Amazing Computer Graphic of Song Hye-gyo
(Update: YouTube video fixed)
It’s over a year old, but strangely I can’t find any mention of this computer-generated image of Song Hye-gyo (송혜교) in the Korean blogosphere. Click on the picture for a larger version, and you can see the whole process of its production by Indonesian artist Max Edwin Wahyudi here.
I found it myself via browsing her Wikipedia entry after admiring this recent advertisement of hers:
( Source )
My original intention was to use both for a post on Korean women and (post)modernity in this series that I’m in the process of writing, and I still will, but then I realized that the first image was notable in its own right, and would get lost in another 5000 word post. Hence this intermezzo, but I find that I can’t resist discussing them just a little, especially as despite the way in which the first image was produced, it is ironically the hair style and clothing in the latter that better evokes the sense of Korean zeitgeist that I’m so love in with (see here and especially here).
But why? I’d be lying if I said that my interest in Korean feminism, women’s body images, and advertising wasn’t at least in part due to some physical admiration for my subject(s), and for some reason that particular advertisement got me thinking: was it really merely my heterosexual male gaze that drew me to it? Not that I’d be embarrassed to admit it, but instinctively my reaction is no, that I like it purely in an aesthetic sense, as I do of this and this similar Japanese example from this post too.
( Source: Laneíge )
But then why wouldn’t, say, this Laneíge commercial for a male sunblock with Kim Ji-hoon (김지훈) provoke similar feelings of modernity in me, especially as a review of it that I’m in the process of translating (up soon) says that that was precisely the advertiser’s intention?
Certainly it may be just that that particular commercial doesn’t do it for me, but then none of the other thirty or so I’ve looked at on their site today do either, and I sense that very few commercials or advertisements featuring exclusively Korean men ever will. After all, what is a “sense of zeitgeist” other than a fantasy really, and what role does sex not ultimately play in all of those?
Ever so slightly off-topic, but personally I didn’t realize how fundamental sexuality was to simply being human until I watched the following scene from The Matrix Reloaded five years ago, and even while watching it in the cinema I realized that any society denying that plain fact only ever led to deep social pathologies. Certainly I’ve been very blasé about the subject since at least then, although more in the sense that I don’t feel any need to avoid discussing sexual topics rather than using them simply to provoke people, which is what my wife and most of my friends (annoyingly) seem to think.
(Update: Puzzled as to why this video was “no longer available” the day after I posted it here, I did some investigating. Actually, it is still available, but as “it’s not suitable for minors” apparently you have to be logged-in to YouTube first to watch it. All fine and good, but couldn’t the embedded video just say that instead? If you’re not logged-in already then, follow this link to do so)
So, I may well like the advertisement simply because there’s an attractive Korean woman in it, and that doesn’t preclude me from justifiably considering myself a feminist either. But the jury’s still out really, as many of my sources, almost entirely Korean women themselves, also wonder why “women appear to be more ‘modern’ than men in South Korea”, albeit in far different senses to what I’ve mentioned here. But that discussion would best be left for that latter post really, so I’ll have to leave you with just those teasers for now I’m afraid!
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Song Hye Kyo is so beautiful, that both men and women admire her.
Did you notice that Trinity is so manly that she and Neo are almost the same?
Ah, gender.
I’d say you aren’t attracted to the gorgeous men because you’ve never been properly introduced to the pleasure. This is, no doubt, par for the course within patriarchy. Men aren’t supposed to be capable of possessing such bewitching beauty, only women are (see for example Kym’s comment).
And as for the matrix, maybe it is Neo who is womanly.
Humanity is in dire need of liberation from its entirely stultifying notions of “womanly” and “manly,” which are in fact merely shorthand for the concepts of “stereotypically male/female performance.”
Upon leaving Korea, nothing, absolutely nothing, felt better than being liberated from the gender prison that is Korean culture. Whatever their faults, western women and their allies at least believe in and practice cultures that acknowledges that “woman” can be defined in a multitude of ways. The conformity of Korea was never more bone-chilling than when actuated on young female bodies in the form of “femininity.”
SHG is sooo manufactured. She’s had lip implants (the top lip is very obvious; it’s even shaped like the implant!) and cheek implants and maybe nose/double eyelid surgery.
It did come together nicely, though.
Kym,
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the character of Trinity is “manly”, but now that I think about it, certainly her goth-like clothing does leave Carrie-Anne Moss looking a little androgynous most of the time.
Lana,
Oh yes, quite…on both counts. Ironically, in my experience many Korean women do not personally (if not publicly) mind their stars having had extensive cosmetic surgery, even going so far as to demand, say, “a butt like Jