 2021, the last Wednesday of every month was designated as “A Good Day to Wear Hanbok” by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Leon Weebers claims that hanbok is much closer to its historic past than nearly any garment in Western dress. So, what makes the expansion of hanbok interesting is this question about what is tradition, for it is important to make tradition relevant for today as hanbok changes over time (Hanbok Advancement Center 2019: 29). The search for relevance is evident in how hanbok is utilized as K-fashion, especially in relation to K-pop and the Korean Wave. In this context, the case of “Jungkook hanbok” – particularly how youth wear and make meaning of the clothing – provides a timely and valuable discussion surrounding these issues.

Hanbok, Fashion and BTS There have been a handful of studies that look at K-pop through the lens of fashion (e.g. Kim 2012 on K-pop styling; Lee 2013 on goth in K-pop; Kim 2017a on K-pop’s role in K-fashion). Suk-Young Kim (2019b: 54) asserts: K-pop music videos, one of the most important ways for the genre to circulate globally, often become parables of fashion consumption. They resemble closely a fashion showcase – both haute couture and street fashion – as many K-pop fans follow their favorite idols to observe their style. Likewise, gonghang paesyeon (airport fashion) provides celebrities a chance to showcase their sense of style outside “official appearances” (E. Kim 2020: 383). In this vein, airport fashion has evolved from “a type of peeking at the casual and personal fashion of celebrities to a fashion strategy that is aimed at creating new trends through brand sponsorships” (Kim 2012: 25). Judy Park (2015: 131–2) defines the relationship between Korean designers and celebrities as a “winwin” one wherein “designers need celebrities for a boost in publicity and a trendy and hip image, and celebrities need designers to stay relevant and maintain a luxurious and stylish image.”

56  Myoung-Sun Song Within the scope of airport fashion, what makes the “Jungkook hanbok” significant is that it is not a designer item. In fact, it is a generic saenghwal hanbok and beopbok that was personally purchased by Jungkook. Previous research on the fashion of BTS has examined gender performativity in music videos (Jung and Lee 2020); comparative study of K-pop boy groups (Wang et al. 2021); image making in concept photographs (Yi and Suh 2021); and the use of color, material, pattern and detail in styling (  J.H. Kim 2020). In examining BTS and hanbok, the music video and performance stages for “IDOL” have been most widely studied (c.f. Choi et al. 2020 on the “new hanbok” worn by Blackpink in their music video “How You Like That”). Some have argued that the “boundary-free” movement, color and lines of hanbok worn by BTS in “IDOL” embodies a “global possibility” for Korean traditional culture (Hanbok Advancement Center 2019: 6). “IDOL” has also provided fertile space for research in authentic Koreanness (Willoughby 2022); traditional culture as soft power (Chung et al. 2021); Korean traditional dance and viewer attitude (Lee and Seo 2020; Y.J. Kim 2021); and the development of textile design based on traditional symbols used in the music video (Lee and Choi 2022). The “Jungkook hanbok” is not the first time a member of BTS wore hanbok to the airport. On 29 November 2017, Jin wore traditional hanbok including the durumagi (overcoat) and gat (hat) to the Incheon Airport as the group departed for Hong Kong to attend the 2017 Mnet Asian Music Awards (MAMA). News reports described Jin as “the perfect incarnation of a seonbi [noble scholar] from the Joseon Dynasty” (M. Kim 2017b). Fans speculated that he wore hanbok because “he lost at rock-paper-scissors.” To their questions, Big Hit Entertainment (currently HYBE) replied that the hanbok was worn in filming their variety content “Run BTS” (M. Kim 2017b). What is important to note in this interaction is that hanbok is perceived as something one wears when one loses a game. In other words, wearing hanbok is a punishment or consequential action. This attitude takes a significant shift with the “Jungkook hanbok.” S.Y. Park (2019) writes, “Jungkook stole the show with his airport fashion. He wore saenghwal hanbok, not as a penalty, but simply as stylish, everyday wear.” S.J. Kim (2019a) headlines a photo of Jungkook with the words: “Promoting National Glory through Gaeryang Hanbok.” In an interview, Zijangsa praised Jungkook’s seonhan yeonghyangnyeok (positive influence) in expanding the hanbok industry (S.Y. Park 2019). Calling it the “Jungkook effect,” Zijangsa went further to state that Jungkook helped make hanbok accessible and popular among Korean and international youth (S.Y. Park 2019). While Jungkook may have had this influence, he is not the first K-pop star to wear the item. In fact, Lee Hyori wore a similar outfit two years before. On 30 June 2017, Lee Hyori wore an indie pink saenghwal hanbok on her way to shoot Happy Together at KBS. She styled it by layering a white t-shirt underneath and sported a pair of beige Vans Authentic shoes. She also carried a beige F/CE wash nylon packable day pack. The following week on 7 July, she wore the same design – this time in navy – on her way to shoot Music Bank. While she carried the same backpack, this time she styled the set with a striped knitted crop top, sky-blue Adidas Nizza lows and a pair of sunglasses. Similar to “airport fashion,” chulgeunlluk (going-to-the-office look) and toegeunlluk (leaving-the-office look) are photographs taken of celebrities as they arrive or leave their “workplace” (e.g. broadcasting studios, concert venues and similar events). Like airport fashion, these provide opportunities for celebrities to cement their status as a fashion leader and icon. The “Jungkook hanbok,” more precisely, is beopbok. Beopbok refers to clothing worn by Buddhists, and it is purposefully designed so that the wearer is comfortable when praying at the temple. Beopbok is simple and modest in design; in essence, the upper and bottom pieces should neither sag loose nor cling tight to the body. Beopbok is different from the clothes that are worn by Buddhist monks (seungbok). In stores, beopbok is categorized as saenghwal hanbok or gaeryang hanbok. One advantage of beopbok is that it can be easily purchased between 30,000 to 50,000

Celebrity Fashion and Fan Consumption  57 Korean won (H.W. Lee 2022). In essence, the Zijangsa two-piece set is fundamentally different in its design, price and function from other popular hanbok brands like Tchai Kim or Isae (c.f. Lee 2017 for a comparative study of the two labels). In cities like Busan, where there is a large Buddhist population, it is not uncommon to see middle-aged and elder groups dress in beopbok as everyday casual wear. So, it is not surprising that Zijangsa happens to be a store located in Busan that is also the birthplace of Jungkook. In 2007, Zijangsa launched its e-commerce store through the Cafe24 platform. Zijangsa directly manufactures and sells their products through their online website. At the time, CEO Oh Sang-Mok wondered whether there would be sufficient online demand. He quickly found that Buddhist monks as well as middle-aged and elder customers – the main target for Zijangsa at the time – used the Internet quite well. Since then, Zijangsa has maintained a steady annual sales growth of 20% and has now established itself as a representative brand with the annual sales of more than 1 billion won (Paik 2021). Saenghwal hanbok accounts for 80% of their total sales, while seungbok takes the remaining 20%. Since Jungkook wore the item, customers in their 20s and 30s have accounted for nearly half of the total sales (ibid.). Because Zijangsa’s clothes are handmade, they are only able to make 50 to 60 sets each day. Although this causes a delay in product delivery, the consumers – including BTS fans – remain happy due to the high quality of the clothing. In November 2019, Zijangsa entered the Lotte Department Store in Busan. In April 2020, Zijangsa entered Musinsa, which is currently the most popular online fashion platform among youth. In 2021, Musinsa recorded sales of 466.7 billion won. The annual transaction on Musinsa reached 2.3 trillion won, which is a record high among all domestic platforms (Jung 2022). What is unique about Musinsa is that it offers various styling suggestions for the two-piece under the “Codi” (Coordination) tab. Musinsa creates styling options by mixing and matching items from Zijangsa as well as other brands that are sold on the platform. Currently, there are 20 different styles using the “Jungkook hanbok,” categorized under “casual,” “dandy,” “street” and “girlish.” In his airport fashion, Jungkook styled the set by layering a simple t-shirt underneath and paired it with sneakers. In the official product photos of Zijangsa, the item is worn on its own and paired with light gray socks and black gomusin (traditional rubber shoes). The official name for the Jungkook hanbok is “Unisex pre-dyed 20-count V-neck set.” This has been expanded to “Unisex pre-dyed 20-count V-neck Gaeryang Hanbok Saenghwal Hanbok Jungkook Hanbok V Hanbok Airport Fashion Zijangsa.” The item is made from 20-count pure cotton, which is dyed before the material is cut and sewn together (Paik 2021). This pre-dyeing method results in the color becoming more vivid. The official product description reads, “Original Jungkook Airport Fashion, BTS Jungkook Hanbok. The item that BTS Jungkook wore as airport fashion~!! Thank you for your interest and support. Thank you x 100 to BTS Jungkook and V.” As a genderless item, Zijangsa recommends its uses for “family look in travel, pictures and costume. Suitable for daily wear and everyday activities. Useful as a group uniform and temple stay clothing. A set that can be worn for many occasions and purposes.” As of 15 August 2022, there are 2,223 registered reviews for the “Jungkook hanbok” on the Zijangsa website. The product has a 4.9 out of 5 rating, with 96% of the purchasers being satisfied with the product. Out of the 2,223 reviews, 2,002 reviewers gave a “5” (Very Satisfied); 132 gave a “4” (Satisfied); 84 gave a “3” (Neutral); 1 gave a “2” (Unsatisfied); and 4 gave a “1” (Very Unsatisfied). Out of the 2,223 reviews, 1,248 contained photographs and/or videos uploaded by the reviewers. This study examined the “Photo & Video Reviews.” The function to “filter” the Photo & Video Reviews was applied, after which these reviews were arranged by “Suggested Reviews First.” Suggested reviews were prioritized based on the reviews that were selected by Zijangsa as well as the reviews that had garnered “Helpful” likes by the other customers.

58  Myoung-Sun Song This study examined the first 110 reviews using this method, and each photo was coded in the following categories – the color of the purchased item; the number of photos and/or videos uploaded with the review; the number of people within the photo; the gender of people within the photo and/or indicated by the review; the location of where the photo was taken; how the photo was taken and the type of styling involved in wearing the item. Overall, 186 photos were collected and 145 people were featured within these photos. For example, if one reviewer uploaded three photos taken with the same background, this was coded together as one unless their pose and/or styling changed within the three photos. The reviews were analyzed thematically for content. For each review, a minimum of three and up to a maximum of five key words were identified and categorized. Reviews that had direct references to Jungkook, BTS and ARMY, as well as hanbok, were closely examined. With that said, this study does not presume that every reviewer is ARMY, nor that every purchase is influenced by BTS.

“I Wanted to Wear One after Seeing Jungkook” While not to suggest that gender is binary, the majority of reviewers were female (87 female; 49 male). Five were unidentifiable neither by photo nor by review comment. The most popular color was black with 48 purchases. Black pearl (dark gray) ranked second with 40 purchases; mustard yellow with 20 purchases; navy with 10 purchases; pink with 9 purchases; watermelon green with 6 purchases; khaki with 5 purchases; light gray with 4 purchases; white with 2 purchases; and cocoa with 2 purchases. Out of 126 photos, 50 were taken during vacation or travel; 50 were taken at home; 10 were taken right outside of the home (e.g. in the apartment complex, in the playground and in the parking lot); 6 were taken in everyday contexts (e.g. at work, at school and at gym) and 10 were taken on specific occasions (e.g. at a concert and at a studio for a family photo shoot). The most commonly uploaded photo was the full-body shot without face (32) and full-body shot including face (28). Full-body selfies were also popular (19) along with the upper-body shots (17). As can be seen in these numbers, the majority of photos can be divided into two categories: travel and home. The two most frequent comments that appeared in the reviews were that the hanbok is comfortable and that they were going to buy hanbok again (e.g. buy as presents for family and friends, buy for themselves and buy kkalbyeol [in all colors]). There was a general consensus that the hanbok fits well. The size – for some described as “overfit” – was comfortably spacious but not overwhelmingly large despite worries that it may be “too baggy.” Because of how comfortable the hanbok was, many mentioned that it was worn as a “daily look” and as an “everyday uniform.” This was also connected to the multipurpose use of hanbok being worn inside and outside the home. The “Jungkook hanbok” was described as being very suitable for most weather and seasons. It could be worn on its own and styled with a t-shirt, hoodie or coat on colder days. In addition, it was versatile for styling to reflect one’s body and personal taste (e.g. folding up the sleeves or bottoms, wearing the top only with jeans or wearing the bottom only with hoodies and embroidering flowers on the collar). Travel was another prominent theme mentioned in the reviews. Kim and Kim (2019: 344) argue that for Korean youth wearing traditional hanbok to tourist sites like palaces is comparable to costume play. This is concurrent with the recent trend of wearing “hanbok as play” (Choi et al. 2017: 18), well demonstrated in the use of popular hashtags like #hanbokstagram on social media where youth upload photos of themselves wearing hanbok. Within the reviews, travel included domestic locations like Gyeongju and sigol (countryside) and transnational spaces like the border between France and Spain. One reviewer writes, “I am currently promoting hanbok while traveling around the world. I am very satisfied with this purchase. Foreigners compliment that it is so pretty! When I return to Korea, I plan on purchasing more and wearing them every

Celebrity Fashion and Fan Consumption  59 day. The second photo in this review was taken along the French-España border!” (posted on 27 May 2022 by a reviewer). In the first photo of the review, there is a close-up shot of the wearer’s back, which reveals a customized top with an iron-on patch of taegeukgi (the national flag of South Korea) and the phrase “Hanbok is a traditional Korean costume” embroidered in both Korean and English. Many reviewers mentioned their satisfaction with the color, price and quality of the hanbok (e.g. thick but breathable fabric, detailed cuff design, deep and sizable pockets and meticulous tailoring). This satisfaction was connected with their praising of the hanbok as “yeppeun” (pretty), “meosinneun” (cool) and “hiphan” (hip). It was also linked to feeling proud of their choices in purchasing the item. The hanbok was described to be worn with family (“family look”), friends (“ujeongtem,” meaning a friendship item), partners (“couple look”) as well as colleagues at work (“danchebok,” meaning a group uniform). As such, the hanbok offered an opportunity both for individual styling and for collective bonding and community building. This was also true for the BTS fans who purchased the “Jungkook hanbok.” For example, one reviewer writes, “I have a lot of ARMY around me, so I didn’t have to tell them I was wearing Zijangsa. The hanbok felt hip and cool” (posted on 24 September 2020 by a BTS fan). Other fans purchased the hanbok to wear at BTS concerts (posted on 28 October 2019 by a BTS fan). Out of the 110 reviews, 16 reviews directly referenced Jungkook, BTS and/or ARMY. There were a handful of reviews that included purple heart emojis instead of an explicit reference, although these were not included in the tally. Out of the 110 reviews, 12 included the word hanbok and/or tradition (e.g. gaeryang hanbok, saenghwal hanbok, jeontong hanbok, jeontongbok and beopbok). For example, one reviewer writes: This hanbok is the epitome of comfort; it’s comfortable to the level of not feeling like you are wearing anything. I wear it together as a set; I also wear the top separately with jeans. I really wanted to wear our traditional clothing in my everyday life, and now it’s possible. In my opinion, this hanbok is very hip. And when you wear it… you become completely filled with gukppong. This hanbok made me realize what I preferred in clothes kkkk. The fabric is really great too!! This is going to be my uniform till the weather becomes too hot. Thank you. It’s really pretty! I’ve never written a review this long kk. It was a very personal review for me! (Posted on 7 July 2020 by a female reviewer) Gukppong – a portmanteau for gukga (nation) and hiroppong (philopon) – is an Internet slang pejoratively describing those who are “intoxicated with nationalism.” Even so, in the review above, the word is utilized in a more endearing way. What this review reveals is that the “Jungkook hanbok” instills a sense of national pride for the wearer. Another review echoes this sentiment: “I just logged onto the website to buy another… I think I’m going to end up buying all the colors available… What should we do about this… What do you mean… I’ll just have to become a Korean who promotes our country’s traditional clothing… Zijangsa fighting!!!!!!” (posted on 11 July 2021 by a reviewer). As can be seen in the two reviews, wearing the Jungkook hanbok is equated to having national pride and promoting Korean culture. In a study on values and awareness of hanbok by the Korean youth in their 20s, Jung and Lee (2017) found that out of 267 survey participants, 83.6% described hanbok as “pretty and nice.” Nonetheless, they were hesitant in wearing hanbok because they were shy and did not have an occasion to wear it. 78% did not own hanbok and rented when needed; only 24.3% wore hanbok more than once a year (ibid.: 153). Under these conditions, what the “Jungkook hanbok” provides is a highly affordable and accessible means to personal as well as national identity building. Hanbok has always been a

60  Myoung-Sun Song contested product of tradition/modernity, East/West and Korean/global debates. Saenghwal hanbok has inherent qualities of being wearable, genderless and ageless clothing. Even though it has mainly been worn by middle-aged and elder groups over the past four decades, when met with the needs and desires of youth, it becomes reimagined and reinterpreted as stylish and sought-after clothing. The so-called MZ generation describe their fashion as kkuankku (an abbreviated slang for “wearing something as if you didn’t put in much effort”) (Seoul Urban Life Museum 2021: 150). In other words, what makes one look “effortlessly stylish” can be readily found in wearable, genderless and ageless clothing – the saenghwal hanbok. As demonstrated in this chapter, Jungkook – as an idolized celebrity – precipitated the Korean youth to finally notice, choose and wear what had been there all along. On 23 September 2021, a photograph of Coldplay sporting the “Jungkook hanbok” was revealed on social media. Fans speculated that Jungkook had given the item to Coldplay as this is something he has done before. In 2020, BTS gave personalized gifts to the trainees who made Top 12 on I-Land. Ni-Ki – who is from Japan – wore Jungkook’s present on ENHYPEN’s live broadcast. This particular set had Jungkook’s signature and the words “BTS JK” embroidered on its sleeve in purple. Other idols have recently worn similar styles including So-Yeon, the leader and main rapper of the girl group (G)I-dle and Yerin, former member of the girl group GFriend. What this forecasts is that the trend will likely to continue, but will the saenghwal hanbok evolve into a staple and classic item for the Korean youth? Moreover, how do international ARMY purchase, style and make meaning of their “Jungkook hanbok”? In the globalization of K-pop and Korean fashion, what is the role of saenghwal hanbok in negotiating Koreanness and constructing national identity? These are some questions that remain for the future in an increasingly cosmopolitan world.

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Celebrity Fashion and Fan Consumption  61 Kim, E. (2020) “Fandom and New Cultural Intermediary in New Media Era: Focusing on the Case of BTS,” The Journal of the Korea Contents Association, 20(1): 378–91. Kim, H. (2020) Wearing Hanbok and Flying the World, Seoul: Hanbok Advancement Center. Kim, H.S. (2017a) “An Analysis of a Strategy for the Activation of Korean Wave K-Fashion,” Journal of Korean Fashion & Costume Design Association, 19(3): 175–92. Kim, J.H. (2020) “The Study on the BTS’s Fashion Style,” Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial Cooperation Society, 21(9): 310–20. Kim, M. (2017b) “The Reason Why BTS Jin Wore Hanbok as Airport Fashion,” Xsports News, 29 November. Kim, M. and Kim, B. (2019) “Study on the Experimental Hanbok Culture and User Experience,” Journal of Digital Convergence, 17(2): 339–45. Kim, S.J. (2019a) “[MD Photo] BTS Jungkook, Promoting National Glory through Gaeryang Hanbok,” Mydaily, 8 July. Kim, S.Y. (2019b) “Beauty and the Waste: Fashioning Idols and the Ethics of Recycling in Korean Pop Music Videos,” Fashion Theory, 25(1): 53–73. Kim, Y. (2012) “A Study on the Fashion Style of K-pop Stars,” Journal of the Korean Society of Fashion Design, 12(2): 17–37. Kim, Y.J. (2021) “A Study on Success of BTS through Rethinking the Identity of Korean Dance,” Korea and Global Affairs, 5(1): 103–29. Kwak, T. and Nam, M. (2002) “A Study on the Relationship between Clothing Evaluative Criteria of Hanbok and the Lifestyle Characteristics of University Students,” Journal of the Korean Society of Costume, 52(4): 25–38. Lee, H.W. (2022) “The Baggy Clothing that Bosal Wear… Jungkook and Ni-Ki Are Wearing,” Chosun Ilbo, 28 May. Lee, K. and Choi, Y. (2022) “Development of Textile Design Combining K-Pop Star Symbols and Traditional Patterns – Focusing on BTS ‘IDOL’,” Fashion & Textile Research Journal, 24(1): 1–14. Lee, Y. (2017) “Fashioning Tradition in Contemporary Korean Fashion,” International Journal of Fashion Studies, 4(2): 241–61. Lee, Y. and Seo, H. (2020) “The Effects of the Recognition, Expectation, Attitude and Image of Korean Dance on the Viewers’ Intention: Based on BTS’s Performance ‘IDOL’ at the 2018 Melon Music Awards,” Korean Journal of Dance, 19(4): 121–31. Lee, Y.K. (2013) “The Goth Image Expressed in Korean Wave K-pop Fashion,” Journal of the Korea Fashion & Costume Design Association, 15(2): 65–75. Lee, Y.R. (2015) The Story of Hanbok, Seoul: Hanbok Advancement Center. Paik, J.Y. (2021) “Finding Hope for Small Businesses – 1 Billion Won in Sales through Online Shopping Malls,” Digital Daily, 18 April. Park, J. (2015) “Star Power in Korean Fashion: The Win-Win Relationship between Korean Celebrities and Designers,” Fashion Practice, 7(1): 125–33. Park, S.Y. (2019) “BTS Jungkook Personally Buys Daily Hanbok. The Jungkook Effect Spreads to Overseas Fans,” OSEN, 19 November. Seoul Urban Life Museum (2021) Seoul and Fashion, Seoul: Seoul Urban Life Museum. Soh, H. and Shim, H. (2000) “A Study on Active Use of Daily Hanbok through Sales on the Internet,” Journal of the Korean Society of Costume, 50(4): 181–95. Wang, L., Kim, Y. and Lee, K. (2021) “A Study on the Fashion Design and Style of K-pop Boy Groups – Focusing on the Music Programs and YouTube Videos of BTS and Seventeen,” Fashion and Textile Research Journal, 23(6): 726–43. Willoughby, H. (2022) “Bona Fide True Symbols: BTS as Purveyors of Authentic Koreanness,” Journal of Ewha Music Research Institute, 26(1): 167–98. Yi, J. and Suh, S. (2021) “Analysis of BTS Images from Peirce’s Semiotic Perspective,” Journal of Fashion Business, 25(5): 114–30.

Part II

Popular Cinema

5 The Rise of New Korean Cinema and Hallyu Chi-Yun Shin

The profile and popularity of South Korean (hereafter Korean) cinema peaked with the success of Parasite (directed by Bong Joon-Ho, 2019) both at the Cannes Film Festival (Palme d’Or) and at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020, where it made history by winning the Best Picture Award as the first ever non-English language film. Just before Parasite’s triumph at the Oscars, a Guardian article, titled “Funny, political and bone-crunchingly violent: why Korean cinema is the world’s best,” claimed that “if Parasite wins best picture, it will be overdue recognition for the creative hothouse that is South Korean cinema” (Hoad 2020). Though the title of the article is a tad misleading – in the sense that it frames the entire national cinema with three defining tropes – Korean cinema has indeed become one of the most dynamic and successful film industries in the world. As the headline of a recent interview with the Emmy-winning Korean actor Lee Jung-Jae puts it, however, “the cinematic rise of Korean cinema took years in the making,” even as “smash hits like Squid Game and Parasite may make it look easy” (AFP 2022). Lee has become the first Asian and non-English-language performer to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in the drama series Squid Game, which is the most-watched Netflix show of all time. Lee eloquently describes that: For a long time, Korean cinema has been trying to figure out how to connect better with global audiences. Now, as a result of these years-long efforts, we see a lot of high-quality content that has resonated around the world and won critical acclaim (ibid.). In fact, a creative and commercial resurgence of Korean cinema – which is often referred to as New Korean Cinema (so as not to be confused with the Korean New Wave of the 1980s) – began with many factors and forces coming together in the late 1990s, which include changing political climate, restructuring of film industry and growth of film culture. Though the first generation of the Korean Wave or Hallyu 1.0 is primarily associated with the popularity of Korean television dramas in the Asian region in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rise of New Korean Cinema also contributed to the emergence of the Korean Wave, as the export of Korean film titles dramatically increased during the same period. While the popularity of Korean dramas of Hallyu 1.0 was initially limited within the Asia region, fueled by the so-called inter-Asia affinity, the profile of New Korean Cinema is more complex and multi-­ layered in its flow and exposure. For instance, while local box office hits such as the 1999 action blockbuster Shiri and 2001 romantic comedy My Sassy Girl sparked a huge interest in Korean cinema in Asia, it is Oldboy (2003), a violent action thriller, that put Korean cinema on the map of world cinema in the West. Taking the 1990s, the decade that witnessed a tectonic shift in all areas of Korean cinema as an entry point, this chapter charts the unique trajectory of the New Korean Cinema, tracing the significant backdrops and conditions that transformed the Korean film industry in tandem with the evolution of Hallyu.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-8

66  Chi-Yun Shin

The Early 1990s: Out of Crisis In the early 1990s, Chungmuro – a street and area nearby where many film companies were based, hence a byword for the Korean film industry – was in crisis. Pressurized to liberalize the media market by the US government and the Motion Picture Export Associations of America (MPEAA) more specifically, the Korean government had lifted the protective measures in the 1986 amendment of the Motion Picture Law (MPL), which then allowed unlimited and direct distribution of foreign films. Despite fierce protests from the Korean film community, in 1988 the Hollywood majors opened their branch offices on Korean soil, taking over a significant share of the local market by the early 1990s. For the Korean film industry, this also meant a loss of investment, as relatively lucrative earnings from distributing foreign films that used to be reinvested in domestic film production were gone. The Hollywood branch offices also instigated nationwide direct distribution, bypassing Korean regional distributors. This amounted to a further loss of investment, as Seoul-based production companies used to presell release rights to regional distributors, which financed domestic film production. Direct and nationwide distribution practices of the Hollywood majors resulted in a broken investment cycle that had supported the Korean film industry. Inevitably, with the lack of investment, many local film companies went out of business. By 1993, the domestic market share of Korean films reached an all-time low, and there was a palpable sense of fear that the whole industry might collapse. The apparent crisis, however, as Jinhee Choi (2010: 17) neatly sums up, “propelled a modernization of production practices in the Korean film industry, as a new generation of filmmakers and producers quickly adapted to the changing mediascape” and “began to find alternative methods of financing.” A new flow of capital came first from the Korean conglomerates such as Samsung, Daewoo, SKC and LG in the early 1990s. These big companies initially invested in the film production to obtain content for burgeoning home video market; they were not only manufacturing VHS players but also operating video/entertainment divisions (videocassette rentals and sales). Daewoo and Samsung also expanded their activities to building theater chains and cable television channels – Daewoo Cinema Network (DCN) and Catch-One, ­respectively – all of which needed a steady flow of content. As such, it was a logical business step for the conglomerates to invest in film projects (evolving from partial to full financing) in return for the rights to the films that included theatrical release, video and cable television. New production companies made full advantage of the circumstances and had exclusive deals with the conglomerates who preferred to work with them rather than existing companies. Daewoo, for instance, had contracts with Cine2000, and Samsung with Uno Films (now Sidus), Myung Film and Cinema Service, and SKC with Ahn’s World Productions. As a result, the new generation of filmmakers and producers were able to gain prominence and lead the way toward a new environment that emphasizes self-sufficiency, and the conglomerates were able to establish a vertically integrated structure in which they could influence and control film projects from preproduction stage through production to distribution and exhibition that included video and cable television markets. Notable films that were financed by Samsung include Marriage Story (Kim Ui-Seok, 1992), To the Starry Island (Park Kwang-Su, 1993), Taebaek Mountain (Im Kwon-Taek, 1994), A Hot Roof (Lee Min-Yong, 1995) and Three Friends (Yim Soon-Rye,1996), while Daewoo financed Two Cops (Kang Woo-Suk, 1994), A Single Spark (Park Kwang-Su, 1995) and Their Last Love Affair (Lee Myung-Se, 1996). After the Asian economic crisis of 1997–98, however, the conglomerates came under pressure to concentrate on their core businesses and scale down or close their media and entertainment divisions. By 1999, SKC, Daewoo and Samsung had all made their exit from the film industry. Notably, Daewoo sold its theater chains (Cine House and Megabox) and its cable channel to the Tongyang Group (now known as Orion Holdings), which eventually established

The Rise of New Korean Cinema and Hallyu  67 Showbox (one of the largest distribution companies) along with CJ Entertainment, a subsidiary of Cheil Jedang Corporation (Korea’s largest food manufacturer and distributor), which emerged as a global player in the late 1990s with an original stakeholder of DreamWorks in Hollywood. In addition, the investment gap created by the conglomerates’ exit in the late 1990s was almost immediately filled in by a new generation of financiers – venture-capital companies. Attracted by relatively quick turnaround of investment return and tax benefits, a number of companies – notably, Ilsin Investment, Kookmin Venture Capital, Mirae Asset Investment, Tube Investment and Muhan Film Venture Capital – poured money into the industry, often spreading their investment in a portfolio of titles. It is important to note here that, though short-lived, the conglomerates’ involvement in the Korean film industry brought about significant changes to filmmaking practices and process. As Darcy Paquet (2005: 40) puts it, “the sheer size of the conglomerates and the amounts of money they spent gave a significant boost to Korea’s film infrastructure.” For instance, with conglomerates bringing in substantial capital, film budgets rose considerably, and there was a strong emphasis placed on efficiency and accurate book-keeping. In their efforts to reduce risk, the conglomerates also pushed mainstream/commercial projects with stars attached. In turn, adopting the more corporate approach of the conglomerates, the new generation of producers developed the so-called planned films that involved a long period of script development, market analysis and strategic marketing and promotion. Samsung-funded Marriage Story is the key example of such planned films, and its production company ShinCine (the first Korean film company to set up a planning department) developed the plot based on systematic and largescale surveys they conducted on young married couples and office workers. Upon release, the film topped the box office, and its business model influenced many future productions. The young producers, who had worked with the conglomerates, joined forces with the venture-capital companies that emerged as a major new source of film finance, and went onto become prominent producers of many important titles with commercial and/or critical acclaim. For instance, Shin Cheol of ShinCine Communications produced The Fox with Nine Tails (Park Heon-Su, 1994), the first Korean film to use CGI effects, and box office hits, A Promise (Kim Yoo-Jin, 1998) and My Sassy Girl (Kwak Jae-Yong, 2001). One of the most prominent women producers, Shim Jae-Myung formed Myung Films, which, after achieving its first hit with Contact (Chang Yoon-Hyun, 1997), produced the early titles of some of the best-known Korean directors such as Kim Jee-Woon’s debut The Quiet Family (1998), Kim Ki-Duk’s The Isle (2000), Park Chan-Wook’s Joint Security Area (2000) and Yim Soon-Rye’s Waikiki Brothers (2001). Another leading female producer Oh Jung-Wan founded b.o.m. (or Bom) Film Productions in 1999 and worked on Kim Jee-Woon’s The Foul King (2000), A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) and A Bittersweet Life (2004) as well as Hong Sang-Soo’s Woman on the Beach (2006) and Night and Day (2008). Jo Min-Whan of Uno Films produced Kim Sung-Su’ Beat (1997) and City of the Rising Sun (1998) and Hur Jin-Ho’s Christmas in August (1998), which are all considered to be the 1990s classic films that firmly established the careers of film stars, Jung Woo-Sung, Han SukKyu and Shim Eun-Ha. Meanwhile, the late 1990s also marked a significant change in Korean political and social history. Aside from the financial crisis that swept much of Asia in 1997, there was a peaceful transfer of power in December 1997 when the opposition party leader Kim Dae-Jung was elected as the country’s president. Emphasizing his long-standing belief in the “parallel development of democracy and the market economy,” President Kim Dae-Jung decided to “raise the international competitiveness of Korean industries and companies by abandoning many outdated conventional norms in favour of up-to-date global norms” (Chung 2019: 66). Significantly for the film industry, the Kim Dae-Jung government (1998–2003) implemented measures to support the cultural industries that included the expansion of the Cultural Industries Bureau in

68  Chi-Yun Shin Ministry of Culture and Tourism (February 1998); opening the Korean market to Japanese popular culture (October 1998); promulgation of the Framework Act on the Promotion of cultural industries (February 1999); the First Long-Term Plan for cultural industries (March 1999); introduction of the British Discourse of Creative Industries (April 1999); establishing the Korean Film Commission [which later became Council] (May 1999); designating Culture Technology as a New Driving Industry (August 2001) and establishing the Korea Culture and Content Agency (August 2001) (Chung 2019: 66). Furthermore, one of the most fundamental changes that the Kim Dae-Jung government brought about has been the “arm’s length principle” – that is, to provide support without intervention – which has resulted in much less direct bureaucratic interference in the film industry and much wider range of subject matters. So, for instance, once considered taboo subjects, such as sympathetic treatment of North Korea or North Koreans and critical portrayal of repressive military regimes, became popular themes to explore on screen, examples of which will be discussed in the next section. Along with the structural changes that transformed the Korean film industry, the mid- and late-1990s saw the explosive growth in the wider film culture. To begin with, the wave of liberalization and opening up of the Korean film market, the diverse films, both domestic and foreign, were introduced to the Korean audiences, which then allowed the fan base for (particularly art/classic) films to grow. Riding on this wave, a high-brow weekly film magazine Cine 21 was first published in 1995, and in the same year a monthly magazine KINO was also published, targeting film enthusiasts. Many other film journals soon followed, and the late 1990s saw a boom in film-related publications up to the early 2000s. The period also saw the unprecedented surge in the number of screens, catering to the nation’s cinephiles. Most notably, CJ Entertainment launched Korea’s first multiplex CGV (with 11 screens) in 1998, in partnership with Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest and Australia’s Village Roadshow. CJ CGV – still the largest multiplex cinema chain in Korea (now with branches in China, Indonesia, Myanmar, Turkey, Vietnam and the US) – initiated the boom in the exhibition sector, and Lotte and Megabox soon followed suit, becoming the second and third largest cinema chains in Korea. In addition, many film schools and film-related university programs opened up or consolidated their provisions, training new talents. Film schools and courses allowed great access to film education and provided opportunities to prove their talent through short films of their own, rather than going through years of apprenticeship under more established directors. For instance, a number of acclaimed directors made their debut feature films between the late 1990s and early 2000s, after graduating from the Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA) – established by the Korean Film Council in 1984 – and spending a relatively short period of working as assistant directors and/or screenwriters: Im Sang-Soo and Hur Jin-Ho made their debuts in 1998 with Girls’ Night Out and Christmas in August respectively, and E J-Yong too made his feature debut in 1998 with An Affair (featuring Lee Jung-Jae of Squid Game fame). The most illustrious alumnus of KAFA is, however, Bong Joon-Ho, who made his debut film Barking Dogs Never Bite in 2000. The year 1996 also saw three acclaimed directors, Hong Sang-Soo, Kim Ki-Duk and Yim Soon-Rye, making their directorial debuts, The Day a Pig Fell into a Well, Crocodile and Three Friends respectively, after spending some formative years abroad (Hong in the USA, and Kim and Yim in France). A novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director, Lee Chang-Dong made his debut in 1997 with Green Fish, and Kim Jee-Woon in 1998 with The Quiet Family. In addition, in 1996, the first Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) took place in Busan, and since then it has continued to expand and establish itself as Asia’s premier film festival. In the following year, both International Women’s Film Festival in Seoul (now Seoul International Women’s Film Festival) and Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival were launched. Through the

The Rise of New Korean Cinema and Hallyu  69 late 1990s and early 2000s, many other film festivals of varying sizes, including the Jeonju International Film Festival (launched in 2000), were organized, providing venues to showcase films by the Korean filmmaking talents.

The Rise of Blockbusters and Hallyu 1.0 With all the forces and factors discussed above coming together in the late 1990s, Korean cinema has undergone remarkable growth, improving its technical and aesthetic qualities. Raising their production values, many Korean films have won back the domestic audiences who had preferred more sleek Hollywood movies, and from the year 1999 the Korean film industry experienced a bona fide commercial boom. In particular, the record-breaking box office success of Shiri (Kang Je-Gyu, 1999), which attracted 6.2 million viewers across the nation, symbolized the remarkable transformation the Korean film industry has undergone. This action/spy thriller offered the Korean audiences the spectacle of Hollywood blockbusters or Hong Kong action films, featuring explosions, chase and gun-fighting, while its storyline was firmly rooted in a Korean context, pitting a group of North Korean special agents against their South Korean counterparts. So, while it uses familiar narrative device and premises that include the training of a female assassin and the detecting and dismantling of a bomb, the film also combines action and suspense with the romantic subplot between a female North Korean spy working undercover in South Korea and a South Korean male secret agent. The success of Shiri was a cultural and industrial phenomenon, even a national obsession, dubbed as the Shiri syndrome. Pushing the market share of Korean films to 39.7% in 1999, Shiri “came to represent what the local Korean blockbuster could and perhaps should look like, as well as how astonishingly successful it could become” (Shin and Stringer 2007: 58). Since the release of Shiri, the term “Korean blockbuster” came to be used widely to refer to successive box office hits such as Joint Security Area (2000), Friend (2001), Silmido (2003) and Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War (2004), which appeal to a shared sense of Korean history, referencing North-South relations and/or specific historical moments from recent past, while adopting mainstream genre aspects. Director Park Chan-Wook’s breakthrough film Joint Security Area, for instance, tells a story of illicit friendship shared between North and South border guards in the DMZ, the heavily fortified area that separates North and South Korea. Mixing genre elements of mystery thriller (investigation into the murder of two North Korean soldiers) and human drama, JSA quickly became the best-selling film. The film also stood out for its sympathetic portrayal of North Korean soldiers, particularly the character of Sergeant Oh Kyeong-Pil, played by Song Kang-Ho in his star-making role, as well as the fact that its production company Myung Film built 90% replica of the village of Panmunjom for its setting. Just a few months after the box-office success of JSA, director Kwak Kyung-Taek’s gangster saga Friend drew over 8 million viewers, breaking the domestic box office record. Its runaway success was remarkable considering that the film was rated equivalent to 18 certificates (adultonly) due to its depiction of violence, and that much of its dialogue is performed in heavy Busan accent and dialect. As the writer-director of the film, Kwak, who is a Busan-native, has revealed in several interviews, its producers were anxious that no one outside the port city of Busan would understand what is going on. As it turns out, however, its portrayal of the brutal antics of organized criminal gangs – the Korean mafia called jopok – and their tough Busan dialect worked like a charm in the box office. The director’s autobiographical aspect of the film also lends itself well to its vivid evocation of the past; one of the foremost reasons behind the film’s popularity among the Korean audiences was the strong nostalgia brought on by the way the film evokes the port city of Busan in the 1970s and 1980s.

70  Chi-Yun Shin After a few failed box office cases in 2002, the Korean blockbuster trend continued in December 2003 with Cinema Service’s Silmido (Kang Woo-Suk), which became the first Korean film to reach 10 million viewers, eventually attracting over 11 million admissions nationwide. With $8 million budget, exceptionally high by local standards at the time, and a matching huge marketing campaign, Silmido offered an action-packed entertainment. It is based on the true story of a South Korean military unit who got trained in an inhabited island of Silmido (off the west coast of South Korea) from January 1968 to August 1971 to infiltrate North Korea and kill the then North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung in response to the attempted assassination of the then South Korean president Park Chung-Hee. Only a few months later, another action-packed Korean War epic, Taegukgi (Kang Je-Gyu, who had directed Shiri), repeated Silmido’s success, drawing 11.7 million viewers. As the most expensive Korean film ever at the time (at $12.8 million), the film offered the Korean audiences a star-studded, slick, event movie with full of special effects. Thanks to stunning box office performance of Silmido and Taegukgi, the market share of Korean films reached 53.5% in 2003 and 59.3% in 2004. With the industry boom and commercial success of homegrown films in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Korean films began to earn recognition as appealing products of entertainment outside the country, particularly in the Asian region, with Japan being the biggest buyer of Korean films. Shiri, for instance, became the first Korean film to get a wide release in Japan, attracting 1.2 million viewers, while JSA was sold for US$2 million to the Japanese market and stayed among the top ten hits at the Japanese box-office for eight weeks in 2001 (Paquet 2001). Albeit anecdotal, Friend’s director Kwak Kyung-Taek revealed in a television interview that members of a Japanese yakuza group approached him to make a movie about a “legendary yakuza boss” after watching Friend on Japanese television at prime time. Kwak turned down the offer politely, but the anecdote illustrates the popularity of Korean blockbusters in Japan. Hong Kong also emerged as one of the most receptive markets for Korean films in the early 2000s. The headline for a 2002 Variety article reads: “Korean ‘girl’ wows Hong Kong auds,” reporting that a quirky romantic comedy “My Sassy Girl, helmed by Kwak Jae-Yong, has become the highest-grossing South Korean film in Hong Kong, raking in HK$13 million (US$1.67 million)” (Kan 2002). When it was first released in 2001, My Sassy Girl was a smash hit in Korea, becoming the best-selling Korean comedy, ranked the second best-selling film of 2001 (only outranked by Friend). The Variety article goes on to explain how “Hong Kong experienced a surge of interest in Korean pics after the release of Christmas in August in 1999” and “thirty-two Korean films have been screened in Hong Kong since 1999” (ibid.). Korean films that fared well in Hong Kong include Tell Me Something (Chang Yoon-Hyun, 1999), Shiri (1999), The Foul King (2000) and My Wife is a Gangster (Cho Jin-Gyu, 2001), a mixture of different genres but all domestic hits. As such, through the early 2000s the Korean cinema made a significant contribution to the expansion of Hallyu 1.0, as many local box office hits were popular across borders in the region including Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam as well as Japan and Hong Kong, not just in film theaters but also on DVD and Video Compact Disk (VCD, a medium used to be popular in the Asian region), or in the form of Internet downloads. For instance, the DVD release of My Sassy Girl sparked a large cult following, particularly in China and Southeast Asia. Along with popular Korean television dramas such as Winter Sonata (2002) and Dae Jang Geum (  Jewel in the Palace, 2003–2004), Korean cinema created regional stardom, particularly of Jeon Ji-Hyun, Lee Byung-Hun, Lee Young-Ae, Han Suk-Kyu and Shim Eun-Ha. The popularity of “Hallyu stars” was then fed into the future projects, as the Korean producers took advantage of their overseas “marketability.” In turn, stars have increasingly gone back and forth between film and television projects.

The Rise of New Korean Cinema and Hallyu  71

Korean Auteurs and International Film Festivals As discussed, Korean films began to be more widely known in foreign markets during the late 1990s. Korean cinema’s regional success was partly due to the rapid spread of existing and new media technologies such as satellites, the Internet and DVD that broadened the exposure of Korean media content, including films. With the opening of mainland China’s market and overall market deregulation, the regional media market had also been vastly expanded, and there was a huge growth in demand for content. In addition, as the Hong Kong film industry that had dominated the regional markets in Asia (including Korea) during the 1980s and early 1990s was rapidly declining since the mid-1990s, Asian audiences were abandoning Hong Kong films for Hollywood films. Filling in the gap left by Hong Kong films, while vying with Hollywood for the Asian markets, New Korean Cinema had a competitive edge because of its cultural proximity. As Jang Soo-Hyun (2003: 146) points out, Asian audiences consumed images of Korean society as highly modernized but still reflecting Asian traits such as Confucian traditions with their emphasis on family, group orientation and social hierarchy. The remarkable success of New Korean Cinema at home and in the region has clearly begun to draw attention from beyond Asia, but it was international film festivals that played an important role in raising and promoting the profile of Korean cinema on the global scene. In 2000, the veteran director Im Kwon-Taek’s pansori-adaptation Chunhyang was nominated for the competitive section of the Cannes Film Festival, the first nomination for a Korean film. In 2002, Im won the Best Director award at Cannes with Chihwaseon, a biopic of 19th-century Korean painter who changed the direction of Korean art. But it would not be until 2004 when Korean directors won a string of prestigious European festival awards, gaining significant recognition. To begin with, in February 2004, maverick director Kim Ki-Duk won the Best Director Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival with his tenth film, Samaritan Girl. Even bigger news came in May, when Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy won the Grand Prix at Cannes (apparently missing the top prize Palme d’Or just by one vote). Furthermore, in September, Kim Ki-Duk won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 2004 Venice International Film Festival with 3-Iron. Notably, several films by Kim and Park were picked up by the influential British film distributer (now defunct) Tartan and were promoted under the label of “Tartan Asia Extreme,” along with horror titles by Japanese directors Hideo Nakata and Takashi Miike. As discussed in my article “The art of branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ films,” Tartan’s publicity material routinely stressed the subversive and explicit aspects of these titles (Shin 2009: 92), which further encouraged the discourses of extremity around them. In particular, Kim’s The Isle (2000) and Park’s Oldboy (2003) came under intense debate and controversy over their depiction of “gruesome” and “shocking” violence. Partly aided by such promotion, the Asia Extreme label was particularly popular in the European and American DVD markets, as Tartan acquired rights to other prominent Korean horror titles such as Kim Jee-Woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) and the Whispering Corridors series. Hence, notwithstanding the criticism pointed at the label’s habit of selling complex art films solely on their shock values, the Asia Extreme label did provide audiences with an accessible, curated, catalogue of cutting-edge films. Korean directors’ successes at international film festivals continued into the 2010s and to the present: Kim Ki-Duk won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2012 with Pieta, while Lee ChangDong’s Secret Sunshine (2006) was awarded Best Actress at Cannes, and his Poetry (2010) Best Screenplay at Cannes. Hong Sang-Soo won the Golden Leopard prize at the Locarno Film Festival with Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) and Silver Bear at Berlin with The Woman Who Ran in 2020 and The Novelist’s Film in 2022. Park Chan-Wook won the Best Director Award at the 2022 Cannes film festival with Decision to Leave. Of course, Parasite’s triumph at Cannes

72  Chi-Yun Shin (winning much-coveted Palme d’Or) and the Oscars in 2020 marked the peak of the success story. Before the phenomenal success of Parasite, Bong had had both critical and commercial success with his films, which were invited and screened for competition at various film festivals at home and abroad. The exposures of Korean films at international film festivals have not only promoted the export of Korean films but also brought opportunities for Korean directors and actors to work overseas or to deliver collaborative transnational projects. In 2013, for instance, Park Chan-Wook and Kim Jee-Woon directed the Hollywood-funded productions Stoker and The Last Stand respectively, while Bong Joon-Ho presented Snowpiercer (2013), which was his adaptation of the French graphic novel. It was shot mostly in English, internationally produced and starred an international ensemble of cast that includes Hollywood stars, Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt and Ed Harris. Bong also teamed up with global content producer Netflix and Hollywood’s Plan B Entertainment to make Okja (2017).

Conclusion New Korean Cinema’s success at home and abroad has continued through the 2000s and 2010s and to the present. Local box office records have been broken several times over; for instance, Bong Joon-Ho’s breakout monster film The Host broke all box office records upon its release in 2006, and it is currently ranked 19th in the list of highest-grossing films in Korea. As of the early 2020s, the popularity of Korean media content has never been higher. At home, however, the film industry, which has recently been struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, has had a chronic issue with the distribution system that is structured to benefit big commercial films. The current state of oligopoly with three or four large companies dominating the market has also increased the gap between mainstream and non-mainstream films, undermining diversity in Korean films. Abroad, types of Korean films that have been theatrically distributed and successful are often limited to either award-winning films by acclaimed auteurs such as Bong Joon-Ho and Park Chan-Wook or a handful of hit horror titles such as Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-Ho, 2016). As the Guardian headline “Funny, political and bone-crunchingly violent: why Korean cinema is the world’s best” (Hoad 2020), quoted at the beginning of this chapter, illustrates, this can lead to Western-centric agenda setting with the partial view of the rich and dynamic Korean cinema. Nevertheless, despite many challenges remaining at home and abroad, there is much to celebrate about Korean cinema that has emerged as a recognizable force and continued to expand and challenge existing power dynamics in the global cultural arena.

References AFP (Agence France-Presse) (2022) “Korean Cinematic Rise Years in the Making, Says Squid Game Star,” 15 September. Choi, J. (2010) The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Chung, J.E. (2019) “The Neo-Developmental Cultural Industries Policy of Korea: Rationales and Implications of an Eclectic Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 25(1): 63–74. Hoad, P. (2020) “Funny, Political and Bone-Crunchingly Violent: Why Korean Cinema is the World’s Best,” Guardian, 1 February. Jang, S. (2003) “Contemporary Chinese Narratives on Korean Culture,” Korean Journal, 43(1): 128–63. Kan, W. (2002) “Korean Girl Wows Hong Kong Auds,” Variety, 15 April. Paquet, D. (2001) “Korean Film Newsletter,” Koreanfilm.org. Paquet, D. (2005) “The Korean Film Industry: 1992 to the Present,” in C. Shin and J. Stringer (eds) New Korean Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

The Rise of New Korean Cinema and Hallyu  73 Shin, C.-Y. (2009) “The Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ Films,” in J. Choi and M. Wada-Marciano (eds) Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Shin, C.-Y. and Stringer, J. (2007) “Storming the Big Screen: The Shiri Syndrome,” in F. Gateward (ed) Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, Albany: State University of New York Press.

6 Parasite and Snowpiercer as Derivations to Hallyu Korean Cinema, Neoliberalism and Semi-Global Exclusivity Keith B. Wagner Today, Hallyu signals a global transformation in the direction of Asian cultural production. Claims to such potential thus mandate that Hallyu nurtures not a global consciousness or indicate any global observations about humanity or other places not typically associated with Korea; rather, Hallyu is dissociable to those dimensions. Its overarching schema, a powerful one, is to mobilize local Korean content through a hybrid formula that remodels existing genres – say, the zombie subgenre in horror – to Korean specifications (Wagner 2019). A kind of rerouting of cultural globalization is taking place via Korea’s diffusion of its culture that illustrates that their cultural production is having a new planetary appeal since the late 1990s (Kim 2011; Kim 2021). This chapter will analyze Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) and Parasite (2019) as two interfaces to deduce the Hallyuization of the Korean film industry, other media influences like Netflix and the lessons from Japan’s media expansion that have accelerated this phenomenon. More centrally, Bong Joon-Ho’s rise will be discussed, particularly his penchant to narrativize milieus full of morose, sociopolitical and economic tropes that come to eschew the polite, usually prim and proper attitudes found in essential Hallyu content. Such mechanized and trendy K-pop and Korean television dramas often seem out of touch with reality. Nevertheless, how Bong and the Korean creative industry are at the core of a world system of global culture today is something that also unites them. The purpose of my intervention here is to reconceptualize how “Hallyu infiltrates other contiguous zones” (Choi 2015: 37) like film, and where film as part of Hallyu’s “braided circuitry of culture, its membranes of Korean society” (ibid.: 33) challenges and sometimes “goes beyond” this most important metonym (Kim et al. 2017).

Essential Content/Semi-Essential Content: Hallyu and Contemporary Korean Cinema On its current trajectory, Hallyu, known in English as the “Korean Wave,” is on par to be as synonymous as the Hollywood and Cool Japan metonyms; terms of the past that evoke near-universal recognizability with Korea’s Hallyu now a household name; part of the English, German and Spanish lexicons, among many other languages worldwide, where its cultural reputation has exponentially increased, becoming a newer agent of media globalization for South Korea (Korea hereafter). While Seoul in the 2020s is a new epicenter for content ideation, production and distribution – a glocalized capital city where media corporations, celebrities and movie studios form its core infrastructures – the processes of commoditization by these people making content and entities producing it also align with and then propel a different stage of capitalism on the Pacific Rim – e.g. neoliberalism. Dominated by this powerful capitalist mechanism of privatization and the marketization of culture, neoliberalism finds a prominent place in Korean society (Kapur and Wagner 2011; Wagner 2016). Through such distinctive DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-9

Parasite and Snowpiercer as Derivations to Hallyu  75 Korean media and its recent deterritorialization of the world, Hallyu is dyad for culture and economic prosperity befitting Korea. Hallyu constitutes a unified front for a cultural wave that once crashed on foreign shores in the early 2000s and now laps calmly in these places after its triumphant arrival. Because of this ongoing flow of media out of Korea to international audiences, Hallyu is export oriented. This dissemination of culture is what some have called a “pushing hands” strategy (Rozenfeld 2021), one that started with Korea’s first global cultural export – Taekwondo in the late 1970s and 1980s. Hallyu in contradistinction today to Taekwondo evokes something entirely different: It becomes a totemic essence, one that supplants the Korean sport and offers much more in its grid of intelligibility. It behoves us, therefore, to unravel Hallyu’s edifice – the different pillars that hold it up and provide its transmedia scaffolding, before getting to our other focus, contemporary Korean cinema. As JungBong Choi (2015) has argued, the conceptual endpoint to the continuous stratification of Hallyu consists of four important concentric categories and scales. They are as follows: Essential content (Television dramas, K-pop, and other media products; Semi-essential content: Films, videogames, performing arts and foods; Para-Hallyu products/services: Tourism, cosmetic products, plastic surgery, fashion items, and language services; Distributive channels: Broadcast/satellite/cable televisions, overseas cultural/educational institutions, diasporic community/media, social-network media, and the Internet; Short-/ long-term effects: Sales improvements in content industries/retail business, positive impacts on national image/branding, and higher competitiveness in international trade and public diplomacy. (2015: 34) Such content and goods are actively looped through Korea’s soft power building, with power players quickly moving it beyond a cultural phenomenon and establishing, like Hollywood, its own cultural hegemony. Despite its unambiguous aims, Hallyu still suffers from “the conundrum of its fuzzy boundary properties” (Choi 2015: 31), and, for our purposes here, Korean cinema is an intriguing derivation, yet supportive branch to Hallyu’s overall successes. In my view, Korean cinema thus deviates quite dramatically from the predictable and reserved Korean television and K-pop music that is most often associated with Hallyu. It does so because its manners and themes toward the world are starkly different: Korean cinema often refrains from offering an idealized Korea. It constitutes an amorphous medium and is a dark horse to Hallyu’s cotton candy guilt-free associations and positivity in other forms. In more subversive ways, Korean cinema sometimes courts taboo subject matter, and it also occasionally elides Korean local content for a grander hybridity in form. For example, Space Sweepers (directed by Jo Sung-Hee, 2021), the Korean film industry’s largest science fiction production yet is set off world in the distant future. Jo’s film casts and then prioritizes Korean characters over a supportive international cast, while this sci-fi film also expands the number of countries outside of Hollywood that make this kind of futurist cinema; proving popular on Netflix. In other ways, where Hallyu is measured and micromanaged, it envisions Korea through a squeaky-clean lens and becomes a highly palatable churn of ultra-conservative content, in contrast to Space Sweepers’ dystopian scavenging but still nationalist ambitions set in outer space. Let us therefore delve further into Hallyu’s first-tier content before turning to the volatility and edginess of certain Korean cinema. Essential content is everywhere, and BTS, the Korean male idol band, best exemplifies the Hallyu major leagues. The group was the top-selling music act worldwide in 2021, exemplified by upbeat lyrics and catchy melodies that found near universal appeal, blending emotions and

76  Keith B. Wagner desires through beats and lyrics that international, Asian and Korean publics see as pop-inspired hope. The group’s four Grammy awards for Best Pop Duo and Performance remains a marvelous moment of international recognition. In addition, these accolades mark the first Asian and first Korean musical group to be bestowed with such an honor in the US. Much the same, Korean television is linked with K-pop as another type of “essential content” in Choi’s (2015) words, content which has resonance with other places and audiences. These Korean dramas interlard 1980s Latin American telenovela’s manic tempos, minus the flashing of skin and sexual innuendos, while also folding in the moralistic sensibilities of 1990s Japanese and Taiwanese soaps but with impeccable sets, wardrobes and makeup that undergird these cloying narratives. All this antecedent televisual influence from Latino-Asian dramas is undeniable – hybridized formats which traveled as “global TV content value chains” (Chalaby 2016), which were then creolized in Korea; yet those television networks in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Taipei all fail to find international audiences from nearly every continent. Moreover, Hallyulinked Korean television is accorded with another first, one beyond awards from the US: Korean television has found tens of millions of international viewers and those numbers keep rising. The medical show Hospital Playlist and family drama Hi Bye, Mama! top many lists of must-see dramas. While Korean cinema comes to defy easy classification and sits uncomfortably in the gilded crown of Hallyu, it also qualifies as semi-essential content for overseas consumption. Playing second fiddle to pop music and television, film still shares, according to Choi (2015: 37), “countless connective tissues [that] extend across theoretically divided sections of human life and interests,” yet film still penetrates less like the medium of television and the genre of pop music. No need to rehearse the data on this; it is a well-known fact, across all mediatized societies. So, Korea’s best-known global auteurs – Park Chan-Wook and Bong Joon-Ho – came in through the backdoor of other mediaspheres globally, finding previously a smaller but more diverse cinephile and academic following, which has grown steadily since the early 2000s. And like BTS and Korean dramas a decade later, Korean film was accepted into America’s creative industry. We should recall that both Korean directors accepted Hollywood projects: Park directed the English-language psychological horror film Stoker (2013), while being based in the US, and Bong made Snowpiercer (2013), a film of “post-historical catastrophe” (  Jeong 2019), envisioned in epic proportion through an assemble cast of multicultural characters. These two Korean directors follow in the esteemed footsteps of other Asian film directors such as Taiwanese genre shapeshifter Ang Lee and his blockbuster comic film Hulk (2003) and the Hongkongese dynamo Wong Kar-Wei with his vapid but lushly shot My Blueberry Nights (2007). Such a move to make transnational films shows that Korean cinema ultimately preceded Hallyu but was also more tentatively accepted in comparative scale to that of BTS’s millions of online fans and Korean dramas’ popularity in far-flung places such as Africa and Southeast Asia.

Korea’s Media Conglomerate Ambitions: Lessons from the Sony Corporation and Local-for-Global Content on Netflix The global prominence of Hallyu is different from Japan’s successes in the 1990s via its strategic hybridism and use of and coproduction with foreign media abroad to disseminate its mix-media/transmedia goods. Japan’s distinctiveness is important because as a media hegemon Japan was responsible for several historic firsts in Asian media: It was the first country in Asia to own a Hollywood studio via the Sony Corporation’s purchase of Columbia Pictures in 1989; its media industry matched that acquisition with numerous transcultural processes, most notably a number of American remakes of Japanese films during the 1990s and 2000s, Ringu (2002) as example par excellence; its Nintendo and Sega gaming systems became ubiquitous and were

Parasite and Snowpiercer as Derivations to Hallyu  77 used worldwide; its anime craze and pink globalization via Hello Kitty (Yano 2008) were unrivaled; as well as its homemade television talk shows such as Kokoga hen dayo Nihonjin (This Is So Bizarre, You Japanese) was the first program to feature multi-cultural encounters with Japanesespeaking African, European and Asian foreign-nationals (Iwabuchi 2010). All of this globalized content by Japan is a lesson to Korea’s own unflagging ambition to match or, to some, supplant its neighbor’s past successes. Japanese media – particularly television and film in the 2000s – struggled and then overcame the “contraposition of ‘Japan’ versus ‘the West’,” eventually giving way to “more representations of a global society” (Iwabuchi 2010: 36). Japan’s own global standard at the time – similar to Korea’s understanding of transborder flows – proposed discourses of globalization that “have most notably revolved around the urgency to readjust to the new, U.S.-led, global economic order” in the 1990s (ibid.: 29). While Japan started to integrate people, ideas and float its own globality, “its excessive celebration of tradition, goods, even sports players who succeed outside Japan” (ibid.: 29) is a trajectory that Korean media is currently taking. Football ace Son HeungMin, born in South Korea but who then honed his skills in Germany, is given messiah-like status at home; each goal is worshiped on sports networks in Korea. Internally, Korean media’s similar strategy for Hallyu is a phase of what I label their “semi-global exclusivity,” that the public visibility of foreigners in television series in the case of Bijeongsanghoedam (Non-Summit, JTBC 2014-17) or Squid Game (Netflix) remains largely a position of small inclusion of external figures and ideas, but one in constant flux due to its cultural preservationist stance. In other words, different to Japan’s understanding of the international encounters and exchanges, that of the “uncanny ubiquity of the global” (Iwabuchi 2010: 30), Korea is in constant competition with neighbors and the global notion of an unbounded, universal humanity. Because of Japan’s restrained compliance with the deregulation of its own media markets at home in the late 1990s, all to push its Cool Japan brand of anime, film and television and other consumable goods, such maneuvers are not without interdependent agents and entities acting on its behalf. The relaxation by Japan to foreign media conglomerates who penetrated the country was a short-term process, with the passing of the Broadcast Law in 2001. Only two years later, with the so-called slaying of one of the most divisive media titans, Rupert Murdoch, based on the withdrawal of his News Corporation-owned stake in the television platform SkyPerfecTV from Japan did one see the multinational predator, particularly News Corporation’s past hostile takeovers, imitated later by Japanese media companies. As JungBong Choi (2010: 7-8) adds: “Japan’s media industry and policy agents have counteracted the incursion of transnational media corporations, siphoning off their capital, business leadership and technological knowhow, as exemplified by Murdoch’s case.” In the process, such moves by Japan were “ventriloquistic,” argues Choi, creating a “local predator” (ibid.: 16). But the actions internally by Japanese media professionals used to renationalize their media industry to make it more self-­ sufficient further insulated it from foreign investment. This, I would add, is one of the reasons why Japan is a top-five media market in the world. While Korea’s media market is minuscule in comparison to Japan’s, it too has instituted and benefited from its own counter-maneuvers. Despite its small size and lack of a transnational media conglomerate in the vein of Sony Corporation – though with CJ ENM it is starting to be regarded as such – Korean media has better preserved its media ecosystem through strict tariffs and import restrictions, savvy FTA rule-bending, and the highest cinemagoing public in the world, eager to see Korean and international movies. Add to this the 2022 legislation, which will make Netflix pay for “network usage fees and taxation” (Kim 2022: 414) to further renationalize their market, and Korea’s media ecosystem is tightly buttoned up. But in roughly the mid-2010s, the country and its creative types were still struggling to get Korean content onto the world stage.

78  Keith B. Wagner Enter Bong Joon-Ho as trailblazer and Netflix as disruptor. Sidestepping the multiplexes and their theatrical release through Internet streaming, four years after Snowpiercer, Bong was the first and most prominent Korean filmmaker to experiment with Netflix. This decision by Bong would set a precedent in Korea that the over-the-top (OTT) service could replace homegrown emerging media conglomerates CJ ENM and bypass Hollywood’s cultural imperialism vis-à-vis its conglomerate-owned studios (or its transnational imperative to poach talent like Park via his Hollywood debut). Yet Bong’s negative experience on Snowpiercer with the Miramax Company saw him struggle to maintain control over the creative process. All this would change with Netflix and is central to Bong’s decision to turn to the new streaming network. In the process, Netflix allowed Bong to produce a film unthinkable in Korea – Okja (2017). Drawing on Bong’s sociology degree, he adds environmentalism, animal rights and food commodity chains to his checklist of societal ills in need of examination (Wagner 2023). Ultimately, the auteurlike storytelling that Bong utilizes, his quintessential blend of different genres to achieve an unsettled effect, the neurotic and black humor of his characters, and the location and idea of Korea all become essential to each of his films, but in Okja geography becomes literalized to symbolically mount the importance of Korea as a middle power in a federated world where borders, especially to Bong, are not obsolete but are cherished. But to return to pre-Netflix Korea, I need to focus on Bong’s own semi-global critique of Korean neoliberalism in the post-apocalyptic film, Snowpiercer.

Korean Neoliberalism and Bong’s Semi-Global Turn in Snowpiercer A hyper-neoliberal spirit of domination through competition is imbued as a trope in much of contemporary Korea cinema (Wagner 2016). As capitalism’s latest global phase, neoliberalism must be understood first as political economic system and thought collective loyal to free market principles of privatization, anti-unionism, deregulation, the priority of price mechanism and the expansion of the financial market, all tenets that come to enforce neoliberalism’s colonization of culture. Korean neoliberalism is unique but also represents the “multitude of neoliberal combinations in the world” (ibid.: 118). It renovates the function of the state – a hangover from its authoritarian period (1960–1987) – where the separation of government and market was unthinkable at the time. I adopt Quinn Slobodian’s smart metaphor to “encase” (2018: 2) and deploy it to show that the state functions in Korea as an insurer to the orthodoxy of market. Such neoliberal encasement of the Korean state to the whims of the market is indelibly linked to Korea’s political economy since the 1950s. Looking back, the state and its functional role become not an enemy of capitalism, but an almost-myopic caretaker, one tied to nationalistic narratives of development and its anti-communist ideology. By today’s market-obsessed standards, there is little interference by the Korean government – whether the party affiliation is liberal or conservative; the Moon Jae-In government (2017–21) moved to regulate markets – a brief corrective now short-lived and ineffective – currently being dismantled by the new president, Yoon Seok-Yeol (2022–). Making this a reality is the everyday micro-policies in Korea – the day-to-day chores that civil servants, financial regulators and judicial officials enact all to insulate the market through carefully groomed regulatory bills passed down by politicians and their higher-ups in staff-appointed positions. The belief, therefore, by Korean neoliberals that such safeguards protect and strengthen the country’s international standing and self-esteem, it constitutes a nationalist neoliberal outlook that outweighs any ethical concerns for those it brutally marginalizes and puts into penury. As proof, Korea has one of the lowest budgets out of G-20 countries in terms of spending on social care; a mere 8 percent goes to welfare programs. Hye-Kyung Lee (2019) goes further to show that Korea’s unabashed motivations to bring culture into a market economy is rationalized by the metrics of

Parasite and Snowpiercer as Derivations to Hallyu  79 financial accruement. This reveals a “dynamic push” by the state to try to absorb everything, especially culture, and to neoliberalize it: Hallyu is a quintessential example. While the state pushes the phenomenon of Hallyu as much as it pushes the commodification of the Hallyu effect, for which it has enriched Korea’s coffers through export, the neoliberalization of such conservative blockbuster culture is never questioned by musical acts like BTS. Given more latitude, however, filmmakers like Bong are finding chances to point fingers at economic inequality. While mainstream Korean television vaunts neoliberal culture unequivocally, many of its dramas worship affluence in Korean society. Film remains a commodity of great cultural and economic worth to Korea, but it is one such commodity that fights back in terms of narrative content and the ideologies of directors – filmmakers who question, unreservedly, Korea’s love affair with neoliberal capitalism. But though directors like Bong tell us about the problems that neoliberalism creates, they commission no alternatives and this ultimately subverts any true radicality. Showing the problems caused by neoliberalism is still brave and matters to many Korean filmmakers. This becomes more vital as the global accumulation of wealth has never been more concentrated than it is now, with Korea claiming 28 billionaires in 2021 despite its increasing elderly population living in poverty and a huge percentage of the younger generation underemployed or living on family support and credit cards. Hallyu has created part of this booming affluence gap, along with Korea’s high-performing export economy, a society enthralled with what I call “neoliberal royalty,” a coterie of: elite business owners, politicians and entrepreneurs who survived and thus prospered under the military governments of the past, and emerged (with their descendants and those newly converted to neoliberalism) to oversee the economy above all else; an elite group that wields tremendous economic power and, I would add, cultural legitimacy. (Wagner 2016: 123) Most strikingly and problematically, most capital building by these real-life and fictive neoliberal royals comes through inheritance. These neoliberal royals and their elite culture are portrayed in many Korean films. Sites of extravagance are plentiful: from operas and five-star hotels to department stores and superbrand wardrobes, luxury sedans from Bentleys to Rolls Royces and private jets which serve to whisk people off to the Royal Ascot in England and ski chateaus in Switzerland. Taking delight in pulverizing the Korean rich on screen, Bong Joon-Ho has experimented masterfully with apocalyptic themes via his first foray into science fiction, not set in space or directly in Korea, but rather in a frozen tundra of the near-future earth. Snowpiercer (2013) marks a turn toward a transnational/transcultural film, often classified as world cinema or what Rob Wilson (2019: 202) calls a “Korean-global film.” This film inaugurated a post-apocalyptic science fiction action film for the Korean film industry. As an antecedent moment for Space Sweepers, Korea’s newest blockbuster sci-fi film mentioned at the outset of this chapter, it was Snowpiercer and its adaption from a French graphic novel a decade earlier that first introduced the futurist genre to Korea and global audiences. With “80 percent of the film shot in English, with filming of the train sequences at Prague’s Barrandov Studios” (Wilson 2019: 200), Bong’s diegetic world is a violent one, encased on a train where the last of humanity live after the eruption of environmental Armageddon. This new world survives on rails and moves to keep its passengers alive by cutting through a frozen landscape. Only after a final revolution and then derailment can we read Snowpiercer as suggestive to the pulverization of different systems of oppression. These are allegorically deployed and understood as pyrrhic victories over capitalism, surveillance technicity and industrialization, and the circuitous, dark realities of social class stratification and racial/ethnic

80  Keith B. Wagner segregation come to the fore. Many suffer unspeakable traumas on this Noah’s Arc of death or a “crazed capitalist train” (ibid.: 200), and this puts the film on the radar of fans in the Global North and South. It even prompted Netflix to produce a television spinoff by the same title in 2021. Thus, Bong’s creation of a post-neoliberal Garden of (thawing) Eden, through a tundra-like world that is slowly emerging, drew many fans’ and critics’ plaudits. This reality is revealed when the train is destroyed, and a utopian-like exodus is shown. Disembarking after the train, two children of color – Asian and Black – find themselves in a recovering Anthropocene and faced with the creation of a new humankind. In broader terms, Bong provides Korean and international audiences various transnational themes that have a global appeal, ones where we can understand Korean problems as issues that plague all societies. Korean neoliberalism and the whole of global capitalism are obvious systems critiqued in Snowpiercer but one of the undertheorized allegories is opening – through an underclass rebellion – of a shadow elite represented by the Wilford character (Ed Harris), the designer of the futuristic train and an autocratic overseer, a brutal ruler of this encased society. Janine R. Wedel (2011) theorizes the composite group of the shadow elite that comprise a single network that snakes “through official and private organizations, creating a loop that is closed to democratic processes.” The train, much like the snake metaphor by Wedel, infiltrates the minds of the lower classes with promises of a more just life if they absorb and cease to rebel against the dominance of capital to rule lives. Bong thus encases the revolt on the train as controlled, ultimately, by an elite that is safely out of sight to the lower classes. Their manipulation, or that of one man in Snowpiercer with the character of Curtis (Chris Evans), falls into Wilfred’s plan – to steer the revolution as a release valve there for pacification and to cull those that dare to rise up. This blood-soaked revolution that succeeds only by chance is a reminder that elite values and hegemony will persevere only temporary, as anarchic elements beyond their control ensures that authoritarian leadership is not immune to regime change or destruction through acts of God. Those from below, or, in this case, in the tail-end of the train, create a workers’ utopia in an uncertain future outside the cruel and sinister system of futuristic neoliberalism, breaking the cyclicality of capital’s boomand-bust, creating a permanent break from its systemicity.

Parasite’s Local-to-Global Tropes: Real Estate Speculation, Class Pulverization and an Oscar Win for Korea As Bong’s magnum opus and his latest film as of this writing, Parasite is his homecoming of sorts and its deglobalized transculturality is clear: It is a return to bounded cultural expression, an outbound Koreanized global flow of content (Kim 2013). Similar to Park Chan-Wook’s newest film Decision to Leave (2022) with an unflinching notion of self-contained communities in region-specific Asia/Korea, both directors share a desire to make films with “elements that only Koreans can understand” (Song 2022). Korea is the world that is oriented in this Oscar-winning film, but it simultaneously wishes to represent, obliquely, other local systems of global oppression – real estate speculation (Wagner 2022) and older, calcified social class bias; these two-central themes complement the other tropes found in more visibly, culturally and multiculturally imbued Snowpiercer (2013) discussed above. Roland Robertson (1995: 26) aptly reminds us that the sacredness of the local is often promoted “from above or outside” and that “much of what is often declared to be local is in fact the local expressed in terms of generalized recipes of locality.” Thus, my notion of Bong’s orchestration of the world-system can be found in the depiction of the residential housing struggle in Seoul in Parasite, which reflects fictionally on speculative assets promoted by global real estate speculation occurring everywhere. My previous work on Parasite used a Marxist-cum-Jamesonian

Parasite and Snowpiercer as Derivations to Hallyu  81 specific schema to unpack the previously unexplored parameters of real estate speculation, read as an allegory and an issue of overvaluation not just in terms of property – the home and/or apartment – but also as a thing itself (Wagner 2022). Real estate speculation has become a hobby, a profession, a compulsion, a way of life in Korea, especially in Seoul, and in most other places around the world. I believe that Bong is genuinely concerned with the problems caused by real estate speculation – the grotesque overvaluation placed on the home/apartment/villa – a trope I extracted from the film, along with my fine-grained analysis of class warfare that gave greater salience to contextual readings of financial encroachment as it pertains to property. One angle I did not fully explore was Bong’s conscious corrective to the outside world about Seoul’s (and Korea’s) own brand of extravagant living, a kind of bragging rights associated with a particular ritzy zip code. In Parasite, the Park family resides in one of the capital’s oldest, most lavish and opulent neighborhoods, Seongbuk-dong. I argued: the Park house has equivalents in other old-moneyed districts in cities across the world (for example, Mayfair in London, the Upper East Side in New York, or the Peak in Hong Kong). Indeed Seongbuk-dong’s association with a cosmopolitan worldliness, particularly due to its history as residence for foreign diplomats and chaebol CEOs, each jet-setting from one continent to another and back again. (Wagner 2022) This is conveyed in the narrative and is culturally engineered by Bong to orchestrate Seongbukdong’s importance outside of Korea, all to create a global name for a Korean neighborhood, importantly because Parasite comes to disrupt the tacky consumption of Seoul’s first globally recognized neighborhood, Gangnam (a district South of the Han River cutting through the capital of Seoul, known for people flaunting luxury goods and their bodies). While it becomes a cinematic centerpiece and location – an idea of luxury and a brand itself in Parasite – the opulent home in Seongbuk-dong also revamps the damage done by Korean rapper Psy’s music video “Gangnam Style” (2012), which made a mockery, ironically, of the nouveau-riche tackiness associated with this brash, showy district. Now ten years since it went global, the viral popularity of this music video gave Gangnam a global name of the wrong sort. Viewed over four billion times on YouTube, “Gangnam Style” further solidified this neoliberal enclave’s strange power to captivate. Thus, in stark opposition, Bong’s luxury home in Parasite, itself a prop home built by Bong for shooting and not really located in the location under scrutiny, still exemplifies the luxury home as a newly consumable urban outpost of luxury, a district that outside of the diegetic world has now quickly become a new sightseeing destination for tourists to Korea, an example of what Youngmin Choe (2016) calls “tourist distractions.” Eager cinephiles have recently flocked to Seongbuk-dong consuming not only media content – this film and many Korean television series based in the capital – but more importantly the ideas people have of these districts from the way such media plays into their actual tourist experience of being there: Seoul is thus recast and then experienced through this form of cine-tourism. It thus furthers Bong’s placement of this district as an increasingly homogenized and globalized form, one catering to the tastes of transnational elite found both in Seoul and in other enclaves across the globe. Let me end with a global moment – inextricably linking – Hallyu and Bong Joon-Ho together, in near harmony. While gleefully accepting the Best Director award live during the 2019 Academy Awards ceremony, Bong’s decision to use Korean first to thank the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) can be read in two ways. First, Parasite is representative of what Daya Thussu (2006) coins “contra-flows.” This new route created by Parasite elicits a newer contra-flow that simultaneously encompasses Hallyu’s propagation – much larger in

82  Keith B. Wagner scalar importance – but arguably the televised Oscars put Bong and Hallyu into an ellipse-like cultural orbit. They overlapped. Thus, we can read this as the export-led telegenic impeccability of Hallyu, while Parasite (and Bong’s speech) also signals and is imbued with a kind of local resistance to the dominance of Global English. Here Bong’s Oscar acceptance speech is a literalized contra-flow speak aimed directly at the cultural imperialism of Hollywood, that is, to read subtitles, to engage and discover foreign film, that might at first put people out of their comfort zones, but hearing Korean broadcast to millions watching the Oscars around the world was masterfully planned. It announced Asia’s rise and Korea’s move to further accelerate this process begun by Japan in the 1990s. Switching from Korean to accented English is also an important aspect of Bong’s historic speech. He does so to thank the old guard of New Hollywood film directors, Martin Scorsese, perhaps the first big name American auteur to champion Korean cinema in the early 2000s. This move deliberately puts Bong in the same category as the Oscar-winning Italian American blockbuster auteur, but it also signaled that one Korean director – and perhaps Korea itself – remembers those that acknowledged and complemented its culture before the rest of the world noticed.

Conclusion Hallyu’s global stature and Snowpiercer and Parasite’s differentiated popularity is dependent on different capacities and scales of legitimation and visibility. My overarching contention in this chapter, then, is to show that Korean cinema is rather contrarian and does not push its Koreanized content as much as it stretches Korea’s place in a myriad of systems, conditions and even feelings that define us and is demarcated allegorically – a salient proposition that simultaneously serves, in another register as counterpoint, that Hallyu and Korean cinema explicates a kind of Koreanness that emerges and tames the same external influences, forces, even genres from becoming too globular. In more cerebral ways, Korean cinema presents greater complexities through narratives that are niche, sometimes populated with ethnic minorities, and offer an alternative to Hallyu’s broad, middle-brow appeal and representation of a homogeneous and monocultural Korean culture. Bong Joon-Ho represents the best Korea has to offer in terms of his understanding of a growing Korean-focused globalization, one that, lest we forget, is interdependent to the larger forces and conditions of worldwide cultural globalization; yet Bong has also assessed in Korea the impacts of multiculturalism and neoliberalism and, more prophetically, navigated platformed streaming to his advantage through his co-production with Netflix. Incredibly and to his credit, Bong has come the closest to a globality that is at once detached from the lure of nationalistic undertones and vain monoculturalism seen in many Korean films (and in most national cinemas around the world). Through Snowpiercer, Bong offers the struggles and opportunities with which worldwide globalization acts as agent of change. Later, his local-to-global understanding of real estate speculation and class warfare in Parasite shows the signs of an individual and an industry with a boon of confidence, following the impulse of other nations to engender the “national logo a highly marketable brand” (Iwabuchi 2010: 27). No doubt, Bong is Korea’s leading filmmaker who straddles the line between his global auteur status (Jeong and Szaniawski 2016), his work being simultaneously folded into the Hallyuization of all Korean cultural content. It is paramount that we position Korean cinema as not only part of this metonymic brand but also something separate from it, because film has a different scale and feel to most other content. Indeed, it was Korean film that first catapulted the industry out of the penumbral and into the full view of the world. Taken together, all these transnational influences are necessary for the continued relevance, circulation and accreditation of Korean film in a world of global influences and influencers.

Parasite and Snowpiercer as Derivations to Hallyu  83

References Chalaby, J. (2016) “Television and Globalization: The TV Content Global Value Chain,” Journal of Communication, 66(1): 35–59. Choe, Y. (2016) Tourist Distractions, Durham: Duke University Press. Choi, J. (2010) “Banishment of Murdoch’s Sky in Japan: A Tale of David and Goliath?,” in M. Yoshimoto, E. Tsai and J. Choi (eds) Television, Japan and Globalization, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Choi, J. (2015) “Hallyu Versus Hallyu-hwa Cultural Phenomenon Versus Institutional Campaign,” in S. Lee and A. Markus (eds) Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Iwabuchi, K. (2010) “Ordinary Foreigners Wanted: Multinationalization of Multicultural Questions in a Japanese TV Talk Show,” in M. Yoshimoto, E. Tsai and J. Choi (eds) Television, Japan and Globalization, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jeong, S. (2019) “Snowpiercer (2013): The Post-historical Catastrophe of a Biopolitical Ecosystem,” in S. Lee (ed) Rediscovering Korean Cinema, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jeong, S. and Szaniawski, J. (2016) The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, London: Bloomsbury. Kapur, J. and Wagner, K.B. (2011) Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique, London: Routledge. Kim, J., Unger, M. and Wagner, K.B. (2017) “The Significance of Beyond Hallyu Film and Television Content in South Korea’s Mediasphere,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 33(2): 315–20. Kim, S. (2013) “The Rise of the Korean Cinema in Inbound and Outbound Globalization,” in A. Fung (ed) Asian Popular Culture: The Global (Dis)continuity, London: Routledge. Kim, T. (2022) “Critical Interpretations of Global-Local Co-Productions in Subscription Video-onDemand Platforms: A Case Study of Netflix’s YG Future Strategy Office,” Television and New Media, 23(4). 405–21. Kim, Y. (2011) “Globalization of Korean Media: Meanings and Significance,” D. Kim and M. Kim (eds) Hallyu: Influence of Korean Popular Culture in Asia and Beyond, Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Kim, Y. (2021) The Soft Power of the Korean Wave: Parasite, BTS and Drama, London: Routledge. Lee, H. (2019) “The New Patron State in South Korea: Cultural Policy, Democracy and the Market Economy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 25(1): 48–62. Robertson, R. (1995) “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities, Thousand Oaks: SAGE. Rozenfeld, E. (2021) “Korea’s Pushing Hands: The Story Behind the Global Cultural Expansion of Korean Martial Arts,” Asian Studies Review, 45(4): 576–93. Slobodian, Q. (2018) Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Song, S. (2022) “Korean Audiences’ Feedbacks are More Important than Winning Cannes: Park ChanWook,” Korean Herald, 2 June. Thussu, D. (2006) Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow, London: Routledge. Wagner, K. (2016) “Endorsing Upper Class Refinement or Critiquing Neoliberal Royalty?: The Rise of Neoliberal Genre Modification in Contemporary South Korean Cinema,” Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 30(1): 117–38. Wagner, K. (2019) “Train to Busan: Glocalization, Korean Zombies and a Man-Made Neoliberal Disaster,” in S. Lee (ed) Rediscovering Korean Cinema, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wagner, K. (2022) “A Jamesonian Reading of Parasite (2019): Homes, Real Estate Speculation and Bubble Markets in Seoul,” in K. Wagner (ed) Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory and Geopolitics in World Cinema, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Wagner, K. (2023) “Global Cinema in an Era of Deglobalization: trans-territorial compulsions and the plenipotentiary potential of human activities in Cloud Atlas and Okja,” forthcoming in Globalizations. Wedel, J. (2011) Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market, New York: Basic Books. Wilson, R. (2019) “Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics: Killer Capitalism, the Anthropocene, Korean Global Film,” Boundary, 46(3): 199–218.

7 Her Revenge Low Birthrate Cinema from Lady Vengeance to The Villainess Joseph Jonghyun Jeon

The Villainess (Aknyeo, 2017) is framed by a pair of extended sequences, both ostensible longtake scenes, which deploy slick editing to hide cuts and produce the illusion of uninterrupted action. Such scenes have long been a mark of prestige cinematography, as made famous in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and more recently updated for the digital era in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014). Both these films pushed the trope to its extreme by presenting the entirety of each film as if it were one take. Hitchcock hid a single cut in the darkness of a shot of a man’s back (Miller 1990). Iñárritu used digital editing techniques to hide many cuts that were used in filming. In both scenes from The Villainess, the cinematography expresses the intense nature of the depicted fighting, but they have different points of emphasis. There is a small but important difference between the opening and closing sequences of the film. Whereas in the opening, the cuts are hidden in the frantic and rapid movements of the camera, mostly in whip pans that move too fast for human vision, the cuts are hidden in the final scene primarily in close-up shots of Sook-Hee’s (Kim Ok-Bin) body. The first scene is presented as if from an embodied point of view, and thus the whip pans express the disorientation of Sook-Hee’s perspective, turning to each combatant as she makes her way through a gauntlet of antagonists. The first half of the scene is explicitly shot from the perspective of Sook-Hee in the manner of a first-person shooter videogame; we can see her arms and hand at first firing and reloading a gun and then wielding knives. Around the midpoint of the scene, however, an adversary smashes her head into a mirror, and the perspective shifts to a third-person perspective from which Sook-Hee’s fighting becomes the central object of visual attention. After the shift, the perspective still feels diegetic, as if from someone observing the action from up close, but it is no longer located in Sook Hee’s vision. The smashed glass that marks the transition from one point of view to the other is exemplary of the hidden cutting technique in this opening scene, which hides cuts in rapid movements and action. The closing scene of the film is similar in technique, but here in contrast, most of the cuts use Sook-Hee’s body, taking advantage of the fact that she is wearing a tight black suit to hide them. At these moments, the camera focuses closely so that the screen goes black for an instant, allowing for the cut. The prominence of this technique at the end of the film stands thus in contrast to the similar hidden cuts in the opening scene. With the perspective less diegetic, the use of Sook-Hee’s body as the site of cinematic manipulation seems to make the hiddenness of the cuts more obvious, which we witness from slightly more of a remove. The conceit becomes more pronounced; we become more aware of the fact of elision, in contrast to the opening scene in which the elided cuts are more seamless. In both formal and social terms, we might think of the pair scenes in relation to the most famous long take in Korean cinema, in Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy (2003), in which the protagonist Dae-Su fights his way through a hallway full of thugs in a scene that lasts over three minutes. A clear reference for the framing sequences in The Villainess, the scene from Oldboy DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-10

Her Revenge  85 expresses struggle in the context of labor. If Oldboy’s choreography were not vigorous enough, the shooting process was even more difficult; it famously took 17 takes over two days to accomplish to the director’s satisfaction, leaving the actor Choi Min-Sik severely exhausted. Spike Lee doubled the length of the scene for his Hollywood remake (2013) before the studio insisted on a cut for the theatrical release. As I have argued elsewhere, the scene expresses the affect of the salaryman’s labor in a nation that boasted the longest workweeks in the world (  Jeon 2019: 56–7). But if in the Oldboy scene the exhaustion caused by the salaryman’s labor is expressed by the actor’s fatigue, having had to perform the extended action sequence repeatedly in its entirety for each take since the scene had no cuts, then The Villainess scene expresses the logic of gendered labor in an aesthetic that foregrounds the fact of elision, especially at the end of the film when the hidden cuts become slightly more obvious. Amid all of this spectacular action, which is understood to be the actual labor of this woman whose literal job it is to kill at the behest of her employers, the final scene of the movie ironically calls attention to the kinds of formal disappearances that inhere in the spectacle’s construction. Like Oldboy, I am suggesting then, The Villainess is a movie about labor, but shifts the focus from the post-IMF crisis salaryman in Park Chan-Wook’s iconic film instead to gendered labor much later in the vicious circuit that has continued to spiral since that signal event. And in this shift, we are attuned to what is missing from the image, the invisible labor as it were, that constitutes the scene. If historically speaking, women’s labor has been understood to be somehow fundamentally invisible and especially so in South Korea, then The Villainess expresses this characteristic by making invisibility – in the form of hidden cuts – ironically constitutive of its most visually intense spectacular sequences. This defining formal feature speaks to, I want to suggest, the film’s implicit preoccupation with a particularly vexed issue in the contemporary Korean imagination, the low national birthrate, which has fallen to its lowest point in history and, at the time of writing, is among the lowest in the world. The reasons for declining birthrates in South Korea remain unclear, though there has been speculation about causes ranging from economic to social to ideological. Common explanations include the rising cost of living, more demanding work environments and frustrations with patriarchal expectations. What is clear, however, is that the low national birthrate augurs a bleak economic future caused not just by an overall decline in population but also an imbalanced population, with far more older people and fewer of working age. Experts suggest that the birthrate needs to be around 2.1 per woman to maintain population levels. In 2019, South Korea’s birthrate fell below 1 for the first time, despite significant government policies aimed toward raising that rate. With these numbers in mind, experts predict a catastrophic drop in population along with an aging population, the combination of which would lead to significantly decreased productivity and economic stagnation (Smith 2019; Chang 2021). When combined with current frustrations and anxieties about economic life in South Korea, the future implications of the low birthrate connect contemporary ideological diagnoses of social and gendered inequality that pertain to specific demographic groups to material consequences that affect everyone. In this discursive context, this chapter examines a pair of films separated by 12 years and thus bracket the long post-IMF period in Korean socioeconomic history, marking different points along that trajectory. Park Chan-Wook’s Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan Geumja-ssi, 2005) might be read as a powerful statement about the way in which women’s concerns were left out of the dominant discourse of economic recovery immediately after the crisis, which tended to focus on male blue-collar labor (as in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance [Boksuneun Naui Geot, 2002]) and white-collar salarymen (as in Oldboy, 2003). Both films focus on oppressed women who turn to violence to assess their worthiness not for becoming a mother to yet unborn children – a common trope in Korean cinema – but rather for continuing as mothers for children they

86  Joseph Jonghyun Jeon already have. This tweak in turn shifts what was a moral concern toward the questions of viability at the center of the birthrate discourse. Foregrounding a sociopathic tutor for young children who uses his position for a violent ransom/murder scheme, Lady Vengeance frames the title character’s revenge within a key policy element of the low birthrate discourse as it has emerged over the past decade, namely the availability and the trustworthiness of childcare, particularly for working mothers. Part of a trend in Korean action films featuring dangerous women (Sim 2020), The Villainess picks up this discourse of female precarity years later with the story of a woman is forced to work a violent job (as an assassin) against her will. Both the governmental agency she comes to work for and the criminal organization with which she began leverage Sook-Hee’s motherly commitments to make her do their bidding. Accordingly, both films foreground the relationship between the film’s central heroine and her daughter, a relationship in which the mother’s ability to nurture becomes compromised by several external forces. We might thus think of the pair of films then as forming a trajectory toward the current preoccupation with the low birthrate in contemporary Korea, in which the fact of social reproduction becomes troubled because the conditions become impossible. The villainess is not villainous because of a moral failing but because of the adverse conditions framing her labor. Furthermore, what is distinctive about this expression in these films is that it is not necessarily in the mode of impassioned protest but rather subsumes and aggregates more individual reactions within the cold countenance of hard numbers. It is a statistical expression. The Villianess thus builds on Lady Vengeance’s diagnosis of the low Korean birthrate as a societal rather than individual problem by casting Sook-Hee as a paradigmatic figure rather than as a special case. Despite her very special talents that make her particularly skilled at killing, Sook-Hee turns out to represent a statistically significant sample that indexes a verifiable trend rather than an anomaly that one might dismiss. Here I am explicitly invoking a mathematical language and sensibility in describing the film’s aesthetics. It is a film in which the protagonist expresses not so much an individual character as a demographic category, extending then the seeds of a logic explored in Lady Vengeance. In this critical/aesthetic vein then, revenge in these films, like the low birthrate, becomes the obverse expression of ideological orientations in contemporary Korean life that are fundamentally hostile toward women. With its impersonal statistical expression then, the logic of the low birthrate in these films constitutes a kind of revenge that then is indeed best served cold, in the form of cold hard data.

Remediated Women South Korea’s extremely low birthrate in the last decade has been such a cause for concern, specifically for national long-term economic prospects, that the state began to take policy measures to improve it, including, most infamously, a 2016 website under the Park Geun-Hye administration, with a “real-time statistical heat map” that tracked women of child-bearing age, marriages and births that hoped to spur interregional competition (Roh 2019). It was taken offline amid criticism after one single day when women complained about the narrow view of women as “baby factories” that the website implied. Accordingly, much of the journalism and critical literature on the low Korean birthrate has focused on state policy and its relative in/ effectiveness while, secondarily, also anecdotally citing a familiar set of ideological factors – about the rigidity of South Korean work culture, the patriarchal inequity of childrearing responsibilities among Korean married couples, and the rising antipathy of young Koreans to marriage and family. Despite significant efforts and the deployment of considerable resources, state policies to promote childbirth have had minimal effect (Poon 2018). To be sure, there are plenty of shortcomings in policy and implementation, but the continual downward trend in

Her Revenge  87 birth numbers in the face of state efforts suggests that there are not only flaws in these policies but also, and more significantly, strong social forces that such policies cannot touch. That is, although governmental policies incentivize certain behaviors through tax credits, institutional support and so on, they cannot address underlying patriarchal ideological structures and, crucially, the political economy in which it is embedded. While economists have struggled for material and cultural explanations for the low birthrate phenomenon, these films locate this intersection of gender and nationalist concerns in the social and economic reorganization that has characterized Korean political economy since the early 1990s, was accelerated by the IMF crisis, and has persisted ever since despite triumphal claims about paying back the loan and successfully ending the crisis by the early 2000s. The dynamics of women’s revenge in this pair of films thus helps demonstrate how the cultural proceeds from the material in a progression has led to the present in catastrophic ways, one which augurs a bleak future in which the crisis of social reproduction brought on by broader economic crisis is expressed as a crisis of biological reproduction. Both films thus present the spectacle of violent revenge in relation to the woman’s status as the mother of a young daughter. In both cases, the woman must weigh the work of revenge against her child-raising responsibilities, negotiating a perverse work–life balance under life-or-death pressures within the generic conventions of the contemporary revenge thriller. By placing the problem of childrearing within such a layered context, both films index different points along a broader historical trajectory that suggests that the low South Korean birthrate is not simply the result of inadequate state policy, but rather the material expression of dissatisfaction with the patriarchal and economic forms of inequity that define gendered experiences in South Korea. These gendered experiences were exacerbated by economic changes in the long wake of the IMF crisis for which state policy shortcomings have provided cover. The logic of the birthrate statistics in fact seems to reflect this failure to focus on the most relevant material conditions in its preoccupation with the statistical figure of the woman as the unit through which population trends becomes measured. In Lady Vengeance, this statistical imagination emerges forcefully in the last third of the film. The film tells the story of Geum-Ja (Lee Young-Ae), a woman who is forced to serve a prison sentence for the death of a young boy on behalf of Mr. Baek (Choi Min-Sik), the real killer, because Mr. Baek threatens to kill her infant daughter if she does not. Geum-Ja spends the entirety of her time in prison plotting revenge and making allies of her fellow prisoners by helping them through the difficulties of prison life. But at the moment she is finally prepared to mete the death blow on her adversary, she realizes that she is not the only victim of Mr. Baek’s machinations. Her suffering, she comes to learn, is not special but symptomatic. In addition to the child, for whose murder she had taken the blame, she learns that Mr. Baek had killed four more young children, each under the auspices of a ransom plot. This is a nightmare vision of childcare gone horribly wrong. Instead of killing him immediately then, Geum-Ja gathers the parents and guardians of the other victims to allow them to have their say in his fate. What follows is a complicated, strangely procedural discussion, in which the various victims discuss what Mr. Baek’s fate should be and how they should effect it in a way that ensures no single party can reveal their decision and subsequent actions to authorities at a later date. To ensure mutual guilt, the de facto committee decides that they should kill him together in succession, each person taking a turn to torture and eventually kill Mr. Baek. So, rather than a moment of impassioned revenge, what we get at the end of the film is weirdly protracted, deliberate and even bureaucratic. It is as if the point were less vigilante justice and more to solve a policy loophole by a subcommittee charged to deal with the problem of bad childcare (as manifested by a murderous children’s tutor). Accordingly, Geum-Ja transforms throughout the course of a film from the wronged subject of vengeance into its bureaucratic administrator, a

88  Joseph Jonghyun Jeon transformation that aligns with radical expansion of the category of the wronged victim in the film. The problem turns out not to be an individual’s unfortunate encounter with a singular pathological murder acting alone, but rather a social group’s encounter with a pathological system that produces perverse outcomes (namely here the corpses of children) as a matter of course. To be sure, the enactment of revenge when it is finally delivered is indeed violent, but it is also prolonged and procedural, all of it underscored by a kind of sociological sensibility. Importantly, this transformation of motivation in the film from individual and personal to social and collective is expressed aesthetically as a remediation, that is, the expression of one aesthetic medium in another (Bolter and Grusin 1999). I am specifically referring to the burial scene near the very end of the film in which the group inters Mr. Baek’s corpse in order to hide the remains. Before covering him with dirt, Geum-Ja shoots him twice in the head, now belatedly (and perhaps only symbolically) getting her own revenge after all others had taken their turn. We then see an extended close-up of Geum-Ja’s face alternately near crying and laughing, which is interrupted several times, not by a cut but by other members of their group when they pass between her and the camera. The shot then dissolves into the image of a fuzzy television screen on which remains Geum-Ja’s visage before it dissolves completely into visual noise and cuts to a close-up of Geum-Ja’s now-adolescent daughter, who had been watching the screen. Moving then from a filmic logic, expressed by the passing figures who break up the image as if into discrete frames, to a cathode-ray-era television aesthetic, the remediation in this scene presents the moment of Geum-Ja’s revenge as if it were an extension of the abstractions away from individual subjecthood toward systemic administration that I have tracked above. The image becomes fuzzy as the agency of revenge in the film becomes diffuse. As we have already witnessed in the previous discussion of the film’s long takes, The Villainess enacts homage to Park Chan-Wook’s cinematography. It also specifically takes up this remediation shot of Geum-Ja’s face at two discrete moments, both within the opening action sequence of the film. In both cases, a close-up of Sook-Hee’s marks a transitional point between different modes of perception. I have already mentioned the first, the moment when the gangster smashes Sook-Hee’s head in the mirror. We see her mirrored reflection from her point of view (an impossible shot without digital manipulation, of course, given that any shot directly pointed at a mirror will invariably reflect the camera) before the shot pivots to center Sook-Hee herself and not her reflection for the remainder of the extended sequence. Following Steven Shaviro who distinguishes between the function of first-person point of view in videogames (the aesthetics of which are deployed in the first part of the scene) as facilitating player identification and its function in film where it often produces the effect of alienation (Shaviro 2010: 103), the transition at the site of the smashed mirror in this scene toggles between subjecthood and objecthood along the same hinge that it moves from videogame to film. This toggling in turn doubles the film’s preoccupation with the irony of Sook-Hee’s agency; she is an elite agent capable of astonishing endurance, acrobatic feats and rigid self-discipline, but at the same time her efforts are constantly co-opted and contained by larger forces that operate quietly behind the scenes. The second moment makes this logic even clearer. The previously described opening longtake scene ends with a close-up of Sook-Hee’s bloody face as she stands to meet the police who have arrived at the scene of the massacre. We cut to the film’s title card, the first explicit cut we have seen since the film began, but we return immediately to it in a similar close-up of SookHee’s face that zooms out slightly to show the pair of cops that slam her chest down onto the hood of a police car. At this precise moment, the same shot bleeds into an identical image but this time as viewed through the security footage at the intelligence agency that subsequently recruits Sook-Hee for its subrosa machinations. The image becomes here slightly grainier and tinged with green, with the running time stamp below to emphasize the fact of official

Her Revenge  89 documentation. Indeed, the homology between state surveillance and the film audience’s voyeuristic prurience over the spectacle of highly surveilled women is a leitmotif in the film (Jeong 2021). The remediation here from film to security footage, shot presumably from a police car’s black box, explicitly doubles the remediation shot of Geum-Ja in Lady Vengeance. And whereas in Park Chan-Wook’s film, the diegetic audience for the remediated footage is imagined counterfactually to be Geum-Ja’s estranged daughter who had been adopted by an Australian couple and returns to Korea with Geum-Ja for a visit, the audience for Sook-Hee’s video is constituted by the cold impersonal eyes of the state. In both cases, however, remediation of the vengeful woman’s visage parallels each films’ transformation of the individual subject of vengeance into a figure for a larger phenomenon, a category of person more than a specific embodiment.

Statistical Women In this context, Sook-Hee is interpolated in this instant as what Mark Seltzer has described as a “statistical person”: At once “radically embodied and strangely generic,” the statistical person is both particular and typical. Statistical persons, Seltzer continues, “obsessively return, above all, to an interface of vision and embodiment figured as a violent exchange (an excruciating exchange – literally, a crossing point) between the body and the machine” (Seltzer 1987: 91). Seltzer is primarily concerned with American literary social realism or naturalism as manifested in the writing of Stephen Crane, the aesthetics of which seem qualitatively different from the spectacular logic (here in the Debordian sense) of an action film, but his description nevertheless seems particularly apt for the scenes of remediation in the films we have been examining. The redirection of focus toward the statistical woman in the trajectory I am charting between Lady Vengeance and The Villainess indexes in turn a crucial preoccupation in the film in which Sook-Hee’s deployment as a dangerous assassin on behalf of various external interests depends on the management of her priorities through structures of incentives, which are organized around her desire for normative biological reproduction. After she is captured by the state intelligence agency, Sook-Hee learns that she is pregnant, and eventually gives birth during her stay at the facility where she receives further training. To incentivize the dutiful performance of her labor, she is told that she can have her freedom after ten years of service. Her management by the state agency turns out to double her earlier manipulation and training by her husband Joong-Sang (Shin Ha-Kyun), who had ostensibly saved her from the prostitution ring that she had been sold to after her father was violently murdered. Furthermore, after she leaves the intelligence facility to begin her work as an assassin, she is placed under the surveillance of Hyun-Soo (Sung Joon), who hides that fact that he too is an agent and begins a romantic relationship with her. At every turn throughout the course of the film, Sook-Hee becomes the object of strategic maneuvering that operates behind the scenes by powerful state and criminal organizations that ultimately share a deep appreciation for her talent for violence. In fact, we might say that Sook-Hee’s experiences with the state, with criminal organizations and with romantic partners align as recursions of the same social dynamic that offer the prospect of biological reproduction as an ever-receding carrot. In aggregate, Sook-Hee’s experiences become understood not as a series or contingent episodes but rather as paradigmatic instances that repeat the same logics over and over. Her life as a state assassin doubles her previous life of crime just as her romance with the agent charged with her surveillance doubles her earlier love for the gang boss. Such recursion is self-reflexively instantiated when Sook-Hee takes up professional theater as a cover for her secret activities; in a kind of mise en abyme, she plays dramatic roles that explicitly reflect the situations that she has had to deal with throughout her life. Furthermore, we learn that Sook-Hee’s experiences are typical at the agency, which functions

90  Joseph Jonghyun Jeon perversely as a kind of finishing/vocational school for female assassins, where they can learn the “feminine” skills like ballet, cooking and acting (Sook-Hee’s choice) in order to fit in seamlessly to the world outside the compound so as to divert attention from their secret missions. In one scene, we see a new recruit rushing through the same room that Sook-Hee had scrambled through in an attempt to escape the facility. We learn that the other agents take turns in pretending to help the new recruits escape so that they can be subdued, as was Sook-Hee’s experience earlier in the film. This is an ordinary and indeed paradigmatic occurrence. A departure from Lady Vengeance in which mother and daughter attempt to restart their relationship, Sook Hee’s daughter dies in The Villainess, at the behest of the criminal father who had feigned a desire for the kind of normative life that appeals to Sook-Hee. Sook-Hee’s revenge at the end of the film is thus less a course correction and more a rejection of the tightly managed enclosures that have defined her life, ending in spectacular destruction that constitutes a final refusal of not only the institutions that managed her but also the incentive structures through which that control was effected. Through revenge ultimately, Sook-Hee opts out, not least because there remains no way left to opt in. Importantly, it is not exactly the case that Sook-Hee implicitly rejects motherhood or that she is deemed morally unfit to be a mother; rather, motherhood comes to seem impossible under such conditions. According to a further amplification of the logic of Lady Vengeance, what seems remarkable about the formulation in The Villainess is that revenge seems not the purview of a wronged individual but of a demographic in a more systemic, less contingent relation. The aesthetics here are of mathematical modeling in which data inputs are aggregated in order to produce abstract representations of “real world” problems. The literary version of this aesthetics might indeed be allegory, but I want to stress the statistical, mathematical character of the present iteration in which the figure does not merely stand in for a broader social phenomenon but more precisely bears a statistically indexical relationship to it.

Invisible Labor This aesthetics might be located not only within the Korean discourse surrounding the low birthrate but also with respect to the larger political economic frameworks to which this issue connects. In this context, The Villainess’s hidden cuts, which call attention to the fact of their hiddenness, are formally coherent with its scenes of remediation, which call attention to the fact of formal transition between different media. Both ultimately index the broader transition effected in the film between individual woman and an abstract statistical category. In so doing, the film harnesses the threat of the low national birthrate in precisely the mathematical register in which it is typically expressed in Korean public culture. The concomitant form of statistical feminism emerges nearly despite the venues in which they emerge, that is, large-budget films by male directors who might be ambivalent to an explicitly feminist project. Rather, the kind of statistical feminism here bespeaks less a national economic crisis (i.e. the point here is not to advocate for increased childbirth) but rather to note the way in which the problem of low birthrate indexes not only more fundamental ideological structures in Korean society, against which Korean feminism has more explicitly taken a stand in many other kinds of ways, but also the material frameworks of contemporary Korean political economy. In her introduction to a special issue about Cine-Feminism in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Film, Hyun Seon Park states that by 2020 “the visibility of feminism in South Korea has reached unprecedented heights,” particularly with the demands for justice following the Gangnam Station murder case in 2016 and the misogynistic backlash against these demands (Park 2020: 94). That same year, the novel Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982 (82 Nyeonsaeng Kimjiyoung), by Cho Nam-Joo, became a sensation and was shortly thereafter adapted into a film by the same

Her Revenge  91 name in 2019. Cho chose the titular name for her protagonist because Ji-Young is one of the most common names for Korean girls of the generation, and the story about the psychological effects of gender discrimination was meant to exemplify a broad trend in contemporary Korean culture (Kim 2019). Following on the heels of the Gangnam Station murder case, the success of the novel and the subsequent attention brought by the film fueled intense conflicts between feminist groups who called for change, counter-protesting men’s advocacy groups, angry about dwindling opportunities for employment and housing in South Korea, that insisted that men’s lives were no easier (Koo 2022). This later view became a highly visible part of Yoon SeokYeol’s election campaign. The presidential candidate and eventual winner of the 2022 South Korean presidential election pledged to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which was originally established in 1998. Hee Jeong Sohn has argued that in this period feminism “underwent a reboot in South Korea” (Sohn 2020: 98), altered by an emerging “conflict between female solidarity as dreamt by feminism and the hyper competitive individualism as advocated by neoliberalism” (ibid.: 106). Sohn’s insight helps us pivot then from the specific handwringing over the declining national birthrate to the larger questions it implies about gender and economic crisis. Here, Melinda Cooper’s (2016) argument about demographic theories of crisis (like low birthrates) is clarifying. In language that returns us to the formal features of The Villainess’ framing sequences, Cooper suggests that such theories operate “as much through elision and displacement as positive argument, actively working to override the distributional dimension of crisis in favor of a classless narrative of generational conflict or loss... If people aren’t consuming enough, this has nothing to do with the maldistribution of wealth and income, but can be blamed on the fact that they aren’t having enough children. If profitable businesses are failing to engage in new capital investment, this has nothing to do with their rising share of the national income and its disabling effects on consumption; it is simply that businesses have no incentive to invest in a diminishing working-age population and a depopulated consumer market” (Cooper 2016). In the context of the kind of economic stagnation facing South Korea, such elisions and displacements are easy alibis for the kind of more systemic issues that Lady Vengeance and The Villainess index in their statistical presentation of women’s issues. Ultimately, both films are not preoccupied with the local concern of low national birthrates per se and much more concerned instead with the conditions that give rise to them. Low-birthrate figures in this context are like the long-take action sequences with which we began. In both cases, a dramatic spectacle – whether of population decline at Malthusian scales or of action film vengeance – distracts us from noticing that the spectacle would be impossible without the hidden elisions that constitute it.

Acknowledgments This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250006).

References Bolter, J. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press. Chang, D. (2021) “S. Korea in Search of Solutions for Looming Ultra-Low Childbirth, Aging Population,” Yonhap News, 11 July. Cooper, M. (2016) “Secular Stagnation: Fear of a Non-Reproductive Future,” Postmodern Culture, 27(1). Jeon, J.J. (2019) Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

92  Joseph Jonghyun Jeon Jeong, K. (2021) “On the Margins: Action Heroines in Coin-Locker Girl and The Villainess,” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 13(1): 44–57. Kim, H. (2019) “Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982: Feminist Film Reignites Tensions in South Korea,” BBC News, 23 October. Koo, S. (2022) “What a Theory of Evil Korean Women Reveals About Inequality,” Korea Exposé, 5 January. Miller, D. (1990) “Anal Rope,” Representations, 32: 114–33. Park, H. (2020) “South Korean Cine-Feminism on the Move,” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 12(2): 91–7. Poon, L. (2018) “South Korea is Trying to Boost its Birth Rate. It’s Not Working,” Bloomberg, 3 August. Roh, J. (2019) “Not a Baby Factory: South Korea Tries to Fix Demographic Crisis with More Gender Equality,” Reuters, 3 January. Seltzer, M. (1987) “Statistical Persons,” Diacritics, 17(3): 82–98. Shaviro, S. (2010) Post-Cinematic Affect, Winchester: Zero Books. Sim, H. (2020) “Acting ‘Like a Woman’: South Korean Female Action Heroines,” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 12(2):110–23. Smith, N. (2019) “South Korea Foreshadows a Gray, Slow-Growth Future,” Bloomberg, 15 July. Sohn, H. (2020) “Feminism Reboot: Korean Cinema Under Neoliberalism in the 21st Century,” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 12(2): 98–109.

8 The Climate of Cinema Gender, Debt and the Future of Labor in Squid Game and Parasite Soyoung Kim

Unfurling an entangled set of issues concerning debt, gender, technology and the future of labor, Squid Game (2021) and Parasite (2019), respectively, present a killer automaton (YoungHee) to suggest the future of labor and a conundrum of families of domestic labor. The narrative vehicle of Squid Game lies in the strategic form of gamification. Parasite digitizes the primordial material matter, a profusion of an array of water. Rematerialized, the computer-generated imagery (CGI) cinematic elements in Parasite approximate and overwhelm a precarity of immaterial labor and claim an immanent landscape of a speculative “sobject” (subject and object). This chapter will first analyze the shared issues between Parasite and Squid Game and then deploy a series of notions of “new materialism” to explore how the matter is mobilized in Parasite. With Snowpiercer (2013), Okja (2017) and The Host (2006), Bong Joon-Ho interrogates the relationship between the social and the natural, which opens a dialogue for the Anthropocene addressed by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2021) The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and the epistemological, ontological and ethical shift to new materialism. The notion of “the climate of cinema” is not limited to ecocinema or climate cinema; it is attentive to ecological, anthropological and economic problems such as debt and labor, not to mention the history of cinema. It is also an endeavor to reread cinema redemptively in a time of a planetary age. It is a response to account for what is happening in and around cinema and media and to probe de-worlding and prods a process of worlding and reworlding. In the volume Geo-Spatiality in Asia and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia and Anthropocene, Shiuhhuah Chou, Soyoung Kim and Rob Wilson (2022) introduce these terms for transformation and conversion of the world from globalization to worlding to reworlding. Earlier, Rob Wilson offered a substantial analysis of Snowpiercer, pointing to the film’s implication of the Anthropocene-related issues, and it was translated in Korean in Korean Cinema Encountering the World (Kim 2018). In a sense, the climate of cinema carries the burden of the climate of “history in a planetary age,” as well as a responsibility to envision the transformation of cine-media.

The Automaton and the Future of Labor Parasite (2019) and Squid Game (2021) are global hits of the Korean Wave. The enmeshment of the local and the international in these two exemplary cultural productions of South Korea (hereafter Korea) is widely discussed. Parasite brings forth the elemental material of the water in all forms and movements, such as rain, flood, a makeshift “cascade” in the metropolitan area, backflowing black water in the toilet, and human urine sprayed on the half-basement Gi-Taek’s family inhabits. On the screen, one finds the excessive fluidity coupled with disrupted class mobility in a two-story house with an eventful basement. The vertiginous array of the primordial element in the film might cast a quizzical glance at Squid Game, evoking and mobilizing an innocent series of games played by children in Korea. The first game, “Red Light, Green DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-11

94  Soyoung Kim Light,” throws the game players as well as the viewers into a shock not only by exterminating the players but also by featuring an automaton called Young-Hee, a creepy-looking doll intensely gazing and skillfully shooting at a target to kill. The disjunctive gap between the children’s game and the price the players pay produces tension and horror that partly contributes to sustaining one season of nine episodes on Netflix streaming. The presence of a girlish-looking automaton equipped with an automatic rifle prominently against the mise-en-scène of the playground for the game offers an unexpected and empowered girl character in the age of #MeToo. Young-Hee might be seen as the unexpected icon of the algorithm Netflix relies on. The automaton Young-Hee, a narrative image in the poster, occupies a quizzical presence as a non-human, in stark contrast to a peculiar genealogy of femme-fatale care labor, domestic labor and “housemaid” variants such as Thirst (2009), The Housemaid (2010), Parasite (2019) and Decision to Leave (2022). In Decision to Leave, Seo-Rae (Tang Wei) works as a care laborer, turning the narrative thread and generic thriller around. Parasite continues and reactivates gender and class politics displayed and disrupted in domestic space that was critically visited by Kim Ki-Young’s The Housemaid (1960) and Women of Fire (1971) trilogy. Global Korean auteurs such as Bong Joon-Ho and Park Chan-Wook have been engaged to deal with unsettling domestic and care labor; Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother (2009) and Park Chan-Wook’s Thirst (2009) all deal with precarious and unpredictable “becoming” of care laborers, from the wife and mother caretaker to mysterious and domineering figures including a vampire. Decision to Leave casts Tang Wei as a Korean- Chinese care worker playing a diasporic femme fatale after returning to her homeland with a jar of her grandfather’s ashes. Automaton Young-Hee ironically evokes a vampire-turned-care laborer in Thirst, with a twist of her merciless power. With Young-Hee in dominion, the frontman states that the squid game is the most violent and physical among the children’s games. The survival game watched by the rich men is composed of elementary rules but is digitally controlled. The players’ disproportionate tragic consequences are designed to be enjoyed by the viewing VIP. The horrifyingly efficient automaton marks a sharp contrast with the obsoleteness of the 30 years of professional knowledge of glass manufacturing which can tell tempered glass apart from ordinary glass by the refraction of light and sound in Episode 7, titled “VIPs.” His long-term work experience is not remunerated but becomes obsolete as the game operator readjusts the game’s settings; he is merely subject to the voyeuristic pleasure of VIPs on site. The future of labor is not on the horizon, but the robot is. In New Critique of Political Economy, Bernard Stiegler (2010) points out that automation and digitalization have accelerated productivity and the unemployment rate. The libidinal economy of VIPs abounds as people with debt and without jobs are playing survival games. One of them boasts of having a big screen at home that cannot match the extreme enjoyment of seeing the game with one’s own eyes. In line with the pharmacology of the proletariat and the global disintegration of the productivist and consumerist industrial model (Stiegler 2010), the juxtaposition of the automaton coupled with digital surveillance technology with the debtors shows the shifting nature of social relations. The elemental automaton Young-Hee plays the role of the grotesque icon of the so-called fourth industrial revolution led by a robot and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Herein, a remote island is crowded with insolvent debtors and actual obligors who lost their lifeline of work. The future of labor is thrown into the ground where the adult’s physical power is merely mobilized for the children’s games.

Swamp of Debt, Hell of Debt Parasite employs cinematic vicissitude of an element of water, while Squid Game adopts a children’s elementary game governed not only by front men but also by digital surveillance

The Climate of Cinema  95 technology. They both tackle the old but unresolved issue of debt. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon’s (2019) book Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century addresses in detail the economic preoccupations Korean movies unveiled after the IMF crisis in 1997. Both Parasite and Squid Game continue the preoccupation with “vicious circuits” of economic phenomena, as argued earlier by Jeon (2019). Furthermore, this is articulated within the concerns of the Anthropocene, the shifting relationship between the natural and the social. Bruno Latour (1991) argues that nature and society ascribe properties to one another in constantly new connections. Parasite’s water and debt are entangled and diffracted in flood. The Anthropocene issues may not be seen clearly within a single film. It becomes intelligible when the recent films of Bong Joon-Ho, such as The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, are set side by side; one could perceive the “transformation” of politics and membership of a Parliament of things in Bruno Latour’s terms in which non-human actors should also have a say (Latour 1991). Latour calls for a new body politics inclusive of non-humans and a new geo-social politics for a remedy for the damaged planet – moving from the technologies of control to the ones of negotiations. In these films and the Netflix drama Okja, the correlation between subject and object and human and non-human is contested. The issues of materiality, animal rights, the question of the symbiosis of host and parasite, and the climate of the Anthropocene are emphatically articulated in these films. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) addresses the meaning and the implications of climate change to demand two perspectives toward the planetary and the global, urging people to rethink how the Anthropocene questions the foundation of history and philosophy. The climate of cinema unfolds with this set of problems, sometimes unwittingly. The very climate of cinema is entangled with the Anthropocene discourse. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2018) argues that there is widespread recognition now that we are passing through a unique phase of human history when, for the first time, we consciously connect events that happen on vast, geological scales – such as changes to the whole climate system of the planet – with what we might do in the everyday lives of individuals, collectivities, institutions and nations. In this line of thought, what Karen Barad (2007) argues in her pathfinding book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, provides ways in which a film like Parasite can be better understood. The film calls into question what matter and meaning could be grasped beyond representation. The swamp of debt is not just a metaphor in this film. All forms of water and liquidity abound while Gi-Taek’s business is liquidated. Gi-Taek dreamed of becoming wealthy through the Taiwanese “Great King Castella” (sponge cake) business, but with failure he and his family hid to avoid debtors. It is difficult to find a “dream of comeback” out of the “swamp of debt.” Gi-Taek and his family try to escape the debt swamp, including lying about their identities to their employer. Barad (2007:  3) emphatically writes that “matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder.” Whereas the swamp of debt is what the Parasite characters try to escape, it is a hell of debt in Squid Game. After the end of the bloodshed Episode 1, Episode 2, titled “Hell,” has the following dialogue: We may be in debt, sir… [cries] … but that does not justify killing us all. [masked manager] This is just a game. (Squid Game, Season 1, Episode 2 Hell) The survivor players protest, having experienced unmerited opprobrium in Episode 1. The debtors in hell and the debt swamp are the discursive matter that links the two texts. The unexpectedly horrifying game takes people in various kinds of debt hostage. Set in Seoul and the unidentifiable island of Korea, the texts foreground the moral and ethical positionality of the

96  Soyoung Kim characters and viewers concerning debt. Thrown into debt endangered by thugs, Gi-Hun is put under the control of the insidious. Automaton Young-Hee could be read as a vulgar exteriorization of the so-called fourth industrial revolution where AI and robots rule. A killing machine Young-Hee offers shock, curiosity and merciless punishment. She spins Squid Game around as if it were the serial drama of attraction at the amusement park. One who holds a fold of pleasant memory about the elementary school text starting with “Let us play, Young-Hee and let us play, Puppy!” is not ready to accept this horrifying result. The moral disorientation that the viewers might feel about this excessive killing and disproportionate consequences might function as a resourceful effect for the streaming service fed on by the structure of the season and its episodes. The affect is supplemented by the state of the debt the characters are seized within. As David Graeber (2011) points out in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, “the reason it is so powerful is that it is not actually an economic statement; it is a moral statement” (ibid.: 12). Graeber further argues about the moral confusion that the history of debt unveils: If one looks at the history of debt, then what one discovers first of all is profound moral confusion. Its most obvious manifestation is that most everywhere, one finds that the majority of human beings hold simultaneously that (1) paying back money one has borrowed is a simple matter of morality, and (2) anyone in the habit of lending money is evil. (2011: 12) The tension of the series is indebted to the debt the players bear. The creditors are not in Squid Game to chase them, but the debt pressure is to be reckoned with. Graeber (2011) further argues that a creditor has the means to specify numerically exactly how much the debtor owes, two elements of violence and quantification. It is simply that a creditor has the means to specify, numerically, exactly how much the debtor owes. However, when one looks a little closer, one discovers that these two elements – the violence and quantification – are entailed. Korean IMF cinema’s engagement with economic phenomena is intensified by the debt-ridden characters not only in cinema but also in Netflix-driven streaming service series. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon (2019) points out this critique, and Soyoung Kim (2022) argues about the gender politics of globalization after the IMF crisis in her book Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema.

Cine-Media Apparatus in the Discursive Realm of Parasite Water and fire are classical elements proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter. Parasite and Burning (2018) are two exemplary global art films by Korean directors; one could quickly note that water is the catastrophic force in Parasites and fire is its counterpart in Burning. With the heavy burden of metaphor and metonymy over the years, fire and water are overlaid with mythic, psychological and ecological signification. Departing from the usual metaphor and metonymy and taking the patterns of water into consideration concerning Parasite, it will be helpful to introduce the crucial concept of “new materialism,” such as diffractions, to understand the film better and differently. Karen Barad (2007) opens her book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, by stating in detail: Matter and meaning are not separate elements, they are inextricably fused, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder. Even atom, whose very name (atomos) means “indivisible” or “uncuttable,” can be broken apart. But matter and meaning cannot be dissociated by chemical processing, or centrifuge, or nuclear blast. Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature

The Climate of Cinema  97 of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps this is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant. (Barad 2007: 3) Taking a cue from this entanglement of matter, substance, significance and discourse, one could, without difficulties, note that a vicissitude of water substance in Parasite betrays this entanglement. The zenith of cinematic orchestration is centered on water. The water that pours, spurts, vomits, flows, infiltrates and transforms into a waterfall partly corresponds to the characters’ movements. The film’s heavy rain falls mercilessly and the city is flooded. The rich return to their homes but the poor’s homes are flooded. Gi-Taek and his children Gi-Woo and Gi-Jeong, who provide services to the wealthy family, reach their half-basement home through make-shift waterfalls and stairs. Vomiting of water co-occurs with falling and submersion – sputum refluxing from the toilet. Considering these scenes, water might be construed not simply as a metaphor or matter but as a mattering discourse. Water and fire are natural elements, but water substance with CGI and special effects in the digital era becomes a different material. It produces a perception of spectacular and spectral. The vibrant matter turns into binary digital codes. Dexter made a spectacular effect on the CGI of Parasite. Taking the enactment of elastic and indefinite boundaries of three components of “natural” water, water on film and CGI water, all in interference patterns, although smoothened as natural water, unlike fire-breathing dragons in Game of Thrones, for instance. This kind of interference encourages diffractive reading, like the diffraction patterns illuminating the indefinite nature of boundaries and thinking about the cultural and the natural together. Parasite is conducive to thinking of this matter in discursive terms. The notion of “exteriority within” (Barad 2007: 135) of diffraction underlines constitutive exclusions and consequent questions of accountability. The diffractive cinematic phenomenon, blurred boundaries of visualizing and narrativizing matter of natural water, cinematographed water and CGI water, as well as sutured, synthesized, and the montaged and synthesized neighborhood (not one place but many places are put together as if it were the same place; the area becomes placeless) are intriguing. The natural, social and “virtual” (interference) are entangled. The global auteur of the Philippines, Brillante Mendoza, also takes up the issues of poverty, debt and flood in Lola (2009), but it does not involve CGI. One aspect of the ontology of cinema involves the involuntary registration of surroundings when the camera shows and follows a person or a group or materials. The viewer sees the surrounding places, especially when Gi-Taek’s family runs away from their owner’s house. Unlike the director’s previous super pig Okja or Snowpiercer, the local area of Seoul is not produced by CGI but sutured from Seongbuk-dong, Jahamun Tunnel, Huam-dong, Changsin-dong to Bukahyeon-dong. The ontology of place is half erased. Signs and the possibility of in-depth reading are also erased. Tanaka Jun (2019) discusses the importance of local place experience as genius loci, a heuristic method of finding a hypothetical order. As the process of registration of sites on the film is sutured, the apparatus involves the camera and CGI processing, and the cinematic apparatus demands recalibration on spectatorship. According to Barad (2007): Since apparatuses play such a crucial, indeed constitutive, role, it is imperative that we understand their precise nature… Apparatuses are not merely assemblages that include nonhumans as well as humans. Instead, apparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-time matter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming. (ibid: 142)

98  Soyoung Kim Apparatus as reworlding is clearly more extensive than what cinematic apparatus has been, but the implication of cinematic apparatus also entails economic and psychological (imaginary signifier) concerns. As Stephen Heath (1980) takes one back to the first moments of the history of cinema in the founding book The Cinematic Apparatus and draws one’s attention to the fact that it is the technology that provides the immediate interest. The experience of the machine, the apparatus and the how of it are illustrated here: The Grand Café programme is headed with the announcement of Le Cinematographe and continues with its description: ‘this apparatus, invented by MM. Auguste and Louis Lumiere, permits the recording, by series of photographs, of all the movement which have succeeded one another over a given period of time in front of the camera and subsequent reproduction of these movements by the projection of their images, life size, on a screen before an entire audience’; only after that description is there mention of the titles of the film to be shown, the ‘sujects actuels,’ relegated to the bottom of the programme sheet. (Heath 1980: 1) With two apparatuses in mind, it is worthwhile to visit a sequence of the catastrophe in line with the following four meanings; (1) a momentous tragic event ranging from extreme misfortune to utter overthrow or ruin, (2) utter failure, (3) a violent and sudden change in a feature of the earth by a violent, usually destructive natural event such as supernova, and (4) the final event of the dramatic action, especially of a tragedy. Interestingly, Parasite nearly starts matching all four meanings of catastrophe from the moment when the lightning strikes when Gi-Taek’s family throws a party while their employers are gone. It was the lightning that brought heavy rain to the film. When Gi-Taek is worried about the safety of the driver Yoon, who was fired because of his daughter’s scheme, drunken Gi-Jeong shouts: “Do not pay attention to others, but only to our family and ourselves.” At that moment, the lightning strikes and Gi-Taek says the timing is perfect. It is typical of the pathological fallacy when a writer gives human emotions or character to objects or natural animals. This scene creates irony by homage to the scene of the lightning strike used in director Kim Ki-Young’s The Housemaid. However, if it was used as an irony for conversion in The Housemaid, the lightning in Parasite brings heavy rain. The pathological fallacy is fluidly converted into material discourse and discourse material in Barad’s (2007) terms. The situation of the film Parasite changes when the presence of a man (a housemaid’s hidden husband) living in a basement appears as the rain falls and the housemaid Mun-Gwang appears. The laughter disappears. The places in the house turn into fighting grounds and a morgue; the wealthy house becomes a monster, and Mun-Gwang (housemaid) and Gi-Taek (driver) are framed as parasites that depend on the wealthy family. On the other hand, the semi-basement house area becomes liquid – a place of disaster; it is the materialization of the precariat. Rain has the same power as a waterfall. In Memories of Murder (directed by Bong Joon-Ho, 2003), murdered women by an enigmatic serial killer are found in waterways. Another woman Hyun-Seo is trapped in the Han River reservoir in The Host, and Ok-Ja is captured in a factory slaughterhouse full of blood. Women bring rain in Parasite. The water and the fluidity are indeed significant matters for Bong Joon-Ho. Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (1985) provides a detailed explanation of fluidity with materiality embodied in philosophical concepts in her book This Sex Which is Not One, noting that women are associated with fluidity, such as blood, milk, saliva, spit and tears threatening to deform, propagate, evaporate and consume men. She reiterates this point in one chapter (The “Mechanics” of Fluids) of this book by raising the classification issue. The fluidity cannot be contained in a defined category; Irigaray argues that liquidity cannot be trapped in a

The Climate of Cinema  99 specified type and that classification becomes a problem. The contingencies and instabilities of liquid nature do not produce consistent positive results but are always accidental. It is pointed out that the concept of liquidity has an ambiguous and indeterminate nature for critical theory, specifically a queer and gender position in critical theory. For example, queer and gender studies of bodily fluids such as tears, menstrual blood, lactation and female circumcision are quoted and significantly recognized in Elizabeth Stephens’ (2014) article “Feminism and New Materialism: The Matter of Fluidity.” Jane Bennett’s (2010) book Vibrant Matter and Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of “agential realism” are examples of “materialist turn” in feminist theory that share concerns with the matter that matters to the cultural politics of gender. The insistent appropriation of fluidity in Parasite encourages a diffractive reading to see the patterns of resonance and dissonance with gender politics. The issues of materiality, animal rights, symbiotics of host and parasite, climate change and the Anthropocene are reiterated in The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, all directed by Bong Joon-Ho in a neoliberal age. In conclusion, both Parasite and Squid Game grapple with the undercurrent of the neoliberal world. The dismantled lifeworld of the precariat is in tension with the automaton. Enacting debt and discursive matters, two works offer a diagnostic understanding of unsettling politics and the climate of cine-media apparatuses such as digital streaming services and CGI processing. This chapter partly enacts the diffractive reading to illuminate the patterns of resonance and dissonance that two works contend, by being attentive to new materialism and feminism.

References Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2018) “Anthropocene Time,” History & Theory, 57(1): 5–32. Chakrabarty, D. (2021) The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Chou, S., Kim, S. and Wilson, R. (2022) Geo-Spatiality in Asia and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia and Anthropocene, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Graeber, David (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years, New York: Melville House Publishing. Heath, S. (1980) The Cinematic Apparatus, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Irigaray, L. (1985) This Sex Which is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jeon, J.J. (2019) Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jun, T. (2019) The Urban Poetry: Memories and Syndrome of Places, Seoul: Simsan Press. Kim, S. (2018) Korean Cinema Encountering the World [in Korean], Seoul: Hyeonsil Munhwa. Kim, S. (2022) Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Latour, Bruno (1991) We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stephens, E. (2014) “Feminism and New Materialism: The Matter of Fluidity,” InterAlia, A Journal of Queer Studies, 9: 186–202. Stiegler, B. (2010) For a New Critique of Political Economy, Cambridge: Polity.

Part III

Television

9 The Korean Wave Television From Winter Sonata to Squid Game Youna Kim

The Soft Power of the Korean Wave Television This chapter draws attention to the important emergence of a relatively new player in the global culture landscape – the Korean Wave television – and suggests that its transnational mobility across the world, beyond an Asian regional cultural economy, is a facet of the de-centralizing multiplicity of global cultural flows today. With a particular focus on the transnational mobility of K-drama, this chapter addresses its social, cultural and political implications in the global digital age and suggests that its meanings and significance can be seen as a conscious, and often intentional, way to counter the threat and insensibility of the Western-dominated media culture market within the context of global inequalities and uneven power structures. The postcolonial periphery has strengthened its national culture industry to compete against the dominant flow of Western media cultures, while consolidating a relatively rapidly growing position in the global market. The Korean Wave television, as a resource for soft power, has become a major site for the production, representation, circulation and consumption of transnational popular culture (Kim 2007, 2013, 2021). Since the late 1990s South Korea (hereafter Korea) has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational television culture, exporting the Korean Wave or Hallyu products into Asian countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The rise of the affluent urban middle class and digitally connected consumer culture has provided a catalyst for the transnational circulation and consumption of Korean television culture. Digital mobile generations today look for diverse sources of entertainment, culture and identity, not necessarily American or European. The Korean Wave television has become a cultural resource for the growing mass-mediated popular imagination, which is situated within a broader process of global consumerism and a new sphere of digital culture. In a sense, the phenomenon of the Korean Wave television is one of imagined cosmopolitanism in the realm of global consumer culture (Kim 2013, 2021). The primary site for the development and proliferation of shared global consciousness is located in the mundane, representational domain of the mass media and information and communication technologies, intersected with global interdependencies of transnational migration and digital diaspora today. While the popularity of the Korean Wave television was once concentrated in neighboring Asian markets, today it is widely felt in a global world including Americas and Europe. Television drama, as an expressive form deeply tied to national culture and national viewership, has become a global phenomenon in its reach and allure. Importantly, the impact of the Korean Wave television has also reached into communist North Korea. In 2005, a 20-year-old North Korean soldier defected across the demilitarized zone and the reason given, according to South Korean military officials, was that the soldier had grown to admire and yearn for South Korea after watching its television dramas which had been smuggled across the border of China (New York Times 2005). Similar cases have DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-13

104  Youna Kim continued to arise, while the means of access to the Korean Wave television has expanded through the use of digital technologies and mobile phones among North Koreans (New York Times 2016; Kim 2019). The Korean Wave television is spreading to the world through the development of digital media forms, the use of the Internet and online marketing. While the rise of satellite broadcast fueled the spread of the Korean Wave television in the 1990s, social networking services, video-sharing platforms and streaming services such as YouTube, Netflix and Twitter, as well as smartphones, are now playing a primary role in expanding digital Hallyu to Asia, Americas, Europe and the Middle East (Kim 2013, 2021). Today’s digital technologies potentially alter power and “positionalities,” the shifting, asymmetric and path-dependent ways in which the futures of places depend on their interdependencies with other places (Graham 2019). The digitalization of goods, productions and services is crucial to an ever-increasing amount of economic value creation in global production networks, which does not necessarily mean that enterprises can all use digital technologies and connectivity to alter their positionalities or level-playing fields in the same ways. Korean popular culture has not established a routine presence on the mainstream media but connects with international audiences and fans through the social media and streaming services that are less controlled by traditional gatekeepers and that accelerate instantaneous access to content in the post-ownership economy. Korean dramas are being uploaded to the Internet and available with subtitles in various languages including English, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. Driven by a desire to help their idols, fans do real-time translations of idols’ performances on the social media. As a participatory pilgrimage practice, the interest in the Korean Wave television has triggered an increase in foreign tourists visiting the locations where favorite television dramas have been filmed. As each city competes with others for global tourists, national or city identity is reconfigured in the “hyper-spatial,” the stretching of space and time to accommodate the accelerating flows of capital, ideas and desires that characterize the world of neoliberal capitalism (King 2018). In the past, Korean television stations and drama producers were often accused of putting too much focus on dramas at the expense of other programming, but now they are honored for bringing home foreign currency. The growing circulation of Korean television culture has improved the national image and heightened a market awareness of Korean products in general. Overseas sales of Korean consumer goods, including televisions, mobile phones, cars, clothing and cosmetics, have risen in part from the strategic appropriation of popular culture. Korean products are reaping benefits from the enhanced Korean brand value springing from the success of this cultural export. In the widest possible sense, the Korean culture industry is seen to commodify the nation, exporting its popular culture as a cool national brand. The unexpected global success of Korean television culture is drawing an unfamiliar spotlight on a culture once colonized or overshadowed for centuries by powerful countries. The Asian region has long been under the influence of Western and Japanese cultural products, but now Korea has gradually become powerful through its culture. The Korean government sees this phenomenon as a way to sell a dynamic image of the nation through “soft power” (Kim 2013, 2019, 2021); in this context, the Korean Wave television is not just a cultural phenomenon but fundamentally about the creation of soft power, nation branding and sustainable development through transnational meaning-making processes. The immediate profits or effects created by the Korean Wave television are important, but the improvement of national image, though intangible, is considered as more important. The nation can be reinvented as a more favorable and lasting brand by the government’s cultural policy that global circulations of media cultural products promote the construction of soft power, an attractive image of the nation as a whole. The contemporary focus on “culture” by governments in Asia, including Korea, Japan and China, is the product of a neoliberal ideology espousing a global free market and the linking of

The Korean Wave Television  105 globalized consumerism to individual freedom and social well-being (Berry et al. 2009). Popular culture transcends national borders with such frequency and intensity as to constitute an irrevocable and irresistible force that regionalizes, globalizes and possibly transforms identity. It is this power that nation-states in Asia seek to promote through the articulation and legislation of cultural policy and the promotion of culture industries, with a renewed focus on identity, culture and nation branding as an essential component of international relations and foreign policy thinking. The sudden popularity of the Korean Wave television has presented a surprise: Why has it taken off so dramatically? What does it mean socially, culturally and politically in global contexts? The emerging consequences at multiple levels – both macro structures and micro processes that influence cultural production, representation, circulation and consumption – deserve to be explored in an increasingly global cultural environment.

Globalization of Korean Television Culture In the late 1990s, the rise of Korean popular culture was facilitated by the opening of the Korean market to global cultural forces (Kim 2007, 2013). Globalization had long been feared in the postcolonial world because of Western and particularly American cultural power, and the fear was amplified by the uncertainty of the competitiveness of Korean popular culture. Japanese popular culture was equally feared and banned in Korea due to the colonial history (1910–45) between the two countries. Only in 1998, more than 50 years after Japanese colonial rule ended, did the Korean government begin to lift a ban on cultural imports from Japan. At the same time, in 1998, the government carried out its first five-year plan to build up the domestic culture industry and encourage exports. By the time nearly all restrictions on Japanese culture had been lifted in 2004, the Korean Wave had spread across Asia. Korean television dramas – the first major, yet unplanned and accidental, impact of the Korean Wave – were not initially produced for international audiences but for domestic audiences. Unlike the deliberate international marketization of K-pop music, K-drama power was created by accident. In the 1990s, Japanese “trendy” dramas on modern urban middle-class lifestyles were the rage on television screens across East Asia but were replaced by Korean dramas that became routine in daily television programming and a regular component of the viewing habit of regional audiences (Chua 2012). The Korean government has played a role in the co-evolution of the culture industry including film, drama and music in the context of neoliberal reforms and deregulation, whereby the subordinate relationship of Korean broadcasters to the government and the co-evolving marketization have stimulated K-drama’s fast entrance into international markets (  Jeon 2014; Berg 2015). The culture industry is an innovative driver of economic growth and employment, and thus promoted and supported by the developmentalist state (Kwon and Kim 2013). Three nationwide television networks – MBC, KBS and SBS – have led overseas sales for their dramas, typically called mini-series of 16 to 20 episodes that are easily digestible, less sexualized and violent than American dramas, and delicately expose universal themes of love. For example, the Korean Wave television began to peak in Japan when Korean romance drama Winter Sonata (2002) became a national phenomenon in 2004 (Kim 2007). It was first broadcast by NHK in 2003 and has been repeatedly aired four times due to popular demand. Almost 40% of the entire Japanese population has seen the drama at least once. Winter Sonata proved so popular that its lead actor was nicknamed by the Japanese as “Yon-sama” (a deferential word reserved for royalty). This tragic love story features beautiful winter scenery and pure love between a young woman and her boyfriend suffering from amnesia. The hero’s unconditional love for a woman – faithful and devoted to one lover, sensitive and understanding of woman’s emotional needs – has captivated many Japanese women in their 30s to 50s. The appeal of the hero is that he always says the exact thing that women want men to say (Japan Times 2004). The depth of fans’

106  Youna Kim admiration for the hero is striking. “If there were ever such a man in Japan, then I would not be suffering like this” (a Japanese fan, Japan Times 2004). “He is not like young Japanese men these days” (a Japanese fan, Yomiuri Shimbun 2004). This can be read as a hidden criticism of Japanese men and society. Japanese women reflexively interrogate and project their needs and desires, which are unmet in modern society, onto the Korean drama’s idealized hero. This can be “Japan’s lack” and “a longing for what Japanese modernity has never achieved” (Iwabuchi 2005). To Western eyes, this kind of Korean drama seems “old-fashioned” and the hero of Winter Sonata might be written off as “a wimp in a Western drama” (Financial Times 2004). Contrary to Western and particularly American popular drama with a strong emphasis on sex appeal, Korean drama depicts love without any nudity or lustful content. The delicate way of representing emotions and intense romantic passion without overt sexuality resonates further with viewers in the Middle East where displays of physical sexuality can draw censorship and protest (Ravina 2009). The intensification of emotions, especially the theme of pure love, underpins the transnational flow and popularity of Korean drama across Asia. “There is something pure about Korean dramas. In Japanese dramas, if a man and a woman fall in love, they go to kiss and have sex. Koreans don’t do that right away” (a Japanese fan, Asia Pulse 2004). “They love one woman until the end of their lives and carry her picture in their wallets. Vietnamese women just fall for that” (a Vietnamese fan, Asia Pulse 2004). The fans appear to suggest that they are yearning for something other than overly Western or Japanese. Korean dramas, unlike their Western or Japanese counterparts, do not show sexual scenes but emphasize love in its pure form, longing and delicate romance culminating only in a kiss. While the audiences of receiving countries are familiar by now with the exposure of Western values and lifestyles on the television screen, they may still find the Western and particularly American culture’s explicit emphasis on free sexuality incompatible with their local values and aesthetic taste. In a modern world where relationships are becoming increasingly complex and fast moving, the pure love meant only for one another can be refreshing to the viewers’ sensibilities. Korean drama is seen to be capable of dealing with love relationships in a more tender, significant and emotional rather than sensual way. Interestingly enough, some female fans have taken a step further after watching the Korean drama. They have registered with matchmaking agencies for the popular item – a Korean husband – and many have visited the places featured in Winter Sonata. “You know, there is this scene where they went up by cable car and got caught in a snowstorm? We went up, too. I even went to the restaurant where the two of them sat” (a Singaporean fan, Straits Times 2003). The phenomenon of transnational marriages (Vu and Lee 2013), transnational intimacy and traveling to Korea (Lee 2020) has emerged with fans’ romantic and intimate desires for Korean men as influenced by Korean drama and popular trends. The impact of Korean drama was felt on the streets of tropical Southeast Asia by young people wrapping the wool scarf conspicuously worn by the leading characters in Winter Sonata (Chua 2004). Scenery, as a marker of foreignness, constitutes a mode of visual tourism. Avid fans of Korean drama can become so enamored by the sceneries that the locations become “must visit” places. Moreover, Korean drama has prompted an interest in learning the Korean language, and the number of private language schools and classes that teach Korean has mushroomed. “Watching the drama, I just wished I could understand what he was saying in Korean” (a Japanese fan, Yomiuri Shimbun 2004). “It was kind of like an awakening. I started to learn about South Korea through the boom, and then I wanted to know more and more” (a Japanese fan, Japan Economic Newswire 2005). The affective engagement with Korean drama has created a new awareness among audiences and allowed for their self-reflection. International audiences are drawn to the powerful emotional storylines of K-drama set against the backdrop of historical and contemporary Korea. “I was almost dreaming about it, every day

The Korean Wave Television  107 anticipating the next episode. I can’t think of a single American show that has that sort of pull for me” (a Chinese-American fan, San Francisco Chronicle 2005). The Korean Wave television peaked further with the airing of historical drama Jewel in the Palace (Dae Jang Geum, 2003), which was sold to over 120 countries. Set in Korea’s Chosun Dynasty (1392–1910), the drama depicts a story about royal physician Jang Geum, who rose from an orphaned kitchen cook to the king’s first female physician. The heroine goes through tough times of palace politics, court intrigue and persecution, but she endures and upholds all the virtues of Confucian values. The persistence, self-sacrifice, optimism and hope projected on the drama captures the hearts of audiences living in transitional society. Jewel in the Palace became the most-watched television show in Hong Kong history. The series finale reportedly drew a record of 3.2 million of Hong Kong’s 6.9 million potential viewers – more than 40% of the total population (Korea Times 2005). This explosive popularity has intensified the Korean Wave phenomenon in Hong Kong, including restaurants that serve various Korean cuisine featured on the drama, and an increase in the number of tourists to Korea visiting the traditional village where the drama was filmed. For the older generations of China, Korean drama is appealing for its Confucian framework, and some modern Chinese find Confucian social concepts embedded in Korean drama are awakening a respect for traditional values lost under Communism. Traditional values are fading as the Chinese society undergoes restructuring and competition under the global market economy. Korean drama may evoke a nostalgic longing for what China has lost. Since the late 1990s, the growing success of Korean drama has challenged the domination of Japanese popular culture present in Taiwan’s everyday life (Ko 2004). Japan is no longer seen as a solo power in regional cultural flows. Audiences perceive Korean drama as “ours” even more than Japanese drama (Iwabuchi 2005). For the first time in the Middle East, Korean television culture has begun spreading the non-economic side of its soft power to the political sphere (Kim 2007). The Korean government initially provided the television drama Winter Sonata for free to broadcasters in Iraq and Egypt to generate positive feelings toward the Korean soldiers stationed in Iraq and to improve the image of Korea in the Middle East that had little understanding and exposure toward Korean culture. Originally, the government considered providing Korean movies, but this was repealed due to concerns that a flock of moviegoers might lead to possible accidents or terrorist attacks. Thus, the final decision was made to broadcast the television drama that had already proven popular worldwide. This led to thousands of fan letters to the Korean embassy in Egypt. A flood of e-mails and phone calls were received at the embassy when another Korean drama, Autumn in the Heart (2000), was broadcast. Korean dramas have stimulated the youth of the Middle East to learn the Korean language and engage with Korean studies. Active audiences have launched Korean drama fan clubs and websites in the Arabic cultural sphere, expressing their new interest in Korean culture and desire to visit Korea. The increased circulation and appeal of Korean popular culture in the region has been enabled in part by voluntary fans who take on the roles of cosmopolitan cultural experts and grassroots educators to promote a positive image of Korea in their home societies and to enhance their own self-image that has been stigmatized by the Orientalist view of the West (Lyan 2019). Korean dramas have captured the hearts of people in the geographically distant but culturally proximate Middle Eastern communities that still hold resentment against coercive Western ideas and colonial power. The Korean government has appointed celebrities as cultural and tourism ambassadors, while hosting events for fan clubs overseas. For instance, fans of Jewel in the Palace are encouraged to visit the historical drama’s shooting site, Jeju Folk Village, and experience traditional culture such as hanbok (traditional clothes), hanok (traditional house) and hansik (traditional food). Sponsored events such as “Korea Day” or “Korea Week” aim to enhance the country’s international standing and change the image of its economic and military hard power far outweighing its soft power in the Middle East.

108  Youna Kim In the Western market, Korean dramas are circulated through a curated library of content on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Viki and so on. Powerful streaming services like YouTube and Netflix intensify the fragmentation of television audiences into ever-smaller pieces, as relatively independent modes of production and distribution thrive outside the control of traditional channel gatekeepers (Johnson 2018). Television content is no longer a static cultural object inherently tied to the television set but is often received via laptops or other mobile devices that transnationally enable how television viewing is self-structured and disrupting dominant power of the television industry. Audiences in the digital streaming age have more control and choice to self-schedule television online independent from uniform television schedules and modify the schedules based on their own desires and needs, although the audience control does not necessarily translate to substantial shifts in power (Jenner 2018). Netflix’s audience-taste-driven narrowcasting appeals to disparate groups of people across the world without a unified cache of content, by using its sophisticated algorithm and seemingly endless resources to buy, develop and distribute as many different types of content to as many micro-targeted audience groups as possible (Barker and Wiatrowski 2017). By making the products of small countries more available outside their home markets, Netflix appears to be a facilitator of frictionless digital trade, but nevertheless its cross-border distribution strongly advantages the US-origin products (Aguiar and Waldfogel 2018). Netflix has been co-producing and adding K-drama series, both recent and nostalgic, because of an increase in popular demand from international audiences. As the world today becomes more secular, global, insecure or overwhelming, some audiences may question progress of the modern world, re-evaluate the past and its juxtapositioning with the present, and prefer nostalgic consumption of previously circulated content or idealized old memories. The historical supernatural thriller Kingdom (2019, 2020) and the romance Crash Landing on You (2019) featuring unlikely love between a North Korean soldier and a South Korean heiress have appealed to broader audiences, and Netflix has widened the reach and popularity of Korean dramas. Squid Game (2021) has become Korea’s most popular drama export and Netflix’s ­highestranking show in over 90 countries including the USA, shattering the record for a non-­English language show (New York Times 2021). Since its release in September 2021, the nine-episode series has instantly generated an unexpected sensation and global cultural ascendancy. The success of Squid Game is a milestone for Netflix, which has increased investment in fast-growing Asian markets, particularly Korea, by producing original contents, acquiring studios and establishing talent training bases as growth in the US market slows. Since Netflix entered Korea in 2016, the streaming company has invested about $645 million in Korea and created about 80 original dramas and films using Korean talent and creators (Wall Street Journal 2021). All of these are made accessible to mainstream Western audiences and can be watched with different subtitles or dubbing tracks from anywhere in the world. Before the advent of streaming services, most television channels took few chances with non-English language shows, and the lack of accessibility for non-English language titles was predicated on a suspicion among entertainment industry gatekeepers including distributors that audiences did not want subtitled content because of potential tiredness and distraction (BBC 2021). Squid Game’s global success has proven that perception of subtitles to be wrong, while simultaneously eroding the kind of hierarchical cultural gatekeeping that has traditionally been enforced by the broadcasting television media and Hollywood’s overreliance on White stories by Anglo-American powers. Earlier in 2020, the acclaimed director of Parasite (2019), Bong Joon-Ho, memorably told international audiences when he won the most awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay – at the Academy Awards: “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films” (BBC 2020). About 95% of the Squid Game viewers are outside Korea, indicating that younger generations do not

The Korean Wave Television  109 necessarily show hesitancy toward non-English language content and reading subtitles but overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles and that they are perhaps more open to cultural diversity. Along with the worldwide popularity of film Parasite and K-pop music such as BTS attracting younger generations, the US viewing of Korean dramas has increased significantly in recent years. While most drama productions in Korea still value the local market and want to attract more viewers in the home country, some production companies seek to diversify platforms for their works to reach global viewers since Netflix as co-producer covers a large portion of production cost and showcases dramas in more than 190 countries. Created by the Korean director Hwang Dong-Hyuk, Squid Game is a hybridized drama mixing the genres of thriller, satire and emotionally touching human melodrama. Tapping into the popularity of contemporary game shows, the concept of Squid Game resembles a reality TV show that forces contestants to battle and eliminate their opponents through fictional games. The hyper-violent dystopian thriller features 456 debt-ridden, impoverished and desperate individuals who are lured to participate in a deadly survival game for a cash prize. The participants come from all walks of life on the margins of society, such as a divorced gambling addict who has a heart of gold but does not have money even to buy his daughter a birthday present; an embezzler who is on the run by the police; a foreign migrant worker who is mistreated by his employer; and a North Korean defector who needs to secure enough money to rescue her separated family. Treated merely like toys in the capitalist market, the game participants no longer have names but are reduced to numbers on their green track suits – the uncool outfits often associated with the people of low social class in Korea. Monitored by masked anonymous guards in bright pink suits, the participants compete in the elimination process through a series of traditional Korean children’s playground games. Conducted in a colorful, childlike and minimalist environment, the games are made simple and easy enough for international viewers to grasp. Overcoming a potential language barrier, Squid Game emphasizes striking visuals, along with simple and clear message. Since there is no chance to get out of their misery in the real world, the economically desperate are willing to participate in the games that are believed to be the only chance to win money for their bare survival. If they do not win each round in the brutal process of elimination, they are executed instantly. In this dystopian world of competition and constant surveillance by the masked guards, only the sole winner can be awarded a cash prize of $38 million. Surprisingly, this deadly competition game is simply entertainment for disaffected wealthy spectators who feel pleasure over the extreme bet on humans, just like gamblers bet on horses. In the crisis of humanity, the extravagant rich exploit and make the desperate and powerless poor risk lives for their own pleasure. Beyond the dehumanizing reality of neoliberal capitalism and despair, the winner of the game in the end struggles with his guilt and moral conflict, trying to retain his humanity and hope that people will work to save each other in a capitalist battleground. Squid Game is not just violent entertainment but a socially reflexive critique of runaway capitalism, which captures the despair of poverty, wealth inequality and socioeconomic anxiety that lead to deadly consequences. “The stories and the problems of the characters are extremely personalized but also reflect the problems and realities of Korean society” (Hwang Dong-Hyuk, New York Times 2021). The dark social commentary critically reflects the hyper-competitive and hyper-precarious nature of Korean society, specifically the socioeconomic plight of a growing number of unemployment and downward social mobility. Korea has achieved fast capitalist industrialization, a compressed modernity that has taken place in an incomparably short period of time, enabled by a tight alliance between the developmentalist state and the big business chaebol, by repressing labor and excluding it from the benefits of economic growth (Kim and Vogel 2011). Income distribution gaps, widening socioeconomic inequality and the perceptions of deteriorating life and work conditions for the majority of people have been emergent

110  Youna Kim problems in Korea. Much of the spectacularly visible wealth produced by the rapid economic and capitalist growth is concentrated on a minority of the affluent privileged and the familyowned business chaebol (Hart-Landsberg et al. 2007; D’Costa 2015). Neoliberal Korea has increasingly witnessed class polarization, a shrinking of the middle-class, downward social mobility, and a large majority suffering from job market insecurity (Yang 2018), despite Korea’s education fever and the highest rate (70%) of participation in tertiary education among OECD countries (OECD 2019). Korea’s dualistic labor market has a large share of workers in non-­ standard or non-regular jobs, while the underemployment of youth and women, the emerging yet precarious individualization, and the increasing unevenness in the distribution of life chances remain important challenges (Kim 2012, 2016). The characters in Squid Game have reflexively resonated with many younger generations who cannot envisage a chance to get a secure job and make upward social mobility. In contrast, the unique appeal of the competition game in the drama, no matter how vicious and deadly, presents an egalitarian alternative world supposedly based on fair play, where all the people are equal and have an equal chance to win. Socioeconomic inequality in the neoliberal capitalist world has generated a deep sense of precarious individualization, making everybody fight for themselves and trust nothing but themselves. Squid Game is distinctly Korean, but its emotionally intense and critically conscious theme has struck a chord across the globe by tapping into a widespread feeling of inequality and posing a disturbing moral question of human nature. It has more universal appeal beyond Korea because of its relatable characters, fragile human relationships and heightened anxieties, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic that has exacerbated the global economy and widened the already-existing chasm between the rich and the poor. This changing world has made the hyper-violent and unrealistic survival drama very realistic and very relevant, thus reflexively resonant with audiences around the world. The post-lockdown pandemic has also increased the appropriation of online sites and digital streaming services. Squid Game’s unprecedented popularity among the younger generations of global audiences reflects the important role of the social media, user-led promotion and participatory fan culture in popularizing Korean drama. It has not only become Netflix’s most-viewed show but also generated an instant sensation and countless memes across platforms such as TikTok, Twitter and YouTube, sparking a global curiosity for the Korean children’s games featured on the drama. The intensity of the interest in Korean play – for example, a dalgona (sugar honeycomb) challenge, a “red light, green light” game and ttakji (paper-flipping game) – has gone viral among the young replicating the games, while at the same time Korean popular culture is widely circulated and shared through digital fan communities.

Digital Fan Culture The Korean Wave television has emerged at a time when the Asian media market is rapidly growing, fueled by the rise of the affluent urban middle class, and when the globalized consumer culture is proliferating in the digital realm (Kim 2013). The media culture and technological change is socially constructed and does not emerge itself without the involvement of the users who have to accept it as relevant in everyday life (Kim 2008). Younger generations around the world are becoming pop cosmopolitans, consuming the coolness of other cultures and seeking to escape the constraints of their local culture. Pop cosmopolitans’ embrace of the global popular media and of cultural difference represents an escape route out of the parochialism of local communities in order to enter a broader sphere of cultural experience. Globalization, as a mediated cultural force, routinely presents an imaginary of consumer cosmopolitanism that can be commonly shared in the images of something better, seemingly progressive lifestyles. American popular culture still dominates worldwide markets, but the growing proportion of

The Korean Wave Television  111 the popular culture that people circulate and consume comes from elsewhere, especially Asia, in the digital social media age (Kim 2022). The multi-directional flows of the Korean Wave television and digitally networked communications give rise to the de-territorialization of culture and identity politics transcending national boundaries and engaging with power, cultural difference and diversity in an unpredictable way. The global expansion of the Korean Wave television can be attributed to the power of the Internet, streaming platforms and the social media – aided by fans’ participatory culture and voluntary labor (Kim 2013, 2021). What is significant here is the active role played by marginal, largely invisible yet devoted fans in shaping the staying power of the Korean Wave television. The web has enabled fans to start their own small-scale, and sometimes pirate, operations to help import, translate and circulate foreign popular culture. Fansubbing, or amateur subtitling, has been critical to the growth of foreign popular culture and fandom in the West, based on an implicit understanding that fans from around the world contribute their individual linguistic knowledge for the greater good of the collective. Subtitle files are made by fan site members themselves, almost as soon as dramas are aired and songs are released. Versions of Korean dramas, and lyrics for songs within the dramas, are available in 15 to 20 different languages. This organically formed, collaborative culture of linguistic translations, for a language that holds a peripheral status in the global culture industry, is suggestive of fans’ voluntary labor and affective investment built around shared values and imaginations. Fan experiences of Korean popular culture and related social media spaces are performative, co-creative and affective practices that potentially create cracks and fissures in the dominant social imaginaries of the West. In an era of narrowcasting reflected in the rise of digital media technologies, the fan as a specialized yet dedicated consumer has become a centerpiece of foreign niche media producers’ marketing strategies. Fan audiences are wooed and championed by niche cultural industries, as long as their activities do not divert from principles of capitalist exchange and recognize industries’ legal ownership of the object of fandom (Gray et al. 2007). Fandom is slowly being acknowledged in the mainstream, in part for the money and power it generates for a changing culture industry in the West (Ewens 2020). An organized network of fandom is considered to be a vital source of affective labor which is based on participatory fan activity and its free labor in the digital sphere, and which may also allow corporations to exploit the neoliberal commodification of affect and the affective economy. In today’s neoliberal capitalist era, media fandom is increasingly moving from the margins of subcultural celebration to a mainstream identity (Booth 2018; Click and Scott 2018) and potentially de-centralizing the global hegemonic culture market. The Korean Wave fandom is formed primarily by girls and young women of non-White, under-represented minority groups, or Asian diasporas, who consciously seek out something that is not American, not Western and not White, or who occupy marginal subject positions and are interested in other aspects of Asian popular culture as alternatives to the mainstream hegemonic discourses that continue to privilege White representation (Keith 2019; Ohlheiser 2020). Today’s diasporic communities ritualistically appropriate transnational ethnic media and digital communication networks to maintain ties back to homelands or proximate identification, while engaging in complex cultural exchanges and negotiations in host societies in the face of social exclusion and banal racism (Kim 2011, 2017). Fan communities activate multiple, transnational sites of engagement that not only aggregate collective intelligence but also come into conflict with mainstream identities. Although Korean dramas are not primarily intended for audiences in the West, they can nevertheless reach out globally through the ease of the Internet, evoking online fan communities to contest racial, national or other important markers of identity that matter to them deeply.

112  Youna Kim Fans, for better or for worse, tend to engage with popular media texts not in a rationally detached but in an emotionally involved and invested way (Gray et al. 2007). The rise of fandom and celebrity culture in the West is a result of an affective deficit in modern life, the diminution of direct social relations and a loss of community as human relations attenuate and fragment under the pressure of contemporary sociopolitical conditions (Turner 2014; Rojek 2016). The paradox of connection through digital technologies is the consciousness of “alone, together,” making people feel at one moment, in possession of a full social life, and in the next, curiously isolated or utterly alone, in tenuous complicity with familiar strangers (Turkle 2011). Fans’ greater investment in popular culture and celebrity today can be understood as a compensatory means of constructing para-social interactions, presumed intimacy and a new dimension of community through the popular. As social agents and performers, fans activate imaginative and emotional engagements with cultural texts, which come to carry subjective significance as well as being embedded in the historically specific, embodied and lived experiences of these fans (Hills 2002). Popular culture is a complex site for negotiating relations of power, difference and identity in the users’ situated experiences. The Korean Wave television in online communities may allow fans to reflexively imagine new identities and practices at the heart of their social realities, hierarchies and inequalities. Digital fan culture can be seen as alternative spaces of identity in which a different voice can be raised and a self can be expressed, contested, rearticulated or reaffirmed in relation to global cultural Others (Kim 2013, 2021).

Meanings and Significance The extent of the Korean Wave television has left observers in a state of surprise and puzzlement, searching for answers to explain the sudden interest in Korean popular culture. However, a key common response in various transnational locations is that Korean television dramas are emotionally powerful and self-reflexive (Kim 2005, 2013, 2019, 2021). While Korean producers do not pay particular attention to a global formula for the success of television drama, nevertheless they have found its affective form useful to touch the sensibilities of disparate audiences. Television dramas are often seen as a source of aspiration and reflexivity in transitional society, and globalized dramas can serve the function of extending the space for reflexivity (Kim 2008, 2019). The emotional level of investment in human relations and social realities constitutes a major source of popular pleasure that continues to hook viewers to Korean drama. It provides some of the most recognizable and relevant material that allows viewers to build a felt sense of the self. What makes Korean cultural forms popular has to do with a pleasure of recognizable human experience with powerful emotional responses, a felt sense of the texture of life that reaches not only the intimate sphere but also the heart of the reflexive self. Asians are often seen as being more reserved in the realms of expressing about their love, emotion and sexuality, and this conservatism could be one common denominator among audiences, the young and the old, who favor Korean dramas (Leung 2004). For many Asian audiences, things “American” are dreams to be yearned for, but things “Korean” are their “accessible future,” examples to be emulated and commodities to be acquired (Iwabuchi 2002). Popular television drama provides topical material for everyday talk and functions as an emotional, revelatory, self-reflexive and shared cultural resource, almost like a ritual social event. One of the key pleasures that women find in drama is the validation of their own kind of talk. This validation works well because drama tends to use the same forms of talk that women use in everyday language, and also because its discourse provides common knowledge of the characteristically female patterns of social interaction and interest – the personal, intimate, emotional and familial relationships. Through deep engagement with the meaning of television drama and its integration into the everyday, viewers can find the means to understand their

The Korean Wave Television  113 social roles, their relations to others and the possibilities for social action. This viewing quality can be explained in terms of “A-ha! emotion,” an emotional resolution and closure in the experience of the relevant and recognizable forms of popular culture (Kim 2005). Surprisingly triggering and stimulating thinking, A-ha! emotion becomes a point of immediate recognition of popular drama that is particularly relevant to viewers’ lived experience. This is not to suggest that television drama is a therapy genre, but that there is a certain therapeutic quality in the emotional way in which viewers talk about characters and circumstances in drama with particular relevance to the conditions of their own lives. Popular television drama has the unique capacity to create a rare, sometimes therapeutic, space where viewers’ emotions could be voiced in available language codes as a process of self-discovery. The therapeutic culture, which had predominantly been restricted to America, is now a global phenomenon, as it is mediated through popular culture genres including self-help TV in neoliberal consumer society (Madsen 2014). Popular drama functions as a “cultural public sphere” (McGuigan 2010), wherein viewers identify with characters and their problems, talk and argue with friends and colleagues about what they should and should not do, and think reflexively about their own lifeworld situations and how to negotiate their way in and through systems. Ideas of good life and such rising expectations are mediated mundanely through popular media discourse. It is important to recognize an intersection between South Korean popular culture and the mobilization of inner self and possible social change to emerge within communist North Korea, where real-life situations are felt to be particularly constrained and mobility in a variety of capacities and forms becomes all the more important (Kim 2007, 2013, 2019). North Korea remains the most closed and repressive media cultural environment in the world. Despite tight control set by the regime, copies of South Korean dramas are increasingly smuggled across the border with China into North Korea, also through digital technologies, and surreptitiously consumed through black markets. South Korean dramas have become so widespread across North Korea that since 2004 the regime has launched a sweeping crackdown on university students – the biggest audiences. Many North Koreans get a taste of freedom, modernity and free market fantasies spun by illegal, smuggled dramas. “North Koreans love the fact that South Korean TV drama is not about politics, but about love and life, the fundamentals of human existence anywhere in this world” (a North Korean defector, Radio Free Asia 2007). Confronted by imaginary of South Korean drama and higher living standards, North Korean viewers doubt the claims of their own government’s propaganda and internally question: “Why are we poor?” “Why is South Korea so much brighter than North Korea?” Only when North Koreans defected and crossed the border did they begin to clearly see North Korea as a place of utter darkness, wherein electricity supply is in a perpetual state of emergency. “In North Korea, we would never think of eating for pleasure. Eating was for survival. If I have an opportunity to go back or if Korea unifies as one nation, I want to cook for the people in North Korea who could not enjoy eating” (a North Korean defector, USA Today 2017). Engagement with South Korean drama can create a shared sense of humanity among North Korean viewers raising existential questions that concern the self and its emotional state. “What do I really want to do with my life? What can I really do here in North Korea? This form of skepticism about the limits of North Korean life is on the rise” (a North Korean defector, Daily NK 2016). This critical reflection emerging from the viewing moment is a sign of coming change. Reflexivity, in a form of self-analysis and self-confrontation, penetrates to the core of the self and its deepest emotions in everyday life. The people’s capacity to make sense of the meanings of everyday life, or the grounds of what they do, what they think and what they feel, has become dependent on the unofficial mediation of South Korean popular culture. Media cultural consumption is part of the process of imagining about, and reflecting on, social transformation and other structures of identity, while attempting liberation of desire from established structures. The spread of the

114  Youna Kim global media intersected with popular consumer culture has profoundly influenced the aspirations, attitudes and imaginations of citizens inside the closed society of North Korea (Kim 2019). Low-level dissent or criticism against the regime may emerge as the circulation of outside culture, consumer capitalism and new cultural awareness grow in the digital age. The rise of cultural weaponization means that in addition to soldiers, tanks, battleships and aircraft deploying violence to impose a political order on people, television and digital media technologies deploy the entertainment to bring about the same goal through long-term cultural engagement (Fattor 2014). The growing forces of transnational popular culture and such soft power resources stand a better chance of moving the hearts and minds of people and potentially fostering social change than does more immediate and coercive action. The illicit flows of banned, attractive culture are quietly transforming how North Koreans self-reflexively see the outside world, their country, and the conditions of their lives. Transnational television culture can be appropriated as important resources for everyday reflexivity, perhaps even more so in relatively rigid and conservative society where other sources of reflexivity might not be readily available (Kim 2005, 2008, 2013, 2019). Unlike American dramas, in which the focus is on romance between young lovers and the family has often disappeared, Korean dramas are perceived by Asian audiences to embrace reality by dealing with diverse and complex relationships in the Confucian familial framework. Unlike Japanese dramas where the urbanity and individual happiness are the themes, the conflicts between Confucian tradition and social modernity are some of the major cultural experiences in Korean dramas, which young audiences engage with deeply (Ko 2004). While Japanese popular culture appears to be too Westernized or too modernized for the audiences of Asia, Korean cultural contents are perceived to have the right amount of modernity and Asian traditions to fulfill their taste. Korean dramas represent struggle over tradition and a common ambivalent experience of modernity which American popular culture cannot represent, and, therefore, a structure of feeling which audiences can relate to more readily. In a sense, the Korean Wave television can be seen as a contemporary manifestation of Asian traditions, a yearning to rediscover cultural links between Asian societies that were interrupted by the Western colonial wave (Kishore 2006). Korean television dramas are infused with urban middle-class scenes as representations of modernization, yet affectively portray youthful sentimentality and provide an imaginary for approachable modernity. In Malaysia, K-drama’s representations of modern femininity (Syed et al. 2019) and male openness with emotions, albeit only in the private sphere (Weng and Abdul 2017), are attractive to audiences. Similarly in China, individual pursuits of love and career success intersect with women’s engagement with K-drama (Shao 2020). In the urban centers of Asia, there are many young viewers whose desires and aspirations overlap with the way Korean dramas are presented – the beautiful urban environment, young and single professionals, aestheticized lifestyles, and the pure love relationship which is still possible. The emotional purity or the raw emotion conveyed in Korean dramas, primarily through a sensitive male or “flower boy” character and soft masculinity, is imagined to be a unique expression of Korea’s modernity by female audiences. This feminization of masculinity, to some extent, employing feminine aesthetics, caring and new masculine identities, may challenge the hitherto clearly defined gendered order while reflecting an imaginary empowerment of women within patriarchal society. Popular media culture has historically played a key role in negotiating the ongoing and changing internal tensions of gender and modernity, not only for the nation-state but above all for the everyday lives of people, as cultural participants (Driscoll and Morris 2014). Korean drama lends well to the exploration of identity constructions at different junctures of gender, age, sexuality, class and nationality (Park and Lee 2019). The rapid growth of the Korean Wave television has spurred the imagination of the power of Asia, vernacular modernities and modernizing desires. People located in different parts of

The Korean Wave Television  115 the world are adept in using Korean popular culture to imagine their own multiple, at times conflicting, subjectivities and to negotiate what they see as their distinctive modern identities (Lin and Tong 2008; Kim 2013, 2021). The rise of Korean popular culture is seen as a longawaited flowering of post-colonial Asian artistic expression, and a creation of an Asian cultural manifestation against the erstwhile domination of Western culture (Dator and Seo 2004). Implicitly, an intriguing reason behind the successful phenomenon of the Korean Wave television is the nation’s historical colonial victimhood – a combination of Korea’s tragic history, the intensity of Korean emotive culture and the perceived non-threatening nature of its people in a current postcolonial situation (Kim 2007, 2013). “For centuries Korea has been occupied by China, Japan or the USA. We are not seen as a threat to anybody” (Korean producer of popular culture, Reed Business Information 2005). The success of Korean popular culture can be understood by the dynamics of global power relations and political sensitivities. “Korea is surrounded by powerful neighbors. Throughout history, we have suffered and endured. Koreans keep hope inside and never give up” (Korean director of drama Jewel in the Palace, San Francisco Chronicle 2005). Such thoughts suggest that the political conflicts and sociocultural tensions of the divided nation have been used to good effect to create emotionally powerful contents. Korean culture reflects the nation’s unique sensibility of “han” – a Korean word for a deeply felt sense of oppression and deep-seated grief. “Korean dramas express sadness particularly well. The writer of Autumn in the Heart would cry when writing his script. The actors, during rehearsals, started crying too” (Korean director of dramas Winter Sonata and Autumn in the Heart, Time Asia 2005). Often, the ambivalent nature of foreignness in imported Western and Japanese cultural products can be perceived by two extremes – fascination and threat – but the threat is relatively less manifested in the way Korean popular culture is received and affectively invested by audiences. There is a lingering anti-colonial sentiment lurking in the hearts of people in many parts of the world. However, Korean popular culture is seen to be a less problematic source of power and ideological threat than American cultural imperialism and “Japanese odor” (Iwabuchi 2002) that Japanese cultural producers try to remove from their products to soften anti-Japan sentiment. Anti-Japanism is a symptom of historical trauma of the Japanese empire and its legacy, although young people’s consumption of Japanese popular culture and commodities does not mean that they are becoming Japanese (Ching 2019). Arising as part of the historical milieu of decolonization, the transnational mobility of the Korean Wave television is a facet of the de-centralizing multiplicity of global cultural flows today, and the significance of its popularity and soft power is reflective of a key site of decolonization work that may self-reflexively interrogate and unsettle the global hegemony of Euro-America (Kim 2013, 2021). Although the de-centralizing tendency still occurs within the context of global inequalities and uneven flows, a current image of global cultural flows may not be that of settled centers of politico-economic and sociocultural power, but of unstable, plural and shifting networks in the digital social media age.

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10 Netflix and Korean Drama Cultural Resonance, Affect and Consumption in Asia Anthony Fung and Jindong Leo-Liu

This chapter explains the popularity of Korean television/online dramas, from Boys Over Flowers to Squid Game under a broad framework of Asian cultural resonance. South Korea (hereafter Korea) has shared similar social conditions with many Asian cities/countries, such as rising living costs and high social inequality. The social conditions have become the backdrop of television dramas in that class differences are precisely the obstacles to romance, marriage and achievement. For the past 20 years, Korean dramas have constructed affective and imaginative solutions to these social problems, while the recent co-productions of Korean dramas (e.g. Squid Game) between the local productions and Netflix have chosen to foreground such power relations and inequality as the main narratives, thereby interrupting the long-existing harmonious discourse framed by Korean’s own productions. Squid Game is an online drama co-produced by a local Korean producer and the global media subscription streaming giant Netflix. Released worldwide in September 2021, this dystopian story about debts, class stratification and a bloody survival game swiftly swept around the world and became the most watched drama in history on the Netflix platform (Tassi 2022). In 2022, Squid Game achieved a milestone success at the Emmy Awards, with 14 nominations and an award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Young 2022). Based on these achievements, Squid Game signals the new history of the Korean Wave (Hallyu), which has attracted researchers’ attention to understanding the changes in Korean TV dramas under the influence of the global media power Netflix ( Jagan and Kalyan 2022; Jin 2022; Young 2022). In Asia, the series has also had a notable impact on the media landscape. Statistically speaking, Squid Game has led to notable contributions to the number of Asian subscribers of Netflix. In the first quarter of 2022, the series added one million new subscribers in the region to Netflix, despite the total decline of platform subscriptions in the global market (Gordon 2022; Vercoe 2022). Why are Asian audiences so affected by Squid Game? Can the popularity of Squid Game be understood under the same logic as previous Korean TV dramas? Previous studies have attempted to explain the popularity of Korean dramas in Asia by drawing on several theories and concepts – for example, resonance, affect, cultural capital, cultural proximity and cultural translations (Iwabuchi 2004; Lin and Tong 2008; Kim 2013; Fung and Choe 2017). The central idea involves how audiences from different Asian countries have historically shared some common values, and Korean popular culture, among various cultures, bears a sense of “Asian modernity,” which other Asian nations are prepared to acquire and learn from (Iwabuchi 2004). These studies have provided a rich analysis of the texts of successful Korean dramas, such as Autumn in My Heart, Winter Sonata and Boys Over Flowers, for the last 20 years. As mentioned, what differentiates Squid Game from previous famous Korean dramas is the mode of production – the collaboration with Netflix. This initial distinction further leads to different themes, plots and ways of reflecting reality in cultural construction. In particular, as DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-14

Netflix and Korean Drama  119 Squid Game focuses on the theme of class and social inequality, this chapter compares how Squid Game (2021) constructs this social issue in comparison with previous successful Korean dramas. One representative case that also involves the issues of class and social inequality is Boys Over Flowers (2009). This chapter compares the texts of Boys Over Flowers and Squid Game within the framework of cultural resonance to understand their affective and reflexive consumption in Asia.

Cultural Resonance, Social Inequality and Affect To explore the popularity of Korean television/online dramas, from Boys Over Flowers to Squid Game, this study adopts the concept of cultural resonance as the main theoretical framework. This concept has been used widely to study the impact of cultural objects on individuals’ ways of puzzling and reflecting through practical challenges (Lin and Tong 2008; McDonnell et al. 2017). According to McDonnell, Bail and Tavory (2017: 1), originating in sociology, “resonance” has been used as a metaphor to describe “the fit between a message and an audience’s worldviews.” They argue that cultural objects (e.g. TV dramas) can provoke cultural resonance among audiences to catalyze broader mobilization and social change. According to Kubal (1998), cultural resonance contributes to understanding the interrelations between the cultural environment and the movement frames, which further expands the possibility of social change in the form of collective actions. This chapter considers Boys Over Flowers and Squid Game as important cultural objects that may help audiences critically reflect on, and deal with, the practical challenges of their realities, such as class stratification and social inequality. Specifically, cultural resonance has been applied to studying transnational TV drama consumption in the particular contexts of Asia. Iwabuchi (2004: 3) suggests that “intra-Asian cultural flows newly highlight cultural resonance and asymmetry in the region under the decentering processes of globalization.” By using the term “cultural resonance,” Iwabuchi attempts to explore the construction of Asian “modernities” in intra-Asian media texts as a challenge to American media imperialism and Western discourse of capitalist modernities. In line with Iwabuchi’s argument, Lin and Tong (2008) discuss cultural resonance in relation to cultural proximity and difference in the context of Asian audiences’ consumption of Korean dramas to imagine the cosmopolitan “Asian us.” By cultural proximity and difference, they mean that Asian audiences may consume media content from other neighboring countries for the sake of the co-existence of exotic and fantasy-like appeal and cultural closeness (e.g. shared traditional Confucian values and the socioeconomic status quo). Consequently, cultural proximity and cultural difference together constitute cultural resonance for viewers in East Asia and Southeast Asia. In relation to the views of McDonnell, Bail and Tavory (2017) and Kubal (1998), a sense of cultural resonance is articulated in the representation of social justice, modern love and urban consumerist life in intra-Asian drama texts, which drive audiences to both temporarily escape from their social lives and be self-reflexive in their social realities. As Toru (2004) argues, an intricate relationship of realism and fantasy is presented as a key factor in popular dramas, which constitutes a transcultural imaginary landscape for viewers to engage with. A status quo of rapid economic growth and increasing social inequality is shared in various Asian societies, especially East Asia (e.g. Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China). It operates as the prerequisite and reflected reality for the cultural resonance provoked in intra-Asian drama texts (Lin and Tong 2008). With the “miraculous” economic growth in recent decades (Chu and Kong 2022: 4), the rise of the new middle class and upper class in these societies is reflected by the development of a vibrant local creative industry and gentrified places, such as the proliferation of coffee shops in Seoul’s Gangnam district, Hong Kong’s Shum  Shui Po or Taipei’s Songshan (Park and Jang 2018; He et al. 2021; Rogelja 2021).

120  Anthony Fung and Jindong Leo-Liu The gentrification of places signals the construction of fantasyland in reality that can project a sense of “modernity” for Asians in contemporary urban life. On the other hand, these societies all experience issues related to the distribution of their economic “miracles.” Despite the rise of the new middle and upper class, radical inequality co-exists. As the main theme framed in Squid Game and in the Academy Award-winning Korean film Parasite (2019), social inequality in Korea has been increasingly visible in recent years. Although the country experienced a relatively stable change and a medium level of Gini coefficient (around 0.35) over the last 30 years (Chu and Kong 2022), Yang (2022) argues that the Gini coefficient may obscure what Korean individuals actually experience and feel in reality; a growing social inequality in Korea is due to the chaebol (family-owned business conglomerates such as Samsung, Hyundai and LG) privilege, precarious labor and income, downward mobility and increasing anxiety. A similar chaebol phenomenon (often equivalent to the term “Zaibatsu” in Japanese) has also been historically salient in Japan, exemplified by companies such as Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Nissan. Although most Zaibatsu have been dissolved, their impacts on the Japanese socioeconomic landscape remain notable in the form of “Keiretsu” (referring to the companies that have interlocking shareholdings and business relationships) (Park and Yuhn 2012). Among all these Asian societies, Hong Kong has the highest Gini index, which rose from 0.479 in 1990 to 0.539 in 2015 (Chu and Kong 2022). Inequality in the city is evident due to its continuously widening income dispersion and real estate hegemony (Lui 2018; Chiu and Siu 2022). In the dystopian society within the imagination of Western and Japanese cyberpunk films and literature (e.g. Bladerunner, Cloud Atlas and Ghost in the Shell), Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo have often been framed as symbolic cyberpunk metropolises, where mega-corporations control society and most people would live in a nihilistic status of “high tech, low life” (Yuen 2000; de la Iglesia 2018). The social condition has become the backdrop of TV dramas in that class differences are precisely the obstacles to romance, marriage and achievement. In Western liberal societies, the issues of social inequality that incorporate class, gender and race have been important themes for representation on-screen, and many TV dramas and films are highly critical of these social inequalities in response (Espiritu 2011; Cloarec et al. 2016). In comparison, according to Fung and Choe (2017), although social and economic inequality could also be represented and reflected by Korean TV dramas, they tend to be diluted by the cultural affect. Fung and Choe (2017: 3) define “affect” as “the forces that empower the underprivileged in society,” which lays the foundation for potential social change. Rooted in psychology, the notion of affect is associated with how emotions, sensations and sentiments are organized in connection with typical responses, such as enjoyment, excitement, surprise, anger and disgust. According to Tomkins (1995: 111), the affective experience is yielded through the human innate mechanism and an intricate matrix of “ideo-affective formations,” which incorporate how ideologies and affect are nested and how they interact. Tomkins (1995) argues that affect plays an important role in people’s motivations of actions. Media and cultural studies scholars have applied affect by assuming that cultural affect is channeled and sometimes structured and patterned through entertainment media to empower and disempower individuals who belong to certain social groups classified by class, gender, ethnicity and so on (Fung and Choe 2017). For example, Fung and Choe (2017) compare the articulation of affect in Boys Over Flowers and Let’s Go Watch Meteor Shower, two TV dramas that were based on the same original Japanese manga story Hana Yori Dango but were produced in Korea and China, respectively. Through the analysis of the media texts, they conclude that affect was used to empower characters to resist the social backdrop of hierarchy, especially class. Yet at the same time, the frame of affective relationships across the upper and lower classes “dilutes” the class struggle and social conflicts by creating an ideal and perfect fantasy world. Cultural resonance among

Netflix and Korean Drama  121 audiences from different Asian countries can be achieved through the consumption of the cultural affect in dramas. The analysis of the media text is vital for the understanding of the articulation of affect and cultural resonance.

Netflix as the Agent of Change Currently, the landscape of Korean dramas is evolving and changing with the participation and co-operation of global media producers, such as Netflix. Netflix is a world-leading streaming digital platform that provides over-the-top (OTT) video, video-on-demand (VOD) and online television services. Originating from the US, the platform has expanded its business and services in 190 countries by 2022, except China, Crimea, North Korea, Russia and Syria (Netflix 2022). In addition to global distribution, Netflix has also actively engaged in the process of the global production of media content, including films, TV dramas and animation. According to Afilipoaie, Iordache and Raats (2021), there are four typical modes of production in non-US countries – licensed distribution of local products, continual deals, co-producing or co-financing, and Full Original Series – although the boundaries for these four modes are often blurred. In the case of Squid Game, Netflix invested in Squid Game as an original series but still offered the director Hwang Dong-Hyuk and his team large-scale creative freedom with no limit (Lee 2021). Fung and Chik (2022) suggest that Netflix is applying a highly viable model of cultural globalization/localization through the co-production of content that can benefit both the distribution of Asian content globally and the smooth integration of Western platform business in Asia. This co-production between the East and the West also reflects the phenomenon of “reverse globalization” driven by Western media power (Zhang and Gu 2021; Fung and Chik 2022). Rather than a reverse flow of media content from the East to the West, this “reverse globalization” refers to how the West “manages” cultural content produced by the East through investment and distribution control. As a result of the hybrid co-production between Netflix and local Asian producers, the content is no longer purely Asian but also a reflection of Western interests and concerns in the Asian context. Driven by the features of individualistic viewership and binge-watching, Netflix is famous for producing critical, sensational and dark content, such as House of Cards, Orange is the New Black and Making a Murderer (Kim 2022). These elements are also highly visible in Squid Game, which differentiates Squid Game from traditional romance-dominated Korean dramas. An interview with Hwang Dong-Hyuk revealed that the director had the idea about Squid Game in 2008 and finished his script in 2009, but he encountered difficulties in finding investors: “At the time, it seemed very unfamiliar and violent. There were people who thought it was a little too complex and not commercial. I wasn’t able to get enough investment, and casting was not easy. I dabbled in it for about a year, but I had to put it to sleep then” (Lee 2021). This indicates that the genre and themes of Squid Game are very different from typical Korean TV dramas and therefore not favored by local investors. Then, what genre and themes of Korean TV dramas have generally been favored by local investors and the market? The popular drama Boys Over Flowers is a suitable object for comparison.

Comparing Squid Game and Boys Over Flowers Twelve years prior to Squid Game (2021), Boys Over Flowers (2009) was the most popular Korean drama. Its audience ratings reached the top by Episode 7 on Korea’s KBS 2 TV, which was later maintained at over 30 percent after Episode 10, almost double compared to other on-air Korean TV dramas, and it eventually reached 34.8 percent for its final episode. Based on the adaption of Japanese manga Hana Yori Dango, which has been widely adapted to TV dramas in Japan and

122  Anthony Fung and Jindong Leo-Liu Taiwan (known as Meteor Garden in 2001 in Taiwan), Boys Over Flowers also became a big hit after broadcasting in 11 Asian countries (Fung and Choe 2017). Boys Over Flowers and Squid Game are worthwhile to be compared based on their shared similarities. First, the creation of both stories implies a shared inter-Asian social reality. As mentioned, the Korean version of Boys Over Flowers was the successor of both Japanese manga Hana Yori Dango and two regionally popular adaptations in Japan and Taiwan. The director and creator of Squid Game also acknowledged that Squid Game was inspired by several Japanese manga works such as Liar Game, Kaiji and Battle Royale (Brzeski 2021). Therefore, it can be argued that the assemblages of Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese cultural elements lay the foundation for the cultural resonance of Asian audiences for a shared inter-Asian social reality framed in the stories. Second, both stories focus on the themes of social inequality. Boys Over Flowers is a youth love story among high school students from different classes. The story takes place in Shin Hwa school, a privileged institution established by the Shin Hwa Group that is portrayed as the top corporation in Korea. This school is designed for upper-class children without the pressure of admission as it includes kindergarten, primary school, middle school and high school. The heroine from the lower class, Geum Jan-Di, attends Shin Hwa high school by mistake. In the beginning, she is bullied by her classmates under the command of the Flower Four (or F4) group, comprised of four handsome boys from super-rich families. She bravely resists the F4 group and later develops a romantic relationship with Goo Jun-Pyo, the leader of the F4 group and the heir of the Shin Hwa Group. In the end, their love overcomes the social and class differences. Squid Game mainly focuses on lower-class adults struggling in a survival game organized by mysterious upper-class people. The anonymous game organizers wear masks and apply strict rules upon the players and their own workers. The survival game consists of six rounds of inhumane and bloody childhood games in which the losers are killed. The game organizers also permit dog-eat-dog killings between the players in the middle of different grounds. The winners of all six games may clear their debt with the cash award of 45.6 billion Korean won (around $38 million). The protagonist, Seong Gi-Hun, is a divorced gambling addict who has financial difficulties in claiming custody of his daughter. He is the only survivor and winner of the cash award; but he does not use the prize money due to guilt and is determined to reveal the real identity of the game organizers at the end of the first season. According to the basic plot, both series are framed by social inequality, but the ways the stories are framed are different. In the following analysis focusing on the metaphor of “hell,” we argue that Squid Game emphasizes realism and moves away from the creation of a fantasy of society through affect in comparison to Boys Over Flowers. The metaphor of “hell” appears in both dramas. In the first episode of Boys Over Flowers, Geum Jan-Di rescues a male student who attempts to commit suicide on the roof. This student is bullied by the majority of students in the school, who are followers of the F4 gang. In their conversation, Geum Jan-Di is surprised by his intention of suicide: “Die? Do you want to die? Why? You are in such a good school…” The boy says, “This is not school. This is hell.” Geum Jan-Di refutes, “I tell you, the real hell is outside this school. Have you heard of the hell by the name of school entrance examinations?” The bullied boy describes this school as hell because it is dictated by F4. The rich heirs from large chaebol companies have privileges over other students. These students also have privileges over common people outside the school in several ways, such as the guaranteed school promotion from kindergarten to high school without the pressure of school entrance examinations. Geum Jan-Di also experiences hell when she is bullied in the beginning. Later, when she has increasingly intimate interactions with Goo Jun-Pyo, she also experiences a transition from hell to heaven. In Episode 2, Goo asked his servants to “kidnap” Geum to visit his house. She is surprised by the expensive dress prepared for her and

Netflix and Korean Drama  123 the environment of the exotic and elegant house and the beautiful garden surrounded by stewards and maids. She asks the steward whether she is still in Korea. In Episode 5, Geum is invited by Goo to visit a beautiful private island and has an exquisite afternoon tea on the beach. He tells Geum, “As I told you, what you couldn’t imagine, I can show it to you every day.” She is touched, and cries and laughs. She says, “It was like magic… This place was so good. I think my parents never had a chance to visit such a place. They would definitely be happy if they could see.” These types of plots imply the construction of a heaven-like fantasyland. According to Lin and Tong (2008), cultural resonance is provoked by cultural affect among Asian female audiences of Korean dramas due to a shared escapism from reality to fantasy. These beautiful and romantic scenes create the ideal world that serves their desire to escape from the reality of social inequality. In contrast to a transition from hell to heaven in Boys Over Flower, the scenario is more like from hell to hell in Squid Game – a loop of hells. The title of its second episode is literally “Hell.” After the first round of a life-or-death childhood game, the game participants realize the severity of the risk behind the dreamful cash prize. The organizers allow participants to have a democratic referendum to decide on the continuance of the game. Before the vote, players with different opinions quarrel. Many people believe that continuing the game is their only hope. Player 212 refutes people who want to stop the game: “So, what will happen if we leave? Is anything different out there? It’s hell out there anyway.” Player 322 agrees: “I don’t have a home to go back to anyway. At least here, I have hope. But out there? I got nothing out there.” They argue that reality is more like hell than this survival game because there is no chance to change their economic and social status in the real world. As a result of the referendum, slightly more than half of the players agree to stop the game, and all players escape from the secret game spot to their daily lives. Nevertheless, 93 percent of the players return to the game eventually. Player 001 tells Seong Gi-Hun: “Now that I’m back out, I realize everything they said is true. It’s a worse hell out here.” By framing the despair of lower-class people in reality, Squid Game reflects the trend of increasing social inequality and decreasing chances of class mobility in a radical manner. In this scenario, the survival game seems to be a plausible avenue and a source of hope of class mobility for the desperate lower class. Nevertheless, the story intensifies this “loop of hells” by implying that no fantasyland exists at all. In the final episode, Il-Nam, the old man who is Player 001 in the game, is revealed as one of the organizers of the squid game. Before dying, he tells Seong Gi-Hun that his motivation for organizing and attending the squid game was to “have fun.” He remarks: Do you know what someone with no money has in common with someone with too much money? Living is no fun for them. If you have too much money, no matter what you buy, eat or drink, everything gets boring in the end. This implies a sense of nihilism in capitalist society; even after becoming super rich, people still feel unsatisfied in the highly consumerist sociocultural environment. In this case, the cultural resonance among Asian audiences may be provoked not by fantasy but by realism. For the past 20 years, the nature of Korean dramas, as represented by Boys Over Flowers for example, has tended to construct affective and imaginative solutions to these social problems, whereas Squid Game offers a different solution. Compared to Boys Over Flowers, which allows for a shared temporary escapism, Squid Game reminds Asian audiences of a shared ongoing anxiety of encountering low class mobility and high social inequality. Boys Over Flowers dilutes class conflicts through cultural affect, while Squid Game intensifies class conflict through an allegory of the bloody survival game. Squid Game director Hwang remarked in his interview: “I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist

124  Anthony Fung and Jindong Leo-Liu society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life” (Lee 2021). Nevertheless, Hwang also suggests that he did not intend to depict absolute despair as the characters in the series show their humanity, courage and determination of resistance. Given the potential of cultural resonance, it can be argued that Asian audiences have developed a mutual and critical awareness of the social inequalities in their respective societies through the collective consumption of Squid Game. As suggested by many researchers including McDonnell, Bail and Tavory (2017) and Kubal (1998), self-reflexive consumption of popular media culture may possibly pave the way for a critical awareness and collective action attempting to resolve social problems in the form of social activism and movements.

Conclusion Through the comparison of Boys Over Flowers and Squid Game, this chapter has addressed the popularity and change of Korean television/online dramas with the advent of Netflix. By drawing on the concept of cultural resonance, it has suggested how Korean dramas as cultural objects can provoke resonance among audiences to potentially facilitate critical self-reflexivity, broader mobilization and the imagination of social change. Korea has shared similar social conditions with many Asian cities/countries that also face rising living costs and high social inequality. These unsolved social conditions have become the backdrop of recent television dramas in that class differences as well as gendered differences are the main obstacles to self-actualization and well-being. Korean dramas in the past, such as Boys Over Flowers, generally constructed affective and imaginative solutions to these social problems, while the recent co-production of Korean dramas (e.g. Squid Game) between the local productions and Netflix more explicitly foregrounds such unequal power relations and social inequality as the main narratives. Boys Over Flowers allows for a shared temporary escapism, while diluting the issues of class conflicts through cultural affect and the construction of a fantasy-like ideal world. On the other hand, Squid Game not only provokes cultural resonance among Asian audiences through critical realism and intensifies the class conflicts through an allegory of the bloody survival game, but importantly it also interrupts, wittingly or unwittingly, the conventional production of harmonic and resolvable discourses of social inequality embedded in many traditional Korean dramas. Through the collective and critical engagement with popular media culture, audiences can gradually develop a stronger sense of awareness of the social inequalities and the possibility of resorting to collective activism in their societies.

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Netflix and Korean Drama  125 Fung, A. and Chik, G. (2022) “Netflix, the Digital West in Asia: New Models, Challenges and Collaborations,” in Y. Kim (ed) Media in Asia: Global, Digital, Gendered and Mobile, London: Routledge. Fung, A. and Choe, K. (2017) “Cultural Capital and Affect at Work: A Case Study of the Korean and Chinese TV Drama Meteor Shower 1,” In J. Chan and F. Lee (eds) Advancing Comparative Media and Communication Research, London: Routledge. Gordon, N. (2022) “Netflix’s Squid Game Boom Left Asia Subscriber Growth as the Only Bright Spot in the Company’s Earnings,” Fortune, 20 April. He, S., Tao, S., Cheung, Y., Puczkowskyj, N. and Lin, Z. (2021) “Transit-Oriented Development, Perceived Neighborhood Gentrification and Sense of Community: A Case Study of Hong Kong,” Case Studies on Transport Policy, 9(2): 555–66. Iwabuchi, K. (2004) Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Jagan, S. and Kalyan, S. (2022) “Influence of Korean Wave on Youth,” Mass Communicator: International Journal of Communication Studies, 16(1): 21–6. Jin, D.Y. (2022) “Transnational Proximity and Universality in Korean Culture: Analysis of Squid Game and BTS,” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, 35(1): 5–28. Kim, K.A. (2022) “Capitalizing on Contra-Flows and the Korean Wave: Toward a Better Understanding of Netflix’s International Original Content Strategy,” Netflix and the Korean Wave conference 2022 on YouTube. Kim, Y. (2013) “Introduction: Korean Media in a Digital Cosmopolitan World,” in Y. Kim (ed) The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global, London: Routledge. Kubal, T.J. (1998) “The Presentation of Political Self: Cultural Resonance and the Construction of Collective Action Frames,” Sociological Quarterly, 39(4): 539–54. Lee, J. (2021) “The Making of a Global Sensation: The Journey to Creating Squid Game,” Netflix, 30 September. Lin, A. and Tong, A. (2008) “Re-Imagining a Cosmopolitan ‘Asian Us’: Korean Media Flows and Imaginaries of Asian Modern Femininities,” in B.H. Chua and K. Iwabuchi (eds) East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lui, H.K. (2018) “Growing Socio-Economic Inequalities,” in T. Lui, S. Chiu and R. Yep (eds) Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Hong Kong, London: Routledge. McDonnell, T.E., Bail, C.A. and Tavory, I. (2017) “A Theory of Resonance,” Sociological Theory, 35(1): 1–14. Netflix (2022) “Where is Netflix Available?,” Netflix Help Center. Park, B. and Jang, J. (2018) “The Gangnamization of Korean Urban Ideology,” in J. Doucette and B. Park (eds) Developmentalist Cities? Interrogating Urban Developmentalism in East Asia, Leiden: Brill. Park, S. and Yuhn, K. (2012) “Has the Korean Chaebol Model Succeeded?,” Journal of Economic Studies, 39(2): 260–74. Rogelja, I. (2021) “The Museumification of Treasure Hill: Authenticity, Authority and Art in a Taiwanese Urban Village,” The China Quarterly, 245: 227–47. Tassi, P. (2022) “Squid Game is Now Netflix’s Most Popular Show Ever, and It’s Not Even Close,” Forbes, 13 October. Tomkins, S.S. (1995) “Ideology and Affect,” in C. Demos (ed) Exploring Affect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toru, O. (2004) “Producing (Post-)Trendy Japanese TV Dramas,” in K. Iwabuchi (ed) Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Vercoe, N. (2022) “Squid Game Helps Make Asia Lone Bright Spot for Netflix,” Bloomberg, 20 April. Yang, M. (2022) “The Politics of Parasite in South Korea,” Current History, 121(836): 218–23. Young, J.Y. (2022) “New History in K-Drama: South Korea Hails Emmy Success for Squid Game,” New York Times, 13 September. Yuen, W.K. (2000) “On the Edge of Spaces: ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Ghost in the Shell’ and Hong Kong’s Cityscape,” Science Fiction Studies, 27(1): 1–21. Zhang, C. and Gu, H. (2021) “Reverse Globalization – The Crisis of Neoliberalism,” a paper in International Political Science Association.

11 Gender and the Paradox of Body Politics in Korean Makeover Television Ji-yoon An

Makeover television has been an established and popular genre since the new millennium, ­particularly in the Western culture where a plethora of shows have depicted transformations of bodies, finances, relationships, kids and homes, all delivering similar messages of “self-­achievement” and “empowerment.” The scholarship that has arisen in response to this cultural trend has aptly analyzed its contradictory and problematic messages of “true self ” requiring reinvention, gendered logic that submits feminized subjects to authorities and the reiteration of middle-class (White) heterosexual normalcy (Weber 2009). Despite being a country globally famed for its plastic surgery skills and prevalence, the makeover reality show has not been adopted to the same extent in South Korean (hereafter Korean) television. Although some popular programs have depicted transformations in, say, child behavior (My Little Old Boy, SBS, 2016–present) or pet problems (There is No Such Thing as a Bad Dog, EBS 1TV, 2015–present), a typical makeover show illustrating bodily transformation of ordinary people has been surprisingly scarce. The most – and arguably the only – well-known makeover “reality show” is Let Me In (tvN Story On), a hugely successful show that ran from 2011 to 2015, which takes on a typical format exhibiting and celebrating the physical transformations of its contestants. Unsurprisingly, Let Me In has triggered the most academic attention in terms of Korean makeover entertainment culture, examined in relation to an array of topics, from identity crisis (Elfving-Hwang 2013), patriarchal gendered violence (Lee 2020), the grander discourse of bimaxillary surgery (Kim 2020), to even the use of fairy tale tropes in reality shows (Voinea 2018). However, in a sea of cultural content, one reality show is an insufficient measure of the body image messages that are being transmitted via popular media culture. The genre of makeover television is by no means the only method by which body image messages are conveyed in entertainment culture. In the Korean context in particular, issues related to appearance and identity have been more often tackled in non-reality fictional ­dramas – commonly referred to as K-drama. With the growth of domestic cable channels and the entry of international streaming platforms, a diversification of genres in recent years has led to an increasing number of dramas tackling social issues in their generic contents (Han 2022). For instance, characters embodying LGBT rights, though regrettably mostly in the form of side characters, have gradually made a presence in television, as seen in Secret Garden (SBS, 2010), Schoolgirl Detectives (JTBC, 2014-15), Love Alarm (Netflix, 2019) and Be Melodramatic (  JTBC, 2019). Likewise, there has been a rise in mental health awareness, from school bullying and suicide to specific illnesses such as depression, autism and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as representatively seen in the hits It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (tvN-Netflix, 2020), It’s Okay, That’s Love (SBS, 2014) and even arguably My Mister (tvN, 2018). In line with such social awareness has been the insertion of body image messages into romances and romantic comedies, where a makeover is often at the crux of the narrative. At times, these have been subtle messages found within a fantastical setting, where magic allows one to realign the value of appearance; at other DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-15

Gender and the Paradox of Body Politics in Korean Makeover Television  127 times, these have been direct criticisms found in realistic scenarios involving, say, plastic surgery. Yet, what is interesting about the body politics of K-drama is their complexity. Unlike Let Me In and other such reality shows where plastic surgery’s transformation is painted almost singularly in a positive light, seen as just one other “technology of the self ” that could be improved in the spirit of neoliberalism (Seo 2010), these fictional dramas oftentimes emit conflicting messages that condemn the culture of appearance while simultaneously embracing “improvement.” Moreover, these body image messages are inevitably linked to the gender and social status of the protagonists, leading to a more intricate insight into the gendered nature of conflicting ideologies abound in contemporary Korean society. This chapter explores the topography of body image messages found in what I call “Korean makeover dramas” over the past decade, to analyze the ways in which its inconsistent and contradictory messages reflect a realistic depiction of the pluralistic ideologies abound in contemporary Korea. Drawing on a body of dramas from the 2010s until the time of writing, the chapter first surveys the major differences between dramas featuring male and female makeovers in order to establish the fundamentally gendered nature of body image messages in Korean cultural contents. Then, focusing on dramas containing female protagonists (which comprise the majority of the genre), it reveals their seemingly positive body image messages to implicitly harbor a paradox – of criticizing the general culture of valuing oneself through appearance, in particular in relation to the objectification of women, all the while articulating a need to root identity beyond appearance, whereby appearance becomes negligible. The latter has the effect of negating the former message since bodily transformations become a matter of choice and, thus, new appearances (whether gained through plastic surgery, make-up or magic) become readily accepted. Framing these conflicting views under Chang KyungSup’s (2010) theory of “accidental pluralism,” the chapter argues the complexity of body politics to be symptomatic of a larger composition of ideological tensions that permeate Korean society, where the co-existence of multiple conflicting ideologies, from remnants of Confucianism to today’s neoliberalism, can be considered a trait of Korean society. In this light, the body politics of popular culture becomes one of the important means to explore the complexity and paradox of Korea today.

Female Makeover Dramas vs. Male Makeover Dramas In the introduction to a special issue on the politics of the body in contemporary Korea in the Korea Journal, Kim Eun-Shil (2009: 10) writes, “in Korean society, analytical concern over the body emerged with the visibility of social groups such as women, homosexuals and the disabled for whom the body is the fundamental ground of their existence in historical and political senses.” Perhaps arising from this history in which body politics has been more closely intertwined with the female body than the male, Korean dramas have more commonly featured a makeover centering on a female than a male protagonist. This is hardly surprising, considering that Korean culture has historically objectified and commodified the female body more than the male – at least for the past few centuries. The transformation of a female protagonist from “an ugly duckling” into a “beautiful swan” has been a persistent global trope, with one crucial scene usually depicting the physical metamorphosis that is the result of grooming, fashion and make-up. The trope has been a regular in K-drama too – known by K-drama fans as the “transformation trope” – but it has often involved a more radical means of achievement, which can be seen in dramas from the 2010s onward that feature a female makeover (Figure 11.1). Although a few dramas like True Beauty, Oh My Venus and She was Pretty present the transformation of the same character/actor where the “after” look is achieved through make-up,

128  Ji-yoon An

Figure 11.1 Popular Dramas Featuring Female Makeovers from the 2010s to the Present. (Figure Produced by the Author).

fashion and diet, Korean dramas have more frequently portrayed a drastic transformation in women, obtained through either plastic surgery or a fantastical setting where magic instigates a bodily change or body swap. The result is an unrealistic transformation that is technically no longer a makeover, as different actors are then used for the “before” and “after” looks. Yet, such extreme transfigurations have been more popular than dramas featuring actual makeovers – at least when involving female protagonists. Interestingly, this is in stark contrast to the dramas featuring male makeovers. It may be surprising to learn that dramas featuring a male makeover have not been entirely absent from

Gender and the Paradox of Body Politics in Korean Makeover Television  129

Figure 11.2 Popular Dramas Featuring Male Makeovers from the 2010s to the Present. (Figure Produced by the Author).

Korean television, yet the nature of their makeovers have been fundamentally different from their female counterparts (Figure 11.2). Obvious differences are observable from a quick glance. Unlike female makeovers that sensationally depict the maximum transformation possible by using two different actors, male makeovers are more “traditional” in depicting the same actor’s improvements through more “conventional” methods, such as a haircut, losing glasses and skincare. Even weight loss is uncommon, found only in The Last Empress which is only one of two shows to use two different actors for the “before” and “after” looks. The fact that the makeover is more subdued in male cases is a reflection not only of lifestyle culture being directed mostly toward women, but also of the fundamentally gendered nature of body image messages in Korean culture. Korean dramas featuring women appear to be less concerned with depicting a true makeover than in critiquing the culture of appearance. Consistently in all the dramas listed here, the overarching message is that looks should not be important. The female protagonists are all victims, looked down on by society as inferior for being fat and/or ugly. As the protagonist in Birth of a Beauty laments: I want to lose weight, because when you’re fat, it’s hard to control your body. And there’s another reason. Nobody will help me. I know that very well. I’d rather they laughed at me. Being ridiculed is better than being pitied. Being fat is physically draining but what’s more difficult is dealing with my feelings getting hurt. (Episode 1)

130  Ji-yoon An As this voiceover narration is heard, viewers are shown scenes of the presurgery character falling over in a market and on a bus, but no one helps her and instead points and stares at her “clumsiness” which is seen to be a consequence of her fatness, not the market’s disarray or the bus’s erratic driving. Through their transformations, these women experience strangers acting friendlier and nicer to them, simply because they are more attractive. The repeated juxtaposition of such scenes serves to enhance the disapproval of a society where basic manners and human interactions are determined by appearance. The reasoning behind this judgmental culture is that it takes “hard work” and diligence to remain attractive and therefore those who are unattractive are deemed, within a black-andwhite formula, to be lazy. This mentality is aligned with the general development of a “fat shaming” culture that has taken over the world throughout the 20th century, least of all in America. As Amy Erdman Farrell (2011) writes in her monograph Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, the current stigma of fat, contrary to common belief, has in fact preceded any health concerns about large body size; rather, it was developed in relation to cultural anxieties that emerged during the modern period in relation to consumer excess, as well as to prevailing ideas about race, civilization and evolution. Farrell (2011: 173) illuminates how today’s fat shaming, at least in the West, is rooted in the 19th-century belief that fatness is a key marker of inferiority, “of an uncivilized, barbaric and primitive body.” To some extent, such ideas are relevant to the Korean context, where Cold War politics and the infiltration of Western (mainly American) ideas during the 1950s and 1960s shaped much of modern Korea’s outlook. However, the history and locality of Korean body politics must be considered in more depth. As Kim Eun-Shil (2009: 7) explains, until modernization in the 19th century, the body in Korea had traditionally been considered a sacred asset naturally handed down from one’s ancestors (the notion of sinche balbu suji bumo is appropriate here, where the body was considered the basis of both one’s filial piety and one’s propriety as a human being). However, with modernization, the body began to shelter multiple meanings as an important source of social and political discourse in Korean society. In addition to the general culture of consumerism and dieting that began to filter through Korean society in the 1950s and 1960s, the body also became increasingly subjected to state power: In the 1970s, the body was exposed to corporeal regulations under state governmentality in an effort to create a modern state subject (gungmin), while the body also became a site of political protest in repeated acts of self-immolation and fasting in the 1980s. Kim (2009: 9) writes that it was only in the 20th century with the active integration of Korean society into the global neoliberal order that the body “became a medium for expressing oneself and conveying possibilities of creating new subjectivities.” As true as this may be, the body in the contemporary era has not been free from what Foucault (2009) calls “biopower” – the power exercised by the modern state and institutions on individuals. As widely examined not just in the Korean context, the neoliberal system of the 21st century has produced a greater interest in the body than before, where diet, fitness, cosmetic surgery and general body management have been skillfully packaged as “self-improvement” and “self-management” in an effort to produce bodies optimized for the labor market, while relieving the state from its welfare obligations (Harvey 2005). The equating of a large body with laziness in recent Korean dramas is largely rooted in this neoliberal notion of self-management. As Dongjin Seo (2010) explains, the concepts of self-improvement and self-management began to surface in Korea in the 1990s in the form of self-help books. In these books, the will to self-managing was defined as the will to “freedom,” described as a “restructuring of the self.” It is hardly ironic that the late 1990s and the early 2000s was a period of restructuring the Korean economy and society as an aftereffect of the Asian financial crisis from a few years prior. Much like the economy that was restructured for flexibility and privatization that was described as freedom from tighter regulations, the

Gender and the Paradox of Body Politics in Korean Makeover Television  131 self-management culture emphasized a similar flexibility in life, where the self was considered as an enterprise where “everybody is the CEO of a company called Life” (ibid.: 95). Linked to Foucault’s (2009) notion of human capital, such emphasis on self-management was ultimately about improving one’s overall human capital, where every aspect of the self, including appearance alongside education and experience, could be tailored toward increasing one’s competition in the labor market (Feher 2007) – or even in the marriage market in the case for women (Cho 2009). In order to achieve this elusive ideal, the self had to be reprogrammed as something not fixed but continually undergoing improvement, and, in doing so, the key starting point came to rest in “problematizing the self.” Only then could “the technologies of the self ” – such as capabilities, personality, habits, psychological improvements and even physical improvements – be upgraded. It is precisely this notion of “problematizing the self ” that comes to play an important role in female makeover K-dramas. At the start of the shows, when a female character is shown to be bullied/suffering due to her physical appearance, the shows maximize the viewers’ emotional response of compassion and sympathy through music and mise-en-scène. Such scenes effectively criticize the neoliberal logic of self-management by highlighting the unfairness behind the oversimplified logic that a fat/ugly person has not been diligent enough to manage her body and, as an extension, herself. However, as the narratives continue, the stories often change their focus from critiquing the culture of appearance to the protagonists’ need to root their identity in something other than appearance. Whether a drama about a housewife abandoned by her husband for a younger woman (Perfume, Birth of a Beauty) or a high school student being bullied for being ugly (True Beauty, My ID is Gangnam Beauty, The Miracle), the sufferings of these protagonists become realigned as not a consequence of a judgmental culture but as a problem with the individual’s lack of confidence. In other words, fat shaming becomes internalized as a problem of the self. Consequently, the remainder of the narratives focus on the women finding a new identity, usually through a skillset that leads to a career path. A fundamentally different narrative trajectory is apparent in male makeovers. Unlike female protagonists who lack a labor subjectivity from the starts of the shows, male protagonists are naturally endowed with a special skill from the premise, whether it is a genius in Pinocchio or a naturally gifted singer in Dream High. Some are even successful CEOs to begin with, as in Abyss. In the case of Pinocchio, a genius pretends to be stupid and purposefully looks scruffy in order to hide his past. Therefore, when he goes through his makeover to enter a broadcasting company as a journalist, he is in essence returning to his “true” identity. Likewise, the ugly protagonist of Abyss is already a CEO of a large conglomerate, a chaebol heir. After he is magically revived into the best-looking version of himself, he is able to use his new looks, alongside his intelligence, to find the criminal behind his best friend’s (attempted) murder. In other words, unlike women who undergo an identity crisis related to their appearance, male makeovers are not about soul searching since male identities are already solid from the premises of the dramas. Instead, the men use their new (improved) appearances to further their existing identity, whether it is in finding further success at work or being able to exact revenge on previous wrongdoers. Nor is love a goal for these men. Unlike female protagonists who struggle to find love and therefore entering a relationship is an important part of their post-transformation life, it is never the men’s desire to find love. Rather, love is often shown to be a consequence of the transformation. Even in the case of Pinocchio where love is the catalyst behind the transformation, his relationship with his lover is not necessarily contingent on his new looks. In this sense, makeovers are never pivotal turning points in these men’s lives. Rather, they merely act as push factors that allow the men to use their already-existing skills to the best of their availability.

132  Ji-yoon An Such different narrative developments in male makeovers result in fundamentally different messages being emitted to viewers. First and foremost, empathy is never established at the starts of the narratives in relation to the men’s appearances. In fact, unlike female protagonists who cannot help but suffer due to their natural way of looking, most of the male protagonists simply choose to look like a “country bumpkin.” The fact that a haircut is sufficient enough to transform them into chic urban men demonstrates that the male protagonists were never unattractive but simply ungroomed. Not only is there no criticism toward a culture of appearance, as consistently found in female makeover dramas, but the men’s appearance is never linked to laziness or incompetence. Even when male protagonists enter a new public realm, this achievement is portrayed as a choice that they had simply been avoiding until now, not an unattainable goal that has been made newly available due to the change in appearance, as is the case for female protagonists. This is a crucial distinction that confirms the fundamentally gendered nature of body image messages in Korean cultural contents. There is no “fat shaming” for men because appearance is not a core factor in determining the men’s identity nor career. Put another way, in male-featuring dramas, a makeover is plainly just a makeover, whereas in female-featuring dramas a makeover becomes a means for mobility, as elaborated below.

Accidental Pluralism of Body Ideologies in Female Makeover Dramas As female makeover dramas internalize the problem of appearance as a problem of the self, the very neoliberal mentality that is criticized at the starts of the narratives – that the logic of self-management is a ruse that overlooks people’s circumstances and creates a cruel culture of judging purely by appearance – is ultimately embraced as these dramas go on to show women becoming “empowered” by their successful entry into the labor market. Essential to this narrative development is the fact that the female protagonists of makeover dramas can be largely classified into two groups – housewives and students, notably both groups that lack a labor subjectivity (at least for the time being for students). Housewives are an obvious choice for makeovers since their stereotypical image of being fatigued and lacking time and/or money to work on their appearance has the greatest aftereffect when they are radically “improved” into beautiful young women, whether through magical means or plastic surgery. However, the rationale behind housewives and students as the receivers of a neoliberal makeover is not purely visual. As Cho Joo-Hyun’s (2009) analysis of neoliberal governmentality in post-IMF Korean society illuminates, the labor flexibility policies adopted by the Korean government since the IMF crisis (1997–2001) led to an increase in women’s precarious status in society, where only a minority could receive benefits as market-oriented individuals (e.g. working women), while the majority endured vulnerable positions of dependents of male breadwinners. As renumeration increasingly became the measure of value in society, women’s family care work remained neglected, and housewives and motherhood struggled to find their place in the neoliberal order. Yet, as Cho (2009: 25) explains, when love emerged as a savior discourse and sexuality became a project, sexuality transformed into personal assets representing a woman’s identity, and the body, where sexuality is revealed and manifests itself, emerged as the only remaining niche to count on in this insecure reality. As such, for women, gender and class statuses came to be estimated largely on their appearance, even more so for young women preparing to enter either the labor or the marriage markets. Against this sociohistorical backdrop, the focus on housewives and students in makeover dramas become particularly enlightening in highlighting the importance of appearance for these two peripheral groups of women who are preparing and/or struggling to enter the neoliberal order. Yet, narratives involving housewives problematically ignore the societal ­

Gender and the Paradox of Body Politics in Korean Makeover Television  133 circumstances that have created the phenomenon of fatigued housewives. Instead, they blindly focus on the women’s lack of (paid) labor skills, which is seen as the reason for the abuse by their husbands and society. As encapsulated by the protagonist of Birth of a Beauty: I suffered because I was powerless. I was just a married woman who only depended on her husband. I myself need to become powerful, not through my assets or a husband. That’s right, power comes from skills. Working women are cool. (Episode 11) Here, one can see how the protagonist’s sufferings and the ludicrous narrative of her husband attempting to kill her in order to marry his mistress is somehow made into her fault, as though having a successful career would have prevented her malicious playboy husband from cheating and killing her. By reducing this complex social history behind housewives in Korean society into a basic need to have a labor subjectivity, appearance and attractiveness become repackaged as one of various factors that constitute women’s human capital. Dramas featuring students lay more importance on appearance as an asset for survival in society, at least at the starts of the shows. The best example is My ID is Gangnam Beauty, where the protagonist undergoes more than ten surgeries to “upgrade” all aspects of her face during the summer break between high school and university. Despite being labeled as a “Gangnam beauty” (a euphemism in Korean for women who have turned beautiful by having immense amounts of plastic surgery), the protagonist sees this as a necessity for avoiding bullying, finding confidence and finding love. In other words, the drama emphasizes that the desire to “look good” and “be pretty” is not simply about being attractive for appearance’s sake, but a requisite to be accepted into society. Such a message is accentuated in dramas featuring students for obvious reasons that the “wrong” appearance can in reality hinder self-confidence, sociability and even employability for today’s Korean youth. As Cho HaeJoang (2015) observes, in a society where severe competition has been leading to ever-rising unemployment rates, a culture heavily burdened with the pressure to achieve economic stability has created a generation whose subjectivity is comparable to that of a commodity – a generation known as the “spec generation.” Just as technology’s specifications are listed to increase their marketability, these youths’ lives are centered around accumulating resumé-building activities since childhood in order to avoid becoming marginalized in today’s highly competitive society. As Cho (2015: 448) writes, “if they cannot become the best or win, they can at least remain in a safe zone as long as they remain in the mainstream.” It is precisely this attitude that propels the protagonist of My ID is Gangnam Beauty to undergo surgery: Her aim is not to become beautiful but to upgrade her appearance just enough to enter the “normal” boundaries. However, as the narrative increasingly centers on the teenage girl’s insecurities over her new looks – she suffers both presurgery (for being ugly) and post-surgery (for being pretty through artificial means) – the critical outlook on Korean society’s infatuation with appearance also begins to disappear. Instead, spotlight is refocused onto the protagonist finding confidence through her skills in chemistry and perfume-making. By the end of the drama when her confidence has increased enough to overcome her insecurities, she confesses: I used to rate people on the streets purely based on their looks. But I stopped doing that at some point. I thought everyone looked at me and judged me, because I was doing the same to others. But I realized not many people are interested in me. (Episode 16)

134  Ji-yoon An While this speech is a manifestation of her newfound confidence, it is similarly problematic to Birth of a Beauty in invalidating the problems that have occurred throughout the show. Especially in My ID is Gangnam Beauty, much due attention is freshly given to male chauvinism and the objectification of women within college settings, not to mention the general culture in Korea where beauty standards in women are prioritized. Yet, by having the protagonist confess that “not many people are interested in me,” these issues become washed over as the insecure hallucinations of a teenager, regrettably delegitimized as authentic social ailments. While such endings of female makeover dramas may appear on the surface to be “woke” in envisioning women’s upward mobility, it is not difficult to discern the oxymoron at the heart of this development: The very criticism toward the culture of appearance that had catalyst the entire narrative becomes nullified by these endings. As these women develop a fresh identity based on their newfound career paths, the importance of appearance becomes unrealistically downplayed, as though it was never a decisive factor in their previous sufferings. In this new light, bodily transformations become a matter of choice – something that is not at the heart of the character’s newfound identity. Yet, unlike in Shrek 2 (2004) where both Shrek and Fiona choose to live on as ogres instead of good-looking humans to demonstrate that appearances do not matter, rarely do protagonists of K-dramas choose to go back to their former looks (She was Pretty is the only exception). Instead, they embrace body health, self-care and sexual attractiveness as one of the many elements in their human capital that must be regularly honed to upkeep their newfound competition in the neoliberal market. Thus, whether gained through plastic surgery, make-up or magic, new appearances become readily accepted. Such conflicting messages of makeover dramas elucidate the extent to which Korean society itself is “confused” in its stance toward the contemporary fixation with appearance. While it condemns the obsession as superficial and inhumane, it also quietly embraces the culture as necessary. This ideological contradiction is reminiscent of Chang Kyung-Sup’s (2010) theory of “accidental pluralism” in family ideologies. Chang writes that a critical trait of Korea society is that “the coexistence of traditional, modern and even postmodern cultures [have] result[ed] in serious tensions and conflict among different generations who have been exposed to these diverse cultures in varying degrees” (ibid.: 15). Of course, Chang is discussing the multiple and clashing ideologies that have come to co-exist in modern Korean society in relation to the importance of the family as a social unit. However, his theory of accidental pluralism is somewhat applicable here to Korean body politics. Chang identifies four family ideologies to be present in contemporary Korea – Confucian familism, instrumental familism, affectionate familism and individualistic familism. The first, Confucian familism, is the modern inheritance of traditional family values from the Joseon era, where moral hierarchy and support relations between genders and generations are observed. Still the most dominant influence on contemporary Koreans, Chang sees this ideology to be the representative “conservative” paradigm. Instrumental familism is born out of Korea’s turbulent modern history, where people only had their families to turn to for personal protection and social achievement. Here, family becomes a strategic support system for social competition, where often multiple generations make sacrifices for the potential success of one child. Affectionate familism is based on the Western concept of family as a source of psychological (and emotional) protection, an idea that came to be disseminated via mass media from the 1950s onward. Emphasis on love and household consumerism fall into this category. The last, individualistic familism, is based on the development of individualism and feminism in the democratic era, in opposition to much of the ideas of Confucian familism. Interestingly, similar principles behind each of these four ideologies can be perceived in the multiple attitudes toward the body in Korea. Remnants of Confucianism appear in the way that the body is still considered sacred, though not to the extent of seeing the body as an

Gender and the Paradox of Body Politics in Korean Makeover Television  135 ancestral asset. The disapproval of plastic surgery and other drastic changes to appearances that can be noticed in much of the older generation in Korea links well with Chang’s observation that Confucian familism is most common in older (often male) generations. Meanwhile, the continuing influence of Westernization manifests in the lifestyle culture that has saturated Korean society since the 1990s, where fads involving dieting, fitness and body care are not only swiftly embraced but even localized in the Korean context. The adoption of an instrumental mentality is observed in families, where mothers eagerly assist in their children’s plastic surgeries to help them secure a brighter future. As Joanna Elfving-Hwang (2013: 6) observes, Korea is probably one of the only societies where parents apologize to their children on TV for passing on “faulty” genes and for lacking the funds to “fix” these “faults” through surgery. Moreover, the overall culture of embracing “improvement” in all aspects of life is fundamentally aligned with instrumentalism. Lastly, women’s attempt to find empowerment through their body in order to successfully enter the marriage and/or labor markets can be seen as a prevalence of both individualism and feminism, albeit within the limited confines of a continuingly patriarchal society. By framing these conflicting views under Chang’s theory of accidental pluralism, it becomes possible to understand Korean body politics within a larger composition of ideological tensions that permeate Korean society. In this sense, the lack of a singular teleological message in Korean makeover dramas is not a phenomenon exclusive to Korean body politics but symptomatic of Korean society, whereby conflicting views can only be expected, whether in family politics or body politics.

Conclusion In examining the theme of makeovers in contemporary Korean dramas, this chapter has shown how body image messages have fundamentally differed between male and female protagonists. While makeovers appear to similarly affect both genders, they do not act as critical turning points for men’s identity as they do for women. In male-featuring dramas, a makeover is just a makeover, whereas in female-featuring dramas a makeover becomes a means for an identity change, manifest through the female protagonists’ newfound social mobility into the labor market. As the analysis has shown, crucial for such a narrative development is the initial identity of female protagonists as either housewives or students, two social groups lacking labor subjectivities. Yet, as the women become freshly incorporated into the neoliberal order, female makeover dramas hold a paradox whereby the very neoliberal ideology of conceiving appearance as a capital to be honed that is criticized at the starts of the narratives become incongruously embraced. Despite harboring such contradictions, these dramas ultimately accept the makeover culture, which is diegetically justified through labor, as though entry into, and status within, the labor market atones for the judgment of bodily transformation. By drawing parallels between Chang Kyung-Sup’s (2010) four family ideologies and the contradictions found in the attitudes toward the body in Korean society, the chapter ultimately argues the inconsistent and contradictory messages of Korean makeover dramas to be symptomatic of a larger composition of ideological tensions that have come to pervade modern Korean society. One drama that stands out within the sea of cultural contents as arguably the only K-drama to truly emit a positive body image message is Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-Joo (MBC, 2016– 2017), where the main protagonist is a weightlifting national athlete. Although the drama touches upon the protagonist’s desire to be “skinny like the ribbon gymnasts,” she never loses weight nor tries to appear more “feminine.” As refreshing as it is to see a young woman refuse to conform to the beauty ideals that are proliferated in almost every other drama, the viewers of this show were surprisingly less interested in the drama’s unique body positivity than in the

136  Ji-yoon An chemistry between the two protagonists, as observed in fan comments posted on MBC’s audience opinion forum. Such a lack of engagement from viewers questions if positive body image message is in fact desired by Korean viewers – an enquiry for another, larger research project.

References Chang, K.-S. (2010) South Korea Under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition, London: Routledge. Cho, H.-J. (2015) “The Spec Generation Who Can’t Say ‘No’: Overeducated and Underemployed Youth in Contemporary South Korea,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 23(3): 436–62. Cho, J.-H. (2009) “Neoliberal Governmentality at Work: Post-IMF Korean Society and the Construction of Neoliberal Women,” Korea Journal, 49(3): 15–43. Elfving-Hwang, J. (2013) “Cosmetic Surgery and Embodying the Moral Self in South Korean Popular Makeover Culture,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 11(24): 1–17. Farrell, A.E. (2011) Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, New York: New York University Press. Feher, M. (2007) “Self-Appreciation; or, the Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture, 21(1): 21–41. Foucault, M. (2009) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Han, B.M. (2022) “Melodramatizing Racialized Korea: The Impasse of Black Representation in Itaewon Class,” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 14(2), published online on 5 September. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kim, E.-S. (2009) “The Politics of the Body in Contemporary Korea,” Korea Journal, 49(3): 5–14. Kim, J.O. (2020) “The Locality of Plastic Bodies: Korean Reality TV, Celebrity and Bimaxillary Surgery,” Continuum, 34(5): 720–32. Lee, S.-R. (2020) “When Neoliberalism and Patriarchy Conspire: Plastic Surgery in the South Korean Reality TV Show Let Me In,” TDR/The Drama Review, 64(2): 101–16. Seo, D. (2010) “The Will to Self-Managing, the Will to Freedom: The Self-Managing Ethic and the Spirit of Flexible Capitalism in South Korea,” in J. Song (ed) New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capitalism and Transnational Movements, London: Routledge. Voinea, C. (2018) “The Fairytale Narratives of Plastic Surgery Makeover TV Shows in South Korea,” in L. Scholl (ed) Medicine, Health and Being Human, London: Routledge. Weber, B. (2009) Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship and Celebrity, Durham: Duke University Press.

12 Democratization, Social Media and Korean Television in Transition Ki-Sung Kwak

Since democratization in 1987, television broadcasting in South Korea (hereafter Korea) has been under the control of the government of the day. This has meant that television broadcasters have been forced to support the ideology of the current ruling party. In the last two decades, the development of digital technologies has obliged television broadcasters to adapt themselves to a multi-channel, multi-platform environment, and allowed social media platforms to emerge as a major threat to the existing television broadcasters. This chapter examines the extent to which television broadcasting and emerging social media in Korea have contributed to the development of political diversity in the process of democratic transition. It first addresses the role of traditional television broadcasting, focusing on the level of state control over operation and programming (editorial content and news reporting), particularly in relation to public service broadcasting. It then examines the impact of social media on television broadcasting, focusing on YouTube. This is followed by a discussion of whether a multi-platform television environment would be conducive to broadening ideological and political diversity, and its implications for the nation’s democracy.

State Control over Television Broadcasting From the outset, Korean governments have regarded television as a medium responsible to the public. Under the guise of protecting and respecting the public interest, terrestrial television broadcasting has remained for the most part under the direct or indirect control of the state. Structural Constraints: The most visible control over the operation of television broadcasters has been the compromised board system, in which the nomination and appointment of presidents and board members of public television broadcasters are in the hands of the state. The Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) Board members are all appointed by the president of Korea on the recommendations of the Korean Communications Commission (KCC). Similarly, the board members of the Foundation for Broadcasting Culture (FBC) that owns 70% of Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) stocks are appointed by the KCC, after a selection characterized by open competition. The president of the KBS is handpicked by the Korean president on the recommendation of the KBS Board, while the FBC appoints the president of MBC. Most of the presidents of KBS and MBC have come from the media sector, either from broadcasting or from newspaper companies whose owners share and support the political and ideological orientation of the government of the day. These structural constraints have invariably placed the KBS and MBC in a vulnerable position in regard to their relationship with the state. The political nature of the relationship has been well illustrated in the way the presidents and board members of public broadcasters have been appointed and dismissed by the new government during the transition of power. In 2003, Roh Moo-Hyun, a reformist president, handpicked Choi Moon-Soon, a hardliner with a DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-16

138  Ki-Sung Kwak strong background as a union leader, as president of the MBC. Choi had been the head of the MBC Union since 1995, but he was dismissed from his position in 1996 after orchestrating a strike. He was soon back at work, however, and was elected the first leader of the National Union of Media Workers when it was launched in 2000 after a consolidation of all existing media-related unions. As soon as he was appointed president of MBC, Choi replaced the holders of key positions with hardliners who had worked with him in the MBC Union. Furthermore, he replaced 17 presidents of 19 regional MBC network stations before their terms ended (Choi and Kim 2007). The state’s control over the selection of the president of the KBS has been even more blatant. Jung Yeon-Joo, a former editor of the left-wing daily (Hankyoreh), was personally appointed by the former president Roh Moo-Hyun as president of the KBS in 2003. In 2006, he was reappointed for another three-year term, despite strong objections from the opposition parties and the KBS labor union. After the 2007 election, the new conservative president Lee Myung-Bak soon moved to replace Jung, who had fully supported the ideology of the former Roh government and ruling party (CNMR 2009). Despite pressure from the new government, Jung refused to resign, claiming that President Lee has no legal right to remove the head of KBS. Despite the different legal interpretations about the president’s power, the Lee government redoubled its effort to dismiss Jung from his CEO position. In August 2008, the prosecutors’ office arrested Jung on allegations of embezzlement. It charged him with settling with the National Tax Service (NTS) in the middle of an appeals trial in which the company sought a corporate tax refund, which caused 51.4 billion won ($43 million) in losses to the public broadcaster (Korea Times 2008). The National Board of Audit and Inspection (NBAI) also recommended Jung’s dismissal on the grounds of mismanagement and abuse of authority. President Lee soon dismissed Jung and appointed Kim In-Kyu, a former media advisor to Lee MyungBak during the presidential election campaign in 2007, as the new CEO. The same process plays out in reverse when a new progressive government follows a period of rule by the conservative party. When the progressive Moon Jae-In won the 2017 election after the impeachment of Park Geun-Hye, some KBS board members who had been appointed by the previous conservative president Park were pressured to resign. Those members who resisted the pressure were faced with blatant threats from left-wing civil organizations that had supported the progressive government. This was no different from what had occurred in 2007, when the then progressive-supported members were eventually forced to resign. Control over Editorial Content and News Reporting: These structural constraints have inevitably made South Korea’s public service broadcasters politically vulnerable. Being tied to whichever government in power, they have been saddled with limited options for editorial independence. One example of the state’s intervention in editorial content can be found in the secret guideline on media control that was designed by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) in 2010. The NIS Reform Task Force – created by president-elect Moon Jae-In in 2017 – revealed that the secret guideline authorized NIS to conduct surveillance of KBS and MBC executives and reporters in order to eliminate critical reports aimed at the Lee Myung-Bak government. Under the guideline titled Strategies and Measures for the Normalization of the Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation, the NIS provided specific instructions for gaining control over MBC through the replacement of left-leaning personnel and discontinuation of problematic programs, as well as marginalization of the labor union (Hankyoreh 2017). The guideline further specifies that, with the appointment of Kim Jae-Chul – a candidate supported by conservative president Lee – as MBC’s new president, the influence of key union personnel and the former MBC president Choi Moon-Soon – who had been appointed by the progressive government – would be removed and that all section chiefs in production, reportage and programming would be replaced. The measures undertaken by the NIS to control KBS seemed more blatant than those aimed at MBC. In a document titled A Proposal for Replacement of Personnel after the

Democratization, Social Media and Korean Television in Transition  139 Reorganization of Korean Broadcasting, the NIS had intervened in personnel matters by compelling those who were not aligned with the Lee Myung-Bak administration to be considered unfit to work for KBS. The document further emphasized that the key senior positions in KBS were to be filled by people favored by the government (Kyunghyang Shinmun 2017) and that news and documentary programs should reflect the new government’s ideological orientation. The political vulnerability of public television broadcasters is also illustrated in the state’s intervention in news reporting. Television broadcasters’ coverage of the Sewol Ferry disaster in 2014 is a prime example of the way Park Geun-Hye government tried to control the process of news production. The sinking of the Sewol Ferry on 16 April 2014 was one of the worst maritime disasters in modern Korean history, resulting in the deaths of 304 people, including 246 high school students. After the vessel began to take on water after a sharp turn, many passengers were trapped inside the ferry, as they had been repeatedly instructed by crew members to stay where they were. Many of the trapped passengers died, while those who issued the instructions, including the captain and some of his crew, were able to escape from the stricken vessel. Soon after the ferry capsized, both KBS and MBC reported that rescue operations were well underway, with the help of navy ships and the National Maritime Police. However, contrary to these reports, the National Maritime Police first wasted valuable time at the scene of the disaster by circling around the sinking ship and making no effort to rescue the passengers who were trapped inside (CCDM 2014). In their immediate reports of the disaster, neither KBS nor MBC made any mention of this critical loss of time after the ferry began to sink. Arguably, the timely broadcasting of this information would have compelled the government to implement an effective, active rescue operation. It was later revealed that a request for no mention of this delay had come directly from the Blue House (presidential residence). Lee Jung-Hyun, former senior presidential secretary for public relations, pressured Kim Shi-Gon, the chief of the KBS newsroom, to minimize the negative aspects of KBS news reports concerning the government’s rescue efforts. In a telephone conversation with Kim on 21 April 2014, Lee urged the newsroom chief to drop negative reports on the government’s rescue efforts in its flagship KBS 9 News program, saying, “the President watched KBS.” Lee also decried KBS for criticizing the government at a time of national crisis, using profanities and insults during the conversation (Hankook Ilbo 2016). At the time, the president and the now-defunct Korea Coast Guard bore the brunt of the media’ attacks for their mismanagement of the disaster and the failed rescue operation. After the allegations against Lee Jung-Hyun were raised, however, the Blue House and the conservative Saenuri Party defended Lee, claiming that he was just performing his role as chief press secretary to the president. This kind of attitude reflects an undemocratic view of government-media relations. The incident is reminiscent of the state media control practiced under the authoritarian regimes of the 1970s and 1980s. Political vulnerability was also apparent in the way KBS and MBC covered the Choi SoonSil scandal, which eventually led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-Hye on corruption charges in early 2017. Given the sheer magnitude of the corruption scandal and its effect on the functioning of the government, it was to be expected that the public service broadcasters would engage in investigative reporting to uncover information and analyze the political repercussions of the crisis. However, unlike the majority of the mainstream media that tried to grasp and highlight the implications of the scandal, both KBS and MBC functioned mainly as mouthpieces of the Park government by minimizing or silencing aspects of the events that had negative implications for the president. Without doubt, the public broadcasters’ coverage of the scandal was restricted by pressure from the Blue House, as well as the internal control exerted by the boards of KBS and MBC and their managements. It was another demonstration of declining authority of public service television in Korea.

140  Ki-Sung Kwak

The Impact of Social Media on Television While a comprehensive examination of the impact of social media on television is beyond the scope of this chapter, this section explores the impact of YouTube on television in Korea as YouTube is one of the most popular platforms creating a new infotainment culture and a potential threat to democracy. It examines the ways in which traditional television broadcasters (terrestrial television broadcasters and cable channels) have adapted their news and current affairs programs to the changing YouTube environment. According to the Korea Press Foundation’s 2021 survey of social media users, Koreans spend an average of 156 minutes per day making use of YouTube. The same survey showed that 2% of respondents subscribed to the YouTube channels operated by the major media outlets (broadcasters, newspapers and the Internet), while 73% subscribed to channels provided by the professional influencers (KPF 2021). A further 62.4% stated YouTube algorithms attracted their interest, while only 26.7% found these algorithms not useful. Social media such as YouTube and Twitter have changed the way the media are produced, distributed and consumed in Korea. Traditional television broadcasters have been forced to embrace social media and other digital technologies to increase online viewership and respond to recent challenges that are altering the way TV news and videos are watched, streamed, distributed and shared online (Braun 2015). Indeed, viewership of traditional television programming has been declining, particularly among young viewers who have turned to tablets, laptops and smartphones. In this transitional period of media consumption, YouTube represents perhaps the strongest challenge to television, because it affords viewers far more choice over the content they consume (Munger and Phillips 2022). It offers unlimited and accessible content at any given time, with far greater potential for audience participation. South Korea has been no exception in this transition. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that YouTube has revolutionized the television industry. In 2014, when YouTube was first introduced in Korea, the nation’s terrestrial television broadcasters – KBS, MBC and Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) – stopped their free catch-up television service on YouTube to encourage their viewers to subscribe to their video streaming service (POOQ) or InternetProtocol Television (IPTV) service, through which viewers could access their programs. However, this soon changed, once the terrestrial broadcasters experienced a significant decline in audience numbers. They began to see YouTube as an essential platform for the success of programs that did not normally appear on other platforms, such as terrestrial, cable or IPTV. As a result, in the last few years there has been a significant increase in the number of YouTube channels provided by traditional television broadcasters, most of them focusing on entertainment, lifestyle and news and current affairs. As of October 2021, terrestrial television broadcasters provided 256 YouTube channels (KBS:135, MBC:44, SBS:77), and cable channels provided 65 YouTube channels (Channel A:10, TV Chosun:9, JTBC:35, MBN:11) (Media Today 2021). Utilizing vast archives in their terrestrial or cable platforms, these broadcasters have posted clips, highlights, trailers and recaps of their programs on these channels. Recently, however, more and more channels have begun to produce original content that is only available on YouTube. This has been particularly visible in news channels, which have been losing their audience of younger viewers. One of the most notable impacts of YouTube on television can be seen in the fact that the traditional practice of news production and distribution has been changed to adapt to a new digital logic that highlights audience reaction and engagement. In case of news programs, the provision of news according to the traditional television narrative structure has been losing appeal in online spaces, because it does not encourage audiences to react or share content (García-Perdomo 2021). Previously, television broadcasters attempted to clip content from their

Democratization, Social Media and Korean Television in Transition  141 terrestrial platforms and load it into a YouTube channel, but this has not proved as effective as the creation of content solely for online use. Currently, major news/current affairs and information YouTube channels are provided by traditional terrestrial broadcasters (Table 12.1). In addition to the live delivery of news, terrestrial TV broadcasters’ YouTube channels target specific audiences, allowing them to access news at any time and from anywhere. These channels focus on contents that cannot be shown on terrestrial channels. SBS’s SUBUSU News, for example, targets a young female audience between the ages of 18 and 24 years while another one of its channels, VIDEOMUG, aims to attract a male audience ranging in age from 18 to 44 (Yu and Jung 2020). KBS’s KLAB targets a female audience in their 20s and 30s, while MBC’s MBig News targets those in their 30s and 40s (ibid.) MBC’s 14F provides news and information on lifestyle and living aimed at young female viewers in their 20s and 30s. More recently, it launched a “newsletter” service – a user-tailored news/information service covering a range of issues such as business, investment, trends, IT, global issues and environment (Media Today 2022). Traditionally, it has been the commercial terrestrial broadcasters’ practice to show sensational news content to attract a mass audience. With the ubiquity of digital options, their priority is now the production and distribution of content through YouTube outside of traditional television platforms. To attract young viewers, emotional, sensational and “odd” news have become more prevalent, as online journalists believe news of this type is more likely to attract young viewers (García-Perdomo 2021). This observation was confirmed in a recent report by the broadcasters’ YouTube channels on “the Nth Room case” – a large-scale digital sex crime – that

Table 12.1  Traditional Broadcasters’ Channels (News, Current Affairs, Information) on YouTube Broadcasters

YouTube channels

Starting date

*Subscribers (000s)

KBS

KBS News KBS SasaKeonKeon Journalism Talk Show J Reviews & Comments KLAB MBCNEWS MBig News 14F My Little News Desk PD Diary SBS News SUBUSU News VIDEOMUG JTBC News Hey News NEWS PACE Trigger NEWS TVCHOSUN SiSA TVCHOSUN Channel A News Channel A News TOP10 Kim Jin’s Straight Show MBN News On Mike

6 Aug 2013 18 Jun 2018 17 Jun 2018 27 Aug 2018 2 Apr 2019 5 Nov 2006 27 Jul 2017 21 Jun 2018 11 Jul 2018 8 Jan 2018 2 May 2014 26 Jan 2015 29 Mar 2016 20 Feb 2012 31 May 2019 25 Aug 2017 25 Aug 2017 23 Aug 2012 8 Jul 2016 20 May 2012 25 Feb 2014 19 Nov 2019 4 Mar 2006 23 Apr 2019

1,610 102 228 236 270 2,080 807 1,370 245 471 2,440 760 1,110 2,100 73 42 6 1,250 152 1,580 732 338 1,150 120

MBC

SBS JTBC

TV Chosun Channel A MBN

* Subscribers: as of 3 April 2022

142  Ki-Sung Kwak sparked national anger in the middle of 2020. Using the Telegram messenger app, about 260,000 people paid between 700,000 and 1,5000,000 Korean won to access pornographic video of more than 100 women, including 26 minors, who were forced into sexual slavery by an organized crime ring (OhmyNews 2020). In reporting the case, MBC’s MBig News showed the overly provocative content posted in the Nth Room and distorted the essence of the case by describing the apparent criminal behavior as “a misdeed” (Media Today 2020b). KLAB, one of KBS’s YouTube channels, was no different. It described the criminal behavior in great detail, for example “made the victim wash her face with toilet basin water,” and used thumbnails with scandalous phrases such as “I wanted to take out her eyes” (ibid.) Terrestrial television broadcasters’ YouTube news channels – KBS1-TV, 14F and SBS News – have also been criticized for their excessive use of provocative and sensational use of language in their thumbnails (Media Today 2020a). These examples show that the YouTube news channels provided by terrestrial television broadcasters have proved to be no different from YouTube news channels operated by cable networks or political influencers who pursue sensational, emotional and provocative news contents to retain the loyalty of their audiences (Oh and Song 2019; Yu and Jung 2020; Kim and Min 2021; Oh and Choi 2022). They also indicate that public broadcasters, KBS in particular, have been forced to produce content more in keeping with the sensational, provocative and emotional news broadcast on other YouTube channels. In the past, and in contrast to its competitors, KBS had been reluctant to invest in developing content for its YouTube news channels. This change in business strategy has also affected traditional TV programming, because online news and documentaries designed for YouTube can be incorporated into the broadcasters’ regular TV news programming. The increasing number of YouTube news/current affairs channels provided by traditional television broadcasters does not necessarily mean an increasing diversity of views and opinions. As discussed above, terrestrial television broadcasters in Korea are subject to direct or indirect influence from the government of the day, and major cable channels owned by conservative newspapers have continued to toe the conservative line. This ideological polarization can also be seen in their YouTube news/current affairs channels. For example, the video clips shown on the SUBUSU News Channel during the progressive Moon Jae-In’s time in government regularly criticized or satirized the opposition conservative party. The same channel, however, showed only one video clip critical of the Moon government (Namu Wiki 2022). The channel’s biased stance was also apparent in its positive coverage of North Korea, without any attention to fundamental issues such as human rights and the exercise of a brutal dictatorship (ibid.) This approach was clearly in line with the Moon government’s pro-North Korean stance. These examples support the argument that users of YouTube news channels build news credibility not only through their perception of news quality but also through their partisan expectations (Oh and Choi 2022). YouTube news channels operated by traditional television broadcasters, to a varying degree, provide news for those who share these channels’ ideological outlooks. In other words, viewers tend to consume ideologically congruent news, a practice that may be further strengthened through YouTube algorithms. To maintain a close relationship with their loyal viewers, terrestrial broadcasters have tried to utilize other YouTube channels that share their ideological outlooks. Less than two months before the 2022 presidential election, MBC, a pro-government broadcaster, aired an illegal recording of a phone conversation between a reporter from a left-wing political YouTube channel (Voice of Seoul) and Kim Kun-Hee, the wife of Yoon Suk-Yeol, the opposition candidate for president. Despite strong opposition from Yoon’s party and campaign team, who claimed that the Voice of Seoul reporter had spent six months planning how to obtain the illegal recordings, MBC went ahead and aired the material. This clearly shows MBC’s

Democratization, Social Media and Korean Television in Transition  143 willingness to strengthen its pro-Moon stance. By broadcasting the recordings, MBC attempted to embarrass or damage the opposition candidate. While the broadcaster claimed that it only edited and aired the recordings, the fact that it received a substantial transcript from a leftwing YouTube channel just before the election was a clear demonstration of its partisan stance. Contrary to what MBC expected, however, the content of the recordings proved to be trivial and had little or no impact on public opinion. As a result, MBC canceled its planned airing of a second instalment of the recordings. This incident demonstrated that traditional television broadcasters have not been averse to using material from other YouTube channels which support their ideological orientation. Similarly, like-minded political influencers who are popular on YouTube are often invited to appear in political programs on traditional television channels. Further evidence of the television broadcasters’ use of YouTube content that supports their ideological orientations can be found in YouTube community comments posted by viewers. For example, in his analysis of YouTube comments on television (terrestrial and cable) news, Yoon (2021) reported that the hostile and derogatory terms directed at the Moon government, such as “Moon Jae-Ang” (replacing “Jae-In” in the president’s name with “Jae-Ang,” which literally means “disaster” in Korean), “Commie” and “Leftist” appeared in the top 20 most used words in posted comments on cable television news YouTube channels (TV Chosun and Channel A). Given that these channels are owned by the two most influential conservative newspapers, it is fair to say that these YouTube news channels mainly reflect the views of supporters of conservative ideology. Similarly, in reporting speculation on North Korea’s nuclear build-up in early 2021, these conservative cable channels’ YouTube channels voiced stronger suspicion of North Korea’s intentions and ambitions than the YouTube news channels operated by terrestrial broadcasters who tried to take a neutral stance (Seol et al. 2021). Another notable impact of social media on television is social television. With the advance of digital technologies, social media has given the audience control over the way they consume television and significantly enhanced their viewing experience. In a social television environment, viewers share reactions, opinions, attitudes and judgments about programs as they watch in real-time using portable devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones (Raney and Ji 2017). Interaction during broadcasting typically occurs via text messages, tweets, online comments and live chats. Originating with entertainment programs, this experience of “social television” later spread to political talk shows and political debates, particularly during elections campaigns. As viewers share and exchange views with other viewers, this social television experience has come to impact the way television broadcasters format content because they have to consider audience viewing patterns through their immediate reaction to programs (Guo and Holmes 2016). According to KPF’s 2021 survey, 63% of the respondents in their 20s or 30s (57.5%) have social television experience. Of these respondents, 75% indicated that they interact via KakaoTalk (52%) or YouTube (23%) while they are watching television (KPF 2021). Entertainment and drama programs are the most popular among viewers in their 20s and 30s, while for the viewers aged over 40 news programs are the most popular (ibid.). Television broadcasters in Korea began to offer the experience of social television in their news and current affairs programs in the early 2010s. In its flagship news programs – KBS News 9 and Newsline – KBS launched an interactive service that allowed viewers to express their opinions through live-tweeting or SNS. Similarly, MBC attempted to incorporate a tweet-discussion into its popular current affairs program, 100-Minute Talk, allowing viewers to participate live in the discussion (Kim 2012). More recently, with the proliferation of second-screen devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, people can interact with television content through an additional screen, a practice now known as second screen viewing. While the second screen

144  Ki-Sung Kwak television experience enhances viewer engagement, it is premature to measure its influence on television production and consumption in political news in Korea mainly due to the current lack of research in this area.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that state control over public service broadcasting in Korea has been strengthened by the dominant position of the government and ruling party in the operation and control over programming. Government control over television broadcasting is unsurprising, but in the case of Korea governments have sought advantage through their continuing domination of public service broadcasting. It is striking to note that the legacy of authoritarianism – structural constraints and political interference in news reporting – remains a feature of contemporary debates about state control over television broadcasting in Korea. Traditional television broadcasters in Korea, particularly terrestrial broadcasters, that in 2014 refused to show their programs on YouTube, have now fully incorporated YouTube and other social media into their routines. In the rapidly changing YouTube environment, television broadcasters have been forced to provide their own YouTube news channels that are different from their original news format platforms. As part of this process, sensational and provocative news items have become a prevalent part of the YouTube channels offered by traditional television broadcasters, as this type of news attracts young viewers. This practice has been most visible in the major cable networks’ YouTube news channels owned by conservative newspapers and, to a lesser extent, in the terrestrial broadcasters’ YouTube channels. Bound by their obligations to the public, terrestrial broadcasters have maintained somewhat conservative contents in their YouTube news channels. As shown in this chapter, however, there are many indications that these broadcasters are adopting a more aggressive strategy – by showing sensational and provocative contents – to attract young viewers. This raises the question of whether YouTube is a platform that promotes and replicates sensational, emotional stories at the expense of more in-depth and more accurate understanding of key issues. This chapter has also shown that the polarized nature of news and current affairs programs on traditional television platforms has been extended to these broadcasters’ YouTube news channels. As such, traditional television broadcasters’ YouTube news channels in Korea have further widened the ideological gap between the major parties. These channels provide news contents for like-minded viewers, and YouTube algorithms help them to strengthen their shared ideological outlooks. This poses a serious threat to democracy, mainly because the algorithms do not open up access to differing points of view (Wheeler 2019).

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Democratization, Social Media and Korean Television in Transition  145 Guo, M. and Holmes, M. (2016) “An Eye-Tracking Analysis of Visual Attention Between Television and Second Screens,” in J. Pavlik (ed) Digital Technology and the Future of Broadcasting, New York: Routledge. Hankook Ilbo (2016) “Conversation on Sewol Ferry between Lee and Kim Revealed,” 30 June. Hankyoreh (2017) “NIS Found to Have Conducted Surveillance of MBC, KBS,” 18 September. Kim, C. and Min, Y. (2021) “The 2020 Parliamentary Election and YouTube Journalism: An Analysis of the Fairness and Quality of Election Videos on the YouTube Channels of Major Broadcasters and Political Influencers,” Broadcasting and Communication, 22(2): 130–66. Kim, M. (2012) Social Media Research, Seoul: Communication Books. Korea Times (2008) “President Lee Sacks KBS Chief,” 11 August. KPF (2021) Social Media Users in Korea 2021, Seoul: Korea Press Foundation. Kyunghyang Shinmun (2017) “NIS Documents Reveal Control over KBS and MBC with Specific Plans,” 18 September. Media Today (2020a) “Terrestrial Broadcasters’ YouTube Thumbnail Full of Offensive Language,” 12 March. Media Today (2020b) “Terrestrial Broadcasters’ YouTube Channels Provocative and Sensational Reporting on ‘Nth Room’ Case,” 17 September. Media Today (2021) “KBS Ad Income from Its YouTube Channel Justified?,” 12 October. Media Today (2022) “MBC 14F’s New Challenge Newsletter,” 28 February. Munger, K. and Phillips, J. (2022) “Right Wing YouTube: A Supply and Demand Perspective,” International Journal of Press/Politics, 17(1): 186–219. Namu Wiki (2022) “SBS News,” 26 March. Oh, H. and Choi, J. (2022) “The Credibility Building Mechanism of YouTube News Channels Focusing on the Effect of News Quality and Partisan Expectation Fitting on News Credibility,” Journal of Communication Research, 59(1): 50–91. Oh, S. and Song, H. (2019) YouTube Algorithm and Journalism, Seoul: Korea Press Foundation. OhmyNews (2020) “Nth Room Case Reminds Us Last Year’s Nightmare,” 24 March. Raney, A. and Ji, Q. (2017) “Entertaining Each Other? Modeling the Socially Shared Television Viewing Experience: Social TV Entertainment,” Human Communication Research, 43(4): 424–35. Seol, J. Lee, J. and Hong. J. (2021) “Research on YouTube as a Journalism Platform: A Relational Analysis of North Korea Nuclear Build-up Speculation on Channels Operated by Mainstream News and Individuals,” Korean Journal of Journalism & Communication Studies, 65(6): 334–71. Wheeler, T. (2019) “Can Social Media ‘Targetcasting’ and Democracy Coexist?,” 13 November. Yoon, H. (2021) “Text Classification of YouTube News Media Comments: Focusing on Broadcasting, Cable News, & Conservative Creator Media,” Journal of the Korean Data Analysis Society, 23(3): 1399–416. Yu, S. and Jung, Y. (2020) “Online Video Platform and the Strategy of the Broadcasting Networks News Content,” Korean Journal of Broadcasting & Telecommunications Research, 111(Summer): 68–109.

Part IV

Web Drama, Webtoon and Animation

13 Korean Web Drama on the Rise The Difference Independent Productions Make Jennifer M. Kang

It has been a decade since the term “web drama” was first used and popularized in South Korea (hereafter Korea), and today it has become one of the most popular entertainment forms in the Korean media landscape. In the Korean context, web drama refers to professionally produced, short original serialized stories that are first run on Internet platforms. Web dramas are optimized for the mobile screen by telling stories with extremely short running times – a couple minutes per episode – and utilizing screen effects like subtitling and vertical-ratio filming. In other places around the world, this type of content is better known as web series, webisodes and mobisodes, but web drama is what is used in Korea. When web dramas were starting out in the 2010s, they were considered an alternative to television drama because they did not depend on broadcast networks for distribution. Compared to television, web dramas had relatively low entry barriers, which meant that a multitude of players existed in financing, producing and distributing content. In particular, independent production companies have been at the forefront of web dramas. The production company WhyNot Media’s Secret Crushes (2016–2017) series was the first web drama to hit 100 million views, and in 2021 Playlist Studio’s Love Playlist (2017–2019) series set a new record of 600 million views (Noh 2021; Lee 2022). Nowadays, the industrial and academic conversation about web content tends to be on largescale productions by streaming video on demand (SVOD) such as Netflix Korea’s Squid Game (2021) and Apple TV Plus’s Korean original series Dr. Brain (2021), while less attention is given to the smaller-scale productions of web drama. While it is certainly true that large-scale productions have the economic and cultural power to bring widespread changes, this approach overlooks the value of potential that small-scale productions introduce to the industry (Christian 2018). Unlike television drama, web drama is an area where various players – and not the legacy players – have been at the forefront of defining and establishing this new content form. This chapter focuses on two non-legacy players, Playlist Studio and WhyNot Media, that specialize in web drama production. Through a close analysis of these two companies and their content production, it argues that the unique value of non-legacy players’ smaller-scale production is in the critiquing and reinvention of existing industrial practices.

Korean Television and Independent Productions The Korean television industry has long been dominated by the three broadcasters, Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) and Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS). For decades, television was a fairly centralized medium, both industrially and culturally, as it was controlled by a limited number of broadcasters. More than 80% of the total television programs were produced by the broadcast networks’ in-house production companies until the 1990s (Nam 2008). This changed when regulations, namely the independent DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-18

150  Jennifer M. Kang production quota in 1991, were established to lessen the power of the broadcasters and diversify content production. Television drama was one of the popular genres that broadcasters allocated to independent production companies (Oh 2018). This was because of the belief that independent producers be better positioned to gather funding from various sources. Newer distribution channels, such as cable television in 1995, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) in 2009 and streaming services in the 2010s, further eroded the broadcast-centric television culture. When Korean television dramas started to gain popularity in overseas markets in the early 2000s (known as the Korean Wave), this brought significant change to the television industry. For example, the drama Winter Sonata (2002) was exported to Japan in 2003, where it became a huge hit. The drama is a love story between two childhood friends who fall in love when they reunite as adults. The drama was said to have generated over $5 billion in revenue, which included earnings from DVD sales and drama-related tourism (Oh 2018). The Korean Wave has since then expanded to include various popular culture forms, such as K-pop (Korean popular music), digital games, fashion and beauty products, and is distributed all around the world. The Korean Wave export size is estimated to have grown from $1.3 billion in 2005 to $11.92 billion in 2020 (Yang and Lee 2022). The lucrative overseas market has led Korean broadcasters to stick to genres, formulas and talent that has already proven to be successful to manage the unpredictable nature of the television drama industry (Oh 2018). The typical Korean drama that has been successful globally is the urban love story between characters from different social and familial backgrounds (  Ju and Lee 2015). In this archetype, good-looking and fashionable young professionals overcome obstacles that stem from their differences and succeed in their love by the end of the series. This contemporary romance story is especially attractive to advertisers because they are considered to be “well suited to a display of lifestyle-oriented consumer goods catering to a young female audience” (Oh 2018: 61). Due to broadcast television’s revenue model, their favored topics were non-controversial and appealing to a large audience because strong audience ratings led to high advertisement sales. Furthermore, overseas buyers tend to consult the domestic audience ratings when making buying decisions, so going outside of industrial norms to do risky storytelling was not favorable in the television drama industry (Oh 2018). In the 2010s, the popularization of streaming services brought further changes to the drama production industry. Particularly, Netflix capitalized on the global presence of the Korean Wave and aggressively invested in local original drama productions. The subscriber-funded revenue model and large production budgets of the platform meant that local creators were free from the restrictions of broadcast networks. Netflix Korea’s strategy was to provide original series that would be difficult to see on broadcast television (Yu 2020). For instance, it is well known that Squid Game took almost a decade to make because it was “too unrealistic and violent to be commercially viable” by local standards (Verhoeven 2021). Eventually, it was Netflix that greenlighted the series, and it was a worldwide success. Other niche stories such as teen crime (Extracurricular, 2020), horror (Sweet Home, 2020) and zombies (All of Us Are Dead, 2022) were featured in Netflix Korea Originals. In short, Netflix Korea provided space for different storytelling and opportunities for creators that were not limited by the existing industrial norms. These changes in the Korean television industry are frequently discussed in academic and industrial circles (Yu 2020; Yang and Lee 2022). But what gets overlooked in these conversations is the role of independent productions, or, more specifically, small-scale productions done by the non-legacy players. The key definition of Korean independent production is in its “independent status vis-à-vis broadcasters,” in other words, whether the production company has a connection to legacy players, like broadcast networks (Oh 2018: 40). Then, applying this to web drama, we can identify independent web dramas as those created by companies that are not part of the traditional television industry.

Korean Web Drama on the Rise  151 Independent production companies have been leading web drama production since the beginning, but their web dramas are often underestimated because of the lack of their cultural and economic capital. Instead, the large-scale productions such as Netflix Originals and broadcast dramas tend to dominate the conversations about the web original content. The small-scale productions have the potential to fuel key innovations in production, distribution and representation that might spill over into the larger media economy; and it is often those at the margins who are capable of and responsible for such innovations (Christian 2018). Thus, it is necessary to understand the new state of television that fosters fresh producers, narratives and industrial practices by focusing on independent web drama.

From SNS Drama to Web Drama Short, serialized videos certainly existed prior to web drama. At the time, there was no commonly agreed term for this type of content; these videos were called social networking site (SNS) drama, mobile movie, mobile drama and web drama. But in 2013 the term “web drama” was popularized, when the top Internet portal site Naver created a “web drama” category on their streaming platform. Today, web drama refers to specific kind of online content. It is the short, original drama stories that are meant to be consumed on mobile devices and attempt to shift away from television drama conventions (Kang 2021). The audiences for web dramas are imagined to be consuming content on their smartphones, so the drama form has adapted to this small screen viewing environment. There is no single dominant platform for web dramas; instead, they can be seen on a wide variety of platforms, including advertising-based video on demand (AVOD, such as Naver TV, YouTube and Kakao TV) and social media. This definition excludes television dramas that are re-edited for Internet distribution and large-scale web productions that are essentially television dramas. For example, the ten-minute version of Winter Sonata released on KBS’s YouTube channel is not a web drama. In a strict sense, Squid Game is also not a web drama because it was a $21 million production that was distributed through Netflix’s worldwide network. Web dramas offered creative freedom to independent production companies because they did not have to rely on the television’s distribution bottleneck. Many creators were free to experiment with various forms, topics and aesthetics that would otherwise be difficult to see on television. One of the early web dramas, 72 Seconds Drama (2015–2016), exemplifies such experiments. As the title suggests, each episode tells a story under two minutes, and it uses extremely fast, rap-like voiceovers to move the narrative forward during this limited running time. This series has an episodic narrative, and each episode is about the everyday life experiences, like finding loose change on the sidewalk or getting a haircut. This is a clear departure from the melodramatic love stories that Korean television dramas are known for. Also, filming vertically (e.g. Pocket Boyfriend, 2015), using subtitles to clarify the dialogue (e.g. Secret Crushes, 2016–2017) and focusing on supernatural topics (e.g. Aftermath, 2013) are some of the experiments that were happening within web dramas. Moreover, the short running times – usually around 5–20 minutes per episode – meant that the production costs were much cheaper than television. The average production budget for a television drama series (16 episodes) is currently $8.6 million (12 billion KRW) (Yang 2022). In comparison, an entire season of web drama (8 episodes) is estimated to cost between $70,000– 210,000 (100–300 million KRW). These relatively lower barriers meant that diverse types of players, namely the independent production companies, could participate in web drama production. As the volume of web drama being produced grew over the years, it attracted investors’ attention; for instance, the independent production companies WhyNot Media raised

152  Jennifer M. Kang $14 million (20 billion KRW) in investments in 2022 and Playlist Studio raised $17.4 million (25 billion KRW) in 2021 (Kim 2021; 2022). In academic research, scholars generally agree that web dramas are an open field where various players come together to employ innovative practices to define this new media form (Kim and Jang 2015; Lee 2015). There has been much work done on how web dramas differ from television dramas, in terms of narrative and aesthetics. The short running times of web drama required television drama storytelling techniques to be adapted accordingly. Research has identified that formal traits like voiceovers, monologues and computer graphics were employed to help audiences understand the overall narrative within the limited running times (Kim and Jang 2015; Ryu 2018). For instance, in the Oh Gusil (2015–2017) series, voiceovers went beyond their traditional function of providing additional information to the audience. Instead, the narrator in Oh Gusil took on a character of its own, attempting to hold a conversation with the main characters and entertaining the audience members. Ryu (2018) sees this as an experimental way to maintain the audience’s attention on the smaller screen. Likewise, Tae (2020)’s research on the Love Playlist series found that the overall narrative did not have a clear antagonist and left the conclusion to be open-ended, which led viewers to discuss their interpretations in the comments section of the video. This ambiguity stimulated conversation among viewers, allowing viewers to become more immersed in the story. Web dramas have also been a popular topic to study younger audiences, as they are usually thought to be the main audience. The co-produced web drama Dramaworld (2016) has been examined as an exemplary case study to look at the representations of transnational fans, who are considered to be the ideal consumers for new media forms (Oh and Nishime 2019), and Lee and Zhang (2021) have pointed out that web dramas are useful to understanding the dominant discourses of Korean youth because they have become part of everyday entertainment for younger generations. The interesting point to note is that these new perspectives and changes were mainly seen in web dramas made by independent production companies. These companies were the ones engaging with the reinvention of creative forms, narrative structures, business strategies and institutional norms that departed from longstanding television practices. The following sections focus on two independent production companies, Playlist Studio and WhyNot Media, that represent such innovative practices with web drama.

Playlist Studio: The Playlist Universe and Niche Audiences Playlist Studio was created by the top portal site Naver’s subsidiaries, Line Webtoon and Snow Corporation, in 2017. Line Webtoon is a platform within Naver that specializes in webtoons, a form of digital comics. Snow Corporation operates the photo application Snow, which provides virtual stickers, filters and editing tools. Initially, these two subsidiaries established Playlist Studio as a joint investment to produce branded content to promote the Snow app. When their web drama series Love Playlist took off, the company changed their focus to original web drama production. Playlist Studio targets young audiences in their teens to twenties with web drama stories that resonate with this age group (Playlist Studio 2020). For example, they have produced Seventeen (2017) and A-Teen (2018–2019) for high school students, and Not Alright But It’s Alright (2018) for young adults starting their first job. Among their original titles, the Love Playlist series is the most well-known web drama that Playlist Studio has produced. The series focuses on a group of college students and their friendships and romantic relationships. It highlights the ups and downs of young adults’ romances in a realistic manner; the challenges that the couples face is not overly dramatic, but mundane. Everyday issues like being jealous of close friends and

Korean Web Drama on the Rise  153 worrying about mandatory military enlistment (that all Korean men are required to fulfill) are problems that the couples go through. The narrative relies on voiceovers to convey the inner thoughts of the characters to the viewers. As of 2022, Love Playlist has had four seasons, and the web drama has expanded on its popularity into other areas, such as a broadcast television version that is expected to air on KBS. What is especially notable about Love Playlist is that it has demonstrated how producing content for a specific audience can be commercially feasible. Playlist Studio takes a long-term approach to content production and plans their web dramas to be part of a larger transmedia universe. All of Playlist Studio’s web dramas are part of the Plyverse (short for Playlist Universe), which is the neighborhood where all the web dramas take place. The official website of Plyverse has detailed information about the schools, companies and other facilities within this universe. Things like maps, organization structures, statistics of the student/company body and admission information are available on this website. Each of the web dramas targets a specific demographic that aligns with Plyverse. For example, Love Playlist is about the romance between college students from Seoyeon University and all the high school students in A-Teen attend Seoyeon High School. Also, the characters from Playlist Studio’s web dramas crossover into other institutions within this universe. Jae-In Han, one of the main characters of Love Playlist, is a graduate of Seoyeon High School and attends Seoyeon University in Love Playlist. In Ply Friends (2021), Jae-In starts her first job as a designer at Revan Company. As another example, the web drama Re-Feel (2019) centers on part-time workers at a café within the Plyverse and the main characters from both Love Playlist and A-Teen frequently appear in the episodes as cameos. It is difficult to see long-term storytelling on Korean television. The most popular dramas are usually single season with 16 to 20 episodes because this is thought to be the ideal length to maximize audience ratings (Nam 2017). The industrial practices, such as the contract length for creative talent, are normalized around singular seasons, and it is difficult to go against these industrial norms to extend dramas into multiple seasons (Yu and Jeong 2019). The Korean industry relies on a single-writer system, and it is challenging for a writer to write multiple seasons by themselves. Also, actors worry of typecasting if they do multiple seasons of the same character and tend to avoid contracts that require longer seasons. Thus, broadcast drama “seasons” are usually additional stand-alone series that simply share the same premises with an entirely different cast and crew. However, Playlist Studio has successfully built a transmedia universe for their target audience. The company has constructed an elaborate world where their main characters are linked together through their education and workplaces. The web dramas that take place in Plyverse are narratively continuous (as seen with Jae-In’s life story), and the same actors appear in Playlist Studio’s other web dramas as cameos. Moreover, Playlist Studio has expanded their transmedia storytelling into other platforms as well. The Love Playlist series has been made into a theater play and A-Teen into webtoon series. One of the companies within Plyverse, Revan Company, is named as the company that produces the Love Playlist merchandise that Playlist Studio sells. Based on their popularity of Love Playlist, Playlist Studio has accumulated over 14.9 million subscribers worldwide and distributed their content to overseas platforms such as Japan’s ABEMA TV and America’s Viki (Playlist Studio 2020). They have become known for successfully targeting young audiences and legacy players have partnered with Playlist Studio for drama productions. Most notably, Playlist Studio co-produced the television drama Live On (2020– 2021) with cable channel Joongang Tongyang Broadcasting Company (JTBC) and entertainment agency KeyEast. Live On was part of Plyverse, as the premise of this drama was a romance story of high school students attending Seoyeon High School. Today, it has become rare to see teenagers as the main characters on television dramas, due to the industrial perception that this

154  Jennifer M. Kang genre is too niche to gather sufficient audience ratings (Moon 2018). But Live On shows how even legacy players are paying attention to Playlist Studio’s success with younger audiences.

WhyNot Media: Opportunities for New Talent WhyNot Media was started by three previous broadcast producers in 2016. The founders left their jobs at the broadcast networks because they felt that the future was with mobile content production (Seo 2018). The company’s motto is to create “content franchise for the new generation,” and their content is geared toward young adults in their 20s (WhyNot Media n.d.). As such, their original web dramas deal with issues that resonate with this age group. The Between Friendship and Love (2016–2018) series is about how two friends grow closer and move into romantic relationships. A spin-off from this series, Office Watch (2017–2019), focuses on the way two co-workers navigate their professional careers while working at the same company. With Korean television drama, the key creative labor tends to go through an apprenticeship-like training system. For producers, it was expected that one should join a broadcasting organization to learn the production process (An 2018). A recruit would first learn the basics of directing, editing, casting and so on, and do menial tasks on the set. It usually took several years for a recruit to reach a level of seniority to have the power to make creative decisions. For writers, it was typical for new writers to start their career by working under a famous writer, work their way up the ranks and then write an original drama on their own (Kim and Hong 2016). Although there were instances where a newcomer broke into the industry without years of training, this hierarchical pathway was the norm for most talent. Under this training system, there were very limited opportunities for young talent to take on a creative role. Also, the export-oriented nature of the drama industry, thanks to the Korean Wave, further limits fresh talent because the well-known talent is better positioned to make global sales (Oh 2018). WhyNot Media moved away from this labor hierarchy in their content production. The entire production process, from preproduction to feedback from the audience, is led by the producer (Shin 2016). The producer is not a fixed job rank but is a job title given to the person who comes up with the idea for an original series. A worker could be the producer for a particular series but become a crew member for another. Once a producer has an idea, the producer then recruits team members within the company and works on the production with those members. Given that most of the workers at WhyNot Media are in their 20s, this company is giving younger talent the space to experiment with web content. WhyNot Media’s most famous web drama, Secret Crushes, was noted for their innovative format of single-shot filming. Na-Eun Lee, who created Secret Crushes, had no prior filming or editing experience. Eventually, she filmed Secret Crushes in a single take with very little editing cuts, and this became the signature format of the series (Choi 2019). Furthermore, WhyNot Media believed that the best way to reach their target audience was to let creators from the same age group tell relatable stories. The executives deliberately took a hands-off approach to content production and gave space for young workers to create stories that they wanted to tell. The head of WhyNot Media, Min-Seok Lee, has talked about the importance of establishing a production pipeline so that the unexperienced, young creators could concentrate just on their storytelling (Lee 2021). In television drama, conflicts between writers, directors and producers are frequent because all these players come from different organizations and have different visions (Kim and Hong 2016). The pressure to gather high audience ratings can require the creative talent to modify storylines to appease network executives and advertisers. Based on his experience as a broadcast producer, Lee thought that it was crucial to create an environment where creators maintained creative rights over their stories. WhyNot Media has signed exclusive contracts with actors and social media influencers, acquired

Korean Web Drama on the Rise  155 television production companies The Great Show and OZ Arena, and created their own content commerce platform Wadadat (Kim 2022; Lee 2022). As the company expanded their capacity to produce and own various intellectual properties, it has strengthened their position in the web drama production sector. WhyNot Media has over 1.74 million subscribers on their YouTube channel, KOK TV, and they have exported their original web dramas to platforms in Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia. Office Watch has been remade in Indonesia, by the streaming service Genflix, and Secret Crushes has been turned into a novel, webtoon and broadcast drama. The company has won awards at various events, including an award from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism at the 2020 Korea Content Awards in recognition of their global presence. WhyNot Media’s success shows how hiring heavyweight names and experienced creatives are not the only way to succeed in drama production.

Conclusion Web dramas continue to establish their presence in Korean media. With people spending more time on their smartphones than ever, the television industry now recognizes the importance of web content. For example, cable channels tvN and JTBC have each created in-house production houses that specialize in original web content, and broadcasters are collaborating with independent production companies to produce web dramas. There is much attention on the changes that the Korean television industry has gone through in the recent years. The rise of SVOD, particularly Netflix, is perceived to have significant influence on these changes (Yu 2020). Streaming services have worked to ensure the creators’ freedom and be open toward different formal-aesthetic traits, to provide original content to subscribers. It is important to see the widespread impact of the powerful players, but this approach can also obscure the breadth and depth of agents acting within media industries. Independent production companies are often overlooked because they lack the economic and cultural capital compared to legacy players, but their small-scale productions often contribute to important innovations despite their marginalized status (Christian 2018). The norms of the television industry have started to shift toward catering to niche sensibilities and retaining creative rights, which were already happening with web dramas, as seen with the cases of Playlist Studio and WhyNot Media. Recently, the Korean tech giant Kakao has recurited a number of television producers to produce web original content for their platform, Kakao TV. The so-called new web content form that these previous television workers created looks very similar to the early web dramas by the independent companies. It is worth recognizing how the innovations of small-scale productions continue to influence and shape web dramas.

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156  Jennifer M. Kang Kim, H.A. (2021) “Naver Content Studio Playlist Attracts 25 Billion KRW,” eDaily, 14 March. Kim, M. and Jang, Y.J. (2015) “An Exploratory Research on Production and Narrative Characteristics of Web Drama Contents: Focusing on Web Dramas on Naver TV Cast,” Korean Journal of Journalism & Communication Studies, 59(5): 298–327. Kim, M.S. and Hong, J. (2016) “The Study about TV Drama Writers: Focusing on the Conflict and Compromises during the Process of Producing TV Dramas,” Journal of Broadcasting and Telecommunication Studies, 30(4): 41–82. Kim, Y.L. (2022) “WhyNot Media Attracts 20 Billion KRW in Investments,” eDaily, 1 June. Lee, H.K. and Zhang, X. (2021) “The Korean Wave as a Source of Implicit Cultural Policy: Making of a Neoliberal Subjectivity in a Korean Style,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(3): 521–37. Lee, J. (2015) “Aspect of Storytelling in Korean Web Drama,” Humanities Contents, 38: 241–60. Lee, J.B. (2022) “WhyNot Media Opens Content Commerce Platform Wadadat,” Xports News, 21 January. Lee, M.S. (2021) “Content Franchise for New Generation: WhyNot Media’s Content Strategy,” Broadcasting Trend & Insight, 26: 19–25. Moon, S.Y. (2018) “Move to the Web and Expand, Recent Trend of School Contents Drama,” The Journal of Korean Drama and Theatre, 62: 95–122. Nam, J.E. (2017) “4, 9, 10 Episodes, Dramas’ Forms Start to Change,” Hankyoreh, 15 January. Nam, S. (2008) “The Politics of Compressed Development in New Media: A History of Korean Cable Television, 1992–2005,” Media, Culture & Society, 30(5): 641–61. Noh, K.S. (2021) “Dear M, the Next Hit after Love Playlist to Air in February,” Maeil Shinmun, 13 January. Oh, D.C. and Nishime, L. (2019) “Imagining the Post-National Television Fan: Counter-Flows and Hybrid Ambivalence in Dramaworld,” International Communication Gazette, 81(2): 121–38. Oh, Y. (2018) Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Playlist Studio (2020) “About Playlist,” Playlist Studio. Ryu, J.H. (2018) “The Function of Voice-Over Narration in the Web Drama OH Ku-Sil,” Journal of the Korea Contents Association, 18(6): 399–413. Seo, S.B. (2018) “WhyNot Media, Let’s Try Hard, But Not Too Hard,” Herald Business, 4 May. Shin, E.S. (2016) “Mobile Network WhyNot Media Min-Seok Lee, Hee-Jun Lim, Hyun-Ki Kim,” Topclass, 24 November. Tae, B.R. (2020) “Analysis of Love Narratives and Discourse of Web Drama: Focusing on the Web Drama Love Playlist,” Journal of the Korea Contents Association, 20(6): 64–76. Verhoeven, B. (2021) “Squid Game Creator Hwang Dong-Hyuk Looks Back on Developing the Series,” Hollywood Reporter, 19 November. WhyNot Media (n.d.) “About Us,” WhyNot Media. Yang, S.J. (2022) “Silver Spoon Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Drama Production Budgets Skyrocket,” Hankook Ilbo, 19 August. Yang, S.Y. and Lee, S.M. (2022) “The History and Future Prospects of the Korean Wave,” KOCCA Focus, Naju: Korea Creative Content Agency. Yu, K. (2020) “The Influence of Netflix on the Domestic Drama Market,” Media Issue & Trend, 40: 46–62. Yu, K. and Jeong, H.R. (2019) “Study on Production of TV Series in Terrestrial TV of Korea,” Broadcasting & Communication, 20(1): 5–45.

14 Korean Webtoon and Identity Politics in the Digital Age Hyung-Gu Lynn

Since their initial emergence on personal websites and mini homepages in South Korea (­hereafter Korea) of the early 2000s (Lynn 2016: 4–5), webtoons have grown exponentially to become a global force, during the 2010s as loss leaders for competing Internet platforms in Korea, and since the late 2010s as sources of revenues through increasing pay-for-view titles and advertising fees. Webtoons have also provided a test laboratory for and motherlode of a wide range of original stories whose adaptation rights have been purchased by television producers and film directors for live-action versions. The domestic and international commercial and critical successes, particularly of titles adapted into television or streaming dramas such as Itaewon Class (webtoon 2017–19; drama 2020) and Sweet Home (webtoon 2017–20; drama 2020), or into animated series such as Tower of God (webtoon 2010–20; animation 2020) and Noblesse (webtoon 2007–19; animation 2020), have further amplified the popularity of the medium as viewers look for the webtoon original source of the live-action versions. Just one indicator of the potent pull of webtoons is the fact that Yumi’s Cells, a title on the platform Naver, attracted 3.2 billion views when it ended its five-year run in 2020 (Min 2020), which in turn made the adaptation into a live-action series a relatively safe bet for the Korean station tvN and the production companies when they began filming in 2021 as many fans of the original tuned into the adaptation. The rapid growth in popularity and profile of webtoons has triggered a concordant growth in the scale, scope and variety of academic studies of related subjects. Researchers have examined the factors driving the success of webtoons (  Jin 2015; Yecies and Shim 2021), the effects of advertising or “brand” webtoons on SNS or platforms (Ryu 2020), as well as undertaken close readings of specific titles across multiple media (Fulton 2020), among a wider range of approaches. This chapter adds to the burgeoning body of research through the question, why and how have webtoons served as virtual spaces for the construction and contestation of minority and gender identities and rights? For the purposes of this chapter, “minority groups” refer to the relatively disadvantaged in Korean workplaces, namely women, people with different types of disabilities, LGBTQIA+, ethnic minorities and senior citizens. The caveat is that within the nebulous category the degree and the experiences of minorities and disabilities are multiple, varied and consilient. Even within blindness or deafness, degrees of sight or hearing impairment can vary widely and diverge in the extent and scope of impact in everyday life, while the challenges of some physically disabled and some elderly might converge. As an initial exploration of the subject, this chapter treats all of these under the broad rubric of “minorities.” Three steps at different scales of abstraction are necessary to answer the question. The first section of this chapter explains the efficacy of treating webtoons and popular culture narratives across all media as forms of “synthetic experiences” that help bridge the fiction–reality continuum, rather than seeing them solely as sources of distraction, escape, artworks, misinformation DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-19

158  Hyung-Gu Lynn or revenue. Second, the chapter argues that the cost efficiency and consequent lower-entry barriers and scale of new releases of webtoons makes it a particularly, if not uniquely, fertile space among popular culture media for creators hailing from marginalized identities to engage in constructions, confirmations, contestations and circulations of a range of collective identities, ideologies and practices, particularly from minority or disadvantaged groups based on gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and/or disability, even as dominant prejudices and assumptions can also be reinforced and normalized for the same reasons of accessibility and variety. Then, the third section briefly highlights how specific titles have introduced storylines and feature characters from marginalized groups but still joust with other webtoons that regurgitate clichés, stereotypes and prejudices.

Defining Synthetic Experiences Mark Twain wrote in his 1897 travelogue, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t” (Twain 1897: 156). This wry observation aside, publications repeating two extremes of dismissal/alarm and celebration/instrumentalization are ubiquitous. Treating culture media and texts as “synthetic experiences” helps bridge the two extremes. On the one hand, discourses and diatribes decrying the pernicious effects of fiction and mass media on reality are difficult to avoid. With the diffusion of digital communications infrastructure, the ubiquity of the stories we tell ourselves run the gamut from realistic slice-of-life narratives to special effects laden, surreal adventures; delivered via multiple platforms and providers, and accessed on a wide range of devices. But clarion calls against the saturation of everyday reality by commercially driven, hypnotic sights and sounds that alienate individuals from real, or at least non-mediated collective practices and praxis, have been a constant accompaniment to the advent and the spread of new technologies. For example, in his The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord famously lamented the displacement of authenticity by mass-mediated images on television and in advertisements that infuse and shape the worldviews of people (1967: 2, 84). Some more recent works assert, “synthetic experience represents a distortion of reality that poses serious consequences for the media audience and for society” (Funkhauser and Shaw 1990: 76), and others warn that the decades-long privatization and commercialization of American popular culture require a more active public diplomacy initiative to filter and manage (Bayles 2014). On the other hand, academic celebrations of, applied warnings against, and government strategies to operationalize popular culture and media, whether defined as public information, propaganda or cyberwarfare, also proliferate. The US Army’s doctrine of Fifth Dimensional Operation essentially treats information, including fiction or propaganda, as well as cyberwar, as one of the core five dimensions of military activities, along with land, sea and air, while the 9/11 Commission’s analysis of the policy failures leading to the attacks encouraged “routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination” as a security counter to map possible future threats (The 9/11 Commission 2004: 344). More anodyne framings in policy, academic and media contexts that treat popular culture as a policy instrument, operating under the banners of public diplomacy, soft power and cultural diplomacy, are similarly ubiquitous (Nye 2008). Rather than rely on binary distinctions of popular culture as distorter of reality vs. powerful shaper of minds, the notion of “synthetic experiences” helps bridge the fiction–reality or reality–virtuality continuum. My definition of the concept incorporates existing ideas about how fiction and popular culture form “simulations” of selves that help recreate extreme situations, model behaviors, and thereby enhance learning and understanding (Mar and Oatley 2008) and

Korean Webtoon and Identity Politics in the Digital Age  159 serve as “pseudo-recollections” that “reinforce, induce and even replace identities and beliefs that affect how audiences behave in the real world” (Daniel and Musgrave 2017: 303). Moreover, it expands on the “synthetic” element by clarifying seven conceptual functions of the term. First, experiencing popular culture helps synthesize or integrate the “real” with the “ideal” or fictional experiences. Second, it is synthetic not simply as in “false” or as an antonym to “natural,” but as deliberate dramatizations or exaggerations that serve as reprieve and escape from quotidian realities (e.g. time is compressed, accelerated, edited; background music often, if not always, constant). Third, these stories have a temporal element since individuals are forced to synthesize the past (memories), present (real) and future (projected) selves, even as this process is shaped by a range of reactions that move from autonomous interpretation to unthinking absorption. Fourth, as most texts require contextual knowledge to ascertain veracity, they are for the most part synthetic rather than analytic propositions per Kant (putting aside whether the opposite category of the “analytic” for internally verifiable truths exists or is useful or not) (Russell 2007). Fifth, not only webtoons, but also film, television and video games, all synthesize the visual and the textual, which in turn accentuates the dominance of “literacy” as visuality, convergent with Walter Ong’s work mapping the transition from orality/aurality to literacy/ visuality (Ong 1977: 126). Sixth, the “false” experience of fiction generates a range of “truths” that are derived from textual, paratextual and contextual sources (Kim 2022). That is, popular culture generates its own rules that link external and internal meanings and rules, rather than merely distorting or displacing an isolated, pure “reality”; to simplify, fictional stories and entities exist and thus have their own quiddity (Thomasson 1999). Seventh and finally, the term encourages the synthesis of cognate ideas orbiting in different disciplines that start with assumptions about the scale and the valences of the impact of popular culture and media, including but not limited to the streams of research flagged above, but also for long-established and debated concepts in psychology, including cultivation theory (Potter 2014) and stereotype threat (Inzlicht and Schmader 2012). Starting with the definition of popular culture as a space of synthetic experiences allows for analysis of contestation and construction, escape or entrapment, reflection of wishes or on reality, with possibility for reshaping narratives, identities and perceptions via potentially powerful framing, agenda setting and priming effects (McCombs 2004), without treating them as moral infringements or frivolous ephemera. A specific popular culture title can critique “reality,” reflect past traumas, express hopes for better futures, distort perceptions of a population, place or events, and reinforce dominant or majority norms, much like news or other “real” sources of information. Therefore, the fact that some fictionalized stories have spotlighted past crimes and injustices in actual history should not come as a surprise. A prominent case in Korea is the 2011 film Silenced (Dogani) (directed by Hwang Dong-Hyuk, starring Gong Yoo) about sustained sexual assault and abuse of students at the Gwangju Inhwa School for the Deaf. The film was based on a 2009 novel The Crucible by novelist Gong Ji-Young, which in turn was based on real-life events at the school. The commercial and critical success of the film triggered public horror at the events that eventually led to the reopening of the real-life legal case and, ultimately, to revision of the laws against sexual assault against children under 13 and disabled people (Choe 2011). Other popular culture forms, such as songs, have long been prominent tools for mobilization as well as aural accompaniments to various social movements. To cite one of many examples is the case of the 1981 Korean protest song “March for the Beloved” from Gwangju moving through time and space to become a prominent rallying piece during the 2019–20 Hong Kong protest movement (Yi 2020). The forms, imbrications and directions of influence are neither unidirectional nor unfettered, with contestations and controversies often trailing in the wake of a hit show. The 2022 ENA hit

160  Hyung-Gu Lynn television series Extraordinary Attorney Woo featured as the lead character an autistic savant brilliant in law, who faced open and frequent discrimination and prejudice in the courtroom and society. The show was widely lauded as improving perceptions of and eroding prejudices against people with autistic spectrum disorder and, by extension, others with disabilities and proved to be a ratings success. However, some viewers with autism had mixed reactions, flagging the unrealistic depictions of everyday life largely filled with ultimately helpful and understanding supporting characters, and the reliance on the clichéd trope of the autistic savant (No 2022). Other viewers with autism, despite praising the lead actor Park Eun-Bin’s performance, asserted that there were limits for any abled actor, no matter how talented, in fully capturing autism beyond a collection of tics and behaviors, and lamented the lack of disabled actors and performers on the show (Ha 2022). The majority of readers in turn noted in the comments sections of media articles on such reactions that no fictional stories or dramas ever reflected reality, meaning the complaints about issues with authenticity and credibility of the story and the character were themselves removed from the “reality” of the entertainment business.

Contextualizing Webtoons If contestations or politics of depictions and representations in popular culture are near constants, webtoons have proved to be particularly fertile grounds for imagining and contesting various identities in Korea due in large part to several factors, including lower production costs that generate relatively lower-entry barriers for authors, and, thereby, a larger numbers of new releases per year than other, more expensive media. This in turn results in a potential for greater variety and flexibility in story contents and style. More specifically, compared to video commercials for broadcast on television, serialized live-action shows or feature films, the budget for each title of a webtoon on the major platforms that control around 90% of the market, Naver and Kakao (formerly Daum), is lower, given that there are no special effects, sets, star actors or other expenses. Exact figures for total budgets of most live-action series are not publicized, but most media estimates for major titles range from ₩10 billion to ₩30 billion (around US$7 million to US$20 million) per series. For example, Extraordinary Attorney Woo reportedly cost ₩20 billion (roughly US$14 million) to produce, while the historical period drama Mr. Sunshine (2018) cost an estimated ₩43 billion (US$30 million). For films, of titles produced in Korea during 2021, the total budget was ₩242.3 billion (around US$170 million) for 200 titles, yielding an average of roughly US$850,000 per film in production costs, even with commercial blockbusters accounting for a much larger share than independent releases (KOFIC 2021). Precise comparisons of films and television shows with webtoons are difficult due to divergent structures wherein films and television will require salaries for directors, lead actors/ actresses, multitudes of supporting actors, production staff, assistants and extras, in addition to location scouting, equipment, marketing and other costs, whereas star webtoon authors might have anywhere from two to five assistants and a studio at most as expenses. Nonetheless, as a rough exercise, top-earning webtoon authors such as Park Tae-Jun, known for the webtoon title Lookism, among others, and Kian84, best known for Fashion King, reportedly have annual incomes estimated at around ₩1.7 billion (US$1.2 million) not only from writing webtoons but also from television appearances, real estate holdings and other investments. In contrast to the top stars, the average annual income from webtoons for authors who wrote throughout one calendar year during 2020 was ₩812,150,000 (around US$570,000) according to a government agency survey (KOCCA 2021b). Among the authors/artists, 57% used assistants and 43% worked by themselves, with the assistants paid through the author’s own revenues rather than contracted by a given platform. Thus, the bulk of the costs for webtoon production for Naver

Korean Webtoon and Identity Politics in the Digital Age  161 and Kakao, the leading platforms for webtoons, is in the form of contracts to authors, usually a combination of revenue sharing arrangements, minimum guarantees, royalties and other fees, with sunk costs in the form of website maintenance and upkeep and editorial supervisions by usually a small team of corporate employees. The elision of a printing and distribution costs associated with book publishing further contributes to the cost effectiveness of webtoons. An outcome of these lower production costs is that there are more, new webtoons released per year than other major visual media. In 2020, 615 domestic films were released in theaters in Korea (KOFIC 2020: 16), and an estimated 94 scripted drama titles were released on the nine major broadcast stations in the same year. These numbers pale in comparison to the 1,671 new webtoon titles released in 2020 (KOCCA 2021a: 29). Another factor driving the growth in new releasers is competition for domestic and international readers. Of the 2020 releases, 410 were on Naver Webtoons and Naver Series, 297 on RIDI, 261 on Bom Toon, 210 on Daum Webtoons (which became Kakao Webtoons in August 2021) and Kakao Page (platform optimized for mobile devices) combined, and 97 on Lezhin, with the rest on smaller platforms such as MrBlue, Bookcube Webtoons, Toptoon, Toomics, among others. Moreover, major webtoon platforms solicit amateur authors to challenge for professional contracts and tournament reward money through competitions leagues such as Naver (Challenge Corner), Kakao (Webtoon League) and Lezhin (Challenge Up). The submitted titles in the league are filtered by the editorial teams of the respective companies prior to being featured in the tournament or league, but once a title is allowed to enter the competition, reader voting determines which titles proceed to the next stages. The system, in addition to serving as lowcost and low-risk scouting tool for editorial teams, allows authors, regardless of background, to experiment with different characters and narratives. These contextual factors combine to facilitate an increasing number and range of narratives about minority groups, as well as providing opportunities for authors hailing from under-­ represented groups. For example, when comparing gender balances among webtoon authors, film directors and television producer-directors, as these have creative responsibility over contents in their respective medium, according to government survey data 66.5% of webtoon active authors in Korea during 2020 were women (KOCCA 2021b). In comparison, over 2009–18, only 11.5% of directors of Korean films were women, with this number dropping to 4.1% for large, commercial, rather than independent, releases. In television, only around 37% of producer-directors at the three terrestrial broadcast stations (KBS, MBC and SBS) during 2020 were women (KOCCA 2021c: 59). Webtoon stories that depict with clarity the quotidian experiences and challenges of many women, written by female authors, have increased in the past two to three years. For example, Daily France by Kyeong-Seon depicts the experiences of the author with racism and gender discrimination as a Korean female student studying in France. Other commercial hits include My ID is Gangnam Beauty (2016–17) by Ki Maeng-Gi, later adapted into a live-action drama on JTBC in 2018, which explored the meaning of true beauty through a commentary on Korea’s accent on outward appearance and looks, and the heroine’s own insecurities despite or because of having undergone cosmetic surgery. No comparable data exists for percentage of authors or directors with disabilities, ethnic minorities or minority sexual orientations. We can observe, nevertheless, that there are several webtoon academies to encourage youths with disabilities to become authors and artists that have been operating since 2019. Depictions of characters with disabilities have occurred in the past in Korean television and film, including such titles as the 2005 MBC drama Sad Love Story (Seulpeun Yeonga) featuring a blind heroine, or the 2013 KBS hit drama Good Doctor featuring an autistic savant doctor, and the 2022 tvN drama Our Blues that featured one actress Jung EunHye with Down Syndrome and another, Lee So-Byul, who is deaf-impaired. However, disabled television and film directors appear to be in shorter supply. Of the 539 individuals and

162  Hyung-Gu Lynn groups belonging to Emiji, an association of disabled artists in Korea (including illustrators, but with no webtoon authors registered), there were four film directors and production teams, with no registered television producer-directors. In relative contrast, deaf-impaired webtoon author Lee Su-Yeon attained critical and public success through her title I am Deaf (Na neun Gwimeogeolida, 2015–17), which describes the daily life and challenges of her surrogate character, Laila, through anthropomorphized characters. Another author, Kim Gun, who has a mental disability, together with Songguk Clubhouse, an NGO in Busan working with people with such disabilities, published two webtoon titles detailing his and other Clubhouse members’ everyday experiences in 2020 and 2022. The lower production costs also allowed organizations such as the Korea Blind Union, an NGO to support the visually impaired, produce webtoons intended to introduce and explain the challenges their members face. In addition, Kakao and Lezhin, as well as other platforms, have targeted the rapidly burgeoning BL (Boy Love) and GL (Girl Love) genres as growth areas. The e-book and webcomic provider RIDI scored a commercial success by turning the BL web novel, Semantic Error, first published on the web novel site Joara in 2017, into a successful webtoon (2020–ongoing). Strategies differ by platform, with Naver being a notably late-entrant into the genre, releasing its first BL title only in 2018, and with a limited number of BL and GL titles compared to webtoon-dedicated platforms such as RIDI and Lezhin. While available data indicates that most authors and readers of BL and GL webtoons in Korea are female, and the legal reality remains that Korean courts do not recognize same-sex marriages, the proliferation of titles in the genre has cascaded from its origins in Japanese manga to Korean webtoons, to live-action dramas, where depictions of very close, emotional or implied sexual ties between two female or male characters have become more acceptable.

Reading Webtoons If webtoons can serve as spaces of empowerment and expression to shape perceptions via narratives and images, they can also serve to reinforce dominant narratives and reflect unthinking discrimination and prejudices. If the medium offers opportunities for authors from marginalized or under-represented groups such as ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, age and disability minorities to express themselves, it can also feature narratives about them from authors that can attempt to portray these very same groups with nuance, depth and precision, or through familiar clichés and stereotypes. Thus, despite the opportunities to forge alternative views, identities and narratives about minority or disadvantaged groups, webtoons remain spaces of contestation between competing agendas and preconceptions. If we return to the depictions of disabled people, if Lee Su-Yeon is a webtoon author who happens to be deaf-impaired and succeeded in writing a webtoon series based on a fictionalized version of herself as the main character, Uksoo, a male author with no hearing impairments, depicted a deaf lead female character as the love interest in his Ho! (2014–15), based on a thread uploaded on Japan’s 2-channel, a popular anonymous Japanese textboard, which was told from the perspective of the male boyfriend. Hong Kyeong-Weon, a female webtoon author who has no hearing impairment, published among her numerous other works, Indiscriminating! Team Leader Kang (Muchabyeol Kang Timjang, 2009), which featured a deaf female lead in a corporate setting. Other titles also feature disabled lead characters depicted with depth and nuance. In contrast, Kian84’s King of Back to School (Boghag Wang, 2014–2021) featured a hearing-impaired character that the Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination (Jeongug Jangaein Chabyeol Cheolpye Yeondae), a Korean disability rights NGO, flagged as being consistently depicted in an unflattering manner. Kian84 eventually issued an official apology for propagating negative stereotypes (Song 2019).

Korean Webtoon and Identity Politics in the Digital Age  163 Webtoon authors are increasingly women, and specific titles that are written entirely from the female protagonists’ perspectives proliferate, but the overall landscape seems to still contain significant gender-based discriminatory content. One study concluded on the basis of monitoring 989 webtoon titles serialized during 2018–2020 that there were 110 cases of gender discrimination (e.g. fixed notions of gender roles, sexual objectification, gender-based violence, gender-based slurs or swearing and comments on physical appearance) of which 51 cases involved sexual objectification, compared to just 7 instances of clear depictions of gender equality (e.g. female characters’ perspective, women defending themselves rather than being protected) (YWCA Seoul 2021). Although the numbers are in relative terms low, and there is a concentration of gender-based violence or discrimination scenes in action, thriller and fantasy genres, the survey did not include pornographic or adult webtoons that have become prominent features of some webtoon platforms such as Lezhin. For diasporic groups, such as Joseonjok (Koreas who were born and raised in China) and defectors/refugees from North Korea, the path toward greater representation as creators and more varied depictions within the stories looks even more daunting. The Seoul Metropolitan Government issued a webtoon series using around ₩9 million (roughly US$6,000) titled Chinese-Korean Awareness Improvement Webtoon (Junggug Dongpo Insig Gaeseon Webtun) (2017) to attempt to counter the negative stereotypes around and prejudices distilled into depictions of them as lawless criminals or entangled in perpetual poverty in films and television shows, including the 2015 film Coin Locker Girl (Chinatown). Such efforts notwithstanding, there are currently no Joseonjok webtoon authors in Korea. Furthermore, other webtoons such as the noire hit Gall-bladder (Sseulgae, 2013) by Kang Hyeong-Gyu feature as the hero a man of Joseonjok origins ploughing through a taut thriller narrative, but trailing with him are an armful of the usual clichés – illegal entry into South Korea, poverty, precarity, criminality and violence. The situation for North Korean defectors is more mixed. There is one webtoon author, Choi Sung-Guk, who had worked professionally as an animator in North Korea, who has published four webtoon titles. But North Korean and defector characters have appeared with more frequency, depth and variety in film, television and YouTube videos than webtoons, even if they remained caricatured and sidelines in many mainstream shows (Yoon 2021). The state of depictions of and by seniors in webtoons seems somewhat more sanguine. Since 2019, there have been webtoon lessons and mentoring programs for seniors offered by the Korea Manhwa Contents Agency, the government agency responsible for promoting Korean graphic or visual narrative contents. Other webtoon titles by authors who are not themselves retirees have pushed elderly characters from the margins to the center stage. One of the earliest and most innovative titles was Kang Full’s I Love You (Geudae reul Saranghamnida, 2007), a love story between two impoverished seniors that spawned a cross-media franchise, including a theatrical adaptation (2008), a film (2011) and a television drama (2012). Navillera (2016) by Hun, also adapted into a 2021 live-action drama on tvN, features among its dual lead characters a retiree who takes up ballet lessons at the age of 70. Blankly (Udukeoni, 2018–19) by Sim Woodo, a pseudonym for a couple who took care of their father who was afflicted by Alzheimer’s that does not shy away from detailing the everyday experiences and challenges of home-nursing a parent with the disease. There are of course other elderly characters who are more familiar, such as the elderly mercenary the Dog Man in Kim Kyusam’s post-insect apocalypse title, Hive (2014–18), who might serve as wish fulfillment for older readers in being the strongest fighter among all the characters. But even as Korea remains highest among OECD countries for elderly poverty, the variety and range of depictions of older characters in webtoons looks to be increasing.

164  Hyung-Gu Lynn

Conclusion Fictional narratives in popular culture, even if adhering to some extent to internal rules (e.g. fictional truths) and assumptions of narrative plausibility (e.g. Twain’s “possibilities”), by their very dramatizations, extensions, distortions and amplifications of everyday experiences allow for reflection, critique and construction of subjects, themes, concerns and perspectives that might be difficult to raise in real life. The use of visual and digital media to tell stories that humanize and centralize the plight of minorities and marginalized people, whether due to race, age, wealth, occupation, gender or sexual orientation, is certainly not exclusive to webtoons, as reflected in the number of films and television dramas that also deal with marginalized individuals or groups. Nevertheless, webtoons, due to their relatively low production costs and entry barriers, have proven to be a fertile space for constructing, contesting or reinforcing a range of collective identities and individual subjectivities. Several specific titles reflect the expansion in variety of authors, narratives and characters. At the same time, the openness of webtoons as a medium means that increased variety in representation of and by minority or disadvantaged groups are not the only factors that have proliferated. Titles relying on stereotypes and clichés regarding characteristics and roles for specific groups remain, meaning that challenging and contesting various ideas and identities through webtoon stories and characters will also continue.

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Korean Webtoon and Identity Politics in the Digital Age  165 No, J. (2022) “What is the Purpose of Extraordinary Attorney Woo?” [in Korean], Media Oneul, 14 July. Nye, J. (2008) “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 616(1): 94–109. Ong, W. (1977) Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Potter, W. (2014) “A Critical Analysis of Cultivation Theory,” Journal of Communication, 64(6): 1015–36. Russell, G. (2007) “The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction,” Philosophy Compass, 2(5): 712–29. Ryu, Y. (2020) “Characteristics of Brand Webtoon in SNS: The Case of Brand Webtoons on Instagram” [in Korean], Manhwa Aenimeisyeon Yeongu, 59: 483–510. Song, U. (2019) “Kian84 Apologizes for ‘Incorrect Depiction’ Amidst Webtoon Controversy” [in Korean], Yonhap News, 10 May. The 9/11 Commission (2004) Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, New York: Norton. Thomasson, A. (1999) Fiction and Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Twain, M. (1897) Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, Hartford: American Publishing Company. Yecies, B. and Shim, A. (2021) South Korea’s Webtooniverse and the Digital Comic Revolution, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Yi, H. (2020) “Multidirectional Memories Connecting 2019 Hong Kong’s Protest and Pro-Democracy Movements Within and Across National Borders” [in Korean], Hangug Eonlon Jeongbo Hagbo, 102: 189–216. Yoon, K. (2021) “North Korean Defectors’ Self-Representation as the Politics of Refusal,” Critical Arts, 35(3): 69–83. YWCA Seoul (2021) Mass Media Gender Equality Content Analysis Report [in Korean], Seoul: YWCA Seoul.

15 Transmediating Tradition Convergence of Premodern Prose, Webtoons and Audio Comics Jina E. Kim

This chapter explores the resurgence of premodern literary prose and its convergence with new digital forms, especially webtoons and audio comics. More specifically, it takes up Shim Cheongga (Song of Shim Cheong), one of the most well-known traditional Korean pansori narratives. Even though the various premodern editions of this text had already combined to create a complex narrative world, the 21st-century digital revolution has further expanded the narrative world of Shim Cheong through transmediation processes. Although the story of Shim Cheong usually centers on the themes and topics of filial piety, social status, gender, religion, family and love, along with supernatural and magical elements, the recent serialized webtoon version Geunyeo eu Shim Cheong (Her Shim Cheong, 2017–19) and the audio comic version (2020) largely overturn the legendary character and the standard story by constructing a “Girl Love” genre. In line with this upending, the oral performance (musical and narrative) aspect of pansori is transformed into a predominantly visual form in the webtoon version. Thus, this chapter shifts the analytical lens to interrogate the representation of sound in Her Shim Cheong to show the various ways in which sound, song and performance are iconographically and linguistically communicated and retained in the webtoon form. Second, the chapter turns to the audio comic version to question how sound, song and performance are reinserted to audially restage the story. Overall, this analysis will consider the curious ways in which Web 2.0 platforms transmediate tradition – premodern narratives, forms and historical issues – in creating a 21st-century narrative culture.

Reintroducing Pansori A popular oral narrative genre, pansori combines storytelling and song performed by a solo gwangdae (the story singer) accompanied by a drummer. According to the late Marshall Pihl (1981: 45), a translator and scholar of pansori, the four distinctive characteristics of pansori are that “it is a solo oral technique, it is dramatic, it is musical and it is in verse.” As an oral narrative genre, even after they were recorded, what distinguishes pansori from other popular oral narratives is its adaptability, in which each story singer can adjust and alter their performance based on the audience and other circumstances they encounter on the spot. For instance, the gwangdae would often embellish or abridge songs; they could eliminate an entire section or episode; or they could interpolate themes and references from other songs and stories. Furthermore, the history of pansori shows its interface with other performative modes, such as shamanistic rituals and Buddhist chants, and intertextual references to both literati and folk cultural texts. Additionally, starting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pansori also took on a new form called changgeuk, in which there were multiple singers, each assigned to an individual character, much like the opera. Most notable was the presence of female singers who would play and sing the part of the main female character, which further led to the advancement of female DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-20

Transmediating Tradition  167 gwangdae. Needless to say, the art of pansori continued to evolve from being performed in villages and yards to movable stages and theaters. As seen from this brief introduction, pansori incorporates multiple forms and performative modes. Even in its premodern form, pansori was transtextual and evolved through transmedia productions. Adding to the capacious qualities of pansori performances, the extant pansori texts exist in multiple editions and physical types – manuscripts, woodblock imprints and typeset editions (Pihl 1994: 113), from which they have been further edited, annotated, translated, reproduced and recreated. Along with the Song of Chunhyang, the Song of Heungbu, the Song of the Water Palace and the Song of the Red Cliff, the Song of Sim Cheong is one of five pansori repertoires that has been preserved and recorded in written form by Sin Chaehyo in the mid-19th century. Of these five extant canonical texts, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Song of Sim Cheong is one of the most beloved, often performed and repeatedly adapted pansori texts. According to Pihl (1994: 114), there are more than 100 known texts of the Song of Shim Cheong, ranging in date from 1873 to 1991, including many prose fiction texts. These extant versions have undergone even more restagings and rewritings in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially with the rapid development of new media technologies, such as print, film, radio, television, and with the advent of the Internet, web-based media texts such as webcomics (webtoons) and podcasts. One of the most notable adaptations took place in 1967 when gwangdae Kim Yeonsu (1907–1974) recorded a series of all five extant pansori performances for Donga Broadcasting System (DBS) radio broadcasting. Instead of performing live on the radio for several hours straight, he used the radio’s technology to prerecord his performances, and then they were aired serially to fit into 10- to 15-minute segments. This required a significant transformation in rearranging the original audiovisual pansori performance specifically for the audio-only media. In doing so, questions have emerged as to what aspects of pansori’s core storytelling and singing remained steadfast and which underwent alterations due to this particular transmedia production.

Shim Cheong as a Transmedia Character Due to the popularity of pansori, Shim Cheong is not just a fictional character who exists in a story world; she has become a cultural icon in Korea. The character evokes filial piety, and she is represented as an epitome of virtue for selling herself to merchants for 300 sacks of rice and sacrificing herself to the Sea God so that her blind father can see again. Likewise, the name Shim Cheong is a sign for a Korean daughter and woman who upholds the Neo-Confucian tenets of filial piety, humility, virtue and loyalty. She has been around for over a century, across numerous kinds of texts, as well as having been submitted to sundry variations and interpretations. Shim Cheong, indeed, can be conceptualized as a transmedia character – a character who is “represented across different texts belonging to more than one media form” (Thon 2022: 142). More specifically, as Paolo Bertetti (2022: 238) argues, characters are not “unequivocally defined by texts once and for all” but are “cultural units … that are recognizable in the collective imagination.” Just as pansori evolved and were reinvented along with the emerging media technologies, the representations of Shim Cheong range in degree of faithfulness to the putative “original” dependent on the way the different media articulate and actualize her. For instance, some major modern writers have parodied Shim Cheong in novels and dramatic plays. Notable authors are the colonial period parodist Chae Mansik, who wrote the play Shim Bongsa (Blindman Shim, 1936), the postwar writer Choe Inhun, who wrote the play Dara Dara Balgeun Dara (Moon, Moon, Bright Moon, 1978), and the contemporary fiction writer Hwang Seogyeong, who wrote the novel Shim Cheong, Yeonkkot eu Gil (Shim Cheong, the Road of a Lotus, 2002–2003). There have been at least five major film productions (1925, 1937, 1956,

168  Jina E. Kim 1962, 1972) in the 20th century, each starring different actresses, not to mention countless comic books, children’s picture books, animations and so on. The ubiquity of the Shim Cheong character in Korean cultural productions points to the ways this transmedia character has resonated with diverse audiences transhistorically. Even though the various premodern pansori editions of the Song of Shim Cheong as well as the more traditional print, performance and film media had already combined to create a multifaceted transmedia character and a complex narrative world, the 21st-century digital revolution has further expanded the narrative world of Shim Cheong. Although the story of Shim Cheong usually centers on the themes and topics of filial piety, social status, gender, religion, family and love, along with supernatural and magical elements, the recent serialized webtoon version Geunyeo eu Shim Cheong (Her Shim Cheong, 2017–19) and the audio comic version (2020) largely overturn the legendary character and the standard story by constructing a “Girl Love” genre and thus offer fresh perspectives on the main character and other female characters in recreating the fictional world to which they belong. It is evident that this canonical story, character and themes are not to be taken at face value, but, instead, a long genealogy of cultural producers have used Shim Cheong as a springboard for critiquing patriarchy, as well as unveiling social-class discrimination and other contradictions in contemporary society and politics. In line with this upending, the oral performance (musical and narrative) aspects of pansori are transformed into a predominantly visual form in the webtoon version. Thus, this chapter shifts the analytical lens to interrogate the representation of the sonic narrative in Her Shim Cheong to show the various ways in which sound, song and performance are iconographically and linguistically communicated and retained in the webtoon form. It also considers the audio comic version to question how sound, song and performance are reinserted to aurally restage the story. Overall, this case study will demonstrate the complex ways in which Web 2.0 platforms transmediate and reimagine Korean tradition in today’s digital narrative culture.

Queering Shim Cheong and Transmedia: Geunyeo eu Shim Cheong (Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019) Written by Seri (b. 1987) and illustrated by Biwan (b. 1987), Her Shim Cheong began its serialization on the Korean webtoon platform JusToon.co.kr on 12 September 2017 and ran until 27 March 2019 for 81 episodes. It is still one of the most popular webtoons available on the Kakao Series site. In addition to its popularity with readers, it also received the 2018 Contemporary Korean Manhwa Award given by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. A printed series in eight volumes was published in 2020 in Korean along with various related merchandise. The same year, an audio comic version was recorded and made available on the site Audiocomics. kr. Her Shim Cheong has also reached the global audience through translations into Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, French, Spanish and English as of 2022. Indeed, the afterlife of the story and song of Shim Cheong has expanded through new digital technologies and modes of dissemination to the extent that she has become a global transmedia figure. To be sure, Shim Cheong is not the only premodern tale to be transmediated into a webtoon or audio comic. One of the interesting phenomena of 21st-century new media texts is the frequent reimagining of the past where historical events and figures are reinvented for popular media consumption through film, television and webtoons. Moreover, as mentioned in the earlier section, Her Shim Cheong is not the only text to use the story of Shim Cheong to imagine a new fictional world. Nevertheless, Her Shim Cheong offers an important opportunity for researchers to examine the relationship between pansori, a traditional oral performance, and webtoon, a new form of graphic narrative. It allows us to ask about the ways a

Transmediating Tradition  169 primarily audiovisual medium partners with a graphic-textual medium. Put another way, what is the relationship between transmedia narratives and audio-narratology? The analysis in the next two sections first considers the processes and strategies incorporated in bringing together pansori and webtoon. More specifically, it explores how pansori sonic narrative and environment are transmediated in the webtoon and audio comic versions of Her Shim Cheong to enhance the authenticity of the Korean traditional performance that still adheres to conventions of modern, digital comics. Second, it posits that Shim Cheong is a reimagined transmedia character and explores the ways this character and story address the tension between tradition and the contemporary world, especially around the theme of filial piety and female virtue. According to media scholar Henry Jenkins (2007), transmedia storytelling is not simply an adaptation, but rather “represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.” Certainly, there might not be a need for another Shim Cheong story or even a printed copy or an audio comic version of the original webtoon of Her Shim Cheong, yet these together and separately make their “own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” (ibid.). Especially in the case of Her Shim Cheong, applying pansori’s formulaic oral composition and narrative technique in a serialized webtoon and audio comic foment an inventive digital network and ecology which opens up multiple entryways to rethinking about history, culture, gender and sexuality. The creators of Her Shim Cheong add various new elements to create their fictional world and characters, which then further expand the readers’ (or listeners’) perspective and understanding of an older and familiar story, form and character. This happens at two levels. First, the central way in which Her Shim Cheong shifts the readers’ participation and perspective is by creating a pansori reading/listening/performing community at the level of form. Second, at the level of content, Her Shim Cheong fashions a homosocial alliance among female characters and forges a romantic relationship between Shim Cheong and Magistrate Jang’s new young bride. In this way, it can be suggested that Her Shim Cheong’s transmediality presents queer possibilities to resist heteronormative conventions of culture and normative ideas about sexuality that existed in the past and the present. In short, Her Shim Cheong’s transmediality works to disrupt dominant perceptions of tradition by playing with a sense of authenticity and mimetics on the one hand and fantasy and postmodernity on the other.

Creating a Pansori Sonic World in Webtoons and Audio Comics “Webtoon” is one of the fastest-growing mass media for storytelling and creating cultural content. The term is a neologism coined and developed in Korea to refer to a new kind of graphic narrative that combines web digital technology with toon comics. Heekyoung Cho (2016) describes webtoon as a media “that has brought about a discrete set of interlinked, mutually implicated changes in comics form and aesthetics, production process and reading practice, and in the concepts and boundaries of authorship and readership, distribution and consumption of cultural capital.” Webtoon has distinguished itself from other Internet comics or webcomics with its vertical layout and scrolling, unlike the traditional horizontal layout. Additionally, because it is web based, webtoon has facilitated various kinds of media mixing, which plays a central role in transmedia productions. Webtoons, as Cho (2016, 2021) discusses, are actually also a site of transmedia production where a webtoon story can be recreated for different media platforms, which resembles an adaptation and does not “always make distinctive contributions to the fictional world-making of the story by revealing the features untold in the urtext.” Seri and Biwan’s Her Shim Cheong webtoon and audio drama versions seem to occupy somewhere

170  Jina E. Kim in between. While the audio comic can be seen as an adaptation of the webtoon, it is also, as Jenkins (2007) has defined, undoubtedly transmedial in its ability to “create an integrated world with unique involvement from each medium.” Together, the audio comics and webtoon allow us to hear more fully the way sound contributes to narrative construction and to the reinvention of the pansori sonic narrative more specifically. Although recent technological advances and aesthetic innovations have allowed sound to be directly inserted into a webtoon, thus providing background music or sound effects, the webtoon version of Her Shim Cheong avoids this technology and focuses on art and writing. It goes without saying that while multimodal tools, such as sound and animation, are readily available to webtoon creators, there are also reasons to not use them but rely on the more traditional conventions of comics. Scholars of traditional comics, ranging from Scott McCloud (1994) and Will Eisner (1990) to translation theorists, have made a strong case for the various strategies comic artists use to visually represent sound, including onomatopoeia, fonts and speech balloons. These scholars have made convincing arguments that comics are polysemic and multimodal rather than simply visual. For instance, the specifications of speech balloons show how in comics they can function as expressions of sound while the morphological aspects of speech balloons can be constructed to represent intended meanings and to specify a particular function. Yet, the digital environment and technology have further expanded and innovated on the traditional print comics representations of sound. Although much of the graphic conventions of the speech balloon are retained in webtoons, they are no longer limited to their morphological representations. Her Shim Cheong uses various kinds of speech balloons. As one would expect, speech balloons are used for dialog between characters, and they vary in morphology from oval, indicating even speech, to uneven shapes indicating hesitancy, agitation and other emotive expressions. Of particular interest to this chapter is how the webtoon Her Shim Cheong represents the pansori narrative technique and formula using comic conventions. There are two ways that this is achieved. First, the pansori narrative is set apart from circular dialog speech balloons by using either a rectangular shape or speech balloons without borders. An example can be seen in the prologue episode, which introduces the character Shim Cheong (Figure 15.1). In this prologue, it is obvious that someone in the story is describing Shim Cheong in verse form rather than in everyday speech. Even when the reader voices these texts silently or out loud, there is a kind of metrical phrasing that marks the hemistich of a line that forms the sentence. For instance, the narrator describes Shim Cheong as having “지저분한 얼굴, 엉망으로 엉킨머리// 굽실거리며 구걸을 다니다// 굽어버린 어깨와 등” [A dirtied face, and tangled hair// bowing here and there to beg her way// bent back and stooped shoulder]. Within each verse, there is an implied stop even if there is not a comma. The syllable count pattern in these particular verses simulate the most commonly used syllabic patterns of 3-4 + 4-4 and 3-4 + 3-4 in a traditional pansori narrative and song (Pihl 1994: 76). Furthermore, the speech balloons and their verses are placed in descending order within the same panel along with two corresponding images also arranged in descending order. This not only shows the movement taking place in describing first Shim Cheong’s head and face and then moving down to her shoulders and back but also could correspond to the dynamics of the sung verse as the pitifulness of Shim Cheong deepens. Last, the verse contains consonance – both alliteration and assonance – which contributes to transmediating the written verse into a sonic performance. For example, the use of dark/ heavy vowels such as eo in eolgul (face), eongmang (messy), eongkin (tangled) and the u sound in “gupsil georimyeo gugeol eul danida” (begging obsequiously) reinforce the wretched state of Shim Cheong’s appearance and abject behavior. All of these linguistic and vocal qualities, thereby, create a sense of the pansori sonic world within the webtoon. The creators of Her Shim Cheong use a similar strategy throughout their work to represent the sonic aspect of pansori. Another example can be seen in Episode 2, where the character Ppaengdeok is introduced (Figure 15.2).

Transmediating Tradition  171

Figure 15.1 Prologue. (Source: Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019)

The text floats around her image. This time, however, it is without visible speech balloon lines. As before, descriptive texts are written in verse form that mimics the spoken (aniri) or sung (chang) passages of pansori. 마을에서 뺑덕어미라 불리는 이 사람은

This person whom the villagers call Ppaengdŏk’s mom

(Aniri)

쌀 대신 엿 사먹고 벼 대신 고기 사고 잡곡으로 술 사먹고

Stuffs herself with sweets, meat and booze instead of sustenance

(Chang)

술 취하면 밤중에 울음 울고 남정네를 유혹하고

When drunk she cries all night and seduces men

(Aniri)

아무에게나 담배를 청하고 정자 밑에서 낮잠 자기 일쑤에

Cajoles anyone around for cigarettes and always napping in the shade

(Aniri)

172  Jina E. Kim

Figure 15.2  Episode 2. (Source: Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019)

Although the webtoon does not mark aniri and chang, in the audio comic version (Episode 3, 4:47–5:44) the first verse detailing Ppaengdeok is sung by a single, female gwangdae, whereas the other lines are spoken. The audio comic also inserts a male drummer (kosu) who provides not only the drum beat but also the essential chuimsae, the exclamatory responses to the story singer, which are not in the text or typographically represented as sound symbols in the webtoon. The drummer’s “Hehh-yi,” “Oh ho” and “Um hum” interjections are completely left out of the webtoon. Whereas in many other comics and webtoons, song and singing are typically iconographically represented with Western music notations, such as the staff or scale of notes, Her Shim Cheong avoids this method and relies simply on using verse form in the narrative to recreate the pansori sonic world. In fact, not including musical notes points to the creators’ attempt at maintaining a level of authenticity of the pansori, since Western musical notes are not usually found in transcribed pansori songs. Although there are librettos, most pansori songs are orally transmitted from master to student. In this way, Seri and Biwan’s work reproduces the oral transmission of pansori in verse form. Additionally, by not explicitly providing the musical notations the creators also allow each reader to vocalize the verses based on their own sonic imagination of pansori.

Transmediating Tradition  173

Figure 15.3  Episode 64. (Source: Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019)

There is, however, an example in Episode 64 of the webtoon where sound, text and image merge to reproduce the pansori sonic narrative. Deep into the story but at the beginning of Episode 64, Shim Cheong’s blind father falls into a stream while wandering around on a stormy day. But, fortunately, he is saved by a local monk. The monk then tells Blindman Shim that he will be able to regain his sight if he donates 300 sacks of rice to Mongeun Temple, to which the monk belongs. This sequence of three panels has a pansori story singer narrating the events of Blindman Shim’s fall in indirect discourse in verse form. Based on its non-bordered speech balloon and the verse form, as in the previous example, we can identify it as being part of the pansori narrative. There are also different kinds of sound symbolism splashed across these panels to show Blindman Shim drowning (쿠르륵/kureureuk), followed by the monk grabbing him (덥석/deopseok) and then pulling him (촤악/chwaak) out of the water (Figure 15.3). These sound symbolisms, in effect, can be read as representing part of the gwangdae’s story singing technique, where they often infuse the narrative and song with onomatopoeia in order to enhance the mode of creating particular impressions, such as braveness or lament. In this particular scene, the sound symbolism created by the lexical semantics and typography shows modes that render danger and urgency, which might accordingly correspond to a faster metronome cycle and guttural vocalization.

174  Jina E. Kim The audio comic (Episode 50) that corresponds to the webtoon episode also brings together techniques that merge audio and visual. As expected, the verses are narrated by a gwangdae in spoken form. Yet, in the audio comic episode, the onomatopoeia that appears in the webtoon is not vocalized. It is replaced with real sound effects like rainfall, or water sloshes and gurgles and placed in the background as the dialog between Blindman Shim and the monk unfolds. There is another difference in important formal aspects between the webtoon and the audio comic. Whereas the webtoon bookends Blindman Shim’s falling into the stream and pleading for help between the end of Episode 63 and the beginning of Episode 64, the audio comic begins with Blindman Shim explaining why he is going outside in the rain in Episode 50. It is expected that the visual form and the audio form will not align exactly, and the length of each episode, indeed, does not line up exactly. The serial nature of both media texts allows for a different kind of formal organization. The audio comic version applies the cliffhanger differently. If the webtoon provides a visual preview of what is to come in the next episode by ending with Blindman Shim leaving his dwelling with the hope of encountering his daughter, this is how the audio comic begins its episode. The audio comic version, in this kind of case, attempts to stay closer to the episodic continuity of traditional pansori performances, where the story singing can last as long as six to eight hours. The audio comic’s episode 49 ends with the sinister monk’s laughter and his plotting to embroil Shim Cheong and take advantage of her father. Episode 50 then opens with Blindman Shim’s venturing out, followed by the gwangdae’s description of Blindman Shim’s stumbles. In this way, unlike the webtoon where the visual narrative components can be easily retraced by scrolling back and forth, the audio comic narrative presents a different kind of ending and beginning that does not force the listener to recall the past episode but guides them to focus on the present temporality of the narrative and the listener. In the absence of visual cues, the audio comic supplements the dialog, plot and story with additional narrative performed by the gwangdae. 심봉사: 아이고, 장대비가 쏟아지는구나. 내 딸 청이는 왜 이리 늦누? 마중을 나가 볼까…. (Blindman Shim: Aigo, it’s really pouring rain. Why is my daughter so late? Should I go out to meet her….) 소리꾼: 그때여 심봉사는 지팽이 흩어짚고 이리 더듬, 저리 더듬 나가는디 (Gwangdae: So Blindman Shim takes up his walking stick, staggering here and stumbling there.) 심봉사: 사, 사람살려! 거기.. 거기 누구 없소?! 사람 살려! 웁! 누가 좀 살려 줘요. (Blindman Shim: Sa-save me! Here, here, anyone there?! Help me! Ugh! Someone please help me.) 소리꾼: 물에 풍 빠져노니, 아무리 소리친들 해 저물고 인적 끊겨 뉘라서 건져주리 (Gwangdae: Plunked underwater, cry as he might, who’s to help with night deepening and not a soul around.) In the above-bolded passage, the gwangdae’s spoken lines help set up the subsequent dialog where Blindman Shim shouts for help. The gwangdae’s following description – “Plunked underwater, cry as he might, who’s to help with night deepening and not a soul around” – ­further amplifies the dangerous situation Blindman Shim is in. Without the gwangdae’s narrative, the listener would have had more difficulty placing where the character was and what kind

Transmediating Tradition  175 of action he was taking even with the voluminous, realistic sound effects of rain pouring and water splashes. Thus, even in the audio comic, the pansori sonic strategy becomes a crucial part of the broader narrative.

Rebooting Shim Cheong as a Transmedia Character Although in pansori performances, the gwangdae’s singing exhibits their virtuosity more than the narrative component, both are necessary in order to produce a complete sense of a pansori performance. As already shown, both the webtoon and audio comic versions of Her Shim Cheong deploy pansori storytelling and singing as an essential form and mode. However, the central means of telling the story is through text, image and drama, while the singing is naturally peripheral. Likewise, characters are neither singers nor storytellers. The development of the characters is also not solely left for the gwangdae to take up in her performative space or for the narrator to set up. Although the characters do not sing, it is the female characters who are the main actants and occupy the narrative point of view. They realize that being a virtuous wife (yeolnyeo) and a filial daughter (hyonyeo) does not allow them to gain their own identities, subjectivities and voices. This realization by the female characters offers a wholly different perspective from the majority of the previous constructions of Shim Cheong. In fact, Seri and Biwan’s decision to reboot pansori and Shim Cheong aligns with pansori as a living art performance that has historically navigated between discursive construction of an orthodox view and queering that exact point of view. As scholars of pansori such as Marshall Pihl and Chan E. Park (2003) have already shown, the accretive qualities of pansori allow each iteration to expand the discursive sphere. Here I would also underscore that characters appearing in Her Shim Cheong are not static but undergo “reboots” so as to address the sociohistorical conditions of the times. Shim Cheong is a character who is at once complex and simple, and who has been made into a Korean cultural icon through numerous media representations. She is a transmedia character appearing across media, but she can also be conceptualized as a “serial figure” that is “shaped and reshaped through the repetitions, revisions and reboots of their stories” (Denson and Mayer 2018: 68). Published at the height of postfeminist movements around the world and in South Korea, such as the #MeToo and “Escape the Corset” movements, Her Shim Cheong is a product of 21st-century South Korean society and more specifically part of the “feminism reboot.” As in the neologism webtoon, the term “feminism reboot” brings together “reboot” from computer and film studies, which refers to taking “an established multimedia franchise/narrative and starting that story again from the beginning in an attempt to revitalize or capitalize on an already existing franchise and attract new fans” (Peters 2012), and “feminism,” a movement and ideology that aim to bring about equality for all genders and underscore the ways that women’s points of view and opportunities have been oppressed by various systems and institutions. According to Hee Jeong Sohn (2020), feminism underwent a reboot in 2015 in South Korea when gender debates were actively taking place on social media and in popular culture. She shows in her study that in engaging with and fighting against the slew of antifeminist, misogynistic popular culture constructions of women in the post-Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 era, the feminism reboot provides a lens through which to “expose the phenomenon’s cultural characteristics and its relationship with popular culture” (ibid.: 99). In this way, as Heo Yun (2020: 186) has shown in her analysis of Her Shim Cheong, this work not only generated a new category that can specifically be named GL (Girl Love) genre, leaving aside the standard BL (Boy Love) genre, but also responded to the recent surge of interest in feminism in South Korea that can expose the ongoing patriarchal hegemony while setting up a narrative of same-sex love between female characters as a way to break down the cultural structure of heteronormative development of women.

176  Jina E. Kim Building on Sohn’s and Heo’s essays, I argue that the radical transformation of Shim Cheong and other female characters at the level of content in Her Shim Cheong addresses the tension between tradition and the contemporary world, especially around the theme of filial piety and oppression of women under Neo-Confucian practices. Additionally, however, I show that attending to the audio narratological aspects, in particular the materiality of the voices of the characters, can heighten the critique of social and gender inequalities which Her Shim Cheong undertakes. Two particular episodes highlight the two main characters’ transformations. First is when Shim Cheong, who has been introduced as a nuisance, unkempt and unfeminine, is transformed into “Hyonyeo Shim Cheong” (Filial Shim Cheong) in Episode 27 (webtoon) and Episode 22 (audio comic). The second example is from Episodes 77–79 – “Beompi chungryu” (In the Middle of the Ocean), “Mulgyeol wi” (On the Water) and “Bulgeun pi, bulgeun maeum” (Scarlet Blood, Scarlet Heart) – and Episodes 60–61 (audio comic), where Lady Jang fights to rescue Shim Cheong from being thrown off the ship. Lady Jang initially coaches Shim Cheong to behave like a good, filial daughter and an aristocratic young lady by telling her how to walk, eat and talk. Lady Jang also changes Shim Cheong’s outer appearance so that she looks like a girl rather than an unidentifiable street kid whom many people had mistaken for a boy. With the changes, even the villagers who had known Shim Cheong since her birth did not recognize her. Shim Cheong’s physical appearance is transformative, and her voice matches the transformation in both webtoon and audio comic versions. When she tells her life story to the villagers, she does so with deferential language and humbles herself by appealing to the villagers’ sense of charity. She begins with “… 여러분께 여쭙니다…” (… I beg of your attention my fellow villagers…). When Shim Cheong continues, she is presented in a panel that shows her large, sparkling, pleading eyes and her hands, which she extends while speaking (Figure 15.4). 앞 어두운 우리 부친 구할 길이 전혀 없어 염치 불구하고 밥 빌러 왔사오니

Without any means to care for my blind father I humbly call upon your charity once again.

한 술씩만 덜 잡숫고 십시일반 주옵시면 추운 방 우리 부친 구완을 하것내다…

If I may ask you to spare just a spoonful so that I may feed my father who lays in our heatless room…

The language Shim Cheong uses reflects the tone of her voice. It is demure and beseeching rather than husky and bellicose as before. What accentuates this voice as different from her typical self comes in the next few panels, where she tries to make herself cry even though she cannot. Thus, while bowing to the villagers, Shim Cheong pokes her own eyes to force tears and to conjure a woeful voice. Within this episode, we hear Shim Cheong alternating between multiple vocalizations just as in a pansori performance, where shifting back and forth from folk culture references to literati intertextual references are common; we read and hear colloquial everyday speech as well as honorific speech using the highest formality of the -shida form. It is also obvious that while Shim Cheong begins her good act of being “filial daughter Shim Cheong,” she also mocks it when she jabs her own eyes to feign a sorrow-filled voice. This kind of humor is also a feature of pansori performance that is used to reveal the many contradictions in the Neo-Confucian practices that dictated women’s decorum. If Shim Cheong enacts filiality through honorific speech and a teary voice, then Lady Jang undergoes an opposite transformation. Her socio-status-appropriate and -trained decorum

Transmediating Tradition  177

Figure 15.4  Episode 27. (Source: Her Shim Cheong, 2017–2019)

completely gives way to adrenaline-driven, fearless speeches toward the merchants and sailors who have taken Shim Cheong on the ship to be sacrificed to the Sea God. She tries to save Shim Cheong and calls the merchants “damn bastards” and “dead bastards” (Episode 77). She shouts at them, saying, “You think you can just send off the bride alone? If she’s to die, then you all need to die!!” (Episode 78). She wields what appears to be a pickaxe and hacks at the ship in an effort to sink it and also tries to climb up the ladder to get to Shim Cheong. When one of the merchants orders her to stop, she shouts back, “Don’t want to! Hope you all die, you bastards!” (Episode 78). The change that has occurred in Lady Jang is shocking, and it is best observed in the language and voice she uses. If in the past she had been following the speech patterns and the modest vocal qualities appropriate for a woman of high social status, then in these scenes she realizes that adhering to those beliefs, behavior and language will not save Shim Cheong. Instead, she uses vulgar language and expresses defiance through paralinguistic features, such as shouts, grunts and shrieks. In fact, in the audio comic, although Lady Jang’s voice actor retains the higher vocal register, the increase in volume and vehemence with which Lady Jang’s lines are performed intensifies not only the chaos taking place in the scene but also the ways they disturb the expected norms of Lady Jang’s stature and gender.

178  Jina E. Kim The transformations that Shim Cheong and Lady Jang undergo are made more prominent when sound and voice are considered. The changes in their beliefs and actions are expressed not simply through the semantic meanings of their language; the ways their words are uttered and performed, thus sounded, deliver meaningful change in the character. The changing voice qualities enacted, in turn, introduce the readers and listeners to changed characters who are making different decisions in the story. This further provides an alternative story world in which Shim Cheong’s filiality is not a quality that is innate to women nor can it be forced upon them, and Lady Jang’s loyalty to Shim Cheong, compared to her loyalty to Magistrate Jang, is much more tenacious and enduring. Shim Cheong and Lady Jang survive the death experience and confirm their love for one another. In confirming their love for one another, they also break down gender structures set up by cultural norms and expectations. Both realize that they do not have to adhere to looking and sounding like a filial daughter and virtuous wife. They can live happily ever after as a same-sex couple on their own terms, calling each other by their personal names.

Conclusion Her Shim Cheong brings into the fold the traditional performance narrative art of pansori – performance art that has been designated by the South Korean government as an intangible heritage since 1964 for fear that this art form would become extinct with the emergence of new mass media. Webtoon, one of the newest web graphic narrative forms, and pansori are brought together to create a transmedia story. Taking up one of the most canonical Korean narratives, Her Shim Cheong reimagines the main character, Shim Cheong, and the secondary characters, especially Lady Jang, as romantic partners who overcome the various obstacles present in society, not the least of which are differences in social status and gender norms dictated by NeoConfucian dictums. This reimagining allows for a critical reexamination of traditional Korean society and culture, and it also becomes a living text commenting on contemporary society. As scholars of transmedia studies have already expounded, one of the most powerful aspects of transmedia storytelling is that it has the potential to shift our perspectives on traditional stories and characters and challenge even our ideas about how a story can be told. The digital revolution and the emergence of the webtoon as a mass media form have tremendously expanded the potential for newer transmedia productions. Webtoon’s ability to insert audio exists, yet webtoon creators are also highly sensitive to maintaining media specificity that does not lead to overstepping its graphic/textuality. Yet sound and voice have always been and are integral aspects of any narrative. The case of Seri and Biwan’s Her Shim Cheong provides an illuminating example of how certain graphic techniques of comic art and narrative styles can reproduce the pansori sonic narrative. The audio comic version further expands the transmedial story world of Shim Cheong with not just representations of sound in the text but audible auditory texts that allow listeners to hear the speaking voices and story singing that are mimetic of a traditional pansori performance. Together, the webtoon and the audio comic contribute to the creation of a real and imagined pansori narrative world that can be experienced beyond the traditional mat and away from the modern stage.

References Bertetti, P. (2022) “Towards a Semiotic Theory of Transmedia Characters,” Narrative, 30(2): 225–33. Cho, H. (2016) “The Webtoon: A New Form for Graphic Narrative,” The Comic Journal, 18 June. Cho, H. (2021) “The Platformization of Culture: Webtoon Platforms and Media Ecology in Korea and Beyond,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 80(1): 73–93.

Transmediating Tradition  179 Denson, S. and Mayer, R. (2018) “Border Crossing: Serial Figures and the Evolution of Media,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, 7(2): 65–84. Eisner, W. (1990) Comics and Sequential Art, Paramus: Poorhouse Press. Heo, Y. (2020) “Same-Sex Romance in the Age of Feminism Reboot” [in Korean], Taejung Seosa Yeongu, 26(4): 183–212. Jenkins, H. (2007) “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” HenryJenkins.org, 21 March. McCloud, S. (1994) Understanding Comics, New York: Harper Perennial. Park, C.E. (2003) Voices from a Straw Mat: Towards an Ethnography of Korean Storytelling, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Peters, I. (2012) “Reboots, Remakes and Adaptations,” Media Commons, 6 August. Pihl, M. (1981) “Pansori: The Korean Oral Narrative,” Korean Studies, 5: 43–62. Pihl, M. (1994) The Korean Singer of Tales, Cambridge: Harvard Asia Center. Sohn, H. (2020) “Feminism Reboot: Korean Cinema Under Neoliberalism in the 21st Century,” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 12(2): 98–109. Thon, J.E. (2022) “Transmedia Characters/Transmedia Figures: Drawing Distinctions and Staging Re-Entries,” Narrative, 30(2): 139–47.

16 Cultural Identity in Transnational Korean Animation The Stateless Fantasy of Ragnarök Daniel Martin

Recent years have seen some striking examples of the global success of Korean popular culture. Bong Joon-Ho’s four Academy Awards for Parasite (2019), K-pop heroes BTS addressing the United Nations and performing their song Permission to Dance (2021) in the historic building, and Lee Jung-Jae’s Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Squid Game (2021) have all become instantly iconic moments of unprecedented validation for international fans of Korean cinema, music and television. The apparent arrival of the Korean media on the world stage is not, however, a recent occurrence; rather, these are peak moments in a decades-long trajectory driven in part by a strategic “soft power” campaign at the national level and to a greater degree by shifting audience interests. The history of the wave of popular culture often called Hallyu or the Korean Wave – which has long since outgrown its initial conception as a way to describe the popularity of a small clutch of Korean media culture elsewhere in Asia – is vast and inclusive. Yet, conspicuous in its absence from these various explosions of attention on Korea is an entire entertainment industry – animation. In the few cases that South Korean (hereafter Korean) animated content has achieved global distribution at any meaningful scale, it finds little success and even less recognition. Indeed, the Korean nature of the country’s most significant exports is inescapable, from the efficient simplicity of the “K-pop” label, the geographic specificity of Squid Game (e.g. Seong Gi-Hun from Ssangmun-dong in Seoul), to the charming presence of Bong’s ubiquitous awards-campaign interpreter, Sharon Choi. Korea’s thriving animation industry likewise produces content that is screened and adored worldwide, yet virtually none of it has the “cultural odor” of these other exports: Subcontracted animation, produced for American and Japanese studios, represents entirely invisible achievements. When will “K-animation” have its moment in the sun? Animated content in Korea is not entirely produced as subcontracted, outsourced work for foreign studios. There is considerable creativity and multiple modes of production, exhibition and distribution, yet nothing approaching the scale of, for example, Japan’s animation industry. Co-productions and cross-cultural adaptations have also contributed to the sense that Korean animation lacks agency and identity, in spite of some instances of dynamic success for animation-adjacent Korean media. One of the best examples of the considerable – but limited – success of Korean properties in the East Asian animation market is the vast, expansive Ragnarok franchise. Initially published as a manhwa (comic book) series, the Ragnarok brand grew to encompass a multitude of video games, merchandise and, in 2003, an animated collaboration between Japanese and Korean creators that saw worldwide distribution. Ragnarok the Animation, broadcast in Japan in 2003 and in Korea in 2004, directed by Seiji Kishi and based on the work of credited “Chief Director” Lee Myung-Jin, consisted of 26 episodes and functions, as will be seen, and an intertext of several other multimedia enterprises. DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-21

Cultural Identity in Transnational Korean Animation  181 This chapter offers a consideration of the transnational status of Korean animation in the context of such fraught, yet undeniably significant, concepts as “national identity” and “cultural odor.” The history of domestic animation in Korea reveals wildly variant approaches to the question of “statelessness” as it relates to the ability to attract audiences both locally and globally. At the point of Ragnarok’s animated iteration, the wider animation industry appeared to be at the cusp of a breakthrough, yet seemingly unable to achieve its potential. In the following sections, the development of the animation industry and the ambitious encapsulated in the production of Ragnarok the Animation will be analyzed, as will the importance of cultural identity in popular media culture, in an era of increasing globalization and borderless entertainment.

National Identity and the History of Popular Korean Animation In 2003, the Korean animation industry was poised on the edge of breakthrough success. The cultural industries in the country were collectively experiencing an unprecedented boom, especially in terms of live action cinema: The blockbuster Shiri (1999) had successfully adapted the Hollywood model of big-budget crowd-pleasing filmmaking to the immense satisfaction of local audiences, achieving record-breaking ticket sales in the process. Animators – and investors in animated content – were eager to catch up, and in Wonderful Days (2003) the industry had what it hoped and expected to be an animated equivalent of Shiri’s incredible success (Kim 2003). The animated film, directed by Kim Moon-Saeng, was a huge gamble, with massive investment by Samsung resulting in the most expensive animated production in the nation’s history. To call the film’s release a disappointment would undersell the enormity of the failure: Wonderful Days spent just two weeks in cinemas and recorded only 224,00 admissions (Shiri had achieved over 6 million), and was critically reviled and quickly forgotten. The failure of the film, in terms of the patterns of success exhibited by past animated productions in Korea, was arguably avoidable. Wonderful Days had been designed by its director, quite intentionally and strategically, to be devoid of almost all elements of visible Korean identity. It was a culturally anonymous film, developed as a way to imitate the style and even, in its character design, the actors of popular Hollywood cinema but without any vestiges of specific nationality (Martin 2011). Given that the peak moments of Korean animation’s past had circulated around films that were pointedly nationalistic and deeply infused with Korean culture, it is easy to see this as the single factor most responsible for the failure of Wonderful Days to entice a domestic audience. Susan Napier’s (2005) influential scholarship on Japanese animation – specifically, its global circulation and success – invokes the Japanese word mukokuseki to explain the supposedly “stateless” appeal of many titles. Napier has argued that a significant amount of anime engages a worldwide audience because it lacks cultural specificity, instead crafting characters and settings (often science fictional and futuristic) that participate in what might be called a nonculturally specific anime style. This work relates strongly to Koichi Iwabuchi’s (2002) equally striking writing on what he terms the “cultural odor” of consumer products; he argues that many of Japan’s most visible exports (consumer electronics and entertainment media, especially) lack obvious signifiers of their national origin (rendering them, in cultural terms, “odorless”). While these theories have proven provocative in consideration of the ways Japanese animation circulates globally and relates to its audiences, the history of Korean animation offers a compelling counterpoint, from its very beginnings. The first full-length, theatrically exhibited animated feature film in Korea was Hong Gil Dong, directed by Shin Dong-Hun and released in 1967 to an enormously warm local reception. The film was a genuine hit, its appeal attributed to its wise focus on a national hero from

182  Daniel Martin Korean folklore and legend, emphasizing positive values and a proud heritage, and distinctly distinguishing itself from contemporary Japanese animation (Choo 2014). Though the animation industry experienced some growing pains and slow development in the aftermath of Hong Gil Dong’s tremendous success, just under a decade later the industry achieved another hit, in the form of an even more influential cultural moment. Robot Taekwon V (1976), directed by Kim Cheong-Gi, was born from undeniable plagiarism: The film was the response to the popularity among Korean children of the Japanese animated series Mazinger Z (Toei Animation/ Fuji TV, 1972–74). Robot Taekwon V was designed as a pointedly nationalistic counterpart to the Japanese robot – a character that had all of the appeal (and a near-identical visual design), but with a heavy added layer of what Aaron Han-Joon Magnan-Park (2010) calls “hyperpatriotic fantasy.” In promoting in simplistic, unmistakable ways the superiority of Korean martial arts and the virtues of Korean culture, the film was welcomed by its domestic audience, as enthralled children and grateful parents embraced the national specificity of the film’s virtually propagandist message. This was a trend that endured in Korea’s animated outputs. In the 1990s, for example, the failure of several high-profile, financially ambitious animated films has been blamed on their lack of identifiably Korean qualities (Lent and Yu 2001). Indeed, the notion of Korean animation being somehow identifiably Korean is connected in complex ways to several other facets of the industry: The labor of Korean animators is frequently “invisible” for numerous reasons, giving any major work which exhibits a strong sense of cultural identity the added purpose of boosting local pride and helping to overcome a kind of collective inferiority complex. The sense that the vast majority of the outputs of Korean animators are unacknowledged and unrecognized is not a paranoid suspicion but the real consequence of the nation’s status as a hub of outsourced, subcontracted animation – hacheong in Korean, or “shadow labor” (Kim 2014). Numerous Japanese and American animation studios use Korean facilities to produce “in-­ between” animation for their feature-length projects and television series – a mode of production that is simultaneously essential and devoid of creative agency. This has led to an unfair, but understandable, wider perception that Korean animators are efficient but unimaginative, and that their work is skillful but soulless. These perceptions have created several misapprehensions about the few instances of co-­ production and collaboration between animation studios in Korea and Japan, too. Kukhee Choo’s (2014) historiographic work on the industry has identified at least two cases of Koreanled projects being incorrectly classified as Japanese, due to mistaken assumptions about the likely nature of the partnerships between animators in the two countries. Likewise, the release of Blade of the Phantom Master (2004) marked a milestone – the first full-scale, creatively equal, animated feature co-production between Korea and Japan. Yet, when the film was distributed in English-speaking markets, it was promoted and consumed as an entirely Japanese piece of media, its Korean elements either unrecognized or deliberately elided (Martin 2015). There is, therefore, a great deal at stake in the degree to which Korea’s animated content exhibits or represses its cultural specificity. Those productions with a strong sense of cultural odor are likely to find domestic success and appreciation. Statelessness in animation, on the other hand, poses the risk of alienating local audiences and rendering the Korean nature of the production invisible and irrelevant to global consumers.

The Ragnarok Franchise: Cultureless Media for a Global Audience The now-vast Ragnarok media franchise began with a popular manhwa (comic book) series by author/artist Lee Myung-Jin. Originally published in Korea in serialized volumes between 1995 and 2001, the narrative was left unconcluded as the franchise expanded, and Lee’s creative

Cultural Identity in Transnational Korean Animation  183 attentions were needed elsewhere. A year after the “final” volume of the manhwa was published, in 2002, two key moments solidified the expansion of the Ragnarok brand: The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) Ragnarok Online launched, effectively worldwide due to a high number of global servers, and the Ragnarok manhwa was published in English, by leading manga distributor Tokyopop. By the time it reached an English-speaking audience, then, the original Ragnarok series by Lee was understood as not just a comic book, but as one component connected to the (far more prominent) video game. Yet, it is essential to understand the appeal of the manhwa in order to explore its status as urtext for a cavalcade of subsequent media. Ragnarok is an action-adventure series firmly in the high fantasy genre. Most striking about the series – in terms of its characters, narrative and fictional setting – is the strong influence of Norse mythology. The historical, fantastical world of the manhwa takes direct inspiration from the well-known legends of Midgard, and the central narrative involves an amnesiac warrior named “Chaos” interacting with radically reimagined versions of iconic Norse figures such as Loki and Fenrir. Author Lee MyungJin has been quoted as admitting that, having read about many different mythologies, he found the Norse variant the “most appealing” and so used it for the basis of his work (Mays 2005). This approach to creative worldbuilding in Ragnarok creates, understandably, a strong sense of statelessness: There is a striking lack of Korean cultural odor in Ragnarok, as a larger franchise, that has been intentional from its inception. Thus, the English-language publication of the original manhwa series by Tokyopop, consisting of ten volumes published over a three-year period (2002–2004), is fascinating for how it was marketed. Sold to readers as a fusion of Asian (  Japanese) visual style and a familiar Western setting, these versions of the published editions feature only a few vestiges of Korean identifiers. Lee Myung-Jin is (obviously) prominently credited on the books as author, but translator Richard A. Knaak is (unusually) featured equally prominently on the cover and spine, appearing virtually as co-author. Knaak was a known entity in American fantasy publishing, having penned several licensed novels in the Dragonlance and Diablo multimedia franchises (both of which are, incidentally, intertexts of wider game-based worlds). Promotional endorsements on the covers come exclusively from White male authors, emphasizing the key appeals of the series as “magic” and “combat,” comparing Ragnarok to the Japanese animation Oh My Goddess! (first released on videotape in the USA in 1994) and Marvel’s iconic Norse superhero Thor, and, as if to emphasize the point by simply rephrasing it, describing the story as a “mix of anime and Norse legend” (Lee 2002). Tokyopop, the publishers, were – as their name suggests – primarily focused on translations of Japanese manga, and the readership they sought with this release was clearly conceived of as a combination of fantasy fans and their usual manga consumers. The consequence of the focus on these elements in Ragnarok’s promotion is the eliding of the text’s Korean origin. The series itself is largely unremarkable in terms of style and content; if the hope is for consumers to read the text in the context of similar Japanese titles, there are few barriers to prevent that. The adventurous narrative of Ragnarok focuses on a well-muscled overachieving male hero and several tightly clad, sexually appealing female sidekicks in precisely the male-gaze-driven traditions of shonen manga. In many ways, Ragnarok utterly epitomizes Angela Drummond’s (2010) assertion that “shonen manga is a combination of universal truths and culture absorbed, adopted and re-created.” The stateless historical setting and shonen-style visuals therefore offer little to distinguish the series from other non-Korean titles. Virtually, the only indicators of the national origin of Ragnarok are the retention of sound effects rendered in Hangeul (the Korean alphabet), and the occasional linguistic reference, as in the case of the mythical Blue Dragon Sword, here given the (awkwardly Romanized) name “Chernryongdo.”

184  Daniel Martin By the time the Tokyopop translations had reached the final volume of the series, in 2004, Ragnarok was far better known as an MMORPG than as anything else, with “over 25 million users representing 130 countries” creating a justifiable perception that the game was “a true global phenomenon” (Mays 2005). Ragnarok Online adapted the setting of the manhwa but not its plot, instead giving players freedom to roam an open world and engage in numerous quests and violent adventures as various kinds of magic users and warriors. The game, though popular worldwide, was again the product of Korean creators, in this case the game development company Gravity, which worked in close collaboration with Lee Myung-Jin. This had, supposedly, been Lee’s great hope all along, and he claimed that he had deliberately crafted a manhwa that “would be easy to adapt into a game or animation series” (Mays 2005). The success of the game far eclipsed the visibility of the manhwa, and at its peak Ragnarok Online had dedicated servers for players in an impressive number of key markets, including Korea, Japan, North America, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Brazil, Indonesia, Spain, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Russia and Europe. There was a perception that Ragnarok Online had achieved something remarkable by penetrating the US market when so many other MMOs had failed; according to Kim Hak-Kyu, a key designer at Gravity during Ragnarok Online’s launch, the game’s unusual success could be attributed to its “graphic style” and a lack of competition for “anime inspired MMOs” (Sheffield 2007). Indeed, it is easy to speculate that while the game achieved significant popularity and a large player base, there was little appreciation for the game as a specifically Korean product; its mythical setting and generic attributes were, again, easy to perceive as entirely stateless. The success of the Ragnarok franchise – even just when it constituted two components – led to increasing expansion. The brand’s popularity in Japan motivated Japanese game developers to produce several offline spin-offs, including Ragnarok DS (2008) and Ragnarok Tactics (2011) by GungHo, and Ragnarok Odyssey (2012) and Ragnarok Odyssey Ace (2013) by Game Arts; these were the first non-Korean iterations of this sprawling stateless game world. The connections between the Korean and Japanese game production elements of the Ragnarok franchise have been stronger since 2008, when the Japanese company GungHo acquired a controlling share in Gravity. The momentum of the first Ragnarok Online eventually faltered, but a sequel, Ragnarok Online II, was launched in 2012 (again, the work of the Korean company Gravity). There have also been several mobile phone games (too many to list here) produced under the Ragnarok banner; Ragnarok Online: Valkyrie Uprising (Gravity, 2013) is the most notable and, capitalizing on the cryptocurrency/blockchain trend, Ragnarok Labyrinth NFT, is the most recent (released in 2022 by Gravity Game Link, the Indonesian offshoot of the Korean parent company). The popular webtoon format has also seen a version of the franchise manifest in recent years, with Ragnarok: Requiem for the Lost first released in 2017. The franchise shows no signs of fatigue and continues to produce new content and new versions of Ragnarok games on multiple platforms. According to Gravity’s current chief operations officer, Yoshinori Kitamura, “we will use the Ragnarok IP and expand our business as a one-source, multi-usage business” (Chapple 2019), echoing the goals of many in the Korean cultural contents industry.

The Transnational Circulation of Ragnarok the Animation The considerable ambitions – and successes – of the Ragnarok media franchise were also manifest in animated form, as a culturally complex co-production between Korea and Japan, at a crucial time for both the development of the animation industry in Korea, and the expansion of Japan’s worldwide markets for its anime. The series consisted of one 26-episode season,

Cultural Identity in Transnational Korean Animation  185 broadcast in Japan in 2004, in Korea in 2005, and released on DVD format in the USA by the Funimation label shortly after. The credits for the series attempt to demonstrate parity between Korean and Japanese creatives in key roles: Planning is credited to Kim Jung-Ryool and Kazuki Morishita, while Seiji Kishi is listed as the sole director, and Lee Myung-Jin is prominently acknowledged with credits both for character design and as “Chief Director.” The animation’s broadcast in both countries was supported by a fairly typical merchandizing campaign: Korean bookstores, for example, sold sticker books and other publications aimed primarily at children, rather than the considerable anticipated audience of adult fans. Players of Ragnarok Online in several territories were able to participate in special in-game events tied to the broadcast of the animated series. Perhaps the most significant detail of the genesis of Ragnarok the Animation is that it was conceived specifically as an animated adaptation of the game, Ragnarok Online, and not as a version of the original manhwa series. The final product, therefore, is an unusual cultural chimera, an idea filtered through multiple creative lenses – a Japanese-Korean animation, based on a Korean video game, which was based on a Korean manhwa series, which was based on Norse mythology. Unpacking the “cultural odor” of the end result presents some challenges, especially given the deliberately stateless design of the animation’s (and the game’s) world. Each episode begins with a brief shot of a map of “Midgard,” the version of the world in which the narrative takes place. Dialogue in the first episode alludes to the geography of the area, with many unfamiliar place names as the central characters travel to “the capital of RuneMidgard” to begin their adventure. The signifiers of local culture – such as architecture and fashion – are all familiar as the vaguely Euro-Scandinavian medieval-historical aesthetic that has come to be intrinsically associated with the majority of modern fantasy’s popular media. The anime, like the manhwa before it, draws on the tropes of the shonen genre in assembling its key characters and establishing point of view; the protagonist is a luckless but plucky young warrior who harbors repressed romantic feelings for his female companion and demonstrates considerable bravery and resilience. The character design and narrative structure mirror the format of the game with a high degree of fidelity. The central characters all have distinct skillsets and roles in combat, as would be expected of a “party” of player-characters questing together in Ragnarok Online. They use skills and magical abilities in ways that defy even the shaky logic of fantasy, and instead replicate the mechanics of MMORPGs: Characters are instantly restored to full health from injuries by the use of “healing” magic, and everyone verbally shouts the name of the specific attack ability as they use them (e.g. “Holy Light!” or “Magnum Break!” in the midst of combat). Each episode’s story structure, likewise, replicates the experience of a typical gaming session: The core characters team up with one or two new allies, accept a “quest” which inevitably involves journeying into and through a dungeon-like environment, defeating multiple waves of unskilled enemies, before overcoming a “final boss” through great effort and coordinated teamwork. Tactics and communication are essential, everyone has a specific role to play, and their methods of attack must be adjusted depending on the particular vulnerabilities of various foes. By the end of the series, in a capitulation to the need for an actual conclusion (a convention of sequential storytelling, obviously, but not a component of the never-ending nature of Ragnarok Online), the narrative has escalated and events are suitably climactic, with key characters dead and a battle against an evil demonic force in order to save the entire world. Ragnarok the Animation was created primarily for two purposes – to attract the existing audience of Ragnarok Online players to consume more media in the series and to promote the game (and wider media world) for those unfamiliar with those other properties. The release of the series in the USA was particularly full of potentiality, given the lower scale of the game’s success

186  Daniel Martin in the West, compared to Asian territories. The DVD release by major anime distributor Funimation marketed the series in ways that recalled Tokyopop’s campaign for the manhwa, comparing the series to both iconic Western fantasy and popular Japanese animation; in this case, though, the comparisons focused (appropriately) on games, with promotional copy referencing both the leading fantasy MMORPG World of Warcraft and the evergreen tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons. The English-language dub of the series, too, reflected some interesting creative choices that were arguably made to distance the series from traditional high fantasy and instead emphasize its status as a video game adaptation. While the ubiquity of American accents even in this historical setting is not uncommon in this type of anime translation, what is notable is the frequent use of modern colloquialisms. The deliberate anachronisms are in place to reflect – quite effectively – not the way that characters in the world of “Midgard” would talk to each other, but how players of Ragnarok Online would actually interact via their in-game avatars. This simple creative choice reinforces the idea that the narrative unfolding on screen is the visualization of in-game actions, rather than an imagined, self-contained fictional narrative. One specific character, a dark-skinned archer romantically paired with one of the protagonist’s key allies, speaks in the English version with an exaggerated Southern-States accent, a quasi-Texan drawl at stark odds with her medieval environment. Yet, given that the game world of Ragnarok Online is likely to be populated by (or, at the very least, want to be seen as welcoming to) users from all over America, this functions not as an awkward anachronism but as a deliberate reflection of the MMO’s modern, global player base. The initial critical and audience response to the animated series was, perhaps understandably, mixed; viewers and reviewers understood and enjoyed the show on a completely different basis depending on their level of familiarity with the game. One user on the AniDB forum, where many fans discussed and debated their responses to new and ongoing anime series, wrote: “For people who have never played the game, this anime would totally suck. For people who’ve spent like 1/10 of their life on this game, it’s kinda entertaining” (an AniDB user, 27 July 2004). The comment concisely summarizes a broader trend in the reception of the series; those who played and liked Ragnarok Online were predisposed to appreciate the animated version, while those who did not found it vastly less entertaining. Another user on the same forum, for example, expressed feeling “left out” by the references that could be appreciated only by players of the game, and concluded that the setting felt, to them, like a “typical fantasy sword and magic universe, where monsters threaten the world, and adventurers roam in seek of fame and fortune” (an AniDB user, 22 May 2004). Outside of the context of the game, then, the series appealed primarily on the basis of highly familiar generic signifiers. The majority of online comments and reviews posted in response to Ragnarok the Animation echo these sentiments, and even viewers understand that the show is most enjoyable (or, perhaps, only enjoyable) to fans of Ragnarok Online; one amateur reviewer on the website Anime Planet noted that as a (former) player of the game they “actually managed to get some enjoyment out of this series,” but cautioned those who “know nothing about the game” to “find another series to look at” (an Anime Planet user, 25 March 2010). The identity and appeal of Ragnarok the Animation is thus truly multivalent. The series has deep roots in the creative endeavors of Korean storytellers, yet it is virtually odorless and stateless in terms of its place in the canon of Korean animation and popular culture; it exists as an intertext of a wider media franchise and is ascribed value based entirely on the familiarity of the immediate audience with those other cultural products; it evokes historical fantasy and modern videogaming technology simultaneously. There is a vibrant field of cultural research that considers what exactly is “Korean” about Korean popular culture; the question lingers here, what is Korean about Ragnarok?

Cultural Identity in Transnational Korean Animation  187

Conclusion: Statelessness and Cultural Specificity in Korean Popular Culture The word “success” – used frequently and fairly above to describe the achievements of Ragnarok’s many media components – is nonetheless a slippery term. While Ragnarok the Animation may have been a “success” in terms of translating the game world to a different medium and reaching a new audience, it is equally appropriate to note the failures of the series. It, after all, did little (if anything) to promote the creative virtues of Korean animators, illustrators and storytellers. Ragnarok Online, likewise, has had a long life and been manifest in an impressive number of iterations, yet this case study has been absent from discussions about the achievements of the “Korean Wave” and the “boom” in Korean popular culture around the world. The Ragnarok franchise simply is not visibly Korean in the manner of K-drama, K-pop, Korean cinema and even Korean cuisine. Its stateless setting, its open invitation to a universal audience, its mélange of cultures and histories in the vaguest way – these elements give the series a very different kind of appeal than Korea’s other “soft power” exports. Bong Joon-Ho famously alluded to the statelessness of his award-winning Parasite, claiming “there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism” (Hagen 2019), yet the film itself never lost its status as a fascinatingly “foreign” entity in the eyes of the American audience. In terms of cultural representation and identity politics, the Ragnarok multimedia franchise is a phantom, visible but invisible, meaningful but meaningless, and a fascinating example of the vast potential reach of stateless popular culture.

References Chapple, C. (2019) “Southeast Asia Powered Gravity’s Ragnarok M to $50 Million a Month,” Pocket Gamer, 5 September. Choo, K. (2014) “Hyperbolic Nationalism: South Korea’s Shadow Animation Industry,” in F. Lunning (ed) Mechademia 9: Origins, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Drummond, A. (2010) “What Boys Will Be: A Study of Shonen Manga,” in T. Johnson-Woods (ed) Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives, New York: Continuum. Hagen, K. (2019) “The Black List Interview: Bong Joon-Ho on Parasite,” The Black List Blog, 11 October. Iwabuchi, K. (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Kim, J.Y. (2014) “South Korea and the Sub-Empire of Anime: Kinesthetics of Subcontracted Animation Production,” in F. Lunning (ed) Mechademia 9: Origins, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kim, Y.H. (2003) Wonderful Days Making Book, Seoul: Yedam. Lee, M.J. (2002) Ragnarok (Volume 1), Los Angeles: Tokyopop. Lent, J. and Yu, K.U. (2001) “Korean Animation: A Short But Robust Life,” in J. Lent (ed) Animation in Asia and the Pacific, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Magnan-Park, A.H.J. (2010) “Technologized Tae Kwon Do Millennialism: Robot Taekwon V and the Assertion of a Triumphant South Korean National Identity,” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2(2): 109–30. Martin, D. (2011) “How Wonderful Days Became Sky Blue: The Transnational Circulation of South Korean Animation,” Acta Koreana, 14(1): 137–52. Martin, D. (2015) “Blade of the Phantom Master: Heroism, Gender, National Identity and Cultural Translation in Japanese-Korean Animation,” in R. Denison and R. Mizsei-Ward (eds) Superheroes on World Screens: Global Exchanges in Superhero Texts, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Mays, J. (2005) “Myung-Jin Lee,” Anime News Network, 3 April. Napier, S. (2005) Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sheffield, B. (2007) “From Ragnarok to The New World: An Interview with Hak-Kyu Kim,” Game Developer, 6 August.

Part V

Digital Games and Esports

17 The Political Economy of the Digital Game Industry An Analysis of Transnational Capital Dal Yong Jin

Korean digital games have continued to increase their role in the global game markets. From online gaming to mobile gaming, Korean digital games have greatly influenced global youth culture. It is crucial to examine the Korean digital game industry from the political economy approach because the industry has been the leading sector of the capitalist economy in the 21st century, and it has become a central part of an economic system. The Korean digital game market is already a battleground for transnational capital and is increasingly a part of a global game market. This chapter analyzes the role of transnational capitals, both domestic and foreign based, in the digital game industry. It discusses whether transnational capitals have played a key role in the reorganization of the new media structure, especially in regard to digital gaming, over the last two decades. It also discusses the interplay between nation-states and private game companies to examine the shifting pattern of ownership and production in the game industries, analyzing these within the overall context of social and economic power relations. The Korean game industry has become one of the largest and most dynamic in the world. While many countries have invested in the digital game industry, Korea has played a pivotal role in the PC-based online game and mobile game markets in the early 21st century. Korea was famous for its leading role in online gaming. Ever since Nexon, one of the leading game companies in Korea, developed and introduced the world’s first graphic massively multiplayer online game The Kingdom of the Winds in 1996, Korea created many profitable and skillfully designed online games, such as Lineage [I], Lineage II, AION and PUBG: Battlegrounds, which made Korea an online game empire (  Jin 2010; Lee 2022b). Mainly because of the rapid growth of game users and the structure and dynamics of the interactive game business, Korea became a key node in the networked environment of virtual capitalism (Kline et al. 2003). However, the Korean game industry has experienced a significant structural change over the past ten years mainly because Korea has developed mobile gaming with the advent of the smartphone age. During the COVID-19 era starting in December 2019, Korea has especially focused on the development of mobile games in order to avoid personal contact, which means that game developers advance mobile games because people can enjoy games remotely and individually. Many people have to go to PC bangs (Internet cafes) – one of the most popular places for socialization by individuals in their 10s and 20s – to play together. However, as the government has controlled social distancing, PC bangs must be closed down due to the lack of visitors and players, and, therefore, online gaming shows a minus growth while mobile gaming shows a meaningful increase during this particular era. Most of all, the Korean game industry has been massively influenced by transnational capital. Both Western and non-Western-based transnational corporations (TNCs) have been highly interested in the Korean game market and invested in large and mid-sized game-developing companies. As esports has become globally popular, transnational corporations also expanded their investment in this particular area as Korea is known as the capital of esports (Yu 2015) and DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-23

192  Dal Yong Jin a mecca of esports. Korea has been a battleground among global game corporations, which eventually emphasizes the capitalization of youth culture. The Korean game industry provides one of the most powerful illustrations of how national game production has transformed into transnational game production. As Harris (2019: 183) argues, “transnational capitalism is a global system of accumulation, cross-border financial investments, and world-spanning networks of production,” and, therefore, it is closely related to globalization, which has been “a powerful force of transformation, sweeping across the world and changing people’s lives.” The Korean game industry has fundamentally changed under globalization. This chapter discusses the context of the recent transformation in the Korean game industry, in particular, from online games to mobile games, because contextualization may provide a process for connecting contemporary circumstances to the social and historical conditions from which local games originated. It examines the primary dimensions of the structural changes, including the industry’s ownership patterns, the market structure and financing of the local game industry, as well as the involvement of transnational capital, which are closely connected to the sociocultural meaning of digital games in contemporary society. As political economy focuses on the power relations between politics and economics, this chapter investigates how the government has developed its game policy in tandem with transnational game corporations.

Major Characteristics of the Korean Game Industry The Korean game market has rapidly grown over the past several decades. From online games to mobile games, many local game developers have advanced digital games to attract more game users. While a few leading countries, including the US and Japan, are major actors in the digital game sector, Korea has developed a bunch of successful online games, followed by mobile games, to become a primary actor as well. In particular, while the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic took a severe toll on the global economy, the digital game industry has continued to grow. The lockdowns and restrictions on the movement of people imposed by various governments across the globe as part of their efforts to arrest the spread of coronavirus in the early 2020s forced people to stay indoors and spend their time in various indoor activities, including playing digital games, thereby driving the number of users and the number of hours spent on playing online and mobile games (Grand View Research 2022). Korea is not exceptional, as the digital game industry has benefited from this historical period. It was not long ago that the Korean game industry was a cottage industry because digital games were not considered a major part of youth culture. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a small industry of about two dozen computer game companies developed digital games to serve the Korean game market. However, since the late 1990s, the Korean game industry suddenly developed video games, particularly online gaming, although the early stage of the development of online games during the 1990s was closely related to social milieu, including several cases of censorship and regulation. The game industry has become one of the fastest growing sectors in the early twenty-first century and has enjoyed its status as the most significant cultural form, representing Korean popular culture in terms of both foreign export and domestic use. Online game firms have rapidly become symbols of the creative industries due to the nature of creativity, youth culture and the export-driven digital economy. (  Jin 2015: 416) Korea has also developed mobile games in conjunction with the growth of the smartphone age since the early 2010s.

The Political Economy of the Digital Game Industry  193 2,50,000 2,00,422 1,88,855

2,00,000

1,55,750 1,42,902 1,31,423

1,50,000

1,00,000

88,047

1,07,223 1,08,945 97,525 97,199 99,706

50,000

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

Figure 17.1  Korean Game Industry, 2011–2021 (Unit: million won). (Source: Korea Creative Content Agency, 2021)

The Korean game industry increased from 88,047 million won in 2011 to 200,422 million won in 2021 (Korea Creative Content Agency 2021). Other than 2013, which showed a minus growth and trigged the Korean government to develop long-term policy measures, the Korean digital game industry has steadily increased its market magnitude in terms of corporate revenues and the number of game users (Figure 17.1). Among digital games, online gaming had been the most significant until the early 2010s. In 1998, when the Korean game industry was very small in revenues and workers, online gaming accounted for only less than 1% in Korea’s game industry, while arcade gaming consisted of 75%, as in many other countries. However, with the introduction of PC bang and Lineage in 1998, the situation was dramatically changed. The global market size of Korea’s gaming accounted for 6.3% in 2012, and within online gaming Korean products consisted of as much as 28.6%, only behind the Chinese market. Korea was the leading country in the realm of online gaming until China took over Korea at the end of the 2000s (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2013). The market share of Korean digital games in the global game markets has not changed much. In 2020, it was still 6.9%, only behind the US (21.0%), China (18.1%) and Japan (11.5%). However, the situation has dramatically shifted. The market share of online games dropped to 12.4%, while mobile games increased to 10.3%. Korean game companies have continued to decrease their investment in online gaming due to a few reasons. Korean people have changed their favorite games, from online games to mobile games, due to the growth of the smartphone. Online gaming will be further decreased due to the difficulties in access and high production cost (Korea Creative Content Agency 2021). In order to enjoy mobile games, people need to have smartphones, and they play mobile games anytime and anyplace. However, they have to go to PC bang or stay at home to enjoy online games. The number of PC bangs was more than 25,000 in the early 2000s; however, they were around 9,970 in 2020. Consequently, the market share of mobile gaming in the local game market in 2020 comprised 57.4%, followed by online gaming (26%) and PC bang (9.5%) (Korea Creative Content Agency 2021) (Figure 17.2). The Korean game industry has also rapidly expanded its influence in the global game markets. In 2008, Korea exported $898 million in the gaming business (Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute 2008). It continued to grow to become $8,193 million in 2020. Unlike the 2000s, mobile gaming was the largest segment at 62%, while online gaming accounted for

194  Dal Yong Jin Arcade Games, 1.2 Console Games, 5.8

Arcade Game Room, 0.2

PC Bang, 9.5

Online Games, 26

Mobile Games, 57.4

Figure 17.2  Market Share of Game Genres, 2020 (Unit: %). (Source: Korea Creative Content Agency, 2021)

35% (Korea Creative Content Agency 2021). Again, the growth of the mobile gaming sector can be attributed to the increasing smartphone penetration rate across the globe. In fact, Koreans shift their primary games to mobile games mainly due to the growth of the smartphone. Unlike massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), which are major games in the realm of online gaming, casual games can be played within a few minutes, anytime and anyplace. As the smartphone has become one of the most significant digital gadgets among Koreans, people are gradually switched to mobile games. Kakao Talk has also played a vital role in the transformation of the game industry, from online to mobile games. Kakao Talk as a free mobile instant messenger was introduced in 2010. Ever since Kakao Talk has become a Korean communication channel, although it did not earn any meaningful revenues for the first two years, 2010 and 2011. The first turning point of Kakao Talk was the release of “Playing Kakao Games” in July 2012. By forming strategic alliances with seven partner companies, ten games, including Anipang, were released, and ever since the situation has fundamentally changed. In this game space, users could invite their friends on the basis of offline relationships. Kakao Talk greatly influenced middle-aged consumer groups to be interested in using a smartphone (Han 2022: 3). Kakao Talk, as a downloadable software application for mobile devices that allows people to send and receive messages for free, has become one of the most popular applications for mobile games among Koreans (  Jin et al. 2015). Since its release in March 2010, the number of subscribers has rapidly increased; it reached 42 million in March 2012, but it soared to 100 million, including international subscribers, in 2020 (Kim 2022). Overall, many Koreans enjoy mobile gaming these days due to its usefulness as a hobby or as a pastime. Smartphones allow them to play games at the right time and at the right place with just one touch of their game applications. This does not mean that online gaming disappears; instead, online gaming and mobile gaming go hand in hand in Korea’s unique socio-cultural setting (  Jin et al. 2015). Korea has fundamentally shifted its game market due to the rise of mobile games in relation to the smartphone era, which itself greatly influences people’s daily activities. Korea will continue to advance mobile games to meet people’s demand to play mobile games easily anyplace.

The Political Economy of the Digital Game Industry  195

Transnationalization of the Korean Game Industry Due to the swift growth of the Korean game industry, either online or mobile games, transnational capital has rushed into the Korean game market by setting up subsidiaries as well as by establishing a form of a joint venture with Korean game developers and publishers. Transnational capital has increased its power as financial investment in the local game market increased. Transnational forces have sought various strategies to work with local game firms in the digital game industry. To begin with, major game corporations from both the West, such as EA, Blizzard Entertainment, Microsoft and Ubi soft, and the East, including Tencent in China, have established their markets in Korea with company buyouts and mergers to strengthen their global hold on the gaming industry (  Jin 2010). Western publishers have been taking on other functions in the production and distribution cycle in the Korean game market. Publishers acquired distribution channels to ensure that their products reach retailers and they had been buying into, or taking over, development studios (Kerr 2006: 51). The transnationalization of the Korean game industry has occurred at meteoric speed because big national game firms have drawn greater interest from foreigners. Along with domestic-based big companies, foreign-based TNCs have swiftly invested in the Korean game industry to make profits while learning cutting-edge game-related technologies (  Jin 2010). When online gaming was the leading game component in the 2000s, many Western-based TNCs had branches in Korea (Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute 2008). Foreign investors were holding around half of the shares of other major Korean game firms such as NCSoft (52%, July 2021) and NHN (51.4%, March 2007), although the share has slightly decreased in recent years. What is significant is that the Korean game industry has diversified its transnationalization strategy. Previously, a few Western-based transnational game corporations, such as EA and Blizzard Entertainment, invested in the Korean online game sector. However, in very recent years, TNCs in non-Western countries, including China and Saudi Arabia, have invested in the Korean game market, including developing and publishing companies and esports sectors. Partially due to the growth in foreign capital, a handful of local game firms have developed their games and increased revenues, although mega transnational conglomerates commodify the game sector (Schiller 2007). More specifically, Chinese Tencent Holdings has continued to invest in Korea. Tencent has been a major shareholder of several Korean game companies, including Netmarble, Krafton, and Kakao Games. It has also been extending its investment into small- and medium-sized Korean game developers. Tencent owns 16.4% of Krafton in March 2021, the label behind the global blockbuster game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). Tencent also invested in Nyou Inc. in 2021 to become its major shareholder. It invested 50 billion won in Line Games, owned by a subsidiary of Korea’s online platform Naver, while it invested in Royal Crow with an investment of 17.7 billion won (Kim 2021a, 2021b). Tencent has increased its investment in the Korean game market partially because the Chinese government continues regulation on its game industry. China has been imposing stronger restrictions on their teenagers to limit their game-playing time, which has been impacting China’s major game companies; therefore, a few Chinese game companies have turned their eyes to Korea (ibid.). Interestingly enough, Saudi Arabia is pouring money into Korean game makers NCSoft and Nexon. Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Middle Eastern country’s sovereign wealth fund, acquired 563,566 shares of NCSoft for about 290 billion won ($240 million) in the first quarter of 2022. PIF has also become NCSoft’s second-largest shareholder with a 9.26% stake, only behind the company’s founder and CEO Kim Taek-Jin with an 11.9% stake. The Saudi fund has injected over 1 trillion won into the gaming firm behind the popular Lineage series (Kan 2022). Although Korea is not the only country that PIF invests in the game sector, it certainly implies that it is highly interested in the Korean game market due to its growth potential.

196  Dal Yong Jin Meanwhile, due to the surge of local digital games and esports, transnational capital has increasingly invested in the Korean esports sector. In 2018, the Korean branch of Riot Games – a subsidiary of Tencent – the developer and publisher of the world’s most popular computer online game League of Legends, constructed an esports arena in Seoul. This stadium, known as LoL Park, is the home of the League of Legends Championships Korea (LCK), one of the most competitive League of Legends tournaments in the world. The new stadium with a capacity for 500 people marks the beginning of a new era for the LCK and the professional players in the region (Moncav 2018). US game business mogul from Silicon Valley, Kevin Chou, has also made a major investment in Korea’s esports sector (Yoon 2017): Chou established a professional esports club based in Seoul in 2017 to join the international regular esports league of Blizzard Entertainment’s online shooter Overwatch. The transnationalization of the game industry has been continuing. Therefore, the Korean game industry experienced unprecedented shifts in the early 21st century. Transnational game corporations have greatly influenced the structure and cultural content. The transnationalization of the local game industry has brought a few major caveats. Transnational capital has invested in Korea as digital games become central to both the economic and cultural apparatus. Local game firms have relied on transnational capital, which eventually changes the major characteristics of the local digital game industry. The Korean game market has become a frontline among transnational capitals since the late 2000s (  Jin 2022). As transnational capital is speculative because it seeks a short-term profit in many cases, the Korean game industry will fluctuate when they take out their investment from the Korean game market. The Korean game industry has become a big part of the global game sphere, which triggers transnational corporations’ investments. However, it also means that the Korean game industry has lost its profits to transnational corporations as they become major stakeholders. When global game corporations invest in Korea, one of the major concerns is also the loss of original technologies and knowhow as they are what TNCs attempt to acquire.

The Interplay between the Government and the Local Game Industry While private game companies and developers take a pivotal role in game production, it is essential to place the game industry in its political and economic framework, and, therefore, it needs to investigate the relationship between the game market and the nation-state, which are the two primary forces that shape Korea’s digital game industry. How the Korean government affects the game industry depends on the interactions between the nation-state and the game market and may be further moderated by the relationship between the government and the digital game firms (Cao and Downing 2008), as the nation-state has continued to work its function as it plays a key role in the media and ICT sectors. The increasing role of transnational capitals, both national and global, implied the decreasing role of nation-states in many cases. In other words, the destruction of state authority over foreign capital has been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines neoliberal globalization, emphasizing a small government while guaranteeing the maximum profit of private companies (McChesney 2008). Consequently, nation-states have been forced to shed social commitments to reinvent themselves as custodians of the private market, which has diminished state authority (Dasgupta 2018). However, the Korean government has continued to develop a variety of policy measures to (de-)regulate the game industry. The Korean government still exerts a tremendous influence through various policies, either explicitly or implicitly, due to the significance of the game sector in the country’s digital economy. In the Korean context, the digital game industry was born marketized, and local capital and non-state enterprises were the primary players as in many other countries (Cao and

The Political Economy of the Digital Game Industry  197 Downing 2008). Nevertheless, the development and success of the digital game industry have been organized around the collaboration and conflict between the nation-state and private game companies. The Korean government plays a key role as a regulator to intervene in the game industry to deal with a few major social issues, including game addiction while working as a deregulator to facilitate the growth of the game industry. The Korean government understands that the digital game industry has become the largest segment in the cultural industries in terms of foreign export and job creation. Thus, the government has advanced a few policy measures to support the digital game industry rather than simply regulating the game sector. For example, as a regulator, the Korean government introduced a Cinderella law, also known as the shutdown law, in 2011. Back then, online games were considered one of the primary culprits behind increasing game addiction and excessive gaming among Korean youth, in particular, teens. On growing public demands, the Korean government introduced a strict measure to band children under 16 from playing online games from midnight to 6 am. A decade later, however, the game industry has witnessed a tremendous shift due to the surge of mobile games in the midst of the continuing growth of the game market. The Korean government finally abolished the anti-gaming rule “in order to keep up with the fast-changing trends,” while strengthening monitoring of harmful game content and providing counseling and treatment programs to prevent gaming addition (Yonhap 2021). More importantly, aside from being a regulator, the Korean government plays a key role in facilitating the local game industry to develop the digital economy. When the Korean government saw a minus 1.8% growth in the local game industry in terms of foreign export in 2013, the government had to plan to support the game industry, and it developed a mid- to long-term promotion plan for the development of the game industry and esports in 2014. It was to provide 230 billion won to the game industry between 2014 and 2019. As the domestic game industry has experienced a tremendous shift, from an online game-focused industrial structure to a mobile game-focused new structure, the government mainly supported the growth of mobile games and relevant platforms (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2014). When this plan ended, the Koran government developed another big plan titled the “Comprehensive Plan for the Promotion of the Game Industry.” In this plan, there are 4 core strategies and 16 priority tasks – supporting innovative growth through active regulatory and institutional improvement, strengthening step-by-step support from start-up to overseas market entry, spreading the positive value of games and nurturing the esports industry, and strengthening the foundation of the game industry. Among these, using financial support is an important part of cultural and information technology industry policy (Lee 2022a). Through this, the government aims to increase domestic game industry sales to 19.9 trillion won and exports to 11.5 trillion won by 2024, while increasing the number of jobs to 102,000 (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2020). As such, the influence of the Korean government on the digital game industry obviously spans innumerable institutional measures. Of most direct interest to game developers, however, are a patchwork of financial subsidies and incentives provided by the government to support the growth of the game industry. Yet while the digital game industry benefits from state financial support, it also collides with the regulatory face of government as in other countries like Canada and China (Dyer-Witheford and Sharman 2005; Cao and Downing 2008). Many game development firms have received government assistance. While game companies and developers are pleased by state financial support, these players are much less happy about attempts to regulate the content and system of the game sector. Subsidies and regulations appear disparate issues, but both bear on the political economy of the games industry (Dyer-Witheford and Sharman 2005: 198–9).

198  Dal Yong Jin The Korean government has continued to work with the private game sector to develop the game industry as one of the major digital industries for the digital economy and culture. Korea has been one of the major countries that saw the largest growth in both the number of downloads and spending on mobile games over the past decade. For example, Lineage 2M, a mobile game developed by NCSoft, saw dramatic growth. The game ranked sixth in the global mobile game sales rankings in the first quarter of 2020, up 31 notches from 37th, and it was the top seller of Google Play in Korea in May 2020. Considering such signs, the Korean government is eager to nurture the gaming industry further and leverage it to boost the digital economy (Kang 2020). The developmental state scheme in Korea is not dead and neoliberal market reform makes no fundamental change to the underlying shapes of its cultural policy (  Jin 2014). Regardless of the complaints from the private sector related to excessive regulation measures, the Korean government and the private game sector have developed, sometimes corporative relationships, and at other times, conflicts, which eventually become significant ecological backgrounds of the growth of the Korean game sphere.

Conclusion This chapter has discussed the transformation of the Korean game industry and the increasing role of transnational capital in the local market. It also deliberated the continuing role of the nation-state and, therefore, the crucial power relations between the government and transnational corporations, both domestic and foreign. The Korean game industry has achieved one of the highest growth rates in the world in both corporate revenues and the number of game users. Korea, which was just one of the many small and underdeveloped countries until the early 1980s, has become a major power in the realm of digital games (Yi 2006). As one of the major characteristics, the Korean game industry has experienced a fundamental shift over the past two decades. On the one hand, once online gaming empire now focuses on mobile gaming in tandem with the advent and growth of smartphones and mobile instant messengers, including Kakao Talk. Consequently, Korea has advanced mobile gaming as the new growth engine in the realm of digital games. Korea has swiftly advanced mobile gaming to become the fourth largest market, only behind China, the US and Japan in 2020 (Lebow 2021). On the other hand, the Korean game industry has been transnationalized over the past two decades. In the Korean game industry, transnational capitalists, both Western and non-Western TNCs, play a key role in shifting the contours of the direction by shifting the ownership structure of game firms. The Korean game industry has been vibrant partially due to the surge of foreign capital to work with local game firms to garner profits and potentially necessary technologies for their own companies. In sum, the Korean game industry has consequently become a core cultural sector among youth. Playing digital games has displaced other cultural activities, including TV watching as a major leisure activity among global youth, including Korean teens and twenties. During the COVID-19 era, Korean youth has enjoyed digital games instead of going to theaters and concert halls due to social distancing imperatives. Aside from being a huge economic and entertainment phenomenon, digital games have “complex social and cultural impacts” (Cao and Downing 2008: 515). Digital games are becoming a social location in which new social relations, community networks and new lifestyles are formed (Whang 2003; Cao and Downing 2008; Humphreys 2005). As digital games have important cultural influences on Korean youth, it is vital to develop digital games not only for economic imperatives but also for cultural developments.

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200  Dal Yong Jin Whang, L (2003) “Online Game Dynamics in Korean Society: Experience and Lifestyle in the Online Game World,” Korean Journal, 43(4): 7–33. Yi, I.H. (2006) “Korea, The Everlasting Empire in the Online World,” JoongAng Ilbo, 21 July. Yonhap (2021) “Changed Gaming Environment Pushes S. Korean Gov’t to Terminate Shutdown Law,” 25 August. Yoon, S.W. (2017) “Foreign Capital Swarming into Korean Esports Industry,” Korea Times, 23 November. Yu, J. (2015) “How Korea Embraced Esports and Haven’t Looked Back,” IGN, 3 September.

18 Techno-Orientalism in Global/Korean Esports “They Play Games Really Well, But It Is Us to Have Them Play” Tae-Jin Yoon and Kyunghyuk Lee In the history of video games and esports, South Korea (hereafter Korea) occupies a unique position. The worldwide game industry was taken aback by the sudden explosion of Korean Internet gaming culture at the end of the 20th century, which was followed by massive industrial growth, social controversy and cultural ambiguity around games. Without Korea’s game infrastructure, the popularity of League of Legends (LOL) and the subsequent global success of esports would not have been fully feasible. Many gamers throughout the world look up to Korea that is known as the “mecca” or host nation of esports. Video games might be conceived and developed by the West, but those gamers also acknowledge that Korea is one of the pioneering nations of esports. It is where the gaming culture emerged and expanded to other parts of the world. There are many reasons why Korea is considered a symbol of esports. It is because there are internationally recognized players like Faker and enthusiastic fan communities. It is also due to its own system established throughout its long history. Although many people around the world agree that Korea is a significant player in the domain of esports, Korea’s significant role and influence has also been mocked or criticized. Some claim that the growth of the video game industry in Korea is a result of state-led development policies, the spread of gaming culture is attributable to the peculiarities of Koreans who enjoy playing and gambling, and that top esports players have honed their skills by training young competitors like machines. In other words, behind calling Korea the “mecca” of esports is the world’s contradictory view of Korean esports and its distorted perception of Korea constructed through the Western-centric hierarchical lens of esports. As this chapter will demonstrate, this is a byproduct of an existing, stereotypical racialization of video game, IT technology and, most of all, Korea and Koreans. This is similarly argued by Nakamura (2009), dubbing Asian esports players the “gamic model minority.” What does it mean now that Korea is a powerful leader of esports? How and why has it happened? The purpose of this chapter is to critically explore the stereotypes inherent in the Western view of the global success of Korean esports. It will address how Korea has become dominant in the world of esports, what its cultural meanings are and how the West views the recent history of esports. By using the concept of “techno-Orientalism,” Morley and Robins (1995) argue that the West’s techno-Orientalism functions to reinforce fears related to technology and the exotic Asian Other. For example, Japanese technology in the 1990s represented by Sony, Nintendo, Honda and so on partly created the Western perception of Japan as a cold, impersonal, machine-like, authoritarian culture with no emotional ties to the rest of the world (Morley and Robins 1995: 168–9). When technological innovation takes place in Europe, it is usually celebrated as a triumph of science; but when it occurs in the East, it is often presented to reinforce the stereotypes of cold, robotic Asians. The Western perception toward the technological development of esports is no exception. Both the technological advancement and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-24

202  Tae-Jin Yoon and Kyunghyuk Lee heightened competitiveness in esports are ideal for the powerful West to maintain and reinforce the long-standing prejudices about the East. The idea of “Orientalism” (Said 1978) and “­techno-Orientalism” (Morley and Robins 1995) can illuminate the asymmetrical power structure in the realm of esports. This chapter aims to contribute to a better understanding of the sociocultural aspects of Korean esports on the one hand and to offer a critical insight of post-­ colonialism in the digital era on the other.

Sociocultural Aspects of Esports in Korea It is necessary to understand the history of how esports has developed in Korea before addressing how the West views Korean esports. Esports has been created and developed by a complex and convoluted process of individual needs, economy, culture, technology and history. When discussing the birth and history of Korean esports, its StarCraft fever cannot be dismissed. The “star frenzy” in Korea in the early 2000s was made possible by an IT infrastructure and, more importantly, by a particular sociocultural condition. In his overview of gaming culture in Korea, Jin (2022) rightly notes how the technological infrastructure of Korea has offered an excellent condition for the development of esports: The proliferation of broadband Internet in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the large investments made in online gaming by media broadcasting and telecommunications corporations, in particular, laid the groundwork for Korea’s supremacy in esports in the years that followed. When faced with the economic crisis, the Korean government sought to find a breakthrough for the development of the IT sector. One of the outcomes was the installation of broadband Internet networks across the country with governmental oversight. The popular game StarCraft was imported at that time. Also, many people who lost their secure jobs as a result of the economic crisis started the PC bang (meaning “room” in Korean) business exploiting the Internet surge. For many young people, going to PC bang and playing online games became inexpensive leisure activity and novel amusement in the failing economy of Korea. The emergence of the specific game title, the government policy and the economic crisis combined to give rise to esports, which was an accidental, historical coincidence in a sense. The development of esports was initiated in this environment, but it was Korea’s unique entertainment culture that played a decisive role in its substantial growth. The rise of the popularity of PC bang in particular, which was seen as the center of Korean gaming culture, was influenced by cultural factors more than by economic factors. PC bang became a new space to promote social interaction and bonding among young Koreans through video games. They could mingle, eat and even study together in this commercialized space. Due to Korea’s strong Internet infrastructure and the low cost of playing at PC bang, at its peak, there were 21,547 PC bangs throughout the country (Nam 2014). As players started to engage together, they had a chance to compete against each other and also exchange strategies. Expert players were soon produced as a result of the knowledge exchange and bonding among the players. The PC bang, which emerged in the middle of the 1990s, was initially a place that resembled a convenience room and offered faster Internet access than telephone-line modems. It was mostly used for stock market trading and document printing. However, as a result of the financial crisis, it quickly increased in size and gained a reputation as a venue for playing games. PC bangs in this context became similar to prior amusement arcades – unlike Internet cafes in the West that were often used for work and business purposes. The social and collective nature of Korean gaming culture was encouraged by the offline space of PC bang. For example, local PC bangs held StarCraft competitions and served as a key hub for Korea’s unique gaming culture that integrated online and offline. When StarCraft gained popularity and professional players started to show up, enthusiastic fans expanded the fun of the game into offline and made

Techno-Orientalism in Global/Korean Esports  203 esports matches an entertainment event. When the first offline esports competition took place in September 2001, the gymnasium where the game was played was filled in full capacity with more than 10,000 people. In July 2004, the world was surprised when more than 100,000 people showed up at an esports competition that was held at a special beach stadium in Southeast part of Korea (Lee 2020b: 65–6). Famous esports players enjoyed the same degree of popularity as pop idol stars in the entertainment industry. The broadcasting system was another important element in the establishment and growth of Korean esports. Korean television broadcasting companies made individual video game plays “spectator sports.” They invented in gameplays relay technologies and devised innovative methods to capture the highlights of games. A quarter century ago when no company in the world was considering video game plays as potential television content, Korea initially began airing StarCraft games on television. It was as early as 2000 when Korea launched a cable broadcasting channel specializing in games and esports. OGN and MBC Game – two prominent esports broadcasting channels in the early 2000s – independently organized esports tournaments, elevated gamers and broadcasters to the status of celebrities, and created effective broadcasting technics. A lot has changed since then. PC and mobile media have replaced cable television as the main broadcasting media, League of Legends has become the most popular game title for esports instead of StarCraft, and the host of broadcasting has also changed from television channels to game companies. The Korean expertise in esports broadcasting, which has been built up over more than 20 years, has not only persisted but also extended to other nations. Korea is regarded as the “mecca” of esports for a number of reasons, one of which is the fact that Korea has developed and popularized the esports broadcasting prototype. As Jin and Yoon (2021) point out, the current global esports system is closely related to changes in broadcasting technology of Korea: It was only after the network and live streaming technology enabled real-time streaming of esports matches through various hardware that esports could become the ­fastest-growing global phenomenon. Before such technologies, esports in most of the areas in the global landscape, except the special case of South Korea, struggled to secure exposure in traditional media such as TV but was never really successful (ibid.: 185). It is evident that the global success of the current esports industry is partly due to Korean television channels that focused on video games in the early 2000s. In short, two key elements for the growth of esports in Korea are the introduction of PC bang culture and the establishment of the television broadcasting system specializing in video games and esports, although the government’s IT policy and economic environment have also had a significant impact. From a Western perspective, the uniqueness of PC bang culture can be associated with the stereotypical images of Asians/Koreans who like to meet offline collectively, play and compete collectively; and innovation in the broadcasting system and the rapid spread of broadband Internet networks can be linked to the stereotype of “technical, mathematical and engineering Asians.” As the next sections will discuss in detail, the West can view Korean esports through the lens of techno-Orientalism.

Techno-Orientalism: A Western Perspective on Korean Dominance in Esports It is interesting to note that Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and French sociologist Roger Caillois, the “founding fathers” of contemporary game studies, were closely related to Asia, specifically India and China. That is why Fickle (2019) claims that their thoughts were inevitably Orientalistic: “[Their works] would carry the mark of a binaristic perception of the East as mystical, timeless, childlike, different; and the West, in contrast, as rational, chivalrous, mature – in a word, normal” (Fickle 2019: 118). Their works unwittingly reveal the implicit role of the

204  Tae-Jin Yoon and Kyunghyuk Lee Orientalistic imaginary as the formal logic guiding their ludic theories. Their binary conceptions of play and seriousness, magic circle and ordinary life, competition and chance were built on the East/West distinction. Orientalism (Said 1978) perpetuates the traditional perception of the timeless Others (Asian nations and Asians) in both the West and the East. It works ideologically and politically as any novel phenomenon is often understood in accordance with Orientalism’s tenets. The idea that the East is a mystical place can easily serve as the foundation for the belief of uncivilized Asians, and the image of hard-working Asians can turn into that of a cold and mindless machine. Thus, the core of Orientalism lies not simply in the groundless prejudice but fundamentally in “categorization,” which distinguishes the exotic Orient from the normal West. Furthermore, this simplified way of understanding the Orient is legitimized by the West and sometimes internalized by Asians. At the cultural level, the colonization process that Frantz Fanon (1952) and Homi Bhabha (1994) observed decades ago is still in progress in today’s digital age. While “Orient” is an imaginative product created by the West, “techno-Orient” is a more intricate and sophisticated product of a technology-driven contemporary capitalist system. Techno-Orientalism (Morley and Robins 1995) thus offers a dynamic and often contradictory image of the Orient. Roh, Huang and Niu (2015: 2) view techno-Orientalism as “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in cultural productions and political discourse.” They further say that the “techno” of techno-orientalism comes to signal Orientalism’s relationship to economic globalization (ibid.: 3). TechnoOrientalism has been used to not only update and expand but also reverse the historical, geographical and conceptual reach of Edward Said’s (1978) discursive framework of Orientalism since it was introduced by media researchers David Morley and Kevin Robins (1995) in their work Spaces of Identity. Instead of reflecting the present through the past by isolating and immobilizing the East in order to promote the West’s quest for self-­identification, techno-Orientalism operates by using technology as Orientalism’s operational mechanism. It is not adequate to consider techno-Orientalism as a subset of Orientalism; but instead, techno-Orientalism describes how Western perceptions of Asia have changed in response to shifts in the global power structure, the global economy and cultural globalization. It conveys the Western perspective on Asian technology and cultural identity. Techno-Orientalism, to put it simply, leads people to imagine Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive. Since the late 1990s, when Korean-style PC bang became a place that gamers around the world were eager to visit, Korea’s game industry and gaming culture has become a subject of curiosity. However, there has not been much information besides some news delivered in fragments by the Western media. From the Western media’s point of view, as Choe and Kim (2015) point out, gaming culture in Korea has constantly oscillated between two contradictory tendencies: The legitimacy of gaming in Korea is unheard of in America and Europe, while young Korean gamers have developed very addicted tendencies as a result of this generous attitude toward gaming (ibid.: 119). This contradictory coverage shows exactly how stereotypes are working. PC bangs in Korea were often presented as evidence of advanced digital culture, but they were also described as places where teenagers died while playing video games for 86 hours without sleeping. The Western media reported that Korea had the best esports players in the entire world but they played games more like they were racing toward a goal than like they were having fun. Lee (2020a) outlines various misconceptions about Korean game culture, which are common in the Western media. One of the misconceptions is that excellent players of Korea may be from wealthy households and have grown up with the sufficient aid of digital technologies. The glitzy presentation of esports tournaments and the “model minority” stereotype might have

Techno-Orientalism in Global/Korean Esports  205 contributed to the misconception that Korean players must come from well-off families. Another misconception is that video games and esports in Korea are popular national sports or “national pastime,” a term coined by New York Times (Mozur 2014), just like professional football and baseball in the United States. Lee (2020a) further claims: When esports was rapidly growing in North America and Europe during the 2010s, the Western press ran stories with colorful headlines such as ‘Korea’s National Sport’ and ‘For South Korea, Esports is National Pastime.’ I have yet to meet a Korean who would agree with either of those headlines. Korea’s most beloved sports have always been baseball and soccer, and they will remain so for the foreseeable future. Of course, the concept of Orientalism is not just about preconceptions, prejudices or the dissemination of inaccurate information about a certain race. However, the lack of knowledge about Koreans, Korean society and Korean gaming culture at the early stage of global online games provided a fertile ground for techno-Orientalism. For instance, the Western perception of Korean top-tier professional esports players is similar to how Chinese laborers were typically depicted in the past (e.g. constructing a transcontinental railroad during the early industrialization period of the USA) or how Japanese engineers were portrayed (e.g. bringing in cutting-edge, futuristic technology in the late 20th century). As Roh, Huang and Niu (2015) argue, Asiatic bodies in the USA have functioned as gatekeepers, facilitators and purveyors of technology. A similar argument can be made about Korea’s standing in the global gaming and esports industries. While serving as a global factory of video games and a hub for technological innovation, Korea also functions as a route for the export of cultural items. In other words, Koreans are active producers, designers and consumers of the international game business, as well as the most fervent fans of esports.

Co-Evolution of Esports and Techno-Orientalism Esports in the world underwent a significant new phase around 2010. According to Taylor (2018), a third wave in the history of esports started around 2010: The first wave, which lasted until the 1980s, was centered on arcades and home console machines; and the second wave from the 1990s to 2010 took advantage of the Internet’s power to enable multiplayer connections and a more universal definition of the competitive space. The development of live streaming, which takes the strength of networking and strongly integrates it with the televisual, is the foundation of the third wave (Taylor 2018: 4). Taylor’s description of each era is accurate, but the reasons for the major shift in the third wave are also related to the evolution of Korean esports. During this period, North America and Europe, which had seen how well-run Korea’s esports industry was, imported broadcasting technics and player development programs, while taking away the power of the esports ecosystem. For instance, the process by which LOL became the most popular esports globally demonstrates how the West appropriates the Korean esports system and reclaims control of the esports industry. Only the North American server was officially available when Riot Games first released LOL in 2009. However, because of the nature of online games, players could connect to the server and play games from any location with an Internet connection. Before LOL’s premiere in Korea, many Korean gamers were already enjoying it. Despite speed and linguistic hurdles, more than 300,000 Korean players were able to access North American and European servers two years after the North American server’s debut. LOL was formally released in Korea in 2011, making it the first area to be located in a single nation after North America and Europe. It began with a 1.9% market share of PC bang in December 2011 and rose to the top spot with

206  Tae-Jin Yoon and Kyunghyuk Lee a 17% market share in April 2012. It finally exceeded 30% of PC bang share in November 2012, overtaking StarCraft to become a phenomenal game (Jin 2022). Due to the visible popularity, the “LOL Invitational,” which was not the first LOL competition but a significant event that contributed to the formation of LOL Champions Korea (LCK) later, was held at Yongsan Esports Stadium in Seoul in 2012. This was the first occasion that Riot Games, the LOL developer and publisher, co-hosted with Korean video game broadcaster OGN (OnGameNet). As mentioned earlier, esports broadcasting started in Korea in 1999, and the existence of gaming television channels had a significant impact on the growth of Korean esports. OGN and MBC Game oversaw not only the broadcasting production but also the staging of the esports contests, developing the esports league as material suited for the television setting. It is uncommon for broadcasting stations to host competitions in other professional sports. The majority of the time, location, event, player and competition style were generally co-ordinated by broadcasting stations because esports contests in Korea have evolved into a source of entertainment material for TV programs. It is important to note that Korean game broadcasters already had a technical setting that made on-site events possible as well as broadcast production and transmission operations, at a time when there was neither a social base nor a formal organization for esports in North America. As LOL’s popularity increased significantly, Riot Games began to step in. Jin (2022) describes the process of how esports’ initiative has shifted from local broadcasters to multinational game developers in less than ten years. OGN handled all aspects of the 2012 LOL Invitational’s planning (including the schedule, location and competition method), administration (including events), production and broadcasting, while Riot Games was only responsible for vetting competition-related issues between the USA and Korea and for giving souvenirs to visitors who came on-site. Later, Riot Games Korea was tasked with conducting LOL regular competitions with the Korea e-Sports Association (KeSPA) in 2013. The event was reorganized in accordance with many competition regulations, including the size of the participating team, tournament format and game method. It was transformed from an international competition in which abroad teams participate to a national competition in which only Korean teams participate. This was a process in which a unique esports system developed in a distinctive gaming culture milieu in the national/regional confines of Korea was to transfer to Western multinational corporations and capitalist systems. Riot Games, which did not have its own broadcasting production capabilities in 2011, has strengthened its capabilities by recruiting sports production personnel based on its experience in Korea since 2012 (Smith 2019). Along with LCK, LCS, EU LCS and LPL were introduced in North America, Europe and China, respectively, in 2013, by Riot Games, and the global LOL esports was finally founded by appropriating the way the Korean esports league was established beforehand. The key terms of “skilled players,” “widely dispersed PC bang,” “passionate fandom” and “gaming television channels” could no longer be the unique features of Korean esports culture. The competition was restructured by game developers and publishers. Korea’s unique player development program for esports has evolved into a global framework that also incorporates other parts of the world. Gaming television channels eventually closed, and PC bang lost its iconic status of advanced gaming. Since Riot Games took over the LCS and LEC league operations and broadcasting in North America and Europe in 2013, the number of viewers of the official online real-time broadcasting has climbed from roughly 8.2 million to 32 million in four years (Davidovici-Nora 2017). This success again led to a more active move in Korea. After the completion of Riot Games Korea’s esports stadium (LOL Park) and broadcasting production facility in 2018, Riot Games Korea formed a broadcasting division there to manage, produce and broadcast its own contests

Techno-Orientalism in Global/Korean Esports  207 (Jin 2022). This approach was significantly impacted by the shift in sports transmission from television to computers or mobile devices. Esports producers, who were once eager to legitimize esports by being part of mainstream media’s existing paradigm, came to claim that it does not need to be on television because it is already legitimized (Taylor 2018: 141). One of the propositions of techno-Orientalism is that Asia appears to represent the future of the entire planet through its technological advancement. However, this futuristic vision excludes humans and is largely composed of machines. The ideological force of techno-Orientalism implies that Westerners are the ones who occupy vacant human places. They are largely responsible for bringing the astonishing and mysterious technological advances of the East to the human world. Since 2010, the esports industry’s structure has changed in line with the idea of techno-Orientalism. Although esports broadcasts and PC bang were novel inventions that Westerners never thought of at that time, the innovative and unique phenomena created in Korea were seen merely as a one-off event ahead of its time from a Western perspective. It was important for the Western enterprises to turn this “cold” technological development into “popular” entertainment for the mass of people and to incorporate unforeseen events into the sustainable system that can last. It is where the Western “human” needs to step in, not the Asian machines, as implied in the Western-centric techno-Orientalism.

Conclusion In a recent article, Fickle (2021) notes that the Western ways of understanding gold farming in China and professional esports in Korea are surprisingly similar, even though they are completely different phenomena. This similarity can be summarized in the ideological framework of Orientalism or “ludo-Orientalism” (Fickle 2021) implying both longing and fear: Since the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, there has been a conflicting perception of the Korean esports sector. One is the ambition to “defeat Koreans at their own game,” which is expressed in Western esports discourse, and the other is respect for Korea as a cultured sanctuary for esports and a “model for the future of esports globally.” The pejorative headlines like “Western pro-gamers shouldn’t want to be like Koreans” in gaming publications, local banners like “Nerf Koreans” at international esports competitions, and fan-made nicknames for specific European teams like “China slayers” explicitly demonstrate racialized ludo-Orientalist abnegations. Asia/Korea has become a threat and a model at the same time (Fickle 2021). However, when online games began to gain global popularity a quarter century ago, there was a hope that it might help dispel prejudices that Westerners held about the East, because games might swiftly connect the world and facilitate pleasurable connection and interaction, which might ultimately lead to a better understanding of people of different races or ethnicities. Rather, the long-standing Orientalistic perceptions of the East have been reproduced and reinforced since the birth of global online games. Orientalism is revived in today’s technologically advanced and globally networked world of popular entertainment such as esports. In dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian countries were seen to be capable of controlling the virus more effectively because of their collectivism. “Views on South Korea’s handling of the coronavirus that stress either the cultural traits of Confucian collectivism or the technological aspects of governmentality might seem contradictory, but they are not totally incompatible” (Kang 2020: 591). From a Western perspective, South Korea is a country with advanced technology, limited individualism and an extremely hardworking but relatively less intelligent workforce. The idea of techno-Orientalism fits in this perspective. The esports scene has also been developing in a similar way. Korean esports players have achieved great success due to their talent and diligent training, which is similar to the positive images of Asians who are regarded the model minority in the US. They are, however, presented as machine-like humans

208  Tae-Jin Yoon and Kyunghyuk Lee who excel in most international competitions. Although they are the subjects of admiration, people of the West do not necessarily aspire to be like them. They are seen to be a threat or “yellow peril” – comparable to Chinese laborers in the past of the US when the body itself was technology. From a Western-centric Orientalistic perspective, Korean esports players’ excellent performance does not necessarily mean intelligence or system management prowess because it is the dominant role of the West to plan, manage and develop a global esports system. Although some of the early success elements of Korean esports were innovative, it was primarily the Western business that accelerated its economic foundation and evolution into a sustainable global system. Although PC bang and game broadcasting system were unique inventions by Koreans, it was the West that boosted human and commercial components in the esports landscape. Techno-Orientalism may be a useful descriptor to understand the development of esports in Korea, and, at the same time, this concept is a heuristic tool to reveal the relatively unknown facets of esports today. By closely observing the historical development of esports in Korea and its appropriation by the West, one can see that Orientalism is still working; and through the lens of techno-Orientalism, one can further find out how Korean esports has lost its cultural and political leadership in spite of maintaining its ever-strong status in global ranking. Korean esports players are extremely skilled at playing games, but they are only a small part of the global esports system that has been largely constructed and operated by the Western power: “They play games really well, but it is us to have them play.” Critically studying esports, therefore, means interrogating the fundamental question of power going beyond the industry or the policy.

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Techno-Orientalism in Global/Korean Esports  209 Roh, D., Huang, B. and Niu, G. (2015) Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History and Media, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. Smith, N. (2019) “The Origins of the League of Legends World Championship,” Washington Post, 8 November. Taylor, T. (2018) Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

19 Visualizing the Invisible Korean Esports and the Representation of Gameplay Skill Keung Yoon Bae

What does esports look like? How is esports visually represented? Esports, defined as professional competitive video gaming, is a fast-growing industry that has significant overlaps with livestreaming, but there have been few attempts to analyze the “visuality” of its media objects. Since the 2000s, South Korean games broadcasters have regularly produced and published promotional videos for esports, and the visual language they developed has now been adopted worldwide. Korean esports media showcase a cinematic vocabulary of esports, in which player and team histories can be referenced in a condensed, dramatized fashion to present it as more “sport-like.” However, esports media must also negotiate between gameplay and player promotion, and compensate for the relative invisibility of the human players in esports matches that predominantly show the gameplay screens. The “cinema” of esports, therefore, comes to center around the question of how Korean esports must visually, abstractly, convey the idea of gameplay skill. This chapter explores how South Korean video game broadcasting companies – OGN (OnGameNet) and MBC Game being the primary examples – have come to define a global visual language for esports in the decades of professional esports broadcasting (2000s to present), a language that has since been adopted by the game developer companies that have become the main “showrunners” of the esports scene in the 2010s. It addresses the problem that esports constantly faces when it comes to negotiating between its physical and the virtual aspects, a problem that is by no means unique to Korean esports, but one that Korean esports broadcasters have attempted to tackle earlier than many other countries’ esports industries. These broadcasters, primarily through their promotional video content, were able to establish visual strategies that do not simply seek to emulate traditional sports tropes, but instead explore new ways of portraying and elevating the abstract concept of “skill.” The chapter will first outline the particular dilemma faced in esports concerning its visuality, physicality and virtuality; and then it will examine various examples of how Korean esports television made the earliest attempts to work around this dilemma, and the enduring mark left by those Korean programs on global esports.

Visuality, Physicality and Virtuality At the offset, questions such as “What does esports look like?” appear to be something of a random, non-sequitur line of inquiry, standing somewhat apart from the main academic questions surrounding esports today, which include the following: How does esports fit into the entertainment and sports landscape? How is esports both work and play? Where might esports be headed in the future considering the fast-paced, ever-changing nature of gaming and streaming? Part of the “randomness” of this question, however, may actually be due to the fact that  the  visuality of traditional sports is usually taken for granted. People have never asked, DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-25

Visualizing the Invisible  211 “what does figure skating look like,” or “what does soccer look like,” because the moment most think of those more “physical” activities, there are distinct images that immediately come to mind – images of skaters executing triple rotation jumps high in the air, or soccer players dodging their opponents in slow motion to score a goal. Most sports have a clearly associated visual image, and the image is something that is understood to be a demonstration of ability. When a figure skater jumps into the air and lands cleanly back on the ice and when a soccer player deftly weaves the ball through the opposition’s defense – these images are emblematic of the sport because they represent what paramount physical ability looks like. This is why it is important to ask, “how is esports visualized?” Not only because there is no easy answer, but also because in attempting to answer the question, it becomes clear that esports is faced with a particular conundrum: How does one visually represent a primarily physical skill that can only truly be understood in virtual, digital terms? How does esports showcase “skill” when it is simultaneously comprised of physical ability, virtual spectacle and sports narrative? It is necessary to first establish that esports is, indeed, a deeply “physical” activity. It is easy to categorize video gaming as a non-physical activity, considering its relatively sedentary nature, and with the word “gamer” it is easy to think of mostly immobile people whose only movement is in their hands and wrists. While gaming clearly does not require the level of heart-­ pumping strenuousness that audiences are accustomed to seeing in popular sports such as basketball, soccer or tennis, a quick look at the way esports professional players train for matches and tournaments will reveal the physicality of what they do. Pro players use “aim training” programs such as Osu and Aim Hero to sharpen their aim skills and attune their PC settings to best fit their arm movement (NYXL 2019); they typically play the game “minimum 50 hours a week” (Jacobs 2015) or “more than 10 hours a day” (Kang 2020); they spend extensive time with coaches, statisticians and analyst staff members to pinpoint issues in their gameplay, fix mistakes and formulate strategies against opponents (Blitz Esports Overwatch 2018). These efforts – the hours spent in training, the acquisition of better-quality equipment, the use of statistics and data analysis to improve performance and competitiveness – are fundamentally no different from the ways that modern physical athletes enhance their performances. Major esports, such as Starcraft, League of Legends, Overwatch, DotA 2 and so on, require quick reaction times, finely honed hand-eye coordination and incredibly fast hand motor abilities. In the first year of Overwatch’s release, one of the players who received a great deal of attention – Ryu Je-Hong (better known as “ryujehong”) – became especially noted for his high mouse sensitivity, which meant that he had tuned the DPI (Dots Per Inch; i.e. the setting that determines how far the cursor moves per inch of mouse movement) of his computer mouse so that he would have to move his hand and arm further distances when aiming. While such a setting could allow for more accurate aim for the player, it also required a great deal of practice and talent to actually be able to take advantage of the setting, and Ryu often would stream with a camera angled above his right hand on his mouse to showcase this: Part of the screen was taken up by a shot of his hand on his mouse, to show how much he has to move his hand and how accurate he is with his movements (Figure 19.1). Fans were particularly enamored with such a clear demonstration of unique physical aptitude, as even among high-level First Person Shooter (FPS) players, Ryu appeared to be using a remarkably high-sensitivity setting (Denney 2017). Another esports professional known across multiple gaming communities, Nicholas Moret (better known as “NiCOgdh”), built a mythical reputation for raw physical skill in the esports sphere after being banned from a game Team Fortress 2. The ban occurred because the game’s anti-cheat team believed that no human hand could be entering inputs as fast as Moret did, and assumed that Moret used a “script” (a kind of cheat or hack in which a sequence of actions are automatically triggered through a single command). Moret, however, submitted evidence to the anti-cheat team that showed he actually could and did physically enter the inputs at that

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Figure 19.1  A Screenshot of Player Ryujehong’s Anubis Ana Play. (Source: ryujehong 2017)

speed, which the anti-cheat team accepted and lifted the ban accordingly (ETF2L 2013). Afterward, Moret added “gdh” to the end of his in-game moniker to represent the words “God Hand.” It will come as no surprise that this story has since been added to his online player biography and become part of Moret’s “lore” (renown) as a talented player (Liquipedia 2020). Now that it has been established that physical skill is not only important but also revered in the culture of esports, I will move onto the next question of how skill is represented visually. Again, this is not a problem that traditional sports has to contend with; it is not difficult for the layperson watching a sports event to understand that top-tier competitors are showcasing physical feats that are nigh impossible for most of the population. When a gymnast like Simone Biles demonstrates multiple spins and flips in the air, it is instinctively understood that most people would not be able to do the same with their bodies. When an esports player demonstrates great skill in a match, however, one cannot assume that the audience can instinctively understand what is being shown on the screen. The reason for this is twofold: First, full understanding requires a knowledge of the game and its mechanics, and, second – as I will discuss further – understanding is also impeded because esports matches inherently “occlude” the player’s physicality on the screen. In most esports, the majority of the game screen is occupied by the game itself – the virtual playable characters (“champions” or “heroes”) played by the human players, the map on which these avatars battle, the various abilities or skillsets these characters have at their disposal and a small “killfeed” that shows when a character has been killed by another. There is a wealth of information at any given moment in an esports match, forcing your eye to constantly roam and track different elements of the game. In League of Legends, viewers may pay close attention to factors such as the amount of gold (in-game currency) collected by the teams, the characters’ various ability “cooldowns” (intervals in which the ability must recharge after being used), in addition to the basic movement of these characters on the map, which occupies the majority of the screen. In Overwatch, viewers often focus on the “ultimate ability charge percentage” (colloquially referred to as “ult charge”) shown at the top of the screen by each character, which

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Figure 19.2  Damwon Kia vs. FunPlus Phoenix Match at the 2021 League of Legends World Championships. (Source: LoL Esports VODs and Highlights 2021)

shows how close or far a character may be from being able to use their “ultimate ability,” which is the strongest skill in their arsenal, as well as the “health bar” under the character icons at the top, showing how much or how little “health” the characters may have at any given moment. The images of the physical players, meanwhile, are relegated to small boxes on the margins of the screen, if they are shown on the screen at all (Figure 19.2). It is not difficult to realize that unless one has personally played the game a significant amount, it is difficult for the layperson to understand the level of skill being displayed on the screen. In addition, the small player-view boxes (“player cams”) in the margins of the screen are limited to showing the players’ faces, ostensibly to show their reactions or emotions at certain moments; however, this means that we are at all times restricted from viewing the actual part of their bodies in which the “physical action” is taking place – their hands. Nicolas Moret (“NiCOgdh”) may be “god hand” indeed, and “ryujehong” may boast a mind-boggling DPI setting, but at no point during these players’ careers in the Overwatch League were the audiences treated to a view of those players’ hands and what they could do. More importantly, however, even if we were to see the players’ hands in action during the gameplay, the view would not exactly make for a compelling “sports” spectacle. “ryujehong’s” view of his hand – his “­handcam” – was certainly instrumental in building his renown as a streamer with a unique style, but ultimately the most spectacular, vaunted, “sports” moments of his esports career came on the competition stage, where he won two back-to-back championships in dramatic fashion. And this comes down to the simple fact that there is very little that is “cinematic” or “visually sport-like” about the physical act of gaming. There is visual beauty when a basketball leaves an NBA player’s splayed fingers, his wrists angled perfectly as the ball makes its arc toward the hoop. There is a perfection in the moment when a gymnast perfectly sticks her landing on the mat. These are qualities in popular traditional sports that typically lend themselves to “cinematic” moments, which are the moments that often get shown in slow motion in sports montages, promotional clips, documentary footage and so on. These are the qualities that are then emphasized and exaggerated in sports films and animated works to dramatize key moments of

214  Keung Yoon Bae competition, as can be seen in popular Japanese anime series such as Haikyuu! and Yuri!!! On Ice. Indeed, Takehiko Inoue, the celebrated manga artist, famously directly drew from dynamic photographs of NBA players for his basketball manga series, Slam Dunk. Such “cinematic” qualities, however, simply do not exist in esports in the same way. An esports player, regardless of what kind of moment of gameplay you may be observing, will typically look like this – somewhat stone-faced or slack-jawed in concentration, with fingers moving at high speed to click on a mouse, press buttons on a keyboard or manipulate joysticks on a console. There is no show of rippling muscle, flying sweat or a cloud of dust kicked into the air by sheer physical impact. There is only the clicking and tapping of keys, presumably at “god-like” velocity, but the real “action” – the “action” that actually means anything for the viewer of the esports – ironically enough is happening on the game server, the digital game space and the screen. When a player fires a shot at the enemy, it is only possible to know that shot has taken place if we see the virtual character/avatar take that action, not when we see the human player press a button on a mouse. Physicality, which is – as discussed above – as integral to esports as it is to traditional sports, is only capable of telling a fraction of the story when it comes to the sports “spectacle” and what is going on in the competition. On the other hand, as one can easily imagine, simply showing the gameplay screen alone is also not the answer. While the gameplay screen is where we see the masterful performances of the players, where the in-game character abilities are carefully timed and manipulated, where we see the deadeye shots fly with practiced ease, these images alone render the experience of esports deeply sterile, and difficult to invest in – like watching a self-playing piano instead of a human pianist. One might technically be listening to the same sonata, but it is undeniable that a live performance is a major component of the musical experience, and likewise, watching skillful gameplay alone does not make an esports experience. It goes without saying that, as in any sports anywhere, the competitors themselves – their struggles, their victories, their journeys – are integral to the narratives that add momentum and drama to the competition. Rivalries, underdog stories, championship dynasties and redemption arcs are all classic archetypes of sports narrative, and again, esports is no exception. “theScore esports,” a popular YouTube channel that regularly publishes short and longform video content about esports, has numerous videos on the competitive scene for the console fighting game Tekken. Of them, two of the most highly viewed and rated are indicative of the importance of good sports narratives: “The Man Who Suplexed the Gods of Tekken” is a video on Terrelle Jackson (“Lil Majin”), who, as an American Tekken player, scored unlikely and exciting wins over the typically dominant Japanese and Korean players (theScore esports 2019b). “The Vanished King of Tekken Who Returned to Conquer the World” is a video on Son ByeongMun (“Qudans”), a Korean world champion Tekken player who returned to the competitive scene after a five-year hiatus to once again win championship titles (theScore esports 2019a). In both videos, while gameplay footage is heavily featured, the video narrative focuses on the context and personal details of the respective players, which give insight on these players as human beings to the viewers – “Lil Majin” as the American underdog who took the risk of using the wrestling-themed character Kingu as his main Tekken champion to beat out the dominant Korean and Japanese competitors, and “Qudans” as the returning veteran of the South Korean Tekken scene, who rediscovered the joy and thrill of competition after the deeply emotional bereavement of his father. The live view of esports players does not give us much insight into them as humans, an insight that is deeply necessary when building compelling sports narratives – narratives that are in turn necessary for building fan support, community and exciting audience experiences. These storylines are also crucial for contextualizing physical aptitude – the speed of a player’s “god hand,” the accuracy rate of a player’s aim – so that it is elevated into what we can call “skill.”

Visualizing the Invisible  215 There are many gamers who can showcase incredible ability when playing casually on stream, just as there are probably many baseball pitchers who can throw at incredible speeds, basketball players who can score with unerring accuracy. But “skill” in a competitive sports context is reserved for those who perform in the right place, at the right time; those who can rise to the occasion in spite of crushing pressure or overwhelming odds. There may be Tekken players who could beat “Lil Majin” and “Qudans” in a casual match or two, but “Lil Majin” was the American underdog who overcame the favorite Korean and Japanese players when it mattered, and “Qudans” was the one who staged an unlikely career comeback after a tragic personal loss. However, it is ultimately only by watching videos like the ones created by theScore esports that we can comprehend the historical significance, the competitive context and the mechanical prowess demonstrated by these aforementioned players. There is simply not enough information made available in the live esports broadcast alone to communicate how and why the spectacle that the audience is watching is, in fact, impressive. The players are hidden from the screen for the majority of the broadcast, showing only the digital avatars fighting with their flashy abilities; there is no intuitive understanding how easy or difficult a maneuver is to execute (though one can reasonably assume that the flashier the spectacle, the more impressive or high level the maneuver is). This means that a great deal of esports media outside of the live broadcast itself – widely referring to the spectrum of esports content, including promotional videos, introductory or explanatory content, fan montages, commentator streams and so on – is burdened with the responsibility of constituting an esports experience that manages to contain all of these elements that cannot be adequately captured otherwise – the presence of the physical player and the competitive narrative. Esports videos must, in short, visualize all that is invisible on the live broadcast. When considering how “visual” media might tackle the problem of capturing the fundamentally “invisible,” one spark of inspiration can be found at an unexpected source. Film scholar Linda Williams (1989) has expounded on this exact problem in her book, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, in which she carefully examines the genre of hard-core pornography and, more importantly, why it looks the way it does. In the book, Williams argues that hard-core pornography has been vitally driven and shaped by a pursuit of “knowledge” or “truth” about sexuality, female sexuality in particular, and the documentation of that truth in photography. Its principle of “maximum visibility,” however, runs into the issue of the fundamental problem of the “invisibility” of the female orgasm, and Williams thus characterizes the history of hard-core film as “the history of various strategies devised to overcome this problem of invisibility” (ibid.: 49–50). While it may appear bizarre to connect esports visual media to hard-core pornography, ironically the two share this common problem – that of the physical body and invisibility intertwined. Both genres struggle with the fact that they are tasked with showcasing a certain “truth” (be it true female pleasure, or an actual accurate representation of gaming prowess) to the audience when that truth is inherently invisible. And, in the same way that Williams (1989) describes, South Korean esports media have developed visual strategies, their own specific visual language, to try and communicate on-screen abstract concepts such as the prowess of their players and the histories that they bring to the game. These strategies, which can be in countless videos from the 2000s to the 2020s, have since been echoed and adopted by US-based game developer companies putting out their own esports promotional content.

Korean Esports and Visuality It is necessary at this juncture to examine and recognize some of the main characteristics and quirks in Korean esports media, and for these purposes I have examined some of the most well-known and well-viewed South Korean esports promotional videos. In the history of

216  Keung Yoon Bae Korean esports, certain esports and gaming broadcast companies feature prominently as key players in the development and success of Korean esports, and therefore global esports. Throughout the 2000s, South Korean esports remained unmatched in the PC-based esports category with regards to its popularity, mainstream visibility and industry infrastructure. Korean esports and gaming scholar Dal Yong Jin (2020) notes that Korean cable broadcasters such as OnGameNet (OGN) and MBC Game became the first television game specialty channels in the world, and OGN in particular “opened the world’s first esports-dedicated stadium” (ibid.: 3736–7). With this in mind, it is appropriate to study the kinds of promotional media that such broadcasters published, and how they attempted to visually crystallize the esports experience. For the purposes of this analysis, I paid particular attention to the promotional videos published for the most successful and well-known esports competitions – MBC Game Starleague (MSL), OnGameNet Starleague (OSL), OGN’s Overwatch APEX and League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK). The Starcraft leagues (Starleagues) are now defunct, but were tremendously successful in the 2000s–2010s; the APEX tournament only lasted from 2016 to 2017, and yet enjoyed great popularity and would go onto shape Overwatch esports globally; the LCK began in 2012, hosted by OGN, and still boasts a considerable audience today. A few common elements immediately stand out across the decades, across all the different games, leagues and competitions. First is the centrality of the players’ physical bodies, often shown in full through long shots, in resolute-looking poses (arms crossed, or looking over their shoulder toward the camera) and stoic, stony expressions under harsh low-key lighting. Illustrative examples of what is described here include 2006 OGN’s Shinhan Bank Starleague Season 1 opening, 2008 MSL Club Day Finals opening, 2008 OGN’s Incruit Starleague “Be the Legend” Top 16 opening and OGN’s League of Legends Champions Winter 2013–2014 Finals opening, all of which can be readily found on YouTube. Second is the conspicuous absence of the very technological hardware that is central to their sport and career: Very few promotional videos feature the computer, the keyboard or the mouse itself, though there are one or two notable exceptions. The OGN Daum Starleague 2007 opening, for instance, featured some shots of a computer mouse and a keyboard that caught on fire; however, images such as these were not often used and are even harder to find in the 2010s–2020s. Indeed, in these “trailers” (often called “openings” or “opening titles”) for upcoming seasons and grand final matches, the players are almost never shown “in action” (e.g. sitting at a desk and playing on the computer), which, to give a traditional sports analogy, is like if a promotional video for Wimbledon included no footage of actual tennis. Third, esports players are frequently portrayed as standing or sitting in a distinctly abstract, almost determinedly blank space with a dramatic color scheme – one that starkly highlights the figure of the player as they strike poses, sit down in chairs or walk dramatically on camera (Figure 19.3). If there are any visual embellishments, these are usually added in post-production, like streaks of color encircling the players, or explosive, fiery effects overlaid onto their bodies. More than anything, these blank or virtual backgrounds serve to remove all visual distractions from the player, leaving only their bodies, their teams and in-game names, and – it is implied – the competition or match that silently awaits them. That is, these visual elements described above all work together to relocate the players from the unglamorous banality of their day-today training for hours on end in front of their PCs, surrounded by the clicking and tapping of mice and keyboards and illuminated by the pale glare of their monitor screens, to an entirely different “plane” that showcases the drama and tension of their esports competition narrative. On this plane, they are revealed not as mere teenagers (as most of them are) sitting forever at a desk but as daring challengers reaching for the trophy, as towering champions defending a title and as competitors who have reached the pinnacle of their discipline.

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Figure 19.3 Chae Gwang-Jin (“Piglet”) in the Promotional Trailer for the 2013–2014 League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) Winter Finals. (Source: KaioShin 2014)

Indeed, the 2017 Season 3 finals promotional video for OGN’s Overwatch APEX tournament was actually filmed in various locations around Seoul near the Han River Park, but its most dramatic moments occur when the players are purposefully “removed” from those real, physical spaces and placed against digital backdrops, emblazoned with their team names and/or in-game nicknames (Bloxxom 2017). These dramatic moments also coincide with the rising tension of the background music, matching the beat of the music and the use of heavily distorted guitar. The visual language makes it clear that these players, in an esports sense, exist on two distinct planes – a mundane one, in which they are regular human beings, and an “esports plane,” one that recognizes and highlights their incredible skill in the video game. For example, Yang Jin-Mo (“Tobi”) is shown walking in a park in the OGN APEX Season 3 finals promotional video: In the next moment, however, Yang’s backdrop is replaced with a virtual one, his physical body displaced into an abstract virtual space where he exists not as a “normal” young man but as one of the most talented players of a video game (Figures 19.4 and 19.5). Another illustrative example of this “esports plane” is OGN’s 2018 LCK Summer Split introduction video, which served to introduce the teams and key players who would be competing that competitive season (kekekev 2018). The video opens with a brisk beat over a rap verse, showing the teams and players posing or walking in various urban locations, such as high-rise building rooftops, glass walkways and concrete staircases. After about 30 seconds in, however, the setting transitions entirely to a more classic, gothic interior with French arched windows, with the song slowing down dramatically as the camera shows a metal star – the iconic long-time logo of the LCK. The video then shows Park Do-Hyeon (“Viper”), at the time a player of the new rising star team “Griffin,” entering this gothic room, which is revealed to be filled with old veterans of the LCK competitive scene such as Lee Sang-Hyeok (“Faker”), Go Dong-Bin (“Score”), Lee Seo-Haeng (“Kuro”) and so on. “Viper” is facing an intimidating cadre of experienced veteran players who now scrutinize him (Figure 19.6). The shot indicates how “Viper” is joining this imaginary cohort of sunbae esports players, each of them with storied careers, some of them now facing the end of their time in competitive League of Legends.

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Figure 19.4 Yang Jin-Mo (“Tobi”) Shown Walking in a Park in the OGN APEX Season 3 Finals Promotional Video. (Source: Bloxxom 2017)

Figure 19.5  Yang’s Backdrop Replaced with a Virtual Space in the OGN APEX Season 3 Finals Promotional Video. (Source: Bloxxom 2017)

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Figure 19.6  “Viper” in OGN’s 2018 LCK Summer Split Video. (Source: kekekev 2018)

The gothic room is, effectively, a historical and competitive plane that serves as a “Hall of Fame” that welcomes a new challenger, and is hence visually differentiated from the modern urban setting that the video began with. It is no surprise that animation and anime-style art have served as a useful way to portray the “esports plane.” Some early examples of this are the 2007 and 2009 OGN Ever Starleague opening titles (L 2009; semolism 2011), which showcase the esports players drawn in comic book or manga-style art, once again transposed into a blank canvas world where they are easily visually molded into more cinematic, more “mythical” and powerful beings. In the 2018 LCK season launch video (League of Legends Korea 2018), the final moments show the game’s undisputed Korean king, Lee Sang-Hyeok (“Faker”), getting up from his computer desk and walking toward a gaggle of League of Legends characters, signaling the resurgence of his career after a crushing defeat at the World Championships the year before (Figure 19.7). Even though, in real life, esports literally requires players to play at their desks, the “cinematic” and “esports” moment of the video is when Lee walks away from the desk, toward the champions that have served him throughout his career – that is, when Lee walks toward the “esports plane” where he exists as “The Unkillable Demon King” of the game. The concept of the “esports plane” has, in recent years, come to be adopted more and more by game companies like Riot and Activision-Blizzard, as they increasingly have taken more direct control of global esports of their games and its administration. Riot’s last several promotional media works for their vaunted World Championships have been animated music videos that showcase the esports narrative with a championship theme song, in the same way FIFA creates a theme song for the FIFA World Cup (League of Legends 2018): 2018s “RISE (ft. The Glitch Mob, Mako and The Word Alive)” transposed the real-life esports players of Kang ChanYong (“Ambition”), Lee Sang-Hyeok (“Faker”), Luka Perković (“Perkz”) and Jian Zi-Hao (“Uzi”) into a League of Legends-inspired animated universe, where a mountain peak represented the World Championship finals (“RISE”). Riot repeated this concept with 2019s “Phoenix (ft. Cailin Russo and Chrissy Costanza),” which saw esports players battling their

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Figure 19.7  Lee Sang-Hyeok (“Faker”) in the 2018 LCK Season Launch Video. (Source: League of Legends Korea 2018)

inner demons (anxiety from online criticism, the mental pressure of continuing an esports career, the embarrassment of never winning a World Championship title) through the avatars of their in-game characters (League of Legends 2019). The “Phoenix” video in particular showcases the flipping back and forth between “real life” (featuring the actual players themselves on camera) and the “esports plane” (as represented by animation). In 2019–2020, Activision-Blizzard also chose to promote their 2019 season playoffs (Overwatch League 2019) and their new 2020 teams with animated videos to drum up excitement (Overwatch League 2020), though their videos – unlike Riot’s – lacked emphasis on specific star player physicality and features, and therefore feel much more detached from the actual teams and players involved. Ultimately, the crux of these videos is to try and make visible and self-evident the excitement and hype around these players, to visually accord them the stature befitting their skill and renown in the esports context. Put in another way, Korean esports promotional media paved the way for the construction of a visual language and visual strategies that could capture, or exalt, the heights of human abilities that could only be evaluated in virtual/digital spaces. One has to watch the esports gameplay to see what the players are capable of, but at the same time one has to also know the players – the physical, real-life players – to follow them, to recognize them, to become fans. What results is visual media that attempt to bridge the gulf between the on-screen and the off-screen, often with unexpected, unfamiliar and surprising results.

References Blitz Esports Overwatch (2018) “How Boston Uprising’s Overwatch Analyst, Mr. Bleeple, Uses Stats and Data to Help the Team Improve,” YouTube, 17 May. Bloxxom (2017) “Overwatch APEX S3 Final Intro,” YouTube, 3 August. Denney, A. (2017) “VIDEO: Ryujehong Shows Off Playing Tracer with Low Sensitivity,” DBLTAP, 11 July. ETF2L (2013) “Ban Overturned,” European Team Fortress 2 League, 29 October.

Visualizing the Invisible  221 Jacobs, H. (2015) “Here’s the Insane Training Schedule of a 20-Something Professional Gamer,” Business Insider, 11 May. Jin, D.Y. (2020) “Historiography of Korean Esports: Perspectives on Spectatorship,” International Journal of Communication, 14: 3727–45. KaioShin (2014) “OGN Champions Winter 2013 Final Intro,” YouTube, 26 January. Kang, J.W. (2020) “I’m Not Sure But More Than 10 Hours,” Twitter (@Void_OW), 11 September. kekekev (2018) “LCK 2018 Summer Intro,” YouTube, 23 June. L (2009) “2007 EVER Starleague R16 Opening,” YouTube, 12 April. League of Legends (2018) “RISE (ft. The Glitch Mob, Mako and The Word Alive) | Worlds 2018 League of Legends,” YouTube, 26 September. League of Legends (2019) “Phoenix (ft. Cailin Russo and Chrissy Costanza) | Worlds 2019 - League of Legends,” YouTube, 8 October. League of Legends Korea (2018) “2018 Legend / Restart,” YouTube, 17 January. Liquipedia (2020) “NiCOgdh,” Liquipedia Overwatch. LoL Esports VODs and Highlights (2021) “DK vs. FPX | Worlds Group Stage Day 1 | DWG Kia vs. FunPlus Phoenix,” YouTube, 11 October. NYXL (2019) “Aim God Pine Teaches You How to Improve Your Overwatch Skills,” YouTube, 23 August. Overwatch League (2019) “Here are Your 2019 Playoff Teams | Overwatch League,” YouTube, 9 September. Overwatch League (2020) “An AMBITIOUS Premise as Grand Finals Awaits?! | An Overwatch League Story – Guangzhou Charge,” YouTube, 10 September. ryujehong (2017) “Artist Ryu’s Anubis Ana Play,” YouTube, 29 September. semolism (2011) “EVER Starleague 2009 Opening,” YouTube, 7 March. theScore esports (2019a) “The Vanished King of Tekken Who Returned to Conquer the World,” YouTube, 25 July. theScore esports (2019b) “The Man Who Suplexed the Gods of Tekken,” YouTube, 26 September. Williams, L. (1989) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Berkeley: University of California Press.

20 Between Super Players and Mega Fans The Emergence of Data-Led Gaming Environments in Korean Esports Peichi Chung

Focusing on computational creativity in South Korean (hereafter Korean) esports, this chapter explores the innovation that Korean esports players demonstrate in driving the development of the country’s globally popular esports culture. Existing studies on Korean esports have tended to emphasize the sports from industrial, economic and historical perspectives. However, this chapter investigates the technological dimension that super professional players in Korean esports teams utilize in order to build fame, create authority of play and shape leadership, all of which further cultivate the mega fan communities they enjoy on global digital platforms. This characterizes Korea’s computational creativity as a critical feature of the country’s unique and competitive esports culture. It sheds light on the array of digital skills that players develop to engage in esports arenas. All this exemplifies the data-led gaming environment that super pro players and their mega fan communities co-create in the interlinked digital space. Historically, the Korean esports industry has been expanding since the mid-2000s (Statista 2022). In 2020, the country was ranked as the world’s third largest esports powerhouse, following the market leads of China and the US. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Korea’s esports ecosystem grew further in the business areas of media rights, merchandise, ticketing, publishing fees, sponsorship, advertising and streaming (ibid.). This industry development can be seen as a reflection of the global trend that benefits esports due to the networked nature of the esports industry. Compared with other entertainment industries – namely, film, music, television and performing arts – esports has gained popularity in global viewership despite cancellations of physical esports events and competitions because people had to stay home during the quarantine process (Fakazli 2020). The outcome of two decades of esports growth manifests in the sports’ economic impact on Korea’s video game industry. In all, this market has expanded three times in scale over the last 15 years, starting with earnings of 5.14 trillion worth of Korean won in 2007 and growing to 18.89 trillion in 2020 (Statista 2022). In the context of the technological dimension of industry innovation introduced to esports by Koreans, esports professionalization has become an issue of concern that challenges the society’s perception of gaming youth and their education, despite the industry’s continuous growth. The public’s largely negative stereotype of gaming reflects an educational value shared by many parents in Neo-Confucian Asian societies. However, the public’s perception toward esports professionalization has gradually been improving in Korea thanks to the climate created by the market and industry expansion with government support. Rea (2016) describes esports as the driver of cultural production generated by the expansion and promotion of Korea’s popular entertainment globally. In 2022, as the government continued to develop the country’s advanced technology infrastructure, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced its plan to advance Korea to a leading global player in the emerging “metaverse” industry. Korea currently aims at investing US$177 million in metaverse projects to support innovative emerging companies and create jobs. The esports industry has also become a targeted industrial sector for DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-26

Between Super Players and Mega Fans  223 developing metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFT) and crypto-gaming technologies (Agarwal and Mishra 2022). The government’s metaverse policy emphasizes Korea’s competitive esports teams and their technologically savvy players and fans that are expected to contribute enormously to the country’s metaverse market, as esports enthusiasts have grown used to spending money on digital goods and therefore will be ready to accept Korea’s new “play-to-earn” metaverse gaming market. This chapter also discusses the society’s transformation in its perception of esports by investigating the potential role that esports plays in bringing social change. It builds on previous research on player-led innovation driven by semi-professional esports players in Korea (Chung 2021). The chapter shifts focus from player labor to the technological dimension of system power that encourages the public’s esports engagement. Digital platforms have become an open space to connect elite esports players and their mega fans. Emerging computational technology forms data-driven gaming environments for elite players, fans and game companies that used to create a presence in Korea’s esports ecosystem. The first section of this chapter presents a review of relevant literature in order to conceptualize the impact of system-based media technology on competitive esports. The next part characterizes the interactive space that provides professional players and their mega fan communities with opportunities to co-create content and esports value, by evaluating strategies that Korean elite players use in order to build their online presence. The chapter then selects the representative esports fan sites as a way to profile the topics and activities of fan engagements in and outside Korea. This chapter then analyzes three popular data analytics companies in Korea in order to explore the emerging data analytic business derived from the fans’ active participation in data-driven gaming environments. This chapter concludes with the discussion on the advancement of computational technology in enhancing digital skills that cultivate the innovative power in Korea’s esports ecosystem.

Technology, Computational Gaming and Esports To evaluate the social impact of automation technology on esports engagement in all its variation, it is necessary to begin by focusing on the technology’s function in today’s networked society. Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2016) identify scenarios in which the computer software– driven work environment enhances organizational productivity using cheap sensors and huge databases. In their influential book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, the authors attribute this new kind of computational efficiency to the arrival of the second machine age. Technological changes brought by the second machine age, they argue, offer clues to a future trend in social change in which machines will gradually take over some parts of human labor. The high efficiency and productivity of existing machines already demonstrate a range of possible outcomes by their ability to complete tasks with fast and accurate mathematical calculation. Nowadays, since game companies are at the forefront of innovation in implementing automation technology, similar developments have also taken place in the field of esports. It is obvious that a new type of human–machine relationship is evolving in the context of an emerging data-driven and data-mediated world. Witness, for example, the game companies actively adopted new technologies of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, non-fungible tokens (NFT) and blockchains to improve the gaming environment. In 2016, Google’s DeepMind project, AlphaGo, surprised the world by defeating Korea’s Go World Champion, Lee Sedol. In 2019, advancements in machine learning produced a revolutionary event in automation technology when the AI-powered Dota 2 bot, OpenAI Five, beat the world’s top single players of Dota 2 (Wigger 2022). Notice, too, that in predictive technology, AI is used in apps like senpAI.GG to coach players in improving performance training.

224  Peichi Chung As AI-powered data analytics intelligence has continued to enrich the computer gaming environment, esports in turn has inspired players to react ever more quickly in their competitive gameplay. All these developments described above indicate that computer-generated data will continue to exert growing influence on human thinking as people make real-life decisions in the physical and virtual world. In video game studies, scholars use the concepts of gaming and systems to explain a new kind of human–machine relationship that is computational (Gunkel 2018; Bogost 2021). Bogost (2021) states that gaming in video game tends to emphasize the process of procedural rhetorics for the purpose of expressive computation. He elaborates how the simulation feature in technology of automation functions in order to deliver play that allows players to express politics, advertising and education. As gaming signifies a mode of engagement in a computer system, the significance of gaming lies in the moment at which a player goes beyond simple interaction with game rules (Gunkel 2018). In Gaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Game Studies and Virtual Worlds, Gunkle (2018) mentions the importance of understanding what happens in a computer system when a player engages in video gameplay. On the one hand, games are developed under the assumption that “gameplay is to be controlled, managed and processed by a computer” (ibid.: 4). When a player engages a system in gaming, he or she is expected to encounter artificial entities – non-player characters, non-human objects and AI opponents – that populate their virtual environment. At the same time, a system also allows players to experience open play with the use of words and avatars. This creates an enabling potential in the gaming process that allows a player to challenge rules by playing beyond the game’s designed regulation to make personal statements demonstrating their unique existence in the game’s virtual world. In electronic sports, gaming in systems for expressive play works in a number of ways. To explain this, Ruotsalainen, Torhonen and Karhulahti (2022) highlight the cultural contexts of esports engagements. When players game competitively in the system, various social interactions can arise to trigger the interaction process between players and game companies. Take the game Overwatch, as an example. It is enriched with a hybrid system design in order to inspire an intelligent co-creative gaming process for all types of players. The system enables player agency so that participating individuals can play it, compete in it and watch it (ibid.). Specifically, Overwatch’s system design allows casual gamers to engage in competitive-style gaming as amateurs. At the same time, the system also provides an effective computational environment for core players who primarily engage in gaming for competition. Elite esports players can use their performance to form fan communities based upon the characters they play in their games. It is acknowledged that tensions between players and game companies sometimes occur when players are immersed in the virtual world they create in the gaming system they use (Blamey 2022). Specific esports engagements can feature player participation in competitive gaming for the purpose of expressing personal identity politics, demonstrating feelings of attachment toward in-game characters, and upholding nationalist sentiments (Ruotsalainen et al. 2022). In addition, as the experience of physical activity has been made central to digital experiences as a result of computational technologies, scenarios such as iReferee and VR esports–viewing audiences can further illustrate well the changing concept of the digitally trained body (Miah 2017). “Data generated by new digital sensors helps to reveal the consequences of tactical decisions and so as to provide insights that will make it practicable to enhance athletes’ performance in electronic sports” (ibid.: 107). In the context of Korean esports, previous research emphasized the historiographical viewpoint to demonstrate the grassroots engagement of spectators in shaping the country’s development of esports (  Jin 2010). Mass spectatorship played a significant role in the early developmental stage of esports ecosystems. Esports began to emerge in the late 1990s when StarCraft became

Between Super Players and Mega Fans  225 a popular gaming phenomenon, rising in tandem with the boom in Korea’s Internet cafe, called “PC bang” (Huhh 2009). Since then, the small tournaments that used to be held in PC bangs have shifted to large stadiums. Government-supported organizations and big corporations such as the International Esports Federation (IESF) and Samsung began hosting international events like the Esports World Championship and World Cyber Games (WCG). The introduction of League of Legends into competitive gaming after 2012 compounded the level of esports enthusiasm in Korean society even further. Two levels of esports engagement can be recognized in local and global contexts. In the local field, the popularity of esports continues to grow as a media phenomenon linked to television broadcasting ( Jin 2010). To nurture this growth, in the 2000s, two cable television and web portals were established, dedicated to all-day game competition programming and news about celebrity players in professional gaming. Since 2010, Korean esports has also expanded into the global field to become a transnational phenomenon (Bae 2021). Although esports broadcasting has been televisual, the rise of live esports broadcasting via social media characterizes esports as a vital and new emerging digital space in which sports teams can cultivate global fan communities (Taylor 2018). The interactive features of platform algorithms contribute to the global increase of spectatorship for Korean professional players. Fans of Korean esports teams, for instance T1, can watch their favorite players competing in League of Legends during playoffs at international tournaments through live streaming services. The 3.8 million social media followers of Korea’s elite player Lee Sang-Hyeok (better known as “Faker”) can even directly interact with Lee by simply typing comments in the chat forum whenever he streams via his personal Twitch channel. Technological advancement blurs the geographical boundaries of esports engagement. In Korean esports, it has unified global and local fans into a single base of media consumption. Nowadays, local media content can enter the global cultural sphere through digital platforms ( Jin 2021). Global access to information about Korean esports shares a similar transformation story with many other local digital cultures that reach out to global consumers through the mediation of AI. As AI-driven digital platforms have changed social media culture from one that emphasizes sociality and connectivity to one that promotes the personalization of culture, users nowadays have greater influence on the circulation of information over social media (van Dijck 2013; Jin 2021). The cultural circumstances, in which Korean professional esports players expand their professional play sphere beyond domestic teams to include international ones as well, can trigger complex engagements related to power, diplomacy and global spectatorship (Murray et al. 2020; Bae 2021). For instance, Korean players and coaches who move to China to join local teams there have raised the competitiveness of Chinese esports teams, which in return challenges Korea’s global leadership in the field (Economist 2022). At the audience level, esports fans in other countries may sometimes feel tired of Korea’s global dominance as they search for moments when non-Korean players win in global esports events (Scholz 2019).

Korea’s Data-Led Gaming Environments Specifically, this section discusses three types of ongoing esports engagements in Korea’s dataled gaming environments. It examines system power adopted by three stakeholders of elite players, fans and data analytics companies in Korea’s esports ecosystem. It addresses how stakeholders connect to each other through platforms to form data-led gaming environments. Scholz (2019) categorizes stakeholder networks in the formulation of an esports ecosystem into two layers of horizontal relationship into primary and secondary. This chapter on Korean esports extends Scholz’s analysis by investigating a cross-network and “vertical” relationship among the three of elite players, fan public communities and data analytics companies to articulate the

226  Peichi Chung data-led gaming environments that emerge as part of the ecosystem. According to Scholz (2019), the convenient access to content in data-driven gaming environments encourages fan participation and cultivates a strong gaming culture. It is also recognized that data companies enrich the primary circle of esports stakeholders by providing data services that support the environmental infrastructure (ibid.). The formulation of supporting infrastructure not only benefits team performance during tournaments, but also provides analytical data to fans seeking to efficiently gather information online whenever they follow performances of their favorite players. This chapter focuses on three fan sites – fmkorea.com, dcinside.com and reddit.com – to explore Korea’s both local and global presentation of data-led gaming environments. It also examines the strategies of esports engagement of elite players and data analytics companies with website analysis of Esports Earnings, PORO.GG, YOUR.GG and OP.GG. Esports Earnings is a website that offers gamers comprehensive and historical esports information related to players, teams, prizes, tournaments, leagues and so on around the world. FMKOREA and DCINSIDE are two online discussion forums where Korean fans gather to discuss a variety of topics in Korean language, while REDDIT is a comparable English discussion forum based in the US. In addition, PORO.GG, YOUR.GG and OP.GG are three e-gaming data analytics companies based in Korea. This study uses multiple methods to analyze selected discussion forums and companies from the three stakeholders. For the fan site analysis, it adopts third-party web crawler, Octoparse, collecting a total of 13,308 messages. It applies Voyant Tools to conduct corpus-based keyword study of these selected messages. It uses two keywords, “South Korean esports” and “e스포츠” (esports), to analyze 2,992 postings from DCINSIDE, 10,000 postings from FMKOREA and 316 postings from REDDIT. (1) Elite Esports Players Korea’s primary player stakeholder network is constituted by a group of young elite players who perform competitively in games such as Dota 2, Fortnite, Hearthstone, Hero of the Storm, League of Legends, Overwatch, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, StarCraft: Brood War, StarCraft II, Tekken 7 and Warcraft III. An analysis of the top 20 Korean players with the highest earnings from the website Esports Earnings shows that most of the elite players share personal information in order to maintain their online presence through social media accounts managed by their esports teams (Table 20.1). All top-earning elite players started their pro-gamer careers from a young age. For example, Maru, with a rank of 3, and TY, with a rank of 15, both began to play professionally at the age of 13. In 2022, most of the top 20 players remain active in professional esports. The shortest length of team service appears to be three years, while 8 of the total of 20 players have stayed in esports for more than ten years. A total of 12 players once served on the Korean National Team to represent their country as the nation’s esports athletes. It is notable that all these players began their pro-gamer careers in Korea. Most players have remained in Korea; however, some of them such as Rogue, Duke, Dark, InnoVation and Zest have moved overseas to play for American teams such as Dragon Phoenix Gaming, Caos Esports Club, the Chinese team Invictus Gaming and the Australian team Ballistix. An extended study of social media accounts affiliated with the top-earning elite players reveals that the players’ official social media accounts often post news about their tournament events. These postings always receive large numbers of likes from players’ followers. Most of the fans respond to news about their favorite players with extremely encouraging messages. Posting meme replies is a popular form of fan expression. Controlling corporations generally portray their esports athletes as people who have fun personalities and are shy and hardworking. Game companies such as Riot Games also produce popular YouTube videos that present personal

Table 20.1  Top 20 Highest Earning Esports Players for Korea Player ID

Total Earnings

Years of Team Service

Age Rank of Play

Teams Joined

1 2 3 4 5

Faker Rogue Maru Loki Duke

$1,367,521 $1,054,174 $1,027,474 $974,467 $954,620

2013–2022 2013–2022 2010–2022 2018–2022 2014–2019

17–26 19–28 13–25 19–24 19–24

6

Dark

$928,261

2012–2022

16–26

7

Bang

$915,846

2013–2021

16–24

8 9 10 11 12

Wolf Pio Esth3R Bengi InnoVation

$913,084 $909,645 $909,195 $810,683 $796,983

2013–2018 2018–2022 2017–2021 2013–2016 2010–2021

16–21 22–26 22–26 19–22 16–28

13

Dubu

$794,804

2014–2022

N/A

14

Moon

$714,925

2003–2022

16–35

15

TY

$705,108

2008–2021

13–26

16

Zest

$679,736

2013–2022

21–29

17 18 19 20

Flash Stats sOs Jaedong

$670,457 $655,805 $651,429 $644,541

2007–2121 2008–2021 2011–2021 2006–2022

15–28 16–29 17–27 16–32

SKT1, Korean National Team 8Th Team, Dragon Phoenix Gaming, Jin Air Green Wings, Korean National Team Jin Air Green Wings, Korean National Team, Onsyde Gaming, Prime, Team NV Damwon Gaming, PUBG, Gen.G Esports, Korean National Team Invictus Gaming, League of Legends (KT Bullets, NaJin e-mFire, NaJin Black Sword, SKT T1) Ballistix, Dragon Phoenix Gaming, Korean National Team, StarCraft II, SlayerS, T1, The Gosu Crew Afreeca Freecs, Evil Geniuses, League of Legends (NaJin White Shield, SKT T1, SKT T1, Xenics Blast) League of Legends (NaJin e-mFire, NaJin White Shield, SKT T1) GC Busan, Gen.G Esports, Korean National Team PUBG, Gen.G Esports, PUBG League of Legends (SKT T1 K, SKT T1) Ballistix, KaiZi Gaming, Korean National Team, O’Gaming, StarCraft 2, Team 1, Team Acer, Team Reciprocity Chaos Espors Club, Fnatic, Geek Fam, Immortals, Dota 2, Team SoloMid, Team Undying DRX, Fnatic, Korean National Team, Meet Your Makers, Vision Strikers, WeMade Fox 8th Team, StarCraft KK, KT Rolster, Splyce, Triumphant Song Gaming, Wemade Fox Dragon Phoenix, Gaming, KT Rolster, Korean National Team, Ocean Gaming, Raise Your Edge Gaming KT Rolster StarCraft 2, KT Rolster, Korean National Team, Splyce StarCraft, Jin Air Green Wings, Korean National Team, Team NV, Woongjin Stars 8th Team, CJ Entus, Evil Geniuses, StarCraft, Korean National Teams

(Source: Esports Earnings, https://www.esportsearnings.com/countries/kr)

Between Super Players and Mega Fans  227

Rank

228  Peichi Chung journeys by top players or promote them as the legendary heroes of the game. The interactive features of social media platforms unintentionally promote a participatory fan culture that can sometimes develop fan communities into a powerful force that can be mobilized against game companies whenever groups seek changes in decisions affecting professional players and their competition results. It is evident that fans in Korea can sometimes be very protective of their favorite players. Also, they can be zealous and immersed in their favorite teams during game competitions. They may act strongly and, in doing so, cross the line to interfere with team management and corporate decision-making. In 2022, for instance, when T1, one of Korea’s most powerful esports teams, lost in one qualifying competition for the Mid-Season Invitational, fans sent a truck to League of Legends Park in Seoul. The truck carried a sign suggesting that T1 remove its coaches and replace them with others who had records of winning world championships (Kwon 2022). A similar case of conflict occurred when the player Faker decided to sue his toxic fans over their verbal abuses and harassing comments in July of the same year; it revealed the twisted outcome that can come from overzealous fan behavior in esports engagement (Tuting 2022). In a global context, the social power of Korean elite players also affects the environment, such as in 2021 when the player Fearless (Eui-Seok Lee), who plays Overwatch for Dallas Fuel in Texas, USA, spoke up about his experience with anti-Asian racism in social media. The owner of the team had to respond with tweets showing his support for Fearless while defending the positive image of Dallas as a safe city in the US (Blakey 2021). (2) Fan Sites Esports fan engagement, according to an analysis of postings from DCINSIDE and FMKOREA, demonstrates how fan communities function for new aggregation. The discussion forum provides an online space for fans to learn about all news and development related to the Korean esports industry. Fans and other people interested in Korean esports are free to post announcements and circulate up-to-date information about the player community, market trend and industry update. The anonymous nature of these fan sites sometimes influences fans to go beyond rational discussion. Similar to fan engagement in the social media accounts of elite players, fans enjoy using meme to express their feelings about the topics they follow. A comparison between DCINSIDE and FMKOREA reveals that fans in the later discussion forum are more active and productive. According to a keyword analysis from Voyant Tools, the top ten words that appeared in a data collection analysis of DCINSIDE for the year 2022 included Hanwha, competition, games, league, LOL, team, official and sports. An extended reading of postings associated with these keywords reveals that a high number of messages posted in the fan site consists of promotional messages of esports teams or their competition news sent by esports companies such as Hanwha Life Esports. A more extensive thread study based on these keywords identifies an international dimension of fan discussion in DCINSIDE. Fans who participate in the discussion forum follow news of competitive esports teams from other parts of the world, although they pay particularly close attention to international teams that hire Korean players. Often, fan postings show their support of favorite teams and players. For instance, fans can share their excitement or frustration in messages by posting a very long analysis of the game competition. One example comes from the posting on the DCINSIDE website in which a fan of DWG KIA shares his thoughts and knowledge about the team’s strength. Fan evaluations are sometimes detailed and accurate due to their familiarity and close monitoring of their favorite team’s style of player training, management and skill development. In addition, online discussion forum also serves as an intimate digital space for professional players to share very personal feelings with their fans. Another posting on the DCINSIDE website reveals the inner voice of a retired professional player who shares his experiences of living under

Between Super Players and Mega Fans  229

Figure 20.1  Word Cloud Analysis for FMKOREA. (Figure Produced by the Author).

the competitive and pressurized environment of a Dota 2 professional player and announces his final decision to retire from professional esports. This case indicates how professional players use the discussion forum to connect to their unknown mega fans and maintain an unofficial channel of communication with their fan communities beyond their official social media accounts. This study further demonstrates the hierarchy of themes and topical discussions that are popular among fans in FMKOREA during the data collection period (Figure 20.1). The most mentioned keywords related to esports in FMKOREA are League of Legends (LOL) (7,293), Internet (823), team (721), Hanwha (673), TV (645), life (562), Afreeca (502), broadcast (477), StarCraft (452) and game (426). LOL is the most popular word mentioned in 7,293 corpus-based contexts, while Internet and team are the second and third popular words that are mentioned 823 times and 721 times, respectively, in corpus-based contexts. The thread analysis of postings based on these keywords further shows a wider variety of discussion topics and focus compared to those on the DCINSDIE website. For instance, under the keyword of “team”, fan messages reveal more discussions on teams of China in FMKOREA. There is also a higher degree of fan engagement on topics about global esports teams. Fans are inclined to share long reflections on overseas teams. They are concerned about esports players and can post to share detailed information about the players – be it about skills, retirement ages or career development overseas after these players have departed from their teams in Korea. In all, fan discussion topics range widely from Nielson market reports and analyses of team strategy to new rules on fan management and new decisions announced by game corporations. Sometimes, cross-posted messages from other fan sites appear, including those posted on REDDIT to be forwarded to FMKOREA. The digital space created by interlinked fan sites demonstrates an open communicative space for community-building of fan culture that is enabled by the technology of automation in the local esports community fan sites. A comparison of fan engagement can be seen in the keyword analysis of postings on REDDIT, which reveals a hierarchy of keywords mentioned by fans on REDDIT (Figure 20.2). The results of this analysis in order of popularity are Esports (125), League (33), Seoul (31), StarCraft (25), South (25), Overwatch games (19), Overwatch (18), Korea (17) and Gaming (15). The activity level of initiating threads about Korean esports numbers fewer than those in FMKOREA and DCINSIDE. Fans tend to follow threads in REDDIT and join conversations with a high number of replies. A comparison of two corpus-based studies shows the

230  Peichi Chung

Figure 20.2  Word Cloud Analysis for REDDIT. (Figure Produced by the Author).

keyword of Overwatch appearing in REDDIT. The results indicate that REDDIT users’ interest in Overwatch games traces to the many professional players who have moved to the USA to play for Overwatch teams after their retirement in Korea. However, the style of discussion among REDDIT users about issues related to Korean esports differs markedly. The corpus-based study of the keyword of Overwatch illustrates fan interest in the pre-pandemic Overwatch World Cup of 2017. Some of the REDDIT postings were written before the pandemic, while discussions about FMKOREA took place mostly in 2022. The degree of esports engagement shows REDDIT to be a smaller fan community compared to the more active and engaged FMKOREA. (3) Data Analytics Companies The investigation of esports’ third layer of engagement among stakeholders of data analytics companies focuses on the diverse directions that business development in Korean esports takes. This analysis reveals Korea’s strength in developing gamer-led innovation through computing technologies. As data analytics and machine learning become increasingly important in esports gaming, data analytics start-ups have begun to appear on the rise. New businesses have been developed to extend the Korean esports ecosystem. For instance, Korea’s esports team, T1, announced its investment in Mobalytics, the Los Angeles-based data analytics company (Mobalytics 2022). Korea’s esports start-up, GameEye, built partnerships with five global esports teams – in Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Korea and the US – in order to test its AI-based game analysis program (Barshop 2022). The country’s data analytics industry has gradually grown more prominent globally as their local products and services cross the national border through the technology of automation. This study uses three representative data analytics companies, PORO.GG, YOUR.GG and OP.GG in order to demonstrate the diversity of data services developed in Korea. The cutting-edge aspect of these data companies demonstrates the increasingly sophisticated gaming environment that requires the capabilities of precision and efficiency in processing data during competitive gaming. PORO.GG provides data services to gamers seeking to improve their performance. Its service helps gamers to improve their gamer profiles as they gain knowledge about character power and player performance. PlayXP, a Seoul-based company, provides

Between Super Players and Mega Fans  231 the  service. YOUR.GG is another data analytics service that focuses on demonstrating the match outcomes of professional players. The innovation of YOUR.GG is reflected in its computational capability to transform values of professional players into public data. The website not only presents numbers to evaluate the players’ competitiveness in the categories of kill-todeath (KD) ratio, but also ranks the players’ power based on the data calculated by computational technology. Improved connectivity enhances esports engagement as fans access all players’ social media channels to view more of their gameplay videos on YouTube, Twitch and Afreeca. The data service provided by OP.GG further indicates the globalization outcome of Korea’s player-led innovation. OP.GG, one of the world’s leading game analytics companies, offers data analytics service for gamers of League of Legends, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Overwatch and so on. The company generates an average of 460 million-page views by worldwide users every month. The data service offered by OP.GG expands Korea’s esports ecosystem much more widely. For instance, the company actively engages in building partnerships with other esports stakeholders in Korea. In 2022, it announced that it would work with Gen.G Esports to develop esports education. It also acquired Korea’s first game broadcasting company, OnGameNet (OGN). Since its establishment in 2013, the company has demonstrated its active involvement in building partnerships with T1 esports team and strengthened the role of OP.GG in the development of ecosystem in Korean esports.

Conclusion Making a case for system power in Korean esports, this chapter has mapped out data-led gaming environments in order to demonstrate the technological dimension of player-led innovation. It has addressed esports engagements by three stakeholders – elite players, fans and data analytics companies. It further recognizes digital skills that emerge from the expanding data-led gaming environments. At the level of elite players, gaming capabilities allow competitive players to advance into professional leagues in order to earn more. At the level of public fan communities, esports fans can now obtain comprehensive esports knowledge by reading news and information aggregated in online discussion groups. The knowledge accumulation power of fans enabled by digital platforms and social media creates and cultivates new kinds of fan communities that can potentially lead to a more powerful impact on the esports environment. Fans can develop their passion further by reading and sharing ideas about teams and players in online discussion forums that function as a digital space in which fans can gain esports literacy. Data analytics companies reveal the innovation provided by the gamer-led technological service. With the advancement of AI and machine learning, data analytics companies are emerging as a growing new business sector in the Korea’s esports ecosystem. Thus, this chapter has recognized the collective efforts contributed by three stakeholders in Korean esports, focusing on computational creativity that forms unique data-led gaming environments with innovative use of automation technology.

References Agarwal, A. and Mishra, S. (2022) “From E-sports to South Korea: A Week in Metaverse,” Sunday Guardian Live, 2 April. Bae, K. (2021) “Too Many Koreans: Esports Biopower and South Korean Esports Infrastructure,” in M. Lee and P. Chung (eds) Media Technologies for Work and Play in East Asia: Critical Perspectives on Japan and the Two Koreas, Bristol: The Bristol University Press. Barshop, D. (2022) “GameEye Partners with Five Esports Teams to Test Out AI-Based Gaming Data Analysis Program,” Business of Esports, 3 May.

232  Peichi Chung Blakey, K. (2021) “Dallas Fuel Owner Speaks Out After Player Describes Racism He’s Experienced While Living in Dallas,” NBC, 7 April. Blamey, C. (2022) “One Tricks, Hero Picks and Player Politics: Highlighting the Casual-Competitive Divide in the Overwatch Forums,” in M. Ruotsalainen, M. Torhonen and V. Karhulahti (eds) Modes of Esports Engagement in Overwatch, London: Palgrave McMillan. Bogost, I. (2021) “Persuasive Gaming: A Decade Later,” in T. de la Hera, J. Jansz, J. Raessens and B. Schouten (eds) Persuasive Gaming in Context, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A. (2016) The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Cambridge: MIT Press. Chung, P. (2021) “South Korea’s Esports Industry in Northeast Asia: History, Ecosystem and Digital Labor,” in M. Lee and P. Chung (eds) Media Technologies for Work and Play in East Asia: Critical Perspectives on Japan and the Two Koreas, Bristol: The Bristol University Press. Economist (2022) “China’s Esports Players Are Challenging Korea’s Dominance,” 2 June. Fakazli, A. (2020) “The Effect of COVID-19 Pandemic on Digital Game and Esports,” International Journal of Sport Culture and Science, 8(4): 335–44. Gunkel, D. (2018) Gaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Games Studies and Virtual Worlds, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Huhh, J. (2009) “The Bang Where Korean Online Gaming Began: The Culture and Business of the PC Bang in Korea,” in L. Hjorth and D. Chan (eds) Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific, London: Routledge. Jin, D.Y. (2010) Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, Cambridge: MIT Press. Jin, D.Y. (2021) Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Production: Critical Perspectives on Digital Platforms, London: Routledge. Kwon, D. (2022) “T1 Fans Send Another Truck to LOL Park Ahead of the Team’s Match Against Nongshim RedForce,” Inven Global, 7 August. Miah, A. (2017) Sport 2.0: Transforming Sports for the Digital World, Cambridge: MIT Press. Mobalytics (2022) “T1 Invests in Esports Analytics Starup Mobalytics,” Mobalytics, 13 March. Murray, S., Birt, J. and Blakemore, S. (2020) “Esports Diplomacy: Toward a Sustainable Gold Rush,” Sport in Society, 25(8): 1419–37. Rea, S. (2016) “Crafting Stars: South Korean Esports and the Emergence of a Digital Gaming Culture,” Association for Asian Studies, 21(2). Ruotsalainen, M., Torhonen, M. and Karhulahti, V. (2022) Modes of Esports Engagement in Overwatch, Cham: Palgrave McMillan. Scholz, T. (2019) Esports is Business: Management in the World of Competitive Gaming, Cham: Springer. Statista (2022) “Size of the Gaming Market in South Korea from 2006 to 2023,” Statista. Taylor, T. (2018) Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tuting, K. (2022) “T1 Faker Files Criminal Lawsuit Against Online Haters.” One Esports, 19 July. van Dijck, J. (2013) The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wigger, K. (2022) “OpenAI’s Dota 2 Bot Defeated 99.4% of Players in Public Matches,” The Machine, 22 April.

Part VI

Lifestyle Media, Fashion and Food

21 South Korean Celebrities and Lifestyle Media Olga Fedorenko

While South Korean (hereafter Korean) boy band BTS has been advancing in international charts and setting music industry records, its members have also been impressing the observers and fans with their marketing effectivity. The seven members signed deals with a striking number of domestic and international brands, such as fast-food chain McDonalds; clothing brands Puma, FILA and Louis Vuitton; home appliance maker Coway; electronics maker Samsung; and car maker Hyundai, to name a few. Moreover, their public or private appearance in identifiable garments caused those garments to sell out regardless of the price tag, usually in multiple countries. For example, after BTS Jimin, a “brand ambassador” for luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton, wore the label’s items for his appearance in the January 2022 issue of Vogue Korea, those items sold like hot cakes. The leather jacket priced at 9.74 million won (over US$8,000) and the chain necklace of 1.41 million won (over US$1,000) were both reportedly sold out in at least 21 countries, including the USA, Canada, Italy, New Zealand, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia. Also sold out in all sizes in at least four countries – the USA, Canada, China and Japan – were the 1.61 million won sneakers that the artist spotted (Scott 2021). While BTS is currently among the most influential acts in the Korean popular culture scene, their sway on how people spend their time and money is not unique among Korean entertainers, who, since the 1990s, have grown to exercise considerable social power, particularly on the youth in Korea and abroad. Many Korean cultural productions, whether films or dramas or music videos, stage the consumerist sublime of refined commodities, elegant lifestyles and beautiful people. Celebrities are both expressions of and tools for producing this spectacle. They realize normative subjecthoods of late capitalism (McCracken 1989; Marshall 1997, 2016a, 2016b), and various entertainment programs and celebrity news intimate those patterns of self-fashioning to those dazzled by the celebrities’ glamor. Most starkly, those edifying effects manifest when celebrities appear in the so-called lifestyle media – media content that focuses on fashioning the self through consumption, from modern living magazines and reality TV shows to advertisements and lifestyle-­ focused social media channels. While instructing audiences on how to spend their time and money, lifestyle media also sell ways of living (Lewis 2010). By engaging with critical scholarship on celebrity and lifestyle, this chapter explores how Korean celebrities not only entertain but also circulate as lifestyle icons and educate audiences on self-fashioning in the age of convergence between marketing and entertainment. Social influence of Korean celebrities has attracted significant academic attention. Approaching the issue from the consumption-positive cultural studies tradition, many scholars have explored the meanings and pleasures that fans derive from their fandom activities, underscoring fans’ agency to make commercial popular culture relevant to their lives. Exploring the popularity of early Hallyu cultural productions, scholars have demonstrated that K-dramas and their gentle male protagonists have mediated challenges to patriarchal relationship scripts in several Asian locales (Creighton 2009; Lin 2012). Some argue that female fans of male idols can DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-28

236  Olga Fedorenko be empowered vis-à-vis real-world men (Kim 2018b; Fedorenko 2021). The fluid masculinities of K-pop male idols have been interpreted as destabilizing traditional gender roles and indeed have become an important resource for queer communities (Kang 2018). The positive value of fandom communities to their members has been recognized by many researchers (Lee 2015; Jin and Yoon 2016; Chi 2017), and it is argued that K-idols themselves become a beneficial force in the lives of their young fans, who relate to them as family members and look up to them as role models (Elfving-Hwang 2018). On the other hand, some have also critiqued the explicit sexualization of female performers and its complicity with patriarchal power relations (Saeji 2013; Epstein and Turnbull 2014). Moreover, Gooyong Kim (2018a) also critiques the role models advanced by K-entertainers for naturalizing neoliberal ideology whereby success is a function of extreme self-discipline and individuals take full personal responsibility for their accomplishments or lack thereof, overlooking social constraints such as class. This chapter adds to the existing literature by exploring how Korean celebrities shape societal ideals about what constitutes desirable lifestyles, and by considering how lifestyle media contribute to celebrities’ status as gurus of self-fashioning practices.

Lifestyle, Identity and Celebrities In late-capitalist consumer societies, lifestyle has become a main axis of identity and also an ongoing project, as individuals are instructed to reflect on their lifestyle goals and strive to achieve them as a means of self-realization. The concept of “lifestyle,” Chua Beng Huat (2016: 10–11) observes, “has generally been reserved for the conscious styling of the self, excluding practices engaged in by necessity.” Employed in a variety of situations, the term “lifestyle” implies adaptability of the self and posits identity as a personal choice unconstrained by class, race or gender (Lewis 2010). A lifestyle describes how a person chooses to spend their time and money (Solomon 2018). Lifestyle comprises choices not only in commodities but also in leisure activities, living environment (city or country), work regiments (in-person or remote), as well as attitudes and values. Nevertheless, for denizens of industrial and post-industrial societies, consumption broadly conceived is the main tool and arena of lifestyle construction. This promise of self-expression and self-realization via consuming fetishized commodities is how industrial and post-industrial capitalism has neutralized popular dissatisfaction with its many problems and motivated workers to accept exploitative regimes of labor (McGuigan 2009). Especially in late capitalist post-industrial societies, such as Korea today, where many jobs are temporary and do not lend themselves to prideful identification, lifestyle and lifestyle-driven consumption are the main venues for articulating distinct identities. Adopting and implementing an attractive lifestyle is not an easy task amid the ever-multiplying cornucopia of commodities, even if one can afford the expense. The how of lifestyles is elaborated on by various lifestyle media, “popular media instructing audiences on aspects of ‘living the good life,’ from home decoration and healthy eating to guides to workplace etiquette and personal makeover narratives” (Martin and Lewis 2016b: 13). Mass media in general have played an important role in educating the audiences in the modern ways of living and citizenship (Abu-Lughod 2005). Lifestyle media directly speak to the projects of self-realization, instructing audiences on spending their time and money in ways that would maximize their opportunities for realizing the mainstream ideas of success in private and public spheres. Lifestyle media have been particularly important in Asia because of the exceptionally rapid economic and social changes in the region, Fran Martin and Tania Lewis (2016b) argue. Building on Chang Kyung-Sup’s (2010) “compressed modernity” thesis, they suggest that the role of lifestyle media has been in modeling how to resolve resulting “tensions and contradictions of late modern everyday life” (Martin and Lewis 2016b: 16), and consider such media “not just as reflective but in fact as constitutive of social life” (ibid.: 13). Whether or not lifestyle

South Korean Celebrities and Lifestyle Media  237 media play a unique role in Asia, lifestyle-focused genres have been decisively popular and influential (Lukács 2010; Martin and Lewis 2016a). Within the lifestyle media, celebrities offer particularly convenient reference points for constructing a lifestyle. As Lewis (2010: 595) writes about lifestyle celebrity expert Martha Stewart, such figures “offer consumers faced with an enormous array of choices an all-encompassing lifestyle ‘blueprint’… which they can apply to every aspect of their lives.” Celebrities have superior resources to explore available options, while the validity of their choices is publicly analyzed in various lifestyle media. Finding a celebrity whose style one admires and emulating their choices is a usual advice for cultivating one’s own personal style and a common strategy to navigate many consumer choices. More fundamentally, celebrities present carefully crafted public personas, and many ordinary people articulate their own identities by identifying with attractive celebrities (McCracken 1989; Turner 2014; Marshall 2016b). Celebrities also model how to publicly reveal those identities. As David Marshall (2016a) observes, if public visibility in the past was expected only of celebrities, with the proliferation of social media today, many ordinary people are compelled to expose their selves in public, like celebrities do, to secure employment in the flexible and precarious labor regime. In the post-industrial economy, many jobs require an investment of one’s subjectivity (affective labor), so an attractive identity might be a prerequisite for securing a livelihood; and celebrities exemplify how to project such an identity via media exposure and lifestyle choices. Known for their extreme care with constructing their public personas, Korean celebrities offer a window into these late-capitalist conditions.

Korean Celebrities as Image Commodities The Korean mediascape is saturated with celebrities. The heavy reliance on celebrities is a key strategy to mitigate the risks of cultural production, and the strong preference for hiring already-famous people stems from practices and structures of the culture industry (Turnbull 2017; Kim 2020). Popular celebrities circulate as versatile multi-genre entertainers: In addition to their main areas of activity such as acting or musical performance, they appear in variety shows and advertisements. Throughout those appearances, a celebrity maintains the same consistent image, whose allure and popularity are the celebrity’s main career asset. It is this public persona that audiences get to know intimately and come to expect as they consume celebrity media, be it television dramas, talk shows, celebrity advertisements or celebrity tabloids. Celebrity content is enjoyed in large measure for elaboration on that celebrity persona, which becomes a source of profits for media producers and advertisers. In a structurally similar Japanese context, Gabriella Lukács (2010) theorizes such celebrity personas as “image commodities.” To maintain profitability within the increasing fragmentation of the entertainment market in the 1990s, the Japanese television industry developed a novel genre of so-called trendy dramas to appeal to young women. Light on storylines and heavy on timely information about consumption and lifestyle, those trendy dramas cast media personalities – tarento – who had already built a particular image as advertising models, to reproduce that image in the television drama roles. If dramas are popular, the tarento becomes invited to talk shows and other entertainment programming, where their image is further elaborated and hence acquires even greater value. As Lukács details, throughout their multi-genre media appearances, those “image commodities” seamlessly blend entertainment with information on lifestyles, producing value for the entertainment industry as well as for fashion, leisure and other lifestyle product companies. The analysis of intermedia image commodity is insightful for understanding the Korean celebrity industry. Examining how K-drama actors produce value for drama production

238  Olga Fedorenko companies in the context of globalization and financialization, Hyun Gyung Kim (2020) draws on Lukács’ (2010) concept to show that it is those entertainers’ public persona – the image commodity – that fuels their acting careers and generates profits for the industry. In Korea, too, actors often start as advertising models and, having developed a recognizable identity, move onto dramas. Kim’s examples include Hallyu star Jun Ji-Hyun, who first gained popularity as a model in a commercial for Samsung printers before establishing herself as an actress and gaining international recognition after starring in tremendously successful romantic comedy My Sassy Girl (2001). Lee Jung-Jae, the star of Squid Game (2021), similarly began as a fashion model before moving onto television and movie acting in the late 1990s. Somewhat differently, K-pop idols do begin as music performers, but nevertheless they are conceived and marketed as image commodities before anything else. Their public personas, along with group “concepts,” are created by their agencies in time for their debut ( Jung 2010: 165; Elfving-Hwang 2018: 193–4) and then carefully maintained across their media appearances, fan events, social media updates and any information revealed about their everyday lives. A member of the first-generation K-pop idol group H.O.T. recalled that when, at the beginning of their career, H.O.T. was recording at the KBS studio for Top 10 Songs program, they could not even go to the toilet at the broadcasting station to maintain their mysterious image (KBS News 2014). In the 2010s, these efforts at building distinct celebrity personas focused on creating the so-called universes, when debuting groups are given elaborate fictional background stories. Boy group EXO, the setters of this fad, debuted as “aliens from Exoplanet, and each member was given a supernatural power” ( Jie 2022). In other words, celebrity is built not so much by showcasing the entertainer’s unique talents, but by articulating and constructing an attractive public persona, the image commodity. Furthermore, just as Lukács (2010) describes for Japanese celebrities, their Korean counterparts are not merely entertainers but also promoters of many commodities. Popular stars appear in multiple advertisements for different products at the same time, which is considered a testimony to their popularity and a welcome opportunity to see more of them for fans, not crass commercialism. EXO, for example, over the years have appeared in commercials for Samsung laptops, Baskin Robbins ice-cream, chocolate-covered cookie sticks Pepero for Lotte, clothing for Kolon Sports, shoes for Sketchers, cosmetic brand Nature Republic and Korean Tourism Organization. Commenting on similar advertising practices in Japan, Jason Karlin (2012: 75) explains, “Unlike celebrities in the USA, Japanese tarento do not endorse products. Instead, image characters lend their star image to the brand, but without implying any direct endorsement or testimonial.” This is a particular case of co-branding, an important strategy in cultivating a celebrity persona, when celebrities and commodities amplify their brand image via mutual association. As Roald Maliangkay (2022: 7) interprets such practices in Korean advertising, the role of the celebrities is not to testify to the quality of particular products but to lead the audience “to believe that by buying a product, they buy into a way of life or aesthetic that appeals to the celebrity.” The products advertised by the celebrity are accepted as the expressions of the celebrity’s persona. By buying the products, one can get a little bit of that persona for oneself, so that both the celebrity and the products become resources for one’s own identity construction. Seamlessly combining entertainment and commercial information, Korean celebrities are invaluable resources for those seeking to construct and exhibit their own lifestyle through consumer choices.

Celebrities in Lifestyle Media and Lifestyles in Celebrity Media In the twenty-first century, it is hard to find media content that is not lifestyle media. With the multiplication of available media and abundance of on-demand entertainment, strictly promotional communication struggles to win the audience’s attention. Marketers have increasingly

South Korean Celebrities and Lifestyle Media  239 moved away from conventional advertising and promotion. Instead, they incorporate their promotional messages into entertainment or hybrid content, relying on product placements, event sponsorships, brand ambassadorships and other “organic” ways to enchant consumers (MacRury 2009; Powell 2013). In Korea, this has taken the form of an increase in product placements, proliferation of variety shows, particularly “observational” ones about everyday lives of ordinary and famous people, and multiplication of YouTubers and other social media influencers, who attempt to make a living from advising their audiences on lifestyle choices while endorsing various commodities. Celebrity media offer a particularly fruitful ground for mixing entertainment and sales. Celebrities may deliver entertainment just by their appearance, but style-conscious audiences pay attention to the lifestyle information those celebrities mediate, so that showcased commodities and styles are noted, bought and imitated. At the beginning of many fashion and beauty trends, there is a popular celebrity acing a particular look. An article on Korean news platform Insight lists fashion fads that celebrities started, such as skinny jeans of a bright color after girl group Girls’ Generation; prim dresses with round, white collars after singer IU; tennis mini-skirts after girl group f(x); and “Jennie’s hairpins” after an accessory used by Jennie of girl group Blackpink (Kim 2019). None of these examples were instances of deliberate promotion, yet they were received as lifestyle references and informed audiences’ consumption decisions. A 2021 survey of 2,030 Korean women in their 20s and 30s revealed that celebrities have significant influence over their consumption choices (Kim 2021). Almost two-thirds of the respondents said that they have bought, or considered buying, a product that a famous person used. Among items of most interest were bags, clothing and cosmetics – to, respectively, 34 percent, 32 percent and 11 percent of respondents. The interviews revealed that some women wanted to simply share the same items as the celebrities, whereas others mimicked celebrities’ choices because they admired their sense of fashion. Similar findings were revealed in Jungmin Kwon’s (2018: 83–4) ethnography of young women, with one-third of her informants having admitted to having purchased items under media influence. Kwon quotes one of her informants, a married public-relations professional: “Yes, I buy celebrity items if I can afford to… I don’t like nail polish, but when I saw the pretty color that Shin Min-A [popular actress] has on her nails, I talked about it with my friends, sometimes effusively” (ibid.: 83). The most obvious trending celebrity items are the ones that appear in regular advertising. As already mentioned, casting celebrities is an extremely popular advertising strategy in Korea (Turnbull 2017). Historically, Korean advertising has been understood not simply as commercial speech but also as a part of public culture, ideally to be appreciated also for affective pleasures, socially conscious message and its entertainment value (Fedorenko 2022). Those tendencies only strengthened when advertising moved into online media and its producers could experiment with various formats. Since the late 1990s, many advertisements that featured K-pop often approximated music videos, the songs from the commercials functioning as the artists’ single (Kim 2007a: 271–2). Such, for example, was singer Lee Hyori’s commercial for Samsung in 2005, “Anymotion”; the advertised cell phone became nicknamed “Hyori Phone,” exemplifying the convergence of popular culture and marketing. With the liberalization of product placement rules in 2010, brands and commodities began to be integrated into many Korean cultural productions, particularly television dramas. In a famous example of star power, the coral red lipstick that actress Jun Ji-Hyun wore in the 2013 series My Love from the Star sold out in many countries, and lipstick sales by sponsor Amore Pacific went up fourfold in the following year (Chung 2015). Lifestyles are direct objects of various reality shows which focus on celebrities’ everyday life. A long-running MBC show I Live Alone (2013–present), for example, offers glimpses

240  Olga Fedorenko into the lives of single Korean entertainers. Ostensibly unscripted, the show uses documentary techniques to follow the host and their celebrity guests living their quotidian lives – cooking, decorating their homes, exercising, camping, socializing and eating out. Some episodes were directly responsible for triggering consumer fads. After I Live Alone aired girl band Mamamoo’s Hwasa eating pork tripe in a particularly appetizing manner, “pork tripe restaurants across the nation had a sudden surge in customers, leading to a shortage of ingredients for the dish” (Lee 2019). However, the irrelevance of some lifestyle information also met criticism, as happened with the episodes of I Live Alone and other reality shows that focused on celebrities acquiring luxury homes, which would be inaccessible to most viewers (Yoo 2021). Such reality shows by mainstream broadcasters compete with social media content, particularly with YouTube channels and V Live livestreams, from celebrities themselves. Korean celebrities are well known for their masterful use of social media to communicate with fans ( Jung 2015). In addition to behind-the-scenes footage of their work, the content they share is also a source of information about those celebrities’ lifestyles, be it wearing a certain clothing item, or attending a place of interest or enjoying a particular food. Many celebrities focus their social media presence on sharing such lifestyle information, for example a popular YouTube channel (vlog) by singer Kang Min-Kyung of the duo Davichi. Highly regarded for her fashion choices, Kang popularized comfortable yet elegant look, particularly wide pants known as “Kang MinKyung pants,” which are praised for being stylish without sexualizing the wearer. Kang’s YouTube channel boasts 1.14 million subscribers (as of August 2022) and showcases her everyday life, such as playing with her puppy, getting a bubble bath, cooking at her well-equipped kitchen, going for a medical checkup, organizing her shoe closet or enjoying a lunch out with the other member of Davichi, Lee Hae-Ri. As expected of lifestyle channels, all sponsorships are openly listed at the end of the videos. While many celebrities showcase their fashion and beauty habits and interior design solutions, others tell about their hobbies, document their travels, share recipes, participate in mukbang challenges and even comment on mental health issues (Thang 2021). In addition to tips on self-fashioning, such content also delivers vicarious pleasures to the viewers who are often too overworked to find time and energy to pursue a hobby of their own, or cannot afford the expense, and thus settle for virtual satisfaction of watching others enjoying a good life. Though many Korean celebrities are talented artists and skilled performers, the parameters for a memorable public persona they can present, as for commercial cultural products in general, are narrow. Commercial cultural products minimally deviate from proven formulas, recombining familiar elements in new ways or taking particular features to extreme. Celebrity personas in Korea share many commonalities – conventionally attractive faces and slim bodies, groomed appearance and masterful use of consumer culture. Furthermore, Korean celebrities are also expected to be impeccable role models and pride-worthy representatives of the nation – to certainly avoid violating any societal norms and ideally exemplify paragons of virtue and self-discipline (Kim 2007b). As frequent celebrity scandals testify, no controversial behaviors are forgiven without many public apologies. This celebrity culture leaves little room to articulate a distinctive persona. The extreme concern with creating unique “concepts” for groups and individual performers suggests that without such marketing ploys many of those image commodities might be indistinguishable from one another – as they are indeed in the eyes of many non-fan observers uninitiated to Korean popular culture (Wang 2019). Carefully crafted self-­ exposure via lifestyle media remains a paramount venue for Korean entertainers to build and promote distinct identities, while lifestyle media depend on those celebrities’ distinctness to deliver promotional content in an amusing manner.

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Conclusion Korean celebrities are carefully manufactured products of the culture industry, and their value to audiences, media producers and advertisers depends on the coherent public persona they present via their cross-genre media appearances. Lifestyle media, from traditional print and televisual productions to online content and social media, are essential in such celebrity constructions. As those lifestyle media provide information on how celebrities navigate fashion, beauty, home decorating, cooking, traveling, parenting and socializing, they also educate audiences on what constitutes a good life and how to achieve it via expert consumption, usually with the help of commodities and brands sold by the content sponsors. This chapter offers a glimpse into the symbiosis between celebrities and lifestyle media in Korea, and many questions remain for future research. Of particular interest is how the proliferation of lifestyle media and lifestyle-based identities relates to the consolidation of the flexible regime of accumulation, disappearance of permanent jobs, and difficulties with establishing stable livelihoods, particularly experienced by the youth in Korea and in many other locales where Korean popular culture has gained popularity. Celebrity-driven lifestyle media productions could offer a lens to refine the critiques of the Hallyu culture industry as complicit with the flexible and precarious labor regime of late capitalism and help explore critically the implications of Korean celebrity culture going global.

Acknowledgments I thank Tomris Silan Kurt and Jiwon Moon for advising me on recent developments with K-celebrities, and Youna Kim for helping me sharpen this piece.

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22 K-fashion E-tailers and Consumption in the Global Market Eunsuk Hur

Korean popular music (K-pop) has gained global recognition in recent years, with a noteworthy effect on youth culture and lifestyle. Fashion, in particular, plays an extensive role in amplifying the identities of major K-pop artists and the diffusion of Korean culture. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research on how K-pop artists’ fashion styles spread to the global market and how K-fashion e-tailers play a role in shaping the cultural images of Korea projected to a global audience. This chapter explores both the positive and negative impacts of K-fashion e-tailers. It shows that K-fashion global e-tailers assist K-pop community engagement by offering the latest K-pop artists’ fashion styles and enabling international fans to emulate them. However, limited diversity in size is a key weakness of K-fashion, which depicts very constrained notions of beauty and stereotypically petite bodies as ideal. Furthermore, the chapter presents arguments that these e-tailers often produce K-pop-inspired copycats or replica clothing, which could ultimately create negative cultural images of K-pop artists by devaluing authenticity and original products. Over the past ten years, K-pop has become widely popular internationally due to the rapid development of interactive digital channels and growing fan-based K-pop communities (Williams and Ho 2016). International K-pop businesses have almost doubled their economic revenue, from $5.7 billion in 2015 to $10 billion in 2019 (Bartlett 2022). Globally, there were around 6.7 billion tweets about K-pop only in 2020. To put this into perspective, a recent study by Liu, Shin and Tan (2021) shows that there were 28% more tweets about K-pop in the first five months of the COVID-19 epidemic compared to COVID-19-related tweets. K-poprelated tweets on Twitter increased by 1.4 billion in 2021 compared to 2020, a 23% rise. This rising international appeal of Korean pop culture has not just brought money to Korea, but, more importantly, has contributed to the growth of Korean “soft power” by creating a positive cultural image and attraction. As a result, K-pop has become increasingly important in cultural exchanges worldwide for the creative industry. This rise in K-pop represents growing cultural globalization decoupling from Western focuses (Cruz et al. 2021). The cultural diffusion of innovation arises when exchanging and distributing cultural discourse with audiences rather than only creating original works of the innovation. A creative process that is used in commercial endeavors is known as “cultural diffusion” (Rae 2005). Rae (2005) asserted that symbolic and economic values are produced through engagement between the audience and the creative enterprise, and that cultural diffusion moves beyond the static and constrained conceptions of “culture production and consumption.” Success in the creative cultural industry depends on the coordination of particular creative efforts, the management of creative work inside the organization and harnessing this creative output into commercial use (ibid.). Despite widely disseminated K-pop music and K-fan communities, there is a lack of in-depth empirical studies that focus on how K-pop music has influenced the commercial use of fashion DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-29

K-fashion E-tailers and Consumption in the Global Market  245 and how K-pop-inspired fashion businesses affect the shaping of Korean culture images from their products and services. Past studies have predominantly focused on the characteristics of K-culture (Lafaurie 2017; Martin Roll 2018; Valieva 2018) and K-pop fashion styles (Sutton 2011; Unger 2015; Tse et al. 2020; Morgan 2021). There is a lack of research regarding the cultural diffusion of commercial products and the roles of online retailers disseminating K-pop fashion that can influence the perception of cultural image. This chapter critically examines the positive and negative impacts of K-pop fashion supplied by foreign retailers. Based on three case studies, it examines how fashion e-tailers sell K-pop fashion-style products and elucidates current challenges and opportunities for the cultural dissemination of K-pop fashion. The findings of this study will aid in the development of creative cultural business strategies beyond existing cultural production and consumption and will offer implications for creative cultural diffusion for fashion businesses.

Fashion and Popular Culture Fashion is a phenomenon that exhibits cultural variety. It signifies cultural identity as a way of interacting with and relating to a certain group. It plays a significant role in how society constructs an individual’s identity and how people perceive a certain culture for an appropriate visual appearance at a specific time (DiMaggio and Crane 2002). According to sociological theory, fashion items are seen as high-involvement consumptions that are closely linked to emotions about one’s individuality, social background and cultural self (Wigley 2015). Historically, TV shows, advertising and new media have introduced new, ideal images of beauty that have affected various cultural, social, political, economic and technological trends by mirroring numerous historical times. Fashion has made significant evolution and dissemination of innovation in shifting our perceptions of attire in popular culture. The diffusion of innovation from Roger’s theory (1962) is one of the most widely acknowledged theories for understanding diffusion and the adaption process. Adapting this theory, many fashion scholars such as Stanforth (1995) have examined how fashion styles spread from innovators, inventive communicators or opinion leaders, and communicative adopters. The trickle-down theory of trend was conceived 100 years ago by Simmel (1904–1957) from a sociological standpoint, when he noticed that fashion trends spread from the top of the social ladder to the lower groups (Atik and Firat 2013). In the contemporary world, the diffusion of fashion trends, driven not only by the higher classes but also by differentiation among people of all classes, is motivated by significant movements in the neo-political of class, race and gender (Atik and Firat 2013). Although there are several interpretations of how new ideas, fashion and cultural practices are disseminated from one culture to another, a review of psychological research shows that people have been accustomed to responding favorably to celebrity suggestions and are unconsciously motivated to follow them to minimize cognitive dissonance by becoming more like the superstars they adore (Hoffman et al. 2017). The reasons for this are inherent in the structure of the fashion industry, the notion of fame and the interaction of each with the media (Wigley 2015). It is a very common practice in the fashion industry to work with celebrities to enhance their brand images or spread their new product innovations to the mass market. From a creative entrepreneurship and diffusion of cultural innovation perspective, Rae (2005) observed that the process of cultural diffusion works in five ways. First, establishing a distinctive character with a personality or branding can attract target consumers as well as people within those groups who can associate with them. Second, creating a culturally grounded product, experience or service can fill a gap in the market, drawing a particular consumer’s attention and engaging with them in symbolic interactions. Third, incorporating cultural elements in a

246  Eunsuk Hur process of business operation creates economic potential by retaining symbolic cultural meaning, practices and monetary value. Fourth, creative use of technology in cultural practices can help communicate, engage with customers and facilitate cultural conversation. Fifth, management of the creative business enables promoting the cultural identity and unique cultural intangible and tangible value interacting with the product and process as a social institution. Therefore, the diffusion of cultural innovation provides audiences with a dynamic exchange of ideas through a creative medium, seeking fresh concepts to capture and hold the audiences’ attention. The next section explores the characteristics of K-culture and K-pop fashion in the context of the diffusion of cultural innovation.

K-culture and K-pop Fashion Korean pop culture, broadly encompassing fashion, cuisine, cosmetics and even cosmetic surgery, has been greatly influenced by Korean celebrities (Shim 2006). The Korean pop culture movement or the Korean Wave, which began in the late 1990s, has had a significant influence on the development of a large worldwide K-pop community of customers and followers (Williams and Ho 2016). The early K-pop community had a top-down structure in which K-pop companies facilitated the engagement of a fan community and events. However, fanbased communities have developed over time, and the growing community now functions more horizontally and reciprocally, with members running their own organizations and campaigns (Liu et al. 2021). A wide range of K-pop dance covers, K-pop fashion styles and K-pop makeovers have become popularized by K-pop fan-generated content. K-pop has a unique method for producing international hits. The core component, captivating music with a powerful melody, is combined with a distinctive dance sequence and is presented in a colorful music video. K-pop has gained a lot of attention because of its unique approach, which draws on mainstream pop conventions, youth online culture and intensive vocal and dancing training (Liu et al. 2021). Among K-pop groups, the Korean boy band BTS alone contributes approximately $3.6 billion to the South Korean economy annually, which is the same as the contribution of 26 mid-sized businesses (Bartlett 2022). BTS achieved a Guinness World Record for the most tickets sold for a live-streamed concert and sold out its Wembley concert tickets in minutes (Billboard 2020). In just over a year, BTS has been the first group since The Beatles to have six No. 1 songs on the Hot 100 (Bartlett 2022). Several other K-pop artists, including Blackpink, Twice, Red Velvet and Girls’ Generation, have become very popular with international audiences. Blackpink, for example, achieved the Guinness World Records for the “How You Like That” song in 2020. The video broke Guinness’ records for most-watched YouTube video in a day with over 86 million views on just its first day of release (Chan 2022) and currently more than 1.1 billion views. K-pop has a notable combination of songs, dancing and fashion. The majority of K-pop combines elements of Western music, such as hip-hop, jazz, R&B and electronic dance music, with traditional Korean music to create a distinctive cultural fusion (Sutton 2011). Modern K-pop is characterized by catchy melodies and a vibrant rhythm. K-pop artists have a distinctive fashion style, performances and energizing theatrical group dance. Each K-pop group’s character and style are also created by music corporations to distinguish themselves from the rest of the industry (Unger 2015). For example, BTS, EXO and Blackpink seamlessly alter their fashion and appearance to delight their passionate fans with diverse themes and ideas (Morgan 2021). Further, 2NE1 has an identity that is confident, even forceful, while keeping a punk, satirical and rough character. Twice distinguishes itself from other K-pop groups with upbeat music and a colorful aesthetic that extends to the girls’ attire, hair and cosmetics, in which each singer is symbolized by a different color (Moon 2019). However, there is some criticism that

K-fashion E-tailers and Consumption in the Global Market  247 the K-pop girl groups are often chosen and positioned in conventional personality to reach out to a large number of followers, including “cute/innocent,” “girl next door” and “sexy” rather than showing actual individual characteristics (Unger 2015). Nevertheless, K-pop artists have established themselves as iconic cultural figures and have significantly influenced Korean cultural images, contributing to the spread of K-pop and K-drama fashion. Visual aspects of fashion design are important for K-pop artists, since audiences can quickly recognize their visual identity and amplify the core story of the song. The visual signals provide information about the wearer’s personality or characteristics and reflect cultural identity. Responding to the popularity of K-pop artists’ fashion, several K-pop-inspired fashion enterprises have recently started their businesses targeting global audiences. Several K-pop companies have developed creative strategies by giving up copyrights and making songs and albums available for streaming on YouTube concurrently (Liu et al. 2021). Most of their revenue streams come from several other routes, such as concerts, advertisement features and K-pop-related products. Several K-pop artists have been collaborating with fashion designers’ brands to promote new products, and they work as brand ambassadors. For example, the members of Blackpink – Lisa, Jennie, Rosé and Jisoo – are frequently connected to French fashion labels, such as Celine, Chanel, Saint Laurent and Dior (Widjojo 2022). Lisa is a global ambassador for Bulgari and Celine, Rosé for Saint Laurent and Tiffany & Co., Jennie for Chanel and Calvin Klein, and Jisoo for Dior. Similarly, BTS was selected as Louis Vuitton’s brand ambassador. BTS’s members wore Louis Vuitton collections to the 2021 Grammy Awards and made their first runway debut in a virtual fashion film for their 2021 Fall and Winter (FW) menswear collections (Narula 2022). Designers’ brands with K-pop artists’ collaborations are a very popular marketing approach for fashion brands. These K-fashion styles are quickly adapted or emulated by K-pop fashion e-tailers, and the associated products are diffused by their global fans who spread K-fashion trends. Although some past studies have examined the characteristics of K-pop fashion and consumer reactions to K-pop artists’ music videos and their styles (Shim 2006; Unger 2015; Morgan 2021), there is a lack of empirical case studies on how K-pop fashion is consumed by global audiences. The next section discusses case studies of retailers that sell K-pop fashion-related products to international consumers.

K-pop Fashion E-tailers In this study, netnography was used to analyze the interactions between K-pop fashion users and K-pop fashion e-tailers. The choice of netnography environments comprised each brand’s website, social media channels and consumer reviews. Using this technique, the researcher investigated retailers that sell K-pop style-inspired fashion products. To appreciate the impacts of K-pop fashion in the international market, K-pop fashion retailers’ products and services, as well as each business’ third party’s customer review websites, were analyzed. The section criteria for each business case study include (a) selling K-pop style fashion, (b) fashion companies that target non-Korean audiences and (c) having third-party consumer reviews and feedback. The data were collected through the observation of each company’s social media content, website contents and a third-party consumers’ review website from Trustpilot. Trustpilot, one of the most popular and quickly expanding online customer review websites, has grown in importance in the UK. An examination of customer review sites revealed consumers’ levels of satisfaction and what issues needed to be addressed for their long-term business operation. Three fashion brands, including “Fashion Chingu,” “Your K-pop Store” and “YesStyle,” were selected for the case studies. The content of each website’s visual and textual materials was

248  Eunsuk Hur examined to identify and contextualize meaning. Each company’s case study was classified using thematic analysis by identifying similar characteristics and themes from the discourse analysis of consumer reviews. Fashion Chingu: Fashion Chingu means Fashion “Friend” in Korean. This company is an e-tailer that sells K-pop and K-drama fashion products that are similar to those worn by famous Korean celebrities. The business was established in 2018 by a young German couple with a shared passion for Korean culture. The two young entrepreneurs explained their motivation for starting their business: I wanted to buy a jacket from a Red Velvet MV. So, I started my research for the outfit I wanted… The jacket I wanted to buy cost around $2000. I was desperate since I obviously don’t have the money to spend $2000 on a jacket. While pouting, I searched for a jacket that is similar to the one I want to have… That’s how I got the idea to start a blog/shop, where we could offer similar pieces. We already found enough suppliers to offer you a small variety of K-pop and K-drama outfits. We always put the similarity and quality of each piece above the price. (Fashion Chingu 2022) Fashion Chingu’s product prices ranged from $9.90 to $126. The low-cost affordable price is an important component of a unique selling proposition for attracting young K-pop audiences. Their product lines were relatively simple, sourced directly from Asian clothing suppliers and distributed to global consumers. Most products were K-pop fashion or K-drama styles that were directly copied from each artist’s Instagram posts or music videos. The retailer’s major communication channels were Instagram, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. It offered several short trend reports and K-pop styling tips, such as “Tips on how to style for a BTS concert,” “10 Korean summer fashion trends 2022,” “K-pop casual outfit ideas” and “Korean sunglasses & eyeglasses trends 2022.” These blog contents helped global K-pop fans quickly capture new K-pop fashion trends and promote Fashion Chingu’s products. Consequently, the retailer currently acts as a cultural ambassador and storyteller to communicate major K-fashion trends and distribute K-pop-inspired fashion products. Its most popular artists’ styles include “BTS,” “Blackpink,” “Stray Kids,” “Twice,” “ITZY” and “NCT.” Some of the most popular K-drama fashions are “Hotel Del Luna,” “Crash Landing on You,” “True Beauty,” “It’s Okay Not to Be Okay,” “Our Beloved Summer” and “Penthouse.” Fashion Chingu received 1890 reviews from its customers via its consumer review website. These included 83% five-star and 9% four-star reviews. Only 7% of the reviews were below the three stars. The company received 597 reviews between 6 May 2020 and 9 August 2022, with an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 from Trustpilot, a third-party consumer review site (Trustpilot 2022a). Overall, 76% of reviews were “Excellent,” 14% were “Great,” 2% were “Average” and 8% were “Poor or Bad.” Major positive reviews were associated with (a) the availability of a good range of K-pop and K-drama fashion, (b) offering inexpensive casual K-pop artists’ style fashion, (c) helpful customer services and (d) good product quality and materials. One reviewer commented: “I ordered sunglasses and a bracelet from the BTS collection. The items arrived quickly and were of good quality. It was impressive that throughout the order and delivery process, the company sent helpful progress updates. I’ll definitely order again!” The company also received negative reviews concerning (a) inaccurate size descriptions, (b) different images between online and actual products, (c) long delivery waiting times from international shipping and expensive return costs, and (d) inconsistent product quality. Major negative comments were associated with product sizing issues as well as late delivery as a result of sourcing products from international garment suppliers. Consumers seemed to understand

K-fashion E-tailers and Consumption in the Global Market  249 the delay in delivery service of the international parcels, but inaccurate sizing and product images were the foremost important issues that need to be resolved by Fashion Chingu. One of the negative customer reviews was: Shipping took a while, considering the amount it costs, but that’s fine! No one expects the fastest times when shopping online anyway. The actual shipment though was nothing short of mediocre – sizing is completely out of whack, in most products the sleeves being MUCH shorter and stubbier than the torso for some reason. Your K-pop Store: Similar to Fashion Chingu, Your K-pop Store sells K-fashion and K-drama-inspired products. However, the company did not offer detailed information regarding its background or vision. They offered blogs that inform K-pop fashion news and key fashion reports, but they have not updated any information since 2019. Their product price ranges were between $14.90 and $78.90. Most of the interactions with their audiences were based on Instagram. Twitter and Pinterest were secondary communication channels for the company. K-pop artists’ images are heavily used on the retailer’s website and its social media channels. A total of 41 people posted their customer reviews on Trustpilot between 6 May 2020 and 18 July 2022 (Trustpilot 2022c). Overall, 73% of reviews were “Excellent,” 10% were “Great” and 17% were “Bad.” Positive consumer reviews concerned (1) cheap prices for several discounted products, (2) a good range of K-pop products and (3) an easy return service. Examples of customer reviews included: “the great selection of K-pop products at great prices! I’ve used your K-pop store for a long time” and “Great for on-the-spot bargains or planning for present ideas.” Most customers commented that low-priced products enable them to follow K-pop fashion trends. However, there were no positive reviews after June 2020. Most of the current reviews were negative due to a lack of customer support, and slow delivery or misplaced delivery. One of the negative customer reviews expressed: At the beginning of April, I ordered a shirt and keychain for my daughter. Never received confirmation by email despite writing to them twice. Plus, they were very fast to take the money from my card. Until now, still no reply and no package. Several similar negative reviews were shown on the customer review site. The products were often not delivered to customers, and the company rarely responded to customers when they missed customers’ parcels. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the company has lost control of managing supply chains and has lost the credibility of the business. YesStyle: Unlike the previous two companies, YesStyle is not particularly specialized in K-pop fashion, but the company offers a range of Asian fashion and lifestyle products. K-pop fashion is one of the major product categories that is popular among global audiences. The company was founded in 2006 and sells a broad range of Asian fashion, beauty and lifestyle products globally. YesStyle was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2021. At the time of this study, the company had a multicultural team of over 400 employees, with offices in Hong Kong, Korea and Japan, as well as a main warehouse in Hong Kong (YesStyle 2022). Products from numerous brands were offered at heavily discounted prices, including highly trend-driven product lines. The product prices ranged from £1.73 to £888.35, showing extensive product categories. Celebrities’ airport fashion was one of the most popular product options in the retailer’s product categories, blending the latest fashion styles and daily comfortable wear. The company offered K-pop celebrities’ news, beauty and fashion tips. Most K-pop-related content was

250  Eunsuk Hur predominantly focused on how to recreate celebrities’ styles using their products. Examples of the contents of their blogs included: “Recreating 6 Iconic Outfits from Nayeon’s Solo Debut Pop!,” “Recreating IVE’s Outfits from Eleven,” “Recreating Every Outfit from IU’s Strawberry Moon” and more. Similar to Fashion Chingu and Your K-pop Store, Instagram was the most active communication channel for engaging audiences. K-pop-related YesStyle’s Instagram content was very popular, showing a high level of engagement. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest were also relatively actively used by the company. From the Trustpilot site, YesStyle received over 73,250 reviews, with an overall rating of 4.3 out of 5 (Trustpilot 2022b). Major positive comments included (a) various ranges of fashionable Asian cosmetics, (b) active community activities from their social media channels, (c) numerous student discounts and promotional activities, (d) easy navigation and fast checkout web systems and (e) inexpensive product prices. Examples of consumer reviews are as follows: “I can find everything from accessories that are fashionable and trendy to all the Asian cosmetics that my favorite idols use, super recommended.” “Big range of products.” “I like that community is active there. And I like students discount too.” The majority of negative comments were associated with post-purchase activities, including slow shipping, refund policy and returning issues. Some customers commented on sizing issues and poor product quality.

Diffusion of K-Fashion and Challenges in the Global Market All three fashion companies in this study actively used social media channels, especially Instagram, to attract their audiences. Fashion media are one of the most influential cultural facilitators in the co-creation of representational fashion. YouTube and TikTok are commonly used as major social media platforms to help K-pop artists engage with their fans and link them to Twitter and Instagram. K-pop random plays dance in public, K-pop cover dancing and K-pop reactions on YouTube have become popular cultural trends for K-pop community groups. Several K-pop fashion trends are spotted in artists’ dance tutorials, YouTube K-pop music videos and Instagram posts. The development of the social media landscape became a notable aspect of the expansion of the Korean entertainment business, which strategically uses social media to attract worldwide audiences (Blas and Erestain 2020). Social media enables the rapid spread of popular fashion trends adopted by Korean celebrities in TV shows, movies and music videos. K-fashion is now considered part of Korean popular culture (Han 2022). These K-pop fashion e-commerce offers the latest fashion style that is adapted or directly mimicked from K-pop stars’ fashion styles, and fans can enjoy K-fashion and culture at very affordable prices. K-pop fans create numerous K-pop song cover content, K-pop dance challenges, K-fashion styles and beauty makeovers using YouTube or TikTok. This user-generated content enables the dissemination of Korean popular culture and the creation of fashion styles in youth culture. Although each company in this study had a distinctive approach to running its business, there are some challenges in selling K-pop-style fashion products and communicating with its audiences. Similar to other fast fashion brands, all three companies mostly offered knockoff K-pop fashion styles that are inspired by Korean celebrities’ Instagram posts. From a consumer perspective, their products help young consumers follow K-pop artists’ fashion styles at a fraction of a lower price. The general public accesses K-pop songs via YouTube channels and reproduces its fashion styles via knockoff products. The term “copycat,” coined from the phrase “copy activity,” indicates a replicating technique that demonstrates a culturally specific comprehension of the original works (Tse et al. 2020). There are growing copycat products that are deceptive (the customer is unaware) and non-deceptive (offered at a cheap price, the customer knowing it is not the original but a nice-looking replica) and inspired by celebrity images (Kapferer and Bastien 2012).

K-fashion E-tailers and Consumption in the Global Market  251 All three fashion companies imitated global prestige labels worn by famous K-pop celebrities. These replica items were subsequently offered by fast fashion retailers or K-pop-inspired fashion companies. These copycat products were purchased by e-tailers at wholesale prices. Some experts argue that replicas help improve the recognition of an original brand and raise its exclusive appeal. Non-deceptive counterfeits, whose prices make it evident that they are fakes, do not significantly affect the customer equity of commercial entities (Kapferer and Bastien 2012). Nevertheless, this copy activity could be detrimental to Korea’s standing in the international fashion business, since it restrains the country’s cultural power and inventiveness. Although some manufacturers mix and match new components into copied designs, most of their products are based on replica products without adding much value. Furthermore, some K-popinspired fashion companies, such as Fashion Chingu and Your K-pop Store, heavily use celebrities’ images on their websites and social media platforms to sell their products without considering copyright issues. Several Korean dramas, K-pop artist groups and films have gained popularity because of their unique identities and innovations. To maintain a sustainable K-pop fashion business, it will be important to consider various ways to attract audiences rather than offering imitation of K-pop artists’ style products only. The production of innovative K-cultural products and services is important to the communication of Korean cultural products, as well as the outputs of creative products, to maintain the long-term sustainable future of K-pop fashion businesses. Most popular K-pop groups have boys or girls with stereotypical fashion styles, doll-like faces, and thin and toned bodies. It can be argued that K-pop fashion-inspired products in the global market often portray and perhaps reinforce these stereotypical images of Korean celebrities and Korean beauty. K-fashion e-tailers also need to deal with the sizing issue to meet the needs of their global audiences. Celebrities’ Instagram images are often considered ideal beauty standards and female body images. According to Verrastro et al. (2020), “digitized dysmorphia” refers to the disconnection between beauty standards from social media’s digital images and women’s real body image. The discrepancy between the standard of beauty portrayed by the media and the real look of a person is a common phenomenon in the fashion or entertainment industry. K-pop fashion companies should consider producing culturally grounded products that fit into global audiences’ body shapes and provide clear sizing guidelines for serving multicultural global audiences rather than offering stereotypical beauty images only.

Conclusion This chapter sheds light on how K-fashion, particularly K-pop fashion, is diffused in the global market and examines K-fashion e-tailers’ activities that can influence the fashion consumption and perception of global fans. Fashion is a vital component of enhancing K-pop artists’ visual identity and creating visual moods for music videos and live performances. Many K-pop fans consider that a sense of community is one of the most important elements for enjoying K-pop fashion. K-pop fashion plays an important role in connecting international subcultural communities. However, existing K-fashion retailers commonly offer replica K-pop fashion styles that depict stereotypical beauty images in fashion. This copycat activity and stereotypical fashion styles could restrain cultural power and innovation by diminishing the originality of creative practices. There are several unexplored territories for creative fashion entrepreneurs to uncover the commercial, cultural and social value of K-fashion and to propose innovative cultural fashion products, services and community engagement activities. Future research can consider how K-pop artists and fashion companies effectively collaborate for the development of K-fashion products by examining how those activities influence overall fashion industry practices and strengthen cultural values.

252  Eunsuk Hur

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K-fashion E-tailers and Consumption in the Global Market  253 Widjojo, C. (2022) “Blackpink’s Jennie, Rosé, Jisoo, Lisa Ambassadorship Deals,” WWD, 30 June. Wigley, S. (2015) “An Examination of Contemporary Celebrity Endorsement in Fashion,” International Journal of Costume and Fashion, 15(2): 1–17. Williams, J. and Ho, S. (2016) ““Sasaengpaen” or K-pop Fan? Singapore Youths, Authentic Identities and Asian Media Fandom,” Deviant Behavior, 37(1): 81–94. YesStyle (2022) “About YesStyle – Our Mission,” YesStyle.

23 Precarious Eating Young Koreans’ Digital Practice of Mukbang Kyong Yoon

Given the phenomenal popularity of mukbang (a live-streamed eating show) among young people, first in Korea and now globally, it is no longer a secret that they like to watch other people eating and cooking in the digital age. This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of mukbang culture in Korea while exploring the sociocultural meanings of this new cultural phenomenon. The chapter suggests that mukbang as a social phenomenon is deeply rooted in the precarious contexts of Korean youth, also known as the ingyeo generation. Young people’s increasing engagement with mukbang illustrates how a shifting sociocultural structure engages with an emerging affective structure through digital mediation. Young Koreans’ negotiation of their precarious present and future through vicarious experiences of binge eating implies how the basic needs of eating are mediated, spectacularized and resignified as a subcultural practice.

Mukbang Goes Global A friendly looking South Korean (hereafter Korean) woman in her 20s broadcasts herself gobbling up 240 sushi pieces in one sitting on her personal channel on the Korean live-streaming platform AfreecaTV. This young woman, known as Tzuyang, is among many other Internet influencers that frequently perform binge eating on their personal channels. In each video, Tzuyang eats various types of food extravagantly – far more than the amount a person would consume weekly. By binge eating for an anonymous audience on the Internet, she has become a microcelebrity, or influencer – that is, an ordinary person who becomes popular online and is committed to “deploying and maintaining one’s online identity as if it were a branded good” (Senft 2013: 346). After her debut in 2018 at the age of 21, Tzuyang became a pioneering eating show performer. Amid her stardom in 2020, viewers accused her of using undisclosed advertising (known as backdoor advertising or dwitgwanggo in Korean) in her content. Tzuyang publicly apologized for the controversy and announced that she was quitting her online broadcasting career, although she returned to the job after a three-month break (Lee and Abidin 2021). Her channel regained popularity. As of August 2022, Tzuyang’s YouTube channel has 6.75 million subscribers, and it is estimated that she may earn as much as a million US dollars annually. Tzuyang’s anecdote reveals important aspects of the digital mediation of gastronomic practices in 21st-century Korea. Increasingly, young people are showing how and what they eat to anonymous viewers through digital platforms. Their desire in presenting and performing eating online is to be microcelebrities who attract large audiences and make large profits. This desire is subject to the continuous pressure of sharing, commodifying and marketing their lifestyle – especially eating and cooking – to others. Furthermore, as Tzuyang’s involvement in backdoor advertising shows, the digital performance of influencers’ seemingly ordinary practice of eating DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-30

Precarious Eating  255 is often interwoven with the commercial interests of corporations that seek to promote their products through “ordinary” user-generated content. On the other side of the camera, a large audience of young netizens follows eating shows in search of pleasure, comfort and meaning. Through digital platforms on which user-generated content is flourishing and shared, young people watch other people’s everyday practice of eating, which is now globally referred to as mukbang. Mukbang, an initially Korean phenomenon and term referring to “eating” (muk) and “broadcast” (bang), has become so popular globally that Oxford English Dictionary registered the term as a Korean-origin English word in 2021. The dictionary defines mukbang as “a video, especially one that is livestreamed, that features a person eating a large quantity of food and addressing the audience.” Indeed, mukbang has increasingly become a global phenomenon, as has the term’s use. Numerous global vloggers and stars have engaged with the digital practice of mukbang. This digital gastronomic culture reveals how the mundane activity of eating becomes a social practice with complex cultural meanings. In particular, young Koreans’ engagement with mukbang involves affective, networked, multisensory and commodified experiences of eating (Kim 2021). To understand the meanings behind this global phenomenon, it is essential to examine mukbang’s emergence, development and cultural politics and explore how it engages with young people’s participatory culture. Thus, this chapter examines how and why mukbang flourished as a popular digital media genre among Korean youth, especially in the 2010s and 2020s, and the phenomenon’s implications for understanding young people’s negotiation of the precarity involved in digital capitalism.

Evolution of Mukbang While mukbang had already emerged in the 2000s – specifically, through anonymous Internet users in 2009 – the trend became significantly popular in the 2010s. Its popularity grew even stronger via the global platform YouTube in the 2020s (Kim 2018). The mukbang phenomenon has also been observed in the overseas social media landscape. The global popularity of mukbang is evident in the increase in Google Trends’ data on mukbang as a search term. The English term “mukbang” has increasingly been searched worldwide since 2015; interestingly, the search frequency rapidly picked up at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The term appeared in Korean news media in the early 2010s, followed by overseas media coverage in the mid-2010s. Taking the example of several mukbang influencers, who have attracted large numbers of subscribers/followers and made significant profits, Korean and overseas news media have described mukbang as a cultural export of Korea that constitutes a newer phase of the Korean Wave, or Hallyu – the global dissemination of Korean media and popular culture (Cha 2014; Ellis 2018; Lee 2018b). Although mukbang was initiated and advanced by Korea’s vibrant technological and socioeconomic contexts and Internet users, the genre has quickly become a “borderless meme” (Ellis 2018). After originating along with AfreecaTV, mukbang evolved as a global genre of vlog through YouTube. YouTube-based, vlog-type eating shows are referred to as second-generation mukbang, compared to the original mukbang that emerged primarily in interactive, live-streaming videos (Rüdiger 2020). Mukbang has been growing on the Internet and particularly on YouTube. Many mukbangers have been among the most influential YouTubers in Korea. For example, mukbang channels were ranked highly among Forbes Korea’s Korean Power YouTubers in 2021 (Lee 2021). The best-known mukbang channel, Jane ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), was ranked at the top of the list, followed by two other eating channels, HongYu ASMR and Hamzy, ranked second and third, respectively. As of August 2022, each of these channels has over a million subscribers – Jane ASMR (16.8 M subscribers), HongYu ASMR (13.8 M) and

256  Kyong Yoon Hamzy (10.2 M). Most videos on these channels have been viewed at least a million times, and several videos have been watched more than 100 million times. Given their large subscriber bases and video view counts, these mukbangers are ahead of many Korean celebrities and K-pop stars, including IU, who is especially popular among young people (8.05 M subscribers) and is known for her vibrant social media presence. Drawing on content analysis of mukbang channels, Hong and Park (2017) have provided a typology of the five most common live-streamed mukbang videos: (1) the “big food fighter,” who binge eats; (2) the “calm eater,” who eats quietly and with great delight; (3) the “weirdo,” who broadcasts eccentric eating practices; (4) the “cook,” who cooks and eats the food they make; and (5) the “pretty boy/girl,” who focuses more on his/her looks than eating itself while seeking to chat with his/her fans. Among these types, the most common components of mukbang are binge eating by an attractive young woman. Mukbang uniquely reflects how and what young Koreans desire to eat, actually and imaginarily. In terms of how to eat, mukbang’s primary characteristics are “to eat a lot, to eat fast, and to eat with relish” (Bruno and Chung 2017: 159). The popularity of watching binge eating implies that viewers may desire to derive vicarious pleasure from watching the excessive and extreme consumption of food. Early mukbang broadcast jockeys (BJs) on the Korean-based AfreecaTV platform also popularized the binge eating practice as a simple method of attracting more viewers for a longer time (Bruno and Chung 2017: 159). In terms of what to eat in mukbang, junk food has been favored by both BJs and their fans. According to Kang et al.’s (2020) extensive analysis of mukbang videos on YouTube (drawing on a sample of 5,952 videos viewed more than 10,000 times), over 90% of mukbang videos portray the consumption of food purchased rather than food cooked by mukbangers, while 83.5% of the videos show overeating. According to the study, the food consumed in mukbang includes fast/junk food (15.7%) or instant food (18.4%). That is, the food culture portrayed in most mukbang videos is distinguished from the middle-class culinary culture that implies sophistication, moderation and elegance (Kim 2021: 112). Fried chicken, a popular nighttime snack and delivery food item among Koreans, appears to be the most frequently consumed food item in mukbang videos (Hong and Park 2017). The kind of food consumed reveals the shifting gastronomic culture of Korea, where instant, fast and delivered food has become prevalent compared to homemade, family-oriented food (ibid.). Another common component of mukbang videos is the online interaction between mukbangers and their viewers/fans. Since its emergence as a form of personal broadcasting on the AfreecaTV platform, mukbang has been associated with live interactions between video creators and viewers – often through live chat. To attract viewers and compete with other eating shows, mukbangers would actively and immediately interact with their viewers, often while sharing exaggerated or extreme content. Such interaction enabled mukbang BJs, especially on AfreecaTV, to develop their character and content (Song 2018). Mukbang videos on YouTube are not live-streamed but uploaded after editing, rendering mukbang on YouTube a subgenre of the vlog. Like other vloggers, mukbangers on YouTube try to interact with their viewers by utilizing several conversational strategies in their video monologues (e.g. the use of imperatives) or in the comment box (Rüdiger 2020). The mukbang genre has been characterized by its “interactive, spontaneous and fluid construction of narratives and behaviors in the show,” in which the creator’s authorial agency and viewers’ ontological status are not necessarily fixed but rather interwoven (Park 2020: 91). These common features, such as the binge eating of instant food while interacting with viewers, are exemplified with variations in the aforementioned popular mukbang channels. For example, Hamzy is a young mukbanger in her early 30s who eats various comfort foods in ordinary settings – especially in her home. Hamzy’s videos highlight the mukbanger’s eating

Precarious Eating  257 process (and sometimes cooking process) in close-up shots. She consumes a single food item or experiments with an interesting combination of items (e.g. instant noodles and octopus). In comparison, Jane ASMR and HongYu ASMR emphasize ASMR components and thus do not even show the mukbanger’s whole face. Instead, their videos show close-ups of the mukbanger’s mouth consuming food, differentiating them from other mukbang channels that present the mukbanger’s face. Despite their different styles, these mukbangers share their effort to maximize the multisensory presentation of eating processes – through facial expressions and/or natural sounds. These three most popular mukbangers focus more on eating and ASMR than on speaking about food. However, on many other mukbang channels, talking about food and other topics while eating constitutes an essential component of the content (Park 2020; Rüdiger 2020). For example, Tzuyang, introduced at the beginning of the chapter, discusses the food items she eats in her videos. Moreover, Hamzy created a spin-off channel documenting her everyday life, probably to complement her mukbang channel, which does not involve direct verbal communication. Overall, mukbangers’ gastronomic activities look simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary. Similar to other lifestyle vlog content, the mukbang videos are ordinary because mukbang reveals what ordinary people do every day (e.g. eat) in a casual setting (e.g. a dining room or a kitchen). Meanwhile, many mukbang videos are extraordinary in that they present an excessive amount of food consumed by seemingly ordinary people – mukbangers and their fans often refer to binge eating as a “challenge” or “fight.” The combination of ordinariness and extraordinariness may be a factor behind the rise of mukbang, as viewers and fans may want to see how ordinary people eat extraordinarily. While the mukbang phenomenon has evolved on digital platforms that allow users to produce and share content, the traditional network TV industry has also adopted the concept and format of mukbang (Hong and Park 2017). Korean lifestyle TV shows have extensively incorporated mukbang components – eating, cooking, or talking about eating/cooking – since the mid-2010s. The increasing number of network TV eating/food programs has contributed to mainstreaming the practice of watching others eat on screen and has, in turn, facilitated the exponential growth of mukbang content online. Although the eating components have been rapidly popularized in network TV programming, the principal format of mukbang is still user-generated video (vlog or personal broadcast). Instead of watching network TV-produced eating shows, young viewers have appeared far more excited about personal mukbang broadcasts online, especially on AfreecaTV and YouTube (Seo 2022). Through user-generated mukbang content, young viewers may explore “the excessive aesthetics of frugality” and enjoy the “deviant mood,” nuanced against the dominant dietary culture (Kim 2021: 111). Undeniably, user-generated mukbang has introduced the pleasure of vicarious eating to Korea’s media landscape while questioning traditional social norms related to eating and food (Hong and Park 2016).

Technological and Sociocultural Factors behind Mukbang Culture Watching someone eating on screen is a relatively new phenomenon that has emerged along with the increasing influence of digital platforms, such as AfreecaTV, YouTube and Twitch. The mukbang phenomenon may symptomatically reveal how Korean youth in the 21st century utilize digital technologies to cope with a shifting sociocultural structure. Arguably, mukbang was initiated and facilitated by interwoven factors – primarily technological and sociocultural factors. Above all, Korea’s vibrant digital environments have contributed to the emergence of the mukbang phenomenon. Korea has not only been a testbed for digital technologies but has also

258  Kyong Yoon generated uniquely localized platforms that open a new door to an interactive digital culture. In particular, AfreecaTV has played a significant role in popularizing mukbang, especially among Korean youth, since its launch in 2006 – five years before its American counterpart Twitch (launched in 2011). AfreecaTV, which stands for “Any FREE broadCAsting TV,” allows any individual to be a BJ running their channel by live-streaming while interacting with viewers via live chat. The platform encourages BJ–viewer interaction. BJs’ incomes are based on the amount of digital currency (called “star balloons”) donated by their viewers/fans. As of 2016, the platform was running 3,500 channels with 300,000 simultaneous users daily, with mukbang being the most popular genre along with gaming (Hong and Park 2016). AfreecaTV’s live-streaming based on interactivity attracted many young netizens to this platform throughout the 2010s. However, due to several factors, such as the platform’s high commissions (20–40% when viewer-donated digital currencies are transferred to BJs) and the increased risk of mediated interactions between BJs and abusive users, famous BJs began to leave AfreecaTV for YouTube or began running channels on both platforms in the late 2010s (Bae 2019). Meanwhile, YouTube has become the most popular video-streaming platform in Korea and a common outlet for Korean and global mukbangers in the 2020s. Despite the BJs’ exodus to YouTube, AfreecaTV in the 2010s significantly contributed to the emergence of mukbang culture among young people by attracting them to the specific form of interactive personal broadcasting in which the daily activity of eating became broadcasting content (Kim 2018). Moreover, BJing as mukbangers on AfreecaTV enabled ordinary netizens to become microcelebrities (Song 2018). Of course, the advanced technological environment alone cannot fully explain the rapid rise of the mukbang phenomenon. Sociocultural factors have also been influential. As critics have argued, showing and watching eating online is symptomatic of what Korean youth desire and how digital technologies are appropriated to address particular social desires (Kim 2018; Song 2018). The rapid individualization of Korean society has been considered the social background behind the emergence of mukbang. Indeed, the society has witnessed a rapid increase in single-person households – especially among those in their 20s (Song 2018) – which partly explains the growing popularity of user-generated online eating shows. As of 2021, one-person households constitute 33.5% of all homes in Korea, which is a noticeable increase from previous years (e.g. 27.9% in 2016) (Korean Statistical Information Service 2022). According to a 2020 survey, most single-person households are concerned about issues such as finances, loneliness, safety and eating (Jung and Oh 2020). Watching mukbang can be interpreted as young Koreans’ response to such concerns derived from individualization. That is, young people who live and dine alone may watch mukbang to avoid feelings of loneliness and isolation (Park 2020). The virtual practice of eating together with (a) virtual other(s) is appealing to those who eat alone (Hong and Park 2017; Kim 2018; Choe 2019) because eating alone (honbab) has been considered a taboo in Korea, where eating together – sharing a table and the same dishes – has crucial meanings as a practice of sharing jeong (locally based intimate and affective feelings) (Chung 2015). In Korean food culture, where each meal consists of rice and several dishes, preparing a meal can be especially burdensome for single people in their 20s and 30s. In this regard, mukbang may fulfill the physical and sentimental hunger of young people living alone (Hong and Park 2017). In 21st-century Korea, the affective structure that increases the virtual and mediated sense of togetherness through digital practices, such as mukbang, has been triggered by the shifting social structure that has accelerated individualization (Kim 2018). The country’s socioeconomic structure has rapidly transformed since the devastating Asian financial crisis in 1997 through intensive neoliberal restructuring of the national economy, primarily forced by the International Monetary Fund (Chang 2019). The labor market’s high flexibility has intensified

Precarious Eating  259 young people’s competition for employment, leaving many without a stable full-time job and having to move from one contract position to another. In response to the rapid neoliberalization of the socioeconomic structure, young Koreans have had to enhance their employability through fierce resume-building activities (Cho 2015). This precarious labor market condition has been so frustrating that the youth even self-deprecatingly call themselves the sampo generation that has given up three basic elements for living – namely, courtship, marriage and childbirth – due to a lack of financial resources. In this precarious context, arguably, “young people’s lives are seen to be reduced to the act of satisfying the self by cooking and eating alone” (Kim 2018: 231). Meanwhile, young Koreans coping with the precarious socioeconomic condition playfully yet seemingly unproductively (from a dominant socioeconomic perspective) have been referred to as ingyeo, especially on the Internet. Ingyeo is Korean Internet slang that literally means surplusage and actually refers to “a person wandering around cyberspace, creating parodies, compounds and distorted expressions, investing their abundant time capital” (Hong and Park 2017: 119). Ingyeo is a digital subject who “has nothing to do or no desire to do anything” (Song 2018: 3). Mukbang can be considered a cultural practice invented and explored by this new type of youth subject, who is regarded as engaging in seemingly useless, extreme and immature activities (Hong and Park 2017: 119) and as having left behind the utopian discourse of the advanced digital nation (Song 2018; Kim 2021). Overall, the explosive increase in user-generated content in 21st-century Korea shows how young Koreans cope with precarious social contexts by engaging in digital subcultural practices. Indulging in mukbang may be an attempt to escape or to question dominant sociocultural norms. However, this unconventional mukbang culture is not entirely free from the ideology of neoliberal capitalism. That is, mukbang implies the contradictory meanings of a new generation of Koreans’ digital responses to precarious social contexts. They may playfully resist the dominant sociocultural norms of gastronomic activities yet be involved in the extensive commodification of their everyday lives as part of digital capitalism.

Cultural Politics of Vicarious Eating Mukbang has been considered a symptomatic practice that reveals “the reality and fantasy of Korean society, encompassing young people’s need, desire, anxiety and pleasure” (Kim 2018: 233). This user-generated genre and its subculture may not remain a mere symptom of contemporary Korean society but also have significant sociocultural effects. Therefore, it is important to examine what mukbang does to its stakeholders – creators, viewers and the larger society. Overall, mukbang entails sociocultural meanings as a challenge to the dominant social norm and a facilitator of digitally driven consumer culture. First, the mukbang phenomenon surprised the public, news media and the government in Korea and overseas in the mid-2010s and has since facilitated discussions about the new genre’s sociocultural influence. Mainstream media coverage of mukbang in Korea has often sensationalized it and its creators by emphasizing the binge eating practice, distinguished from ideal gastronomic practices presented in conventional food-related lifestyle TV shows and public discourses. News media have also paid attention to the celebrity-like fame of “ordinary” young mukbangers, who do not seem to have particular career skills and experience. The sensationalization of mukbang has evolved as a form of media panic, compounded by medical discourse in which mukbang is associated with unhealthy (if not pathological) behaviors, such as surfeit and obesity. According to Kang et al.’s (2020) content analysis of Korean news reports on mukbang in the 2010s, news outlets first addressed the emergence and popularity of mukbang by focusing

260  Kyong Yoon primarily on the entertaining features of this new user-generated culture but gradually noted the harmful effects of mukbang (e.g. health issues related to overeating junk food). The news media, the government and academics have raised concerns about the social impacts of mukbang. For example, the Korean government announced anti-obesity measures including a plan to establish guidelines against media content encouraging excessive food consumption by 2019 (Lee 2018a). The news media interpreted this announcement as the introduction of government-led control over mukbang content, among others, and thus aroused controversy over media freedom. However, the government has not introduced any particular regulation of mukbang content. Interestingly, government regulation of mukbang was implemented in a neighboring country, China, in 2021, as part of an anti-food waste law prohibiting the creation and sharing of videos of binge eating (Qu 2021). Meanwhile, Korean news media’s coverage of negative aspects of mukbang culture has increased, along with scientific studies addressing correlations between mukbang viewing and physical/mental health (Oh 2022). Overall, in response to the rapidly rising popularity of mukbang, the government, the news media and academics have circulated the discourse of health crisis through regulatory discourses (Lee 2018a) and scientific data (Yun et al. 2020; Yoo et al. 2021), imposing biopower over the ingyeo generation’s vicarious practice of binge eating. This has made individuals’ gastronomic practices a matter of public concern and has defined them as a “biopolitical problem” necessitating the state’s control over individuals’ bodies and health (Mayes 2017). Second, the mukbang phenomenon has been incorporated into and facilitated digital mediadriven consumer culture. Some critics have associated the vicarious pleasure of mukbang with the fetishism of commodity (abundant food) and body (young women’s bodies) (Donnar 2017; Schwegler-Castañer 2018), while others have considered the mukbang culture a force that accelerates the commodification of everyday lives that were not extensively marketized prior to digital platform-driven capitalism (Kim 2018, 2021; Lee and Abidin 2021). On the surface, mukbangers’ consumption of an abundance of food can be regarded as a symbolic celebration of consumerism through which excessive consumption is sought and encouraged (Donnar 2017). Mukbang has been referred to as “food porn” that focuses on “excessive and immediate sensations around the act of eating” (Kim 2021: 111; see also Donnar 2017). Some mukbang videos partly hint at sexual implications by reinforcing the voyeuristic pleasure of watching and objectifying young, attractive female mukbangers’ bodies (Schwegler-Castañer 2018). Mukbang as an eating spectacle involves vicarious and voyeuristic pleasures, especially by revealing young women’s appetites and desire for excessive eating that are often repressed in the dominant ideology of the ideal slim female body (ibid.). In particular, young female mukbangers’ binge eating appeals to female fans, who “not only enviously celebrate a performer’s capacity to eat to excess while remaining thin, but also watch to avoid actual eating” (Donnar 2017: 125; see also Moon et al. 2017). Mukbang BJs and YouTubers also voluntarily participate in and disseminate mukbang-driven consumer culture in search of commercial interests. Betraying the viewers’ pursuit of virtual togetherness through the consumption of mukbang, some popular mukbangers seek to maximize their profit by exploiting the commercial logic of digital platforms. They tend to collaborate with sponsors to promote particular products (e.g. food items and restaurants), sometimes without informing their viewers and fans. Many famous mukbang BJs have been criticized by fans for dishonesty and secret collaborations with commercial sponsors. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Tzuyang was accused of backdoor advertising in her videos presenting seemingly ordinary yet sponsored eating. Another popular mukbanger, Banzz, received criticism for dishonesty and misleading advertising of diet products. Individual mukbangers’ commercial interests and secret collaboration with sponsors have been recurring problems.

Precarious Eating  261 Mukbangers have been exposed to the interests of sponsors that seek to commercially exploit the user-generated content of mukbang. Many famous mukbang BJs and YouTubers present their authentic and ordinary practices of eating in their own house or room. However, the settings of mukbang videos are, in fact, staged to look ordinary. Popular mukbangers are no longer generating do-it-yourself (DIY) content but are assisted by talent agencies that brand them and their channels. Mukbang’s “staged fun” is a common strategy adopted in vlogging practices (Song 2018). The seemingly ordinary yet staged fun contributes to the popularity of mukbangers as intimate microcelebrities who are not very different from the viewers – the ingyeo youth frustrated with the prevailing socioeconomic conditions – while questioning the dominant cultural norm of social or familial eating. The authenticity and ordinariness that mukbang promises may provide these young people with parasocial (or pseudosocial) experiences to fulfill their emotional hunger as a way of negotiating the physical and social realities of isolation. The young viewers may, on the one hand, desire the practice of mukbang freely (and excessively) and, on the other hand, be envious of mukbangers as microcelebrities who gain significant financial capital in the digital attention economy without engaging in conventional resume-building activities. Performing and watching eating shows eventually serve the profit-seeking mechanism of digital capitalism, which conveniently exploits participation and playful interactions as a form of labor. As Kim (2021) insightfully explored, mukbang consists of “free labor,” where mukbangers and viewers produce content and data and, in doing so, serve the platform-driven attention economy’s pursuit of surplus value without necessarily due rewards. Eating show BJs tend to compete with others to survive in the attention economy of AfreecaTV and YouTube; for attention, they control their gastronomic practices (e.g. eating a lot and rapidly). Overall, mukbang has been more than a symptomatic reflection of the precarious conditions that young Koreans face. This phenomenon has also had significant sociocultural effects in Korea for the past two decades. It offers a vivid example of a digital subculture for digitally savvy youth, who remain marginalized in the dominant socioeconomic order. The parasocial connections and vicarious pleasure of mukbang are articulated with the ways in which everyday practices and emotions of eating are digitalized, shared and commodified. While mukbang performance is often excessive and extreme, and thus seems to potentially challenge the dominant gastronomic norms, the circulation of mukbang as a live-streamed video or a lifestyle vlog is not free from digital capitalism, in which netizens’ free labor is extensively exploited and incorporated into the seemingly entertaining digital playground without clear boundaries between work and play or between public and private.

Conclusion The mukbang phenomenon implies how the seemingly mundane activity of eating is resignified as an entertaining and interactive digital culture that reveals young people’s negotiation of precarious social conditions. The new modes of personal broadcasting (on AfreecaTV) and vlogging (on YouTube) are relatively easy to participate in as they draw on the quotidian practice of eating. With variations, many mukbangers primarily eat, which does not require particular skills or knowledge. According to Maslow’s (1943) famous pyramid of needs, eating is one of the basic needs to be satisfied for higher needs, such as self-actualization. Mukbang reifies vicarious desires to gaze at and share how basic human needs are satisfied. Arguably, mukbang is more than a form of food porn that reinforces immediate pleasure; it is a cultural practice that engages with multiple sociocultural meanings. As discussed in this chapter, ingyeo youth in Korea may cope with precarious social conditions and immerse themselves in the playful digital culture of mukbang (Song 2018). Moreover, they challenge the

262  Kyong Yoon norms of social or familial eating in Korea (Hong and Park 2016). Mukbangers and their viewers eat alone and a lot while not necessarily conforming to the ideal norms of social or familial eating. Furthermore, by consuming relatively accessible junk/fast/comfort food, mukbang appeals to young people who cannot access high-brow culinary culture due to their limited resources in the precarious socioeconomic conditions of the highly neoliberalized Korean society. In the 21st century, young Koreans are forced to eat alone while participating in networked and mediated spaces of virtually eating together. The mukbang phenomenon has been rising globally as a digital subculture. Its globalization reveals how people’s basic needs and seemingly mundane eating practices are widely mediated, resignified and monetized in the digital attention economy. User-generated eating shows that have been especially popular among young people across different digital and physical spaces reveal how youth playfully negotiate the dominant sociocultural structure while exploring subcultural practices. As shown in the Korean ingyeo generation’s seemingly “useless” doing and watching eating shows (Hong and Park 2017; Song 2018), global youth may question the precarity of neoliberalizing worlds through the vicarious, networked and digital consumption of food; however, in doing so, knowingly or unknowingly, they may be incorporated into the digital attention economy that reinforces the precarity that they face and attempt to challenge.

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Precarious Eating  263 Lee, K. (2018a) “Beware: Gov’t Wants to Regulate Your Eating Habits”, Korea Times, 2 August. Lee, S. (2018b) “The Cultural DNA Moving Beyond National Borders: Overseas YouTubers Incorporating Mukbang,” Donga Ilbo, 13 October. Maslow, A. (1943) “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review, 50(4): 370–96. Mayes, C. (2017) “Food at the Nexus of Bioethics and Biopolitics,” in M. Rawlinson and C. Ward (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, London: Routledge. Moon, Y., Shim, J. and Park, D. (2017) “‘My Favorite Broadcasting Jockey Is…’: Interpretive Analysis on the Mukbang Viewing Experience” [in Korean], Media and Society, 25(2): 55–101. Oh, S. (2022) “Desperately Seeking Weight Loss, Yet Enthusiastically Watching Mukbang: Appetite Controlled by Culture,” Chosun Ilbo, 20 July. Park, H. (2020) Understanding Hallyu: The Korean Wave Through Literature, Webtoon and Mukbang, London: Routledge. Qu, L. (2021) “Waste on the Tip of the Tongue: Social Eating Livestreams (Chibo) in the Age of Chinese Affluence,” Asiascape: Digital Asia, 8(1–2): 43–69. Rüdiger, S. (2020) “Dinner for One: The Use of Language in Eating Shows on YouTube,” in S. Rüdiger and S. Mühleisen (eds) Talking about Food: The Social and the Global in Eating Communities, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schwegler-Castañer, A. (2018) “At the Intersection of Thinness and Overconsumption: The Ambivalence of Munching, Crunching and Slurping on Camera,” Feminist Media Studies, 18(4): 782–85. Senft, T. (2013) “Microcelebrity and the Branded Self,” in J. Hartley, J. Burgess and A. Bruns (eds) A Companion to New Media Dynamics, Hoboken: Wiley. Seo, Y. (2022) “Tzuyang Ahead Baek Jongwon and Lee Youngja: Mukbang Entertainment Shows Defeated by YouTube Mukbang” [in Korean], Hankyung Entertainment, 4 June. Song, H. (2018) “The Making of Microcelebrity: AfreecaTV and the Younger Generation in Neoliberal South Korea,” Social Media + Society, 4(4). Yoo, S. Shin, G. and Kim, S. (2021) “Does Mukbang Watching Really Affect Obesity?: Focusing on the Factors Related to Health and Mukbang Watching” [in Korean], Korean Journal of Journalism & Communication Studies, 65(2): 205–40. Yun, S., Kang, H. and Lee, H. (2020) “Mukbang- and Cookbang-Watching Status and Dietary Life of University Students Who Are Not Food and Nutrition Majors,” Nutrition Research and Practice, 14(3): 276–85.

Part VII

Popular Culture and Nation Branding

24 Branding the Sense of Place Gangnam as the Epicenter of the Korean Wave Pil Ho Kim

Gangnam stands for many things in South Korea. On the one hand, it is portrayed as a place of fabulous wealth, beauty, glamor and luxury; on the other hand, it is a site of polarization, corruption, debauchery and cutthroat competition. Therefore, Gangnam gives Koreans a complex sense of place in their daily lives. Globally, however, it has been recognized as the epicenter of K-pop and the Korean Wave since Psy’s “Gangnam Style” took the world by storm in 2012. The municipal government tried to capitalize on such instant fame, but its place-branding campaign has been clumsy at best. In contrast, the formidable entertainment industry has been able to command global attention to Gangnam, building monumental showcases in the area where it first laid the foundation in the early 1980s. This chapter will follow the trajectory of Korea’s media entertainment industry in Gangnam to show how the sense of place and the place-branding practice are intertwined in complex and ironical ways.

Nation- and City-Branding Arrives in Korea According to an official report by a policy think tank of the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the practice known as place-branding was first introduced to South Korea in 2000 when the official promotion began in earnest for the 2002 FIFA World Cup Games, to be co-hosted by South Korea and Japan (Yi and Kim 2010: 37–8). President Kim Dae-Jung’s administration (1998–2002) initiated a nation-branding campaign with the slogan “Dynamic Korea” (An 2006). The success of this branding campaign, thanks in part to the national football team’s unexpected run to the World Cup semifinals, gave momentum to the Seoul mayor, who launched an ambitious city-branding campaign on the heels of “Dynamic Korea,” adopting the slogan “Hi Seoul.” Unlike the national government ruled by the liberals at the time, Mayor Lee Myung-Bak – hailed from the conservative party with a distinguished entrepreneurial background as a former CEO of the construction company owned by the Hyundai chaebol conglomerate – was able to ride on his crowning achievement as mayor, an urban mega-project known as the Cheonggyecheon Restoration, to the nation’s presidency in 2007. Lee’s successor, Mayor Oh Se-Hoon, would push for even more grandiose mega-projects across the city. The urban entrepreneurial tandem of Lee and Oh redoubled their nation- and city-branding efforts by establishing a special committee at the respective levels of government (Lee 2009; Lim 2021). In terms of cultural policy, the establishment of the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA; formerly Korea Culture and Content Agency) in 2001 set a milestone as it fostered and promoted pop culture industries under the newly minted national brand of Hallyu or the Korean Wave. While South Korean politics has been heavily polarized, liberal and conservative administrations have been in rare consensus on promoting Hallyu as the so-called new growth engine since the early 2000s. Regardless of political ideology, nation-branding has become one  of the prime activities of the state that vies not only for economic gains but also for DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-32

268  Pil Ho Kim international prestige through “soft power” and “public diplomacy” (van Ham 2008; Jang and Paik 2012; Elfving-Hwang 2013). Whether to call it an “entrepreneurial state” (Lee 2018: 15) or state-centered “neodevelopmentalism” (Oh 2018: 23) seems like a matter of semantics insofar as the substance of cultural policy is concerned. As I have argued elsewhere, Korea’s developmental state has always been entrepreneurial in some sense and, at the same time, subordinate to the global “hegemony of liberal capitalism, be it the classical, Keynesian, or neoliberal version” (Kim 2015: 398–399). President Lee’s developmentalist roots in the construction business and Mayor Oh’s early years as a liberal environmental lawyer attest to the bipartisan pull of place branding strategy, which is neoliberal in outlook (global market competitiveness) yet state-led in practice (governmental place-branding committees). Even though both men’s careers feature significant connections with Gangnam (Lee’s company was a major builder of the area, and Oh started his political career as a national assemblyman representing one of its electoral districts), their nation- and city-branding campaigns did not foreground the Gangnam area. Instead, their signature urban mega-projects were built in the old downtown area north of the Han River (Gangbuk) – Lee’s “restored” Cheonggyecheon and Oh’s futuristic Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP). By then, Gangnam was already a well-established brand, domestically at least, that no longer needed a boost from the national or the metropolitan government. Still, Gangnam set a crucial precedent upon which the contemporary place-branding practice was built. Branding was not prioritized when Gangnam was still undergoing development from the early 1970s through the 1980s. In fact, the name Gangnam (literally, “south of the river”) was competing with others, such as Yeongdong and Namseoul (South Seoul), until it slowly prevailed in the 1990s. What Gangnam received much attention for during that period was place “marketing” rather than branding. “Place-marketing” and “place-branding” are not the same, even though they are often used interchangeably, according to the marketing theory literature where the terms originated (Lucarelli and Brorström 2013: 69–70; Hankinson 2015: 14). “Placemarketing” is a general term involving various activities to promote or “sell” the place in question (Hae 2017: 1–2; Oh 2018: 10), which may or may not include branding as a subset of those activities. On the other hand, place-branding is more narrowly concerned with identity-driven “reputation management” (Boisen et al. 2018: 7). Gangnam was heavily marketed and sold to the rising urban middle class before fully shaping its “place identity” and reputation. The final touch on Gangnam development was another global sporting event, the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, an ultimate city-marketing extravaganza engineered by the authoritarian developmental state. Functioning as the gateway to the Olympic Main Stadium built in Jamsil, Gangnam became the urban showcase for South Korea’s global coming-out party (Nelson 2000; Kim 2017).

Gangnam’s Sense of Place and Psy’s Irony Sense of place is a central concept of human geography that refers to the affective qualities of a sociophysical space (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977; Massey 1991; Creswell 2015). While it is not a marketing term, “place-branding theory” embraces sense of place for its own purpose; “the essence of place brands is understanding, enhancing and even helping to shape ‘sense of place’ and how this changes over time” (Ashworth et al. 2015: 5). It is because the sense of place is considered one of the main components of place identity, which a successful branding practice would latch onto (Kavaratzis and Hatch 2013: 75–6). What is Gangnam’s place identity, then? It has been evolving over the six decades of Gangnam’s existence, but some aspects remain constant. First, Gangnam is an embodiment of postwar urban modernity in contrast to the old downtown across the river representing the past 600-plus-year premodern and colonial-era urban tradition. Second, Gangnam is the crystallization of national ambition to attain the

Branding the Sense of Place  269 coveted “global city” status (Sassen 1991; Oh 2018: 144–5). As noted above, it began with the Seoul Olympic Games and has never let up since. Third, Gangnam is a privileged location in terms of social mobility. From the beginning, the place was known for luxurious consumerism but also associated with the rising urban middle class (Lett 1998; Nelson 2000). Since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, the increasing economic inequality and social polarization have changed the public perception of Gangnam as an exclusive enclave for the rich and powerful (Yang 2018). As a domestic brand, Gangnam still retains all three aspects of place identity. Globally, however, Gangnam did not quite earn the status and recognition it was striving for until the arrival of a game-changer – Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video in 2012. The Guinness World Record holder as the first-ever YouTube video to hit one billion views, “Gangnam Style” achieved a global feat hitherto no Korean pop artist had ever dreamed of. For most viewers who were unfamiliar with Korean society and culture, the name Gangnam made as much sense as the rest of the Korean-language lyrics incomprehensible to them. Gangnam was, therefore, a classic “empty signifier” that can be replaced with anything and everything. Numerous flash mob performances and “Gangnam Style” parodies did just that. “Gandalf Style” and “New York City Style,” for example, were among the top ten “Gangnam Style” parodies selected by Billboard. And then there was “M.I.T. Style,” featuring the school’s linguistics professor and public intellectual extraordinaire, Noam Chomsky. The carnivalesque images and atmosphere the music video conjured up were enough for the global viewership to get a kick out of the song, the incomprehensible lyrics and mystifying local context be damned. By the time the YouTube hits reached two billion, however, some became curious about not just the “style” but the “substance” of Gangnam. Among them was an American journalist who found the music video’s hidden-in-plain-sight message fascinating: Gangnam is a tony Seoul neighborhood, and PSY’s Gangnam style video lampoons its self-importance and ostentatious wealth… the video is rich with subtle references that along with the song itself, suggest a subtext with a surprisingly subversive message about class and wealth in contemporary South Korean society. (Fisher 2012) Indeed, Psy was at his mischievous best, exposing Gangnam’s sense of place in the video by making a mockery of its global-capitalist desire and class-polarized reality. In so doing, he created a brand out of Gangnam, yet his act was not typical place-branding described by the marketing theory literature. For lack of a better term, it was an act of anti-branding that stressed the negative, bad sense of place attached to Gangnam. The irony was that this anti-branding satire delivered Gangnam a status of global renown much more effectively than any other place-­ branding or place-marketing campaign, including those that tried to piggyback on the music video’s popularity. One spectacular failure of such a piggybacking effort can be seen near the World Trade Center, the iconic skyscraper that figured prominently in the music video. It is an oddly gigantic bronze sculpture of two dismembered forearms with hands doing Psy’s patented horse dance gesture. Bewildering aesthetics aside, the statue was installed in 2016, probably three or four years too late to capitalize on the music video’s unexpected fame (Figure 24.1).

Gangnam as the Production Space for Pop Culture Industries The World Trade Center is part of COEX, Seoul’s premier convention center complex that includes numerous business offices, five-star hotels, a luxury department store, a sprawling underground shopping mall, a multiplex movie theater and even an aquarium. COEX flexes its capitalist muscle at the eastern end of Teheran Avenue, Gangnam’s economic axle that stretches

270  Pil Ho Kim

Figure 24.1 Hwang Mansok, GangNamStyle (2016) Near the World Trade Center. (Photography by the Author)

across the area horizontally (on the western end stand Samsung’s Corporate Headquarters). With the World Trade Center looming in the background, the Gangnam Style bronze statue sits on the public sidewalk as an example of heavy-handed (both literally and figuratively) place-branding at the municipal government level. By contrast, something is quite different on the opposite side of the skyscraper. It is a smaller building with a slick glass façade and a large, high-tech LED screen on the side (Figure 24.2). SM Town COEX Artium, as it used to be called, had a six-year run from 2015 until 2020 as a showcase for K-pop talents managed by the music industry giant SM Entertainment. Even though SM was losing money over this multimedia entertainment venue, the presence of K-pop’s representative brand was more than enough to change the sense of place. COEX was now incorporated into K-pop’s orbit, attracting international tourists who were infatuated with the music and its idol-performers. Using such pop culture brands as SM and JYP Entertainment in place-marketing has been working for Gangnam to a certain extent: What Gangnam can offer tourists from overseas is shopping venues, medical services (focusing on beauty) and Hallyu entertainment… In the production and dissemination of urban images for international consumption, Gangnam is marketed as a locus of consumption and

Branding the Sense of Place  271 popular culture… The district office has enlisted Hallyu stars as its public relations ambassadors: Rain and Girls’ Generation in 2012; Super Junior, SHINee and EXO in 2014. Marketing through ambassadors turns the stars’ global popularity to account in boosting Gangnam as a globally recognized place, linking the desirable qualities of the stars – their stylishness, trendiness, confidence and popularity with Gangnam. (Oh 2018: 147-8) The Gangnam District Office has been mostly surfing on the Korean Wave without engaging in the production of cultural content, which is understandable given the limited capacity of municipal and local governments, including the wealthy Gangnam District (Oh 2018: 9–10, 158). This “hollow” place-marketing or -branding effort may not amount to much. Still, it reveals, perhaps unwittingly, the true depth of the entertainment industry’s embeddedness in Gangnam as a space of production. It is not just the sheer number of entertainment companies (yeonye gihoeksa) located in Gangnam (including the adjacent Seocho and Songpa districts), which comes close to a thousand or more (MOIS 2022). There are about 200 music and audio-recording industry businesses, some of which long predate the earliest Hallyu boom and

Figure 24.2  COEX Artium. (Source: Public Domain, https://pxhere.com/ko/photo/1343562)

272  Pil Ho Kim

Figure 24.3  Newspaper Advertisement of the Opening of the Hotel Riverside on 19 December 1981. (Source: Naver News Library)

current K-pop explosion. In fact, both SM and JYP had humble beginnings in the outer reaches of Gangnam proper before moving into its most prestigious location, the CheongdamApgujeong-Sinsadong area. Entertainment industry infrastructure had already been built in this riverside strip of Gangnam since the opening of the Hotel Riverside in 1981 (Figure 24.3). The hotel’s legendary nightclub became the new center of adult entertainment thanks largely to the national and the metropolitan government policy to promote Gangnam’s business at the expense of Gangbuk (SMH 2011: 8–9; Oh 2018: 143). Record companies, distributors, recording studios and talent management agencies followed suit to settle in the new business-friendly area. They started producing hit songs ranging from Korean trot to ballad to disco in the mid-1980s. In 1995, the foundation of music cable television channels, the now-defunct KMTV and the CJ conglomerate-owned Mnet, signaled that the music industry’s center of gravity had moved to Gangnam. The film industry, another major component of Hallyu, made a cross-river transition from Gangbuk’s venerable Chungmuro area to Gangnam, following the music industry’s lead. From the mid-1980s, the domestic film industry faced a strong competitive headwind against Hollywood and major US film distributors as the protective barriers were removed step-bystep. The quota system ensuring a certain number of domestic films to be screened in theaters was gone, and so was the “Chungmuro distribution network” that had nearly cornered the domestic movie theater market. The results were devastating; the share of domestic films in the box office revenue was almost slashed in half by 1993, compared to the 30% level in the previous decade. Thus, the 1990s witnessed a significant restructuring of the film industry through “vertical integration” with chaebol conglomerates like CJ, Lotte and Orion. Also, the finance industry began making venture capital investments in film productions with government approval and support (Kim 2007: 416–7). Gangnam was already awash with economic, social, human and cultural capital to replace Chungmuro as the leading film industry cluster. Between 1995 and 2004, Chungmuro’s share of film and video production business dropped from 18.9% to 6.4%, whereas Gangnam’s share was consistently around 40% during the same period. In 2004, 32 out of 48 major film production and distribution companies were in Gangnam, and 20 were in the Cheongdam-Apgujeong-Sinsadong area. Not coincidentally, the film industry’s migration from Chungmuro to Gangnam brought a “renaissance” period that gave birth to New Korean Cinema (Stringer 2005; Choo 2006: 246, 254; Paquet 2010).

Branding the Sense of Place  273 The preeminence of music and film in Hallyu may well be sufficient to designate Gangnam as the epicenter of the Korean Wave. Making it a successful brand for international tourism, or failing to do so, would not change the fact that Gangnam is, above all, a production space for these pop culture industries. If one takes a broader view of Hallyu and considers the gaming industry, Gangnam’s importance rises exponentially. The latest survey result shows that the gaming industry’s share of the total cultural export revenue is at a whopping 72%, greater than all other culture industry shares combined; despite all the media attention K-pop receives, the music industry only accounts for 4.5% (KOCCA 2022). Gangnam’s main business district around Teheran Avenue is also known as the “Teheran Valley,” drawing comparison to the Silicon Valley in the US as the hub of high-tech industries. As such, Korea’s “online gaming empire” was first built in the Teheran Valley area before expanding to the outer reaches of the city, and recently the Valley has been bringing the industry back to its fold ( Jin 2010; Yi 2022).

Sex-Beauty-Entertainment Industrial Complex: Gangnam’s Dark Corners Some commentators have taken notice of an industrial cluster effect on entertainment industries in Gangnam, especially in the fashion and beauty sectors – hairstyling, cosmetics, wedding planning and photography, designer boutiques and so forth (Seo and Byeon 2017; Oh 2018). Perhaps the most stunning display of such a cluster effect can be found in the so-called Beauty Belt, referring to the same area of Cheongdam-Apgujeong-Sinsadong, where anyone with naked eyes can easily spot hundreds of plastic surgery clinics and dermatologist’s offices within a few large street blocks (Yu 2003; Leem 2016). An easy way to explain this clustering effect is celebrity culture supposedly fostered by film, television and pop music. Simply put, consumers of such pop culture products would aspire to attain the same beauty standards and fashion styles as they see in their favorite actors or performers. But it still begs the question: Do these services need to be located where the pop culture celebrities are most visible? The clustering of beauty and entertainment industries has deeper roots than Hallyu celebrity culture, harking back to the early years of Gangnam under development. One of the most effective policy tools the metropolitan government utilized to push reluctant businesses toward the yet-to-be-proven Gangnam area was the “entertainment liquor store license.” This authorization was issued to bars, nightclubs and other establishments that could legally sell alcohol, put on live shows and, most importantly, hire hostesses (or hosts) to “serve” customers. The metropolitan government only issued this special license to the newly opening Gangnam businesses. It ceased renewals of expired licenses in the Gangbuk region, forcing the adult entertainment industry’s relocation to Gangnam (SMH 2011: 9, 44). In the meantime, the national government did its part to promote Gangnam by allowing “tourist hotels” to operate in specially designated regions for international tourism. The aforementioned Hotel Riverside was the first to open in Gangnam, soon followed by four more (Kim 2016: 90–2). By the mid-1980s, these tourist hotels became the keystones of Seoul’s emergent nightlife empire, which would soon sprawl along the vertical axis of the region, Gangnam Boulevard, and the horizontal axis of Teheran Avenue. At the time, the national and metropolitan governments promoted not just “international” tourism but the so-called gisaeng tourism, specifically catering to wealthy Japanese businessmen seeking sexual pleasure overseas (Lee 2010; Norma 2014). From the beginning, Gangnam’s adult entertainment industry (or sex industry, to be explicit about it) hired many women in hostess bars, colloquially known as “room salons,” and other venues for sex work. The large-scale demand for fashion, beauty and grooming services first came from the sex workers living and working in the Cheongdam-Apgujeong-Sinsadong area and around Teheran Avenue (Ha 2011: 46–7; Kim 2016).

274  Pil Ho Kim Burning Sun, a nightclub located on Gangnam Boulevard, became the site of a seismic scandal in 2019, implicating some high-profile Hallyu celebrities and K-pop’s leading entertainment company in a litany of lurid criminal activities – sex and drug trafficking, violent assault and bribing the local police for a cover-up (Bicker 2019; Campbell and Kim 2019). This incident was a stark reminder that the entertainment and sex industries had never really set themselves far apart since their cohabitation in 1970s’ Gangnam. Another, a decade older scandal points to an even wider collusion between media, entertainment and sex industries – the suicide of a budding television actress named Jang Ja-Yeon, who left a note accusing her manager of sex trafficking her to the rich and powerful in the news media industry. She had been summoned to Gangnam’s room salons like a high-end sex worker, allegedly forced to serve clients, 31 of whom she named (Kil 2018). Gangnam’s reputation has taken many similar hits as the crime-ridden locale of the sex-beauty-entertainment industrial complex over decades, invoking a bad sense of place among the local population (Figure 24.4). The rise of Hallyu makes global scandals out of such incidents involving pop culture celebrities, damaging Gangnam’s reputation and place identity.

Figure 24.4  A Street Protest Stage Near the Burning Sun Nightclub Location, 25 May 2019. (Source: Bonnielou 2013 at Wikimedia Commons)

Branding the Sense of Place  275

Conclusion: Bad Reputation, Good Business? When it comes to Gangnam, the state-led place-marketing and -branding practice has a checkered history. By all accounts, the return on the public investment in Gangnam to provide infrastructure for culture industries has been excellent. Music, cinema and digital gaming are globally recognized industry leaders anchored in the Cheongdam-Apgujeong-Sinsadong and Teheran Valley areas. It was not just industrial policy but also the place-marketing campaign by the national and metropolitan governments that fostered the well-trained, creative-minded workforce during the era of Gangnam development from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. In the ensuing period, the nation- and city-branding efforts shifted their focus away from Gangnam, and the municipality-led branding campaign was too clumsy and inadequate to capitalize on the global attention brought by Psy’s “Gangnam Style” and the K-pop industry’s high profile in the area. Still, Gangnam has consolidated its central position in the Hallyu cultural production. KOCCA, the national government agency promoting cultural exports, had its headquarters in Gangnam from 2006 until 2014. Even the negative reputation Gangnam has recently received from the entertainment industry scandals may not hold it back too much. It is true that SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment and HYBE (formerly known as Big Hit Entertainment, the management company of BTS) all moved their business headquarters out of Gangnam in the wake of the Burning Sun incident. Regardless of the actual motivations behind the relocation, they keep various facilities, such as recording studios, training spaces and subsidiary offices, because of the production network firmly rooted in the area for the past four decades. For other cultural producers, Gangnam’s bad sense of place and poor reputation as a corrupt, criminal, consumerist dystopia offer a wealth of materials to work with creatively. Whereas Psy’s “Gangnam Style” merely insinuates it, the filmmaker Yu Ha’s Gangnam Blues (2015) makes an in-your-face accusation of Gangnam’s inglorious past. Yoon Jong-Bin’s film Beastie Boys (2008) is a clinical takedown of Gangnam’s sex industry leaving nothing but a bad taste for the viewer. Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning (2018) laments about “so many Gatsbys in Korea,” like the film’s villain character living in Gangnam. However, all these harsh, valid critiques of Gangnam seem to only strengthen its brand as the epicenter of the new wave of Korean culture.

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276  Pil Ho Kim Hae, L. (2017) “Traveling Policy: Place Marketing and the Neoliberal Turn of Urban Studies in South Korea,” Critical Sociology, 44(3): 533–46. Hankinson, G. (2015) “Rethinking the Place Branding Construct,” in M. Kavaratzis, G. Warnaby and G. Ashworth (eds) Rethinking Place Branding: Comprehensive Brand Development for Cities and Regions, New York: Springer. Jang, G. and Paik, W. (2012) “Korean Wave as a Tool for Korea’s New Cultural Diplomacy,” Advances in Applied Sociology, 2(3): 196–202. Jin, D.Y. (2010) Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, Cambridge: MIT Press. Kavaratzis, M. and Hatch, M. (2013) “The Dynamics of Place Brands: An Identity-Based Approach to Place Branding Theory,” Marketing Theory, 13(1): 69–86. Kil, S. (2018) “Korean Prosecutors to Reopen Actress Suicide Case,” Variety, 2 April. Kim, B. (2017) “What Kind of Effect Did the Olympics Have on Gangnam’s Development? Focusing on the Jamsil Olympic Town Project in the 1970-80s,” in B. Bak and J. Hwang (eds) Making Gangnam, Mimicking Gangnam [in Korean], Paju: Dongnyeok. Kim, J. (2016) “The Study on Korean Sex Industry’s Political Economic Transformation Through ‘BodySecuritization’ of Women,” Economy and Society [in Korean], 111: 142–73. Kim, M. (2007) “Trends in the Structure of the Korean Film Industry,” in M. Kim (ed) Korean Cinema: From Origins to Renaissance, Seoul: Communication Books. Kim, M. (2016) Hotel as an Urban Infrastructure in Seoul Since the 1960s, Ph.D. thesis, Seoul National University. Kim, P. (2015) “Review of Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia: Neoliberalizing Spaces in Developmental States edited by Bae-Gyoon Park, Richard Child Hill and Asato Saito,” Contemporary Sociology, 44(3): 398–99. KOCCA (Korea Creative Content Agency) (2022) Content Industry Statistics, Year 2020 [in Korean], Sejong: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Lee, H. (2018) Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State, London: Routledge. Lee, J. (2010) Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work and Migrant Labor in South Korea, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lee, S. (2009) “South Korea’s Soft Power Diplomacy,” East Asia Institute Issue Briefing, MASI 2009-01: 1–8. Leem, S. (2016) “The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 10(1): 51–71. Lett, D. (1998) In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s ‘New’ Urban Middle Class, Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. Lim, H. (2021) “A Study on Strategic City Brand Policy: Based on the Comparative Analysis of City Brand Slogans in Seoul and Overseas Case Studies,” Journal of Digital Convergence, 19(7): 41–50. Lucarelli, A. and Brorström, S. (2013) “Problematizing Place Branding Research: A Meta-Theoretical Analysis of the Literature,” The Marketing Review, 13(1): 65–81. Massey, D. (1991) “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today, 38: 24–9. MOIS (Ministry of the Interior and Safety) (2022) Statistics of Popular Culture and Art Management Business [in Korean], 22 June. Nelson, L. (2000) Measured Excess: Status, Gender and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea, New York: Columbia University Press. Norma, C. (2014) “Demand from Abroad: Japanese Involvement in the 1970s’ Development of South Korea’s Sex Industry,” Journal of Korean Studies, 19(2): 399–428. Oh, Y. (2018) Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Paquet, D. (2010) New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, New York: Wallflower Press. Relph, E. (1976) Place and Placelessness, London: Pion. Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Seo, U. and Byeon, M. (2017) “Sociology of Gangnam’s Cultural Economy: Combination of Culture and Beauty Industries,” in U. Seo, M. Byeon, B. Kim and J. Kim (eds) Sociology of Seoul: People, Space and Everyday Life [in Korean], Paju: Nanam. SMH (Seoul Museum of History) (2011) Four Decades of Gangnam: From Yeongdong to Gangnam [in Korean], Seoul: SMH.

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25 First Time in Korea? The Mediation of Strangeness through Food Practices Jaehyeon Jeong

Foreigners in Korean Television Since the late 1980s, the Korean society has been increasingly exposed to racial and cultural others. Accelerated by two consecutive international sport events – the 1986 Seoul Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics – and the complete liberalization of overseas travel in 1989, globalization became closer to the surface of everyday life in Korea. In addition, the global force of market opening compelled the Kim Young-Sam administration (1993–1998) to declare segyehwa (globalization) as a major national project. In the early- and mid-1990s, Korea also witnessed a large influx of labor from northeast China, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries (Park 1996). The inflow of foreign migrant laborers was much enhanced after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which put Korea under the control of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Along with the rapid increase in the number of migrant workers, the growth of international marriage greatly affected the ethnoscape of Korean society throughout the 1990s and the 2000s (Jeong 2020). While the number has diminished in the 2010s, international marriage has steadily increased an awareness of multicultural family in both private and public sectors. The number of foreign residents, including short-stay and long-stay foreigners, reached a pinnacle in 2019 (2,524,656) (Ministry of Justice 2022). Reflecting the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has decreased to 1,956,781 in 2021; however, it does not indicate a rapid drop in the number of those “who comes today and stays tomorrow” (Simmel 2008: 312) as long-stay foreigners outnumbered 1.56 million in 2021, in comparison to 1.73 million in 2019 (ibid.). Taken together, these demographic changes imply that the Korean society has become a multicultural society. Indeed, the Korean government employed multiculturalism as a discursive means to manage intra-national cultural diversity (Ang 2001), announcing “A Plan for Promoting the Social Integration of Mixed-Race and Immigrants” in April 2006 and enacting the “Multicultural Families Support Act” in March 2008. This social transformation has made significant impacts on the Korean television industry. From the mid-2000s on, diverse racial and ethnic groups living in Korea have appeared on Korean television taking both leading and supporting roles in different television genres, such as TV drama, documentary, infotainment shows, talk shows and entertainment shows (Ahn 2018; Jeong 2020). Particularly, they have become a major element of Korean entertainment shows since the 2010s. Creating a new subgenre in the Korean television industry, these entertainment shows have featured foreign residents’ experiences in Korean culture, their hardships in living in Korea, their thoughts on the differences between Korean culture and their own cultures, their cultural assimilation processes and so on (Lee and Han 2019). Representative examples include Global Talk Show (Misuda), Mother-in-Law & Daughter-in-Law Story, Non-Summit, My Neighbor, Charles, Seoul Mate, Miss Korea, South Korean Foreigners and Friendly Driver. Among them is Welcome! First Time DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-33

First Time in Korea?  279 in Korea? (hereafter Welcome!) that has driven a widespread popularity of foreigner-centered observational entertainment shows. Premiered in July 2017 (its pilot episodes were released in June 2017), Welcome! has portrayed expats inviting friends from their home countries and navigating Korea’s landscapes, culture and history. The TV show has enjoyed high viewer ratings; its advertising sales exceeded 10 billion KRW in the first six months and won the award for best TV entertainment show at the 31st Korean PD Award in 2018 (Lee and Han 2019). Through an in-depth textual analysis of Welcome!, this chapter explores how foreigners’ strangeness is articulated in Korean television, specifically focusing on the complex relationship between food practices and strangeness. As many researchers have demonstrated, food functions as a marker of cultural boundaries and social identities and it serves two opposed semantic roles  – homogenization and heterogenization of the actors (Appadurai 1981). The chapter critically examines food’s such roles in mediating and negotiating one’s strangeness represented in Korean television. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s (2008) notion of strangeness that highlights the interaction between nearness and remoteness and between strangers and non-strangers, it surveys what food practices are embraced as intimate and accessible and what are suspended or expelled. The chapter will first provide a brief discussion of food’s political relevance and of Simmel’s seminal essay on the stranger. It will then explain John Fiske’s (2011) idea of the codes of television as a primary method. Finally, it will elaborate on how cultural others’ food practices are represented and how they are appropriated to forge and reclaim national identity in Korean television.

Food as a Vehicle for Negotiating Strangeness In our everyday lives, we tend to consider our food practices “virtually transparent” (Parasecoli 2011: 646). The ubiquity of food practices, particularly, make their ideological and political relevance almost invisible (Parasecoli 2008). However, the ways we think about food and foodways are intensely reflexive, and they are germane to the organization of our social lives (Bell and Valentine 1997). As an indicator of social distinction, a system of communication and a pervasive social phenomenon, food practices reveal economic, political, ideological and emotional relationships between people, as well as social tensions, negotiations and conflicts in the creation of meaning (Barthes 1979; Mintz 1985; Cwiertka and Walraven 2001; Parasecoli 2011). In this light, Appadurai (1981: 494) claims that food and food practices feature as a highly condensed social matrix, which signals “rank and rivalry,” “identity or exclusion” and “intimacy or distance.” The signifying roles of food practices are to be observed not only among people belonging to a particular spatial/cultural group but also among those who are on the move and on the border. When people leave their nations, for example, they tend to maintain their own foodways, which embody abundant affective values and cultural meanings, in order to reaffirm their national selfhood and strengthen their sense of rootedness (Tookes 2015; Jeong 2019). At the same time, migrants and diaspora members attempt to adjust their food practices to acquire proper cultural tastes and status in the host nation (Tookes 2015). In other words, people on the move/border create a hybrid culinary practice to carve out their own social position and to articulate what they wish to be in the host land. In a similar vein, expats have used food and foodways as a premier venue for their self-representation and expression of cultural intimacy and distance. As a matter of fact, many expat YouTubers in Korea have attracted a large number of both local and global audiences through the subject matter of food (Oh and Oh 2017; Lee and Cho 2021). The semiotic functions of food – heterogenization and homogenization of actors – are evident even in a new media environment. This study attempts to interpret

280  Jaehyeon Jeong food practices’ symbolic implications on people on the move/border by connecting them to Simmel’s (2008) notion of the stranger. In his canonical essay The Stranger, Georg Simmel (2008, original work was published in 1908) introduces the notion of “stranger” as a unique sociological form, who presents the unity between “the liberation from every given point in space” and “the fixation at such a point” (ibid.: 312). The stranger, as a “potential wanderer,” is different from a wanderer “who comes today and goes tomorrow” in that the former refers to the person “who comes today and stays tomorrow” (ibid.: 312). The stranger is an element of a particular spatial group and his/her position becomes more conspicuous when he/she settles down in the place of his/her activity. However, the stranger’s position is characterized by the fact that he/she “has not belonged to it from the beginning” (ibid.: 312). Thus, he/she is not organically connected with other group members through the “established ties of kinship, locality or occupation” (ibid.: 313). Rather, his/her position is composed of the certain measures of nearness and distance and to be a stranger is a specific form of interaction between them and between those who are the “locals” and who are the strangers (Simmel 2008). As Simmel considers the stranger as a historical figure, such as a trader who needs to stay tomorrow in some foreign place, yet does not hold an ownership of that place, the exploratory value of the stranger has been in question, especially when cross-cultural contacts are more frequent, societies are characterized as global and multicultural and, thus, strangers become omnipresent (Marotta 2012). In this regard, McLemore claims that Robert Park’s notion of “marginal man” would better explain the experiences of (im)migrants and other people on the border (cited in Marotta 2012). While Park’s (1928) concept of marginal man provides an appropriate theoretical tool for our understanding of consequences, conflicts and fusions to be observed in the process of migration and mobility, he pays more attention to the crisis and instability that the marginal man would face. He states, “it is the mind of the marginal man that the conflicting cultures meet and fuse” and “it is the mind of the marginal man that the moral turmoil… manifests itself in the most obvious forms” (ibid.: 881, 893). However, living in two societies simultaneously does not necessarily produce an unstable character. As the broad body of literature on diaspora has demonstrated, migrants and diaspora members actively negotiate two different cultures and perform the aesthetics of “cross-overs” (Hall 1996a). Here, it is important to note Simmel’s (2008) idea of “objectivity” that characterizes the stranger. Although the stranger is a significant element of a particular group, he/she has not belonged to the group from the very beginning. Thus, his/her position involves both “being outside it and confronting it” and he/she conveys something that is near and remote at the same time (ibid.: 312). In other words, the stranger approaches the unique properties and tendencies of the group with the specific attitude of objectivity whilst natives are not free from them and rather entangled in kinship ties, family interests and factionalism (Simmel 2008). For this reason, Simmel proposes that to be a stranger is a very positive relation, stating, “he imports qualities into it [a particular spatial group], which do not and cannot stem from the group itself ” (ibid.: 312). Simmel further claims that objectivity cannot be reduced to passivity, detachment or nonparticipation; it rather is a “distinct structure composed of remoteness and nearness, indifference and involvement” and a “positive and definite kind of participation” (ibid.: 313). This idea of objectivity, along with Simmel’s emphasis on the continuous interactions between strangers and natives, will help us understand the social experiences/roles and the aesthetics of hybrid to be made by people on the move or on the border. Another common critique of Simmel’s stranger is that he presupposes a binary distinction between those who are the “locals” and who are strangers (Marotta 2012). Specifically, Stichweh strongly argues that Simmel defines “anyone who is a non-member” as a stranger and “those who do not conform to the values and world view of the host society” as strangers (cited in

First Time in Korea?  281 Marotta 2012: 677). For Simmel, however, strangeness is both an objective and subjective status. The stranger is given the character of objectivity by the fact that he/she does not belong to a group through primordial qualities. Yet, his/her subjective status in the group is not entirely fixed; instead, it is (re)configured by the interactions among diverse constituents of the group and by the proportion of perceived nearness and remoteness (Simmel 2008). Simmel states: The stranger is by his very nature no owner of land – land not only in the physical sense but also metaphorically as a vital substance which is fixed, if not in space, then at least in an ideal position within the social environment. Although in the sphere of intimate personal relations the stranger may be attractive and meaningful in many ways, so long as he is regarded as a stranger he is no “landowner in the eyes of the other.” (ibid.: 313) As this quote indicates, the position of the stranger is defined in relation to “land” not only physically but also figuratively, and his/her status of strangeness is determined by the relationship with others. Alexander claims that an “us and them” mentality is adopted when a clear distinction between strangers and the locals is applied (cited in Marotta 2012: 676). For Simmel, on the contrary, that mentality precedes a polarizing categorization of strangers and nonstrangers. In this light, Simmel (2008: 315) writes, “a special proportion and reciprocal tension” generates a “specific form of the relation to the stranger.” Indeed, he explains how a sense of strangeness is differently constructed depending on the degrees of common features and differences. It is also noteworthy that Simmel (2008) admits that an estrangement can take place in all human relationships, even including the most intimate relationship. Considering both the objective and subjective aspects of Simmelian stranger that emphasizes an interaction and a reciprocity, his discussion on the stranger will provide a useful framework to examine how the strangeness of cultural/racial others are articulated and addressed in a given society.

Encoding of Reality As its three pilot episodes achieved a considerable success, Welcome! First Time in Korea? started its regular programming on 27 July 2017. As a representative TV show of MBC Every1, it has gained a widespread recognition in Korea in the past five years, leading to the production of similar entertainment shows across different TV networks and making “Welcome!” a buzzword in Korean popular culture. The basic format of the show is that expatriates (hereafter host) with different living experiences in Korea invite friends or family members from their home countries and have a short trip (four to five days) around different places in Korea. Since Welcome! takes the format of travel reality show to hook and manage viewer attention, the invited ones are supposed to go backpacking without much cultural and linguistic knowledge of Korea and without assistance from production staff. Not surprisingly, they face a great deal of trouble in terms of finding lodgings and proper restaurants, using public transportation, communicating with Koreans and so on, which function as major elements of entertainment (Kim 2018). Normally, the host meets the invited ones near the end of their trip and navigate Korean culture together based on his/her prepared plan. In the studio, panels, including the host, watch the pre-recorded videos and have conversations on behind stories, cultural differences, cast’s personalities and so on (Lee and Han 2019). In response to the COVID-19 pandemic that had hampered overseas trip, Welcome! had utilized a slightly different format in which expats or short-stay foreigners introduced their personal or professional lives in Korea, but it soon returned to the original storytelling. As of September 2022, 262 episodes have been televised, the represented countries of which range

282  Jaehyeon Jeong from Italy, France, Germany, the UK, the US to India, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Nepal to Russia, Turkey, Morocco, Australia and so on. Among them, this research focuses on Season 1, given that the show’s major format and narratives were established and fixed during the Season 1 and then have been repeated throughout the following seasons. Particularly, the research critically examines how the hosts interact with their friends or family members and with Korean panels through their food practices. For an in-depth textual analysis, this research employs an analytical tool developed by John Fiske (2011, original work was published in 1987). As Stuart Hall (2001, original work was published in 1973) rightly argues, television production is framed by multiple factors, such as “routines of production,” “historically defined technical skills,” “professional ideologies, “institutional knowledge” and “assumption about the audience” (ibid.: 164). Through this complex encoding process, television, as a cultural agent, produces particular meanings about what are represented (Fiske 2011). Yet, television texts themselves are replete with potential meanings, and thus, they can be differently received or interpreted by viewers. To reduce this “risk” and anchor a singular preferred meaning or dominant ideology in the texts, television production utilizes multiple codes, such as social codes, technical codes, conventional representational codes and ideological codes (ibid.). According to Fiske (2011: 4), codes are essential to signifying practices and feature as “links between producers, texts and audiences.” These codes are shared and learned by members of a given society and they become a second nature of the social members. In other words, people perceive and make sense of reality through the shared cultural codes. Fiske categorizes these codes into three hierarchical levels that involve reality, representation and ideology. What is important is that “reality” is always already encoded; it is never “raw” (ibid.: 4–5). If a reality is encoded by the selected social codes (e.g. appearance, dress, environment, speech and gesture), the technical codes (e.g. camera, lighting, editing, music and sound) make it transmittable, and the representational conventions of the medium shape the representations of narrative, conflict, character and action to make them appear “realistic,” and they are finally “organized into coherence and social acceptability by the ideological codes,” such as patriarchy, materialism, capitalism and so on (ibid.: 5). While the relationship between the conventional and ideological codes is elusive, to specify it is a major task of critical scholars, as Fiske (2011: 6) suggests, because the conventional representational codes are shaped by and naturalize the dominant ideological codes and because they work together to make certain meanings and a particularly represented reality appear as a “common sense.” Drawing on this analytical tool, the following section deconstructs the meanings of the stranger represented as “natural” or “real” in Welcome! First Time in Korea?

Deconstruction of Welcome! First Time in Korea? As noted earlier, to be a stranger is a positive relation. With his/her objectivity constructed by a certain proportion of nearness and distance, the stranger can add new qualities to the group of which he/she is a meaningful element (Simmel 2008). As the stranger is not subject to the border where they stand at, he/she has a potential to create and perform a cross-over aesthetics and thus to expand a social/symbolic space of the group. In particular, the stranger’s role as a symbolic value creator has been increasingly important in the contemporary Korean society where multiculturalism prevails. Arguably, “there is no universal, objective way of perceiving and making sense of ” a reality, even if “there may be an objective, empiricist reality out there,” as Fiske notes (2011: 4). Thus, for a better understanding of the reality surrounding the stranger in Korea, it is necessary to examine what meanings about the stranger are produced and circulated by television apart from what the strangers actually do in Korea, because those meanings

First Time in Korea?  283 define the relationship between strangers and non-strangers and constitute our culture in general and because television is a major repository of visual elements, ideas and discourses that form our imagination and reality. Simmel (2008) suggests different ways in which human relations are made. With the stranger, one has “only certain more general qualities in common (emphasis in original),” whereas the relation to more organically connected persons is based on the commonness of “specific traits which differentiate them from the merely universal (emphasis added)” (ibid.: 313). What characterizes all personal relations is not a certain proportion of common features and differences between individuals; it rather depends on whether the commonality “exists only among the participants themselves” or whether the participants feel the common features are common to them “because they are common to a group, a type or mankind in general” (ibid.: 314). In the latter case, the commonness functions as a unifying basis, but it does not make the members of the group interdependent on one another and it loses its “specific, centripetal character” because a widely shared similarity could connect one with “every possible other” (ibid.: 314). The stranger’s nearness and remoteness are also determined by the features of commonality. The stranger is perceived to be close insofar as the commonness is felt in terms of nationality, social position or occupation, and far, insofar as “similarities extend beyond him and us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people” (ibid.: 314). In this regard, Simmel further claims that an estrangement can take place even within the most intimate relationships because it comes at the moment when the “feeling of uniqueness disappears from the relationship” (ibid.: 314). Thus, the stranger who was perceived to be near can be felt distant when his/her significance can be found in another person. There is another sort of strangeness that is built on a special emphasis on what is “not” common. In this case, the stranger has no positive meaning; the relation to him/her is a “non-relation”; and he/she is not perceived as a member of the group itself (ibid.: 314). What is stressed about this type of strangers is the strangeness of origin, which is or could be common to “many other strangers” (ibid.: 314). The expats with diverse living experiences in Korea (at least for three years) on Welcome! are represented as those who embody “proper” Korean food/drink culture, cultural knowledge/ values and linguistic skills. As their commonness does not go beyond “them” and “us,” they are positioned as the close stranger, in a Simmelian sense. Given that they are not normally connected to the Korean society through kinship ties and other primordial qualities, they are assumed to carry objectivity by means of which they could import meaningful qualities into the Korean society. However, they hardly attempt to add new things, to challenge the arbitrary boundary of the Korea nation, or to perform hybrid aesthetics. Eliminating their positive objectivity, they rather reproduce and deliver, to other strangers, widespread assumptions about what Korean food practices are and, more importantly, what they should be. They also “voluntarily” reaffirm Korean cultural values, satisfy a social desire for recognition, and remind Koreans of the virtue of Korean culture. While Welcome! takes the format of travel “reality” show, its portrayal of reality is not a reflection of the material reality as it is; it rather is an outcome of the complex encoding processes that cut across pre-production, production and post-production, as is the case with other reality shows. On this “staged” reality, the hosts are represented as transnational cultural intermediaries. Originally, the term “cultural intermediary” refers to the “groups of workers involved in the provision of symbolic goods and services” (Nixon and du Gay 2002: 496). In a broad sense, they mediate creative artists/producers and consumers and function as tastemakers and symbolic value creators (Lee and Cho 2021). In the globalized world, transnational cultural intermediaries “translate the specific country, its culture and people to global audiences” and have the potentials to promote cross-cultural awareness and connection between different cultures and to reconstruct a global hierarchical structure (ibid.). Indeed, the hosts convey their translation

284  Jaehyeon Jeong of Korean food/drink culture to the invited ones, explain the common features between Korean foodways and other cultures’ food practices, and further discuss the interchangeability between them. Yet, their translation unfolds from the perspective of those who conform to Korean norms and values, and their introduction of foreign food cultures are quite limited so as not to threaten Korean “soil.” This representational practice is encoded by multiple codes that Fiske (2011) refers to – social, technical, conventional representational and ideological. The ways in which the hosts engage with Korean food practices, the invited ones from their home countries, and Koreans (studio panels) are first encoded by particular social codes, including location, speech, (facial) expression, sound, gesture, dress and behavior. These selected social codes are then materialized by the strategical use of technical codes, such as camera movement/shot/angle, color, subtitle, editing, music and other audiovisual effects. Transmitted and reproduced by the technical codes are representational conventions that have governed individual representations of Korean food cultures, foreigners and their strangeness. What are highlighted during this encoding process are the ideological codes, namely Korean food’s diversity, uniqueness and superiority, the global competitiveness of Korean food cultures, Korean cuisine as an embodiment of long-held traditions and cultural hybridism. When the hosts treat their friends and family members, for example, they bring them to the restaurants that can display and promote the diversity of Korean culture – cool, young, modern, traditional and global – which can rebrand the Korean nation. The Italian host Alberto Mondi and the German host Daniel Lindemann choose hanok (Korean traditional house) as a location to have hanjeongsik (Korean table d’hôtes). The meaning of this selected location is anchored by different technical codes, including subtitle, camera use, shot composition and sound. The visual representation of hanok comes with a subtitle “[I] will show you an authentic Korea” in the Italian episode. Interestingly, the subtitle is highlighted in red, white and green which symbolize the Italian national flag. In the German episode, a subtitle “experiencing traditional hanjeongsik followed by traditional hanok” comes before Daniel and his friends arrive at the restaurant as they stay in a hanok hotel. The episode then spends more time to portray the beauty of the restaurant with a subtitle “enjoying hanjeongsik at the genteel traditional hanok that has a 200-year tradition,” with a nuanced low angle that renders an authority to the hanok building and with a symmetrical shot composition that creates a sense of harmony and aesthetic balance. These social/technical codes successfully transmit the representational conventions regarding Korean (food) culture, such as tradition, harmony and balance, which, in turn, serve to reproduce such ideological codes as the uniqueness and superiority of Korean (traditional) culture. Not surprisingly, this televised meaning mediated by the expat hosts is in line with the prevailing discourses of Korean culture, an example of which is the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s launch of Han-style project in 2007 to promote, industrialize and globalize Korean culture where hangeul (Korean language), hansik (Korean food), hanbok (Korean clothing), hanok and hanji (Korean paper) were selected as representative of Korean traditional cultures (Jeong 2020). The hosts “willingly” participate in this discursive practice of nation branding. Another important social code is a food menu that the expat hosts select, which is closely related to the location, and its preferred meaning is established in relation to other social codes, including speech, expression, sound, gesture, dress and behavior. The abovementioned hosts choose hanjeongsik as an exemplary of Korean cuisine. While the term jeongsik came from the Japanese expression and food culture teishoku, that relation is never mentioned on Welcome! to affirm the uniqueness and authenticity of Korean food practice. Introducing his friends to hanjeongsik, the Italian host says, “This is how we eat here, it’s totally Korean style.” Similarly, the German host states, “I think the core of Korean food is hanjeongsik as it involves a variety of

First Time in Korea?  285 foods and it can introduce them simultaneously.” In the beginning, he admits that hanjeongsik used to be a special menu for royal and noble families, but he soon says, “Koreans normally eat like this.” To emphasize the diversity and high-end nature of Korean cuisine, hanjeonsik is represented as a “normal” and “ubiquitous” food practice regardless of its social fact. Korean cuisine’s values (which are conventional representational codes), such as diversity and harmony, are efficiently transmitted by utilizing camera angle, camera movement, editing and subtitle. When the different dishes of hanjeongsik are presented simultaneously in the Italian episode, each dish is zoomed in to stress its beauty while an overhead shot is used when the harmony between those dishes is emphasized; moreover, a subtitle, “Have kept eating, but never diminishing,” is used to feature the richness of Korean cuisine. Likewise, the German episode uses multiple overhead shots to depict the diverse and harmonious characteristics assumed to be embedded in hanjeongsik and close-ups and long-take shots to reiterate the diversity of Korean cuisine. The editing technique used to feature the conversation between the host and his friends, such as cut-to-reaction-shots, gives the conversation a sense of continuity, which in turn serves to approve the beauty and diversity of Korean cuisine from the perspective of White Westerners. It is also noteworthy that the diversity of Korean food is transferred to the hospitality inherent in Korean people, which is narrated by a Korean female panel’s words, “[We’ve] prepared everything as [we] don’t know what you’d like.” While the expat hosts are the potential wanderer who “has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going” (Simmel 2008: 312), the invited ones are the potential stranger in that they have not decided whether to stay tomorrow. Thus, the interaction between the hosts and the invited ones is important to define or represent the nearness and remoteness of the hosts. As mentioned above, the expat hosts on Welcome! play a role of transnational cultural intermediaries, albeit limited and skewed, in terms of mediating Korean culture and foreign cultures. Their attitudes toward the invited ones are represented as varying depending on their personalities and intragroup/national characteristics. However, all the hosts from eight different countries in Season 1 distinguish themselves from the invited ones, and they mediate two cultures in a hierarchical manner. On the show, the hosts are portrayed as those who embody the essential elements that constitute Korean cuisine – a limited set of basic foods, a distinct manner of preparing food, distinctive flavor principles and a set of manners (Belasco 2008). While their knowledge and experience of Korean cuisine could differ, they all attempt to teach, persuade and/or discipline their friends or family members. For instance, the Italian host teaches his friends about table manners and push them to try raw foods; the Mexican host gives his friends a lesson on jeong (warm-heartedness) and makes them eat the food that his friend is suspicious about by saying, “Give it a shot, you’ll definitely like it”; in the German episode, a friend who is picky about food is represented as the one whose taste is “vulgar” or “absent” and the host tenderly persuades him to fix it by trying Korean foods; in a similar vein, the French host makes his friend who dislikes seafoods and spicy foods have marinated raw crab and spicy kimchi, stating, “I used to dislike seafoods when I first came to Korea, but I’ve learned how to enjoy them as they are cooked differently in Korea”; and the Indian host even gives his friend a scolding for eating with hands, as featured in a subtitle “as if scolding a son,” and finally changes the friend’s food practice. The hosts’ disciplinary acts make themselves feel “closer” to Koreans while emphasizing strangeness of the invited ones. Yet, their strangeness is represented as something that could be easily taught, treated and fixed for the mutual benefits. The strangeness of the invited ones is also differently represented depending on their willingness to enjoy and appreciate Korean foods and cultures and to change their tastes and behaviors. The ones who are ready to learn about Korean foodways, language and culture, such as the friends from Germany and Finland, are positioned as far strangers because the commonness between them and Koreans could

286  Jaehyeon Jeong connect a greater people. On the contrary, when it comes to those who are hesitant to change their tastes and protocols (or codes of etiquette) and, thus, are in need of their own food practices, the emphasis is given to what is “not” common and the strangeness of origin. However, their strangeness is not represented as a danger that might threaten Korean “soil”; rather, it is presented as something that could be forgiven, embraced and domesticated, which retells the diversity, superiority and global competitiveness of Korean food culture. According to Hall (1996b: 4), identity is a not a matter of being, but of becoming or positioning; it is more concerned with “what we might become” rather than “who we are” or “where we came from.” As an embodiment of Korean cultural values, the hosts of Welcome! manifest themselves as someone who are connected with the Korean society through “specific” traits which “differentiate them from the merely universal” (Simmel 2008: 313). In other words, what they wish to become is not the stranger regardless of the perceived nearness/remoteness, but the organically connected person. As a matter of fact, some of the hosts belong to Korea in terms of family relations and some show a better knowledge of Korean history and culture than Korean panels in the studio. On the show, however, their knowledge must be confirmed and approved by Korean panels. When they have an interaction with other foreigners, they are allowed to answer, teach and discipline; on the contrary, within an interaction with Korean panels, they are supposed to assume the role of those who ask, which is what Fiske (2011) calls the “conventional representational codes.” In the Finnish episode, for example, Albert Mondi (the host of the Italian episodes), as one of the studio panels, asks the Korean male panel about the correct eating order of different pork cuts even if he demonstrates his relevant knowledge on other Korean TV shows. While the Korean panel gives a detailed account, Alberto and the Finnish host express their surprise and agreement. Moreover, Welcome! continuously places images of national flags within subtitle/dialogue boxes or highlights subtitles with particular colors that symbolize relevant countries. Perhaps, these technical codes are used to show a respect for the represented countries; however, more importantly, they constantly remind viewers of the foreignness of both the invited ones and the hosts, which contributes to the cultural boundary between “us” and “them.” While the hosts “voluntarily” conform to the values and world views of the Korean society and become docile bodies, and, thus, they are granted a cultural membership, they are not yet allowed to be an “owner of soil.”

Conclusion Drawing on Simmel’s (2008) notion of the stranger, this chapter examined the represented meanings of the stranger in Korea, specifically focusing on the complex relationship between food practices and strangeness. In the contemporary society where cross-cultural contacts are more frequent and people on the move/border are omnipresent, the stranger’s role becomes more important in that he/she could import positive qualities into a particular spatial/cultural group and that he/she, as a transnational cultural intermediary, could promote cross-cultural awareness and reconstruct a global hierarchical structure. Given the significance of represented meanings over material realities in defining the relationship between strangers and nonstrangers, this study conducted a critical textual analysis of Welcome! First Time in Korea? that has driven a widespread popularity of foreigner-centered observational entertainment shows in Korea. In particular, it employed an analytical tool developed by Fiske (2011) who considers codes as essential to signifying practices and the construction of a “social” reality. By analyzing the social, technical, conventional representational and ideological codes, this study demonstrates that the expats who embody Korean cultural norms are represented as the close stranger; however, their objectivity is vanishing on the staged reality; and they rather reaffirm Korean cultural values, satisfy the Korean society’s desire for global recognition and remind Koreans of

First Time in Korea?  287 the virtue of Korean (food) culture. What are highlighted through these representational practices are Korean food’s diversity, uniqueness and superiority, the global competitiveness of Korean food cultures, Korean cuisine as an embodiment of long-held traditions, and the assimilative power of Korean food practices. The study also shows the hierarchical relationships between the expat hosts (the close stranger) and their friends/family members (either the far stranger or non-relation) and between the hosts and the Korean panels (non-strangers) – while the close stranger is allowed to teach, persuade and/or discipline other foreigners, he/she is supposed to take the role of those who “ask” in relation to non-strangers and is not allowed to be an owner of soil. As noted earlier, the stranger has a positive potential to perform a cross-over aesthetics and expand a social/symbolic space of a given society. His/her role, as a symbolic value creator, becomes more important when societies are characterized as global and multicultural. As this analysis reveals, however, Korean television produces and circulates limited meanings surrounding the stranger. Considering those meanings constitute our perceptions of the stranger (and more broadly, of foreigners) and make the pre-existing ideological assumptions look “natural,” we are in need of continued cultural criticism on media representations of cultural/racial/ethnic others. An analysis of media texts cannot exhaust the discussion of the complex relationship among reality, representation and ideology. However, a careful deconstruction of media texts does provide critical researchers with a good starting point and ample discursive resources.

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26 The Korean Wave and Mega-Asia Imagining a Pan-Asian Community Doobo Shim

From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, novel media forms of modern popular culture – including films, records, the radio and television – appeared and were transmitted in the world. Newspapers, which grew rapidly against the backdrop of Western industrialization and urbanization in the 19th century, played a critical role in reporting on newly evolving trends in popular culture. During this period, Asian countries focused on importing, appropriating and localizing Western popular culture forms and contents. In East Asia, the main cities that imported Western culture were Shanghai and Tokyo. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Shanghai grew rapidly as a concession to Western powers. Western culture and arts were actively accepted and practiced in Shanghai, as its nickname “Paris of the East” indicates (Shim 2020). The Korean peninsula imported Western culture mainly through Tokyo, the capital of Japan, which became modernized in a short period of time and set out on the path of colonialism and imperialism. In other parts of Asia, political and economic cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) imported Western culture and spread it to surrounding small and medium-sized cities and villages. With the end of World War II in 1945, the US acquired a global cultural hegemony as well as political-economic power. In his book, Modernity at Large, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996) described how much he dreamed of studying at Stanford University as a Mumbai boy in India in the 1950s. He recalled that by reading Life magazine at the US Information Service Center near his home and watching Hollywood movies at local theaters, he had fallen in love with the “sexier,” “blue jeans” land in North America. Similar anecdotes can be found all over the world in the mid- to late 20th century. In the case of Korea, Ahn Junghyo’s (2012) novel, The Life of the Hollywood Kid, describes in detail how the culturally and materially deprived Korean youth of the 1950s became fascinated by American popular culture. At that time, a “Made in USA” symbol was a marker of a product’s preeminent quality, and the US political system and popular culture were exemplary systems of reference. In other words, to apply Hegel’s conception, the US was a “universalized particular” (Moss 2020). This kind of “soft power” and the structure of feeling, one in which people become fascinated by and yearn for American culture, has been commonly found across most Asian countries. During the Cold War, the US policymakers focused on countering the spread of communism. In 1949, right after the Chinese Communist Party took power in China, the US established mutual defense treaties with Japan, Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand between 1951 and 1954 to prevent the further spread of communism in Asia. Such bilateral political alliances intensified Asian countries’ dependence on American culture as well as the US nuclear umbrella (Roehrig 2017). The US military bases, the US Information Service (USIS) centers affiliated with the US Embassies, and the American Forces Network (AFN) broadcasters located across Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines functioned as the bases for disseminating American culture. DOI: 10.4324/9781003292593-34

290  Doobo Shim On the other hand, intercultural communications between Asian countries were rare in the mid- to late 20th century. The Cold War between the Free Bloc and the Communist Bloc created an ambiance of political and cultural hostility in Asia; even within the Free Bloc, countries that experienced Japanese colonialism banned the import of Japanese culture, although the USA wanted Japan to function as a hub in the Bloc. Asian countries immersed themselves in nationalist nation-building, often neglecting cultural exchanges with neighboring countries and resulting in a weak sense of “community” within Asia (Chua 2012). In fact, discourses on “Asian regionalism” are an outcome of modernity. Strictly speaking, the distinction between Huá and Yí (화이지변; 華夷之辨), a historical Chinese concept, was not about Asian regionalism but about differentiating a culturally defined China from cultural or ethnic outsiders. Rather, An Jung-Geun’s (Yi et al. 2019) Pan-Asianism in his essay “On Peace in East Asia” (동양평화론; 東洋平和論) – which was left unfinished before his execution in 1910 – and the territorial expansionist policy and propaganda slogan of the Japanese Empire, known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (대동아공영권; 大東亜共栄 圏), were the discourses premised on the Asian continent as we know it today. Both discourses are inseparable from the history of imperialism and colonialism, as both were created as a response to the (presumed) threat of the West and the colonial ambitions of Japan. The theory of cultural imperialism, which emerged in the mid- to late 20th century, also stemmed from the opposition to Western hegemonism. Recent discourses on Asian regionalism are led by China. After decades of functioning as the “world’s factory” and the “market,” China has been on the road to becoming a G2 since Xi Jinping took office in 2013. Under the banner of the Belt and Road Initiative (일대일로; 一 带一路) policy, Chinese capital has become a major investor in the economies of Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America, leading the country to emerge as a hegemonic power to challenge the US. Considering the de-Westernization movements, the transnational rise of Korean popular culture – known as the Korean Wave or Hallyu – is also significant, as this chapter will discuss in detail. The development of the media industries in several Asian countries stimulated by the Korean Wave and further circulation of Asian cultural products in Asia are creating cracks in the existing US-dominated popular culture in the region. Ching (2015) pays attention to these changes from the perspective of neo-regionalism. The role of the West, which has long occupied the center of discussions on Asian regionalism, has become relatively excluded; Japan’s international status has been declining; and with the rise of neoliberal capitalism since the 1990s, China and South Korea (hereafter Korea) have emerged as new regional players. These changes depart from the past discourses on Asian regionalism. If China is a threat to the military and foreign policy system that has been coordinated by the USA and Japan, the Korean Wave phenomenon challenges the cultural hegemony traditionally occupied by the USA and Japan. This chapter explores the meanings of the Korean Wave from an international political-economic perspective, building on the discourses on Asian regionalism.

The Korean Wave in Global Political-Economic Contexts In the 1990s, the decade in which the Korean Wave appeared, the 20th-century global economic system led by the US underwent a crisis and sought new changes. According to Arrighi (1994), global capitalism experienced the most profitable period of economic growth over the 20 years between the Korean War (1950–1953) and the Paris Peace Accords (1973). The Accords was a peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Republic of Vietnam and the US to end the Vietnam War. Marglin and Schor (1992) called this period “the golden age of capitalism.” With control over the world’s currency, oil, food and strong

The Korean Wave and Mega-Asia  291 military power, the US was a global hegemony. Through the Bretton Woods system that began in 1944, the US dollar served as a global reserve currency linked to gold. However, as deposits in the euro currency market rose sharply in the late 1960s, it became difficult for the US Federal Reserve to maintain the Bretton Woods system that regulated the commercial and financial relations among the major economies in the world. Ultimately in 1971, President Richard Nixon declared the end of the Bretton Woods system by ending the gold standard in the US. In addition, Japan and West Germany, whose economies grew rapidly based on organizational innovation and technological development, threatened the USA in the global market. The encroachment on the US market by Japanese products has pushed the USA into a balance of payments deficit and a fiscal deficit. In addition, the US, which had been fiscally affected by its participation in the Vietnam War, was criticized both at home and abroad for its inhumane tactics, losing its moral authority. The 1973 oil crisis opened a period of recession in the world economy, which was regarded as a sign of weakening of the international economic control that the US had exercised (Arrighi 1994). The Iranian Revolution in 1978 and the ensuing Iran hostage crisis severely damaged the function and prestige of America’s role as a global policeman. The one-country hegemony system practiced by the US has now been replaced by a three-pole system (the USA, Europe and East Asia). The Reagan administration, which came to power in 1981, actively promoted neoliberalism to overcome the economic crisis and “make America great again” (Reagan 1980). Regulations were greatly removed to encourage the free investment of capital, and the government’s authority over the market was given to corporations. Many of the public sectors were sold to the private sector, and the existing social security system was largely abolished. Internationally, the administration strongly pursued market openings, elimination of tariffs, and freedom of transnational movement of capital. In the case of the media industry, the measures that prohibited cross-ownership across the newspaper, broadcasting and film industries were lifted sequentially (McChesney 1999). Cross-ownership was facilitated with all information and entertainment contents being produced and stored in the same way (through bits and bytes). In other words, the digital revolution made separate classification between diverse media industries unnecessary. Huge capital continued to enter the media sector, and Hollywood lobbied the government to open overseas markets. In 1987, succumbing to the pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to open the film market, the Korean Ministry of Culture and Information (now the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism) lifted restrictions on foreign investment in the domestic film industry and allowed the establishment of foreign film companies. Against this backdrop, multinational film distribution companies, United International Pictures (UIP) which distributed Paramount, Universal, MGM/UA films and 20th Century Fox, started a film distribution business in Korea. NGOs and film industry figures fearing the demise of Korean films protested fiercely by starting the “Don’t Watch UIP Movies” movement. Yet, ordinary citizens who were disappointed by the backward quality of Korean films gradually turned their backs on these efforts. The local media also raised their voice; if there were no more means to protect the movie market, it would have no choice but to compete with Hollywood movies by enhancing the entertainment quality of Korean movies. The film industry had no choice but to change its stance. At that time, the blueprint for a future society that futurists such as Alvin Toffler (1984) had long preached became visible with the looming digital revolution and neoliberal policies. It is symbolic that Sony, famous for home appliances, acquired Columbia Pictures for $3.4 billion in 1989, and Matsushita Electric (Panasonic) acquired Universal Pictures and MCA Records in 1990 for $6.1 billion. The word “synergy,” meaning “one plus one can create an effect of two

292  Doobo Shim or more,” became popular as companies of different fields of business combined (Shim 2002). As in the case of Sony and Matsushita, the Korean electronics industry took advantage of the logic that cultural content should be produced in order to increase sales of TVs, radio sets and cassette recorders. The agenda that “the audio-visual industry would lead the national economy in the future” was pumped up by the local media, and many chaebol corporations invested in cable, film and record companies, following the deregulation measures. At the same time, the unexpected box office success of the movie Seopyeonje (1993) reaffirmed the value of a film as a means of popular culture and as a commercial possibility. The local press produced and distributed a discourse that the growth of the media culture industry is necessary for jumpstarting the national economy. Middle-class consumers, who had secured sufficient disposable income through the decades of national economic development and personal savings, actively supported the expansion of cultural infrastructure such as better theater facilities (Shim 2006). Neoliberalism and the digital revolution that started in the US landed in Korea, blossoming as a discourse on rejuvenating the cultural industry, as well as on sociopolitical democratization. For the historical background of the rise of the Korean Wave, it is further necessary to understand the sociopolitical situation of Korea in the 1980s. After the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, Korean citizens staged a long and painful democratization movement, eventually gaining several democratic measures including the direct presidential election in 1987. Through social consensus, the government liberalized the media industries, expanding the number of broadcasting channels. This decision was also linked to the policy judgment that the economic value of information and culture would soon increase (Shim 2002). The enthusiasm of the democratization movement that swept university campuses in the 1980s started to turn to a new outlet when the country achieved long-desired democratic measures in 1987. Young adults with such aspirations for social change instead chose the media industry for their career – a job through which they could act upon their critical views. Some of the socialism-inspired students, who felt momentarily purposeless during the time of the collapse of the communist and socialist regimes in the early 1990s, also took their enthusiasm to the media and cultural industries. Their choices came in lieu of working for large-capital companies that they once criticized, as they sought to compromise between the activist spirit of their school days and their livelihood. It was a time when the soon-to-be-realized electronic public sphere was predicted to directly contribute to democracy (Dahlgren and Sparks 1991). The establishment of the Hankyoreh newspaper in 1988 was symbolic. It was a national daily newspaper funded by ordinary citizens who responded to the newspaper’s vision of becoming an alternative to existing newspapers that were often influenced by the then-authoritarian government and large conglomerates. Some students or democratization activists viewed the alternative media such as Hankyoreh as an attractive option for their post-college career. With the media liberalization, numerous region-based broadcasting companies and newspaper companies began operating across the country. The launch of cable television in 1995 led to the mushrooming of independent production companies that would supply content to cable channel operators (Shim 2002). The youth’s fresh ideas and passion for cultural production cultivated a more creative atmosphere in the audiovisual industry. The number of students studying abroad increased through the liberalization of overseas travel in 1989, and young artists who returned from study abroad introduced new genres and trends. Sociopolitical democratization led to the relaxation of the censorship system that had hindered the development of the Korean media culture industry in the past and allowed creative freedom to produce high-quality content. Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), a private terrestrial broadcaster newly established in 1990, declared from the beginning that it would compete with existing television network broadcasters by producing

The Korean Wave and Mega-Asia  293 high-quality dramas. As a result of the intensified “drama war,” each broadcasting company invested manpower and money to produce dramas. In the 1990s, dramas with viewership ratings exceeding 50% were mass-produced, such as Jealousy (MBC, 1992), What Is Love All About (MBC, 1992), Eyes of Dawn (MBC, 1992), Son and Daughter (MBC, 1993) and Hourglass (SBS, 1995). In addition to dramas, television stations have conceived and churned out various programs with high entertainment quality. Changes in the media industry have developed similarly in neighboring countries such as China, Taiwan and Vietnam. Each country opened the film market under the pressure from the USA and established more broadcasting stations to prepare for the then-impending new media era. In the case of China, Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening policy began to open doors to foreign cultures in the late 1970s. While Japanese pop culture was popular in the 1980s, the Communist Party of China controlled the import of Japanese culture from the 1990s, judging that the decadence of Japanese culture had a bad effect on adolescents. The party and the government also imported American culture partly because they believed that a process of “learning” through such import was necessary to improve the production capacity of the country’s underdeveloped pop culture. However, American culture was also decadent from the older generation’s perspective. Against this backdrop, Korean dramas were an appropriate substitute. For example, What Is Love All About, after first airing on CCTV in 1997, was rebroadcast in 1998 at the request of domestic audiences in China, and ranked second in China’s all-time imported video content. The Chinese government, reassured by the conservatism of Korean dramas, also tolerated the popularity of Korean music among the youth around that time. The boyband H.O.T held a concert in Beijing in 2000, and the fashion trends of popular Korean singers and actors including Ahn Jae-Wook and Choi Jin-Sil were imitated in a whirlwind. Overseas Chinese peddlers traveling back and forth between Taiwan and Korea delivered VHS videotapes of popular Korean dramas and entertainment programs to Taiwan’s cable network. In a cable environment where dramas from the USA, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan competed, some of the stations aimed at “niche” content sent out Korean dramas and variety shows. Through this, the demand for Korean pop culture gradually increased. For example, the male duo Clon (Koo Jun-Yup and Kang Won-Rae), who debuted in the summer of 1996 and gained popularity with the dance song “Kungtari Shabara,” entered Taiwan’s broadcasting industry in 1998 with the compilation album from their first and second albums released in Korea. Despite singing in Korean, Clon was popular for its dynamic dance moves and trendy style, selling more than 350,000 albums in Taiwan. In particular, Koo Jun-Yup was so popular that he was voted as “Taiwan’s Sexiest Man” by a Taiwanese entertainment magazine and was selected as the “Best-Dressed Male Celebrity” by Taiwanese designers. His romantic relationship with Barbie Hsu, one of Taiwan’s most popular actresses at that time, was the topic of interest for celebrity gossip tabloids (Han 2022). Hsu played a lead role in the drama Meteor Garden (the Taiwanese version of Boys Over Flowers) that aired in 2001 and became a huge hit throughout Asia. After her divorce in 2021, Hsu married Koo in 2022 (Taipei Times 2022), which re-creates Koo’s popularity in Taiwan and makes him the “People’s Brother-in-Law” and the “People’s Son-in-Law.” While there are various opinions on where the term “Korean Wave”, or “Hallyu” (韓流) originated, some contend that it originated in Taiwan (Kang 2020). When Korea’s foreign exchange crisis in 1997 affected Taiwan’s economy, the Taiwanese media described the phenomenon as a “Korean Wave” (韓流, pronounced as “Hanliu” in Chinese and can be translated into “Korean current”). The neologism “Korean Wave” (韓流) was a homonymic wordplay of the Chinese phrase “cold current” (寒流) flowing from Northeast Asia. As the phrase “Korean Wave” (韓流) connoted the economic crisis flowing from the Korean peninsula, it was void of

294  Doobo Shim the positivity contained in its present-day use to implicate Korea’s cultural influence. However, in the same way that the word was expanded to describe Clon’s popularity, the “Korean Wave” gradually expanded to the meaning of today as the “new pop cultural current (trend) from Korea.” On 17 December 1998, the tenth edition of Lianhe Evening News (联合晚报) reported that “following the Japan mania, there will be the Korean Wave in Taiwan.” This article noted that the successful sales of Clon’s (酷龍 in Taiwan) album in Taiwan led the then-agent Rolling Stone Records to decide to bring in other Korean idol groups such as Diva, Juju Club and H.O.T. The Hallyu fever in Taiwan around 2000 was also confirmed by the fact that the Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-Bian used Clon’s song as a campaign song during the Taiwanese presidential election in 2000. On 19 November 1999, Beijing Youth Daily, one of China’s state-controlled daily newspapers, ran an article acknowledging the “passion of Chinese audiences for Korean TV dramas and pop songs” using the term “Korean Wave” (韓流). Even before this reportage, the Korean TV drama What Is Love All About had ranked second in China’s all-time imported video content, when the drama was aired by the Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV). The usage of the term “Korean Wave” can also be found in South Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s music CD titled “韓流 – Song from Korea,” meaning “Korean Wave – Song from Korea” in 1999, with the purpose of distributing it in China. Looking back on the period 2001–2006 when I lived in Singapore, the frequency of the Chinese word “Korean Wave” (韓流) in local Chinese newspapers increased every year, and the English newspaper The Straits Times translated its Chinese character into English “Korean Wave” and reported it as a proper noun. As such, the local media of each country would have wanted to find words to refer to and explain a new phenomenon, and the word “Korean Wave” gradually spread across Asia and beyond.

The Korean Wave and Asian Regionalism According to the traditional theory of British cultural studies, popular culture is a complex site where multiple meanings arise, contest and struggle for their recognition and power (Hall 1981; Fiske 1986). The main character in recent Korean drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022), which was aired on ENA and streamed around the world through Netflix, is a precarious neoliberal subject who is no longer guaranteed professional stability even though she is an exceptionally capable lawyer. One of her male colleagues, who looks forward to being converted from a non-regular worker to a regular worker, is trying to harass her out of excessive competitiveness. In another recent Korean drama My Liberation Notes (2022), which aired on JTBC channel locally and streamed on Netflix, the three main characters who are brothers and sisters living in Gyeonggi-do (the surrounding areas of Seoul) are angry at the fact that they have not become Seoulites and constantly lament their socioeconomically marginal status. The drama evokes sympathy from viewers by showing the characters with pipedreams of “liberation,” while the characters remain shackled in a social structure of discrimination and ever-increasing wealth gaps. To many young adults who suffer in the reality of a neoliberal system, these Korean dramas serve as representations of their ongoing struggles, desires and fantasies. While early Korean dramas catered to the Confucian family values of older viewers, the narratives of recent dramas have focused on making socioeconomically independent women more visible. For example, recent dramas such as Be Melodramatic (2019), Work Later, Drink Now (2021) and Thirty-Nine (2022) present the bonding and community of female friends who try to solve their problems collectively in everyday life. The heroines of The Uncanny Counter (2020), Sweet Home (2020) and Sisyphus: The Myth (2021) play more powerful and intense action than men. These novel narratives, however, still include segments of romance between

The Korean Wave and Mega-Asia  295 characters, an element of popular appeal in K-drama. Asian viewers continue to find that Korean actors’ delicate and emotional performance draws attention and empathy. However, one must not be over-preoccupied with the economic success of Korean popular culture overseas as the neoliberal production methods in the Korean cultural industries remain problematic. In the past, for example, the so-called slave contracts for K-pop idol trainees and singers became a social issue. While this issue has made it mandatory now to write standard labor contracts, unfair contracts still remain rampant in the Korean media landscape; entertainment companies continue to exploit the “supplementary agreements” clause in the standard labor contracts (Son 2021). Although the transnational success of K-dramas has long enhanced national pride among Koreans, until the 1990s Korean dramas were denigrated for containing “low quality” by domestic viewers. In foreign countries, they were once criticized and ridiculed, along with evaluations such as “relying on similar plots and cliché” and “too sentimental.” In addition to disparaging the value of Korean content, there were some negative speculations and distrust of the existence or the sustainability of the Korean Wave phenomenon. In the 2000s, many people inside Korea said in doubt, “I can’t believe the unreliable reports of the Korean media” (Cho 2003). Given the coinage process of the Korean Wave as mentioned earlier, the Korean Wave phenomenon was not unconditionally welcomed in foreign countries. When Taiwanese and Chinese media called it the Korean Wave, it contained their own nationalistic expectations that the Korean Wave should stop and disappear as a temporary phenomenon like the “cold currents” (寒流). It was in this context that the Taiwanese actors’ guild protested to reduce the airing of Korean dramas in 2004, and that some right-wing nationalist groups in Japan organized anti-Korean Wave demonstrations near Koreatown in Tokyo and on 2channel, a popular online site. The Chinese government and the Communist Party were relatively favorable to Korean culture that was deemed conservative compared to American and Japanese culture, but they were still wary of Korean culture as it was a foreign culture anyway. In the end, in 2016, China implemented a “Korea ban” prohibiting the distribution of Hallyu culture in China under the pretext of South Korea’s decision to deploy the anti-missile defense system THAAD against North Korea. The South Korean government has also played a role in causing an unintended aversion to Korean popular culture abroad. The government, which has been seeking better recognition and “nation branding,” has proactively assigned the symbolic features of nationality to “K-pop” and “the Korean Wave” to create a cool and attractive image of the nation. The nation-state has utilized the two neologisms as leverage or a source of soft power, sometimes overusing the “K-” prefix to rename or rebrand existing cultural forms, institutions, consumer goods and all kinds of phenomena, as seen in the terms of K-food, K-tourism, K-classic, K-sports and so on. K-pop, which originally gained a centripetal force through voluntary fandom overseas, has become misunderstood by foreign observers as a “child of nationalist planning” due to the Korean state’s promotion and aggressive “K-” prefix tactics. If the 20th-century popular culture led by the US expanded globally through the legacy media, the 21st-century popular culture has been produced, circulated and promoted through Internet-based media forms that originated in the 1990s. The 1990s was also the time when those who founded leading Korean entertainment companies such as JYP, YG and HYBE (formerly Bit Hit) began their careers as singers, dancers and composers in the entertainment industry. Today, the Korean Wave is spreading through the active participation of fans who use the Internet, social media and smartphones. As opposed to the nation-branding approach of the Korean government, the K-pop industry has chosen to remain stateless to target a more global market. For instance, SM sent a teenage girl BoA to Japan for training early on including the acquisition of the Japanese language, and the boyband TVXQ gave up their stable popularity in

296  Doobo Shim Korea but instead built a career in Japan as a rookie singer. In 2020, JYP created a Japanese-only girl group NiziU through K-pop-style training and production. In the Philippines, Korean entertainment agency ShowBT Entertainment produced boyband SB19 that is called the pioneer of P-pop. Partly due to the K-pop industry’s positioning as stateless, K-pop has become accepted and appropriated throughout Asia. The Korean Wave has led to potentially positive consequences as well, which should be importantly recognized. People across the region have shown curiosities about how the Korean Wave is accepted and interpreted, and how different cultures are influencing each other in Asia. There has been an increasing number of cross-referencing among Asian researchers on Asian popular culture. While watching Korean dramas, Asian audiences may get a chance to critically reflect on the similarities and differences between the media representations and their lives. They may talk about the plot and issues in K-drama, travel to K-drama filming locations, experience new cultures and may be stimulated by new lifestyles and novel perspectives. In the past, such symbolic mediation was largely coordinated by the attractive power of Hollywood and Japanese pop culture. Today, Asian viewers, especially younger generations, feel connected to an imagined community of Asia through their engagement with the Korean Wave. The idea of popular culture as the foundation of a particular regional identity is a plausible assumption, although that transnational identity may be confined within the realm of cosmopolitan consumerism. Nevertheless, the Korean Wave has shown the potential to make Asians, who have long been recognized as “others” with each other, come to see other Asians as “neighbors” or “us” in an enlarged, imagined pan-Asian community. This new cultural development in an imagined mega-Asia, however, does not necessarily mean that the rise of the Korean Wave is a substitute for the US-Japan pop culture hegemony. Rather, it can be argued that the Korean Wave has heralded the start of a golden era in which various Asian pop cultural products proliferate and compete. For instance, the school romance and youth dramas from Taiwan and the queer romance from Thailand, also known as BL (Boys’ Love) dramas and Y shows, are attracting the audiences in Asia (Guzman 2022). Global overthe-top (OTT) platforms such as HBO Asia and Netflix provide local producers across Asia with a lucrative source of revenue, “allowing them to aim for bigger production budgets, higher production values and to explore new genres for international audiences” (Wong 2022). Japan’s soft power is still strong not only for its media cultural products but also for its technological superiority, arts and cuisines. With diasporic Chinese scattered around the world as potential consumers, China’s rapidly growing cultural industry is poised to compete with that of Korea for viewership in Asia and beyond. The growth of the Korean Wave has led Asian nations to recognize each other as an object of mutual referencing and cooperation, breaking away from the practice of emulating the USA and the West as a model for cultural production (Chua 2012). Partly due to the influence of the Korean Wave, an imagined mega-Asia of today is gradually moving in the direction of de-Westernization.

Acknowledgments The first draft of this work was presented in the Korean language at the Mega-Asia Conference, Seoul National University, on 30 August 2022.

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Index

adaptations 157, 162 advertising 237, 239 affective labor 4 AfreecaTV 254–8, 261 airport fashion 53, 55–7 America as method 30 American imperialism 5–7 American popular culture 7, 23–4, 30–1, 110, 114 animation 219–20 anticolonial nationalist ideology 9 ARMY 2, 58–60 artificial intelligence 38, 94 Asia 289 Asian economic crisis 66–7 Asian fashion 247–9 Asian media sphere 8 Asian modernity 118 Asian pop culture 23, 25–7, 30 attention economy 261–2 audio comic 168–70, 174, 176, 178 automation 93–4, 223, 231 beauty 2, 273 biopolitics 260 BlackPink 246–7 Bong Joon-Ho 2, 10, 65, 68, 72, 94–5, 99, 108, 180, 187 Boys Over Flowers 118, 121 BTS 2, 53, 55–60, 75, 235, 246 Bubble app 38 capitalism 6–7 capitalism, post-industrial 236–7, 241 celebrity 53, 55–6, 60, 235, 273 celebrity, Japanese 237–8 celebrity advertising 238 celebrity culture, Korean 235–8, 240, 273 celebrity lifestyle 237, 239 celebrity persona 237–8, 240–1 chart manipulation 44, 46–7, 49 China 3, 7, 10, 107, 113, 193 cinema 210, 213–4, 219 city branding 267–8 CJ ENM 77–8

CJ Entertainment 67–8 class struggle 120 climate of cinema 93 Clon 293 codes 279, 282, 284–6 Cold War 289–90 colonial modernity 9 Columbia Pictures 76 computational creativity 222, 231 consumption 44, 235–6, 239 contra-flow 7, 11, 81–2 cool Korea 4 COVID-19 110, 191–2, 198 creative culture industry 8 creative talent 153–4 critical awareness 124 cultural affect 120 cultural capital 151, 155 cultural diffusion 244, 250 cultural imperialism 6–7 cultural public sphere 113 cultural resonance 118–9 dark horse 75 data analytics 225, 228, 230–1 data-led gaming environment 222, 225–6, 231 deafness 157, 159, 161–2 debt 93–6 decolonization 115 derivation 74–5 de-Westernizing cultural flow 4 digital fan culture 110–2 digital game 191–7 disabled 157–62 dominant ideology 12 East Asian pop culture 23–5 eating alone (honbab) 254, 259 eating show 254–8, 261–2 emotion 106, 112–3, 115 encoding 282–4 entertainment trainee system 26–7, 29 entry barriers 158, 160, 164 esports 222–5, 229–31

Index  299 esports plane 216–7, 219–20 ethnic minorities 157–8, 161–2 Euro-American centrism 23, 30 everyday life 12–4, 16, 113 everyday talk 112 expats 279, 281, 283–7 experience 14, 16, 113 fan 44, 53, 55, 57, 59–60 fan café 34 fan community 3, 111 fan labor 45 fan site 226, 228–9 fandom 2, 23, 25–8, 49, 111–2, 235–6 fandom platform 34 fashion 2, 273 Fashion Chingu 248 feminism, Korea 90–1 feminism reboot 175 financialization 39 flower boy 114 food 2 food porn 260–1 food practices 279–80, 282–7 gameplay 224 Gangnam 267–73 Gangnam Style 267, 269, 275 gender 89, 158, 161–4 Girls’ Generation 129, 271 global fan 35 global pop culture 23–4, 29–31 global transformation 74 globalization 4, 16, 55–6, 60, 74, 105, 245–6, 251 Hallyu 2–3, 8, 74–6, 79, 103, 180, 187, 255, 272–5 Her Shim Cheong 166, 168–9 HYBE 275, 295 hybridization 9–11 I Live Alone 239–40 identity 5, 9, 11, 16–7, 105, 112, 115, 268, 274 ideological polarization 142 idol 27–9 image commodity 237–8, 240 independent production 149–52, 155 individualization 258 industrial norm 150, 153 influencer 254–5 ingyeo 254, 259–62 innovation 222, 231 interaction 279–81, 285–6 invisible labor 90–1 Japan 3, 10, 105–6, 115, 193 Japanese odor 115 jeong 258

Jewel in the Palace 107 Joint Security Area 67, 69–70 Jungkook hanbok 53–60 JYP 272, 275, 295 K-culture 28 K-drama 2, 10, 105–6, 108, 114 K-fashion 245–6 K-film 2, 10 K-inspired fashion 245 K-pop 2, 10, 25–7, 44, 55–6, 60, 180, 187, 273–4 K-pop artists 247, 251 K-pop celebrities 247, 251 K-pop culture 244, 250 K-pop fashion e-tailers 247 K-pop styles 245 Kakao 160–62 KeSPA (Korea e-Sports Association) 206 Kim Jee-Woon 67–8, 71–2 Korean blockbuster 69–70 Korean cinema volatility 75, 78–82 Korean cuisine 284–5, 287 Korean drama 118 Korean game industry 192–7 Korean government 4, 25, 28, 104, 196–8 Korean language 2–3 Korean neoliberalism 78–82 Korean popular culture 3, 8, 17, 23–5, 30, 105, 113, 115 Korean society 109–10 Korean television 278–9, 287 Korean War 290 Korean Wave 3, 8, 10–11, 103, 105, 150, 154, 255, 267, 289 Korean Wave celebrity 4 Korean Wave history 23–4, 26, 31 Korean Wave television 103–4, 111, 115 labor 93 Lady Vengeance 85–9 Latin American telenovela 76 LCK (LOL Champions Korea) 196, 206 League of Legends 201, 203, 205–6, 211–3, 216–7, 219–20 lifestyle media 235–8 long revolution 23, 31 low national birthrate, Korea 85–5 ludo-Orientalism 207 manhwa 180, 182–6 media convergence 7 media globalization 74 media imperialism 5–6 mediation 14 metaverse 34 microcelebrity 254, 258, 261 Middle East 106–7 minorities 157–8, 161–2, 164

300 Index model minority 201, 204, 207 modernity 114–5 moral economy 44 mukbang 254–62 multicultural 278, 280, 282, 287 My Sassy Girl 65, 67, 70 narrative 211, 214–6, 219 nation branding 267–8 national identity 59–60 Naver 157, 160–2, 195 neoliberal encasement 78–9 neoliberal royalty 79 neoliberalism 74, 78, 80, 82, 258–9 Netflix 1, 3, 8, 10–11, 74, 78, 94, 104, 108, 118, 121 New Korean Cinema 65, 71–2 news production change 140 news reporting control 138 NFTs 40 non-legacy players 149–50 North Korea 103, 113–4 objectivity 280–3, 286 OnGameNet (OGN) 210, 216–9 OTT 296 Overwatch 196, 211–3, 216–7, 220 pansori characteristics 166–7, 170, 172, 175 pansori extant repertoire 168 Parasite 1–2, 10, 65, 71–2, 93–8 Park Chan-Wook 67, 69, 71–2, 76, 84–5, 88–9, 94 participatory culture 4, 111 PC bang 193, 202–8 place branding 268 platform 254–6, 258, 260–1 platform imperialism 11 platform studies 33 Playlist Studio 149, 152–54 politics of everyday life 14 pop cosmopolitanism 3, 110 popular culture 3, 5, 12–4, 16, 112, 289 postcolonial 4, 9, 11, 13, 16, 115 power 7–8, 11, 114–5 professional player 225, 229–31 promotional media 210, 213, 215–20 Psy 267–9, 275 public service broadcasting vulnerabilities 139 queer(ing) 168–9, 175 Ragnarok 180–7 Ragnarok Online 183–7 Ragnarok the Animation 180–1, 184–7 reality 281–3, 286–7 reality show 239–40 reflexive learning 17

reflexivity 15–7, 112–4 remediation 86–9 representation 279–87 reverse colonization 7 reverse globalization 121 review 53, 57–9 Riot Games 196, 205–6 Robot Taekwon V 182 saenghwal hanbok 53–7, 59–60 self-fashioning 235, 240 semi-essential content 74, 76 semi-global exclusivity 74, 76 seniors 157, 163 Seri and Biwan 168, 175, 178 sexual minorities 157–8, 162–4 Shiri 65, 68, 72, 181 SM 270, 272, 275, 295 small-scale production 149–51, 155 Snowpiercer 74–8 social inequality 1, 109, 118 social media 8, 111, 115 social media impact on TV 140–4 social television 143 soft power 4, 8, 75, 104, 107, 114–5, 268, 289 Song of Shim Cheong 166–8 Song of Shim Cheong variations 167 Sony Corporation 76–8 sound 170, 172–3, 178 Space Sweepers 75, 79 spectator sports 203 spreadable media 8 Squid Game 1, 65, 68, 72, 93, 95–6, 108–10, 118, 121 Starcraft 202–3, 206 statelessness 180–5, 187 statistical women 89–90 stereotypes 158, 160, 162–4 strangeness 279, 281, 283–6 stranger 279–84, 285–7 styling 54–60 synthetic experiences 157–9 system 224–5, 231 techno-Orientalism 201–5, 207–8 television broadcasting constraints 137 textual analysis 279, 282, 286 THAAD 295 The Villainess 84–91 theScore esports 214–5 tradition 53–60 transmedia 153 transmedia character 167–8, 175 transmedia definitions 169 transmedia productions 167, 169 transnational capital 191–2, 196 transnational cultural intermediaries 283, 285–6

Index  301 US market 26, 29–30 variant imperialisms 7 variety show 239 virtual idol 39 virtualization 38 VLive 36 voice 170, 175–8 webcomic 167–70, 174, 178 webtoon 157–65, 167–70, 174, 178 Welcome! First Time in Korea? 278–9, 281–6 Weverse 37

WhyNot Media 149, 151–2, 154–5 Winter Sonata 105–6 Wonderful Days 181 YesStyle 249 YG 295 Your K-pop Store 249 youth 53–60 YouTube 3, 27–8, 104, 108, 254–8, 260–1, 269 YouTube impact on TV 140 YouTube of terrestrial broadcasters 141–3 Zijangsa 53, 56–7, 59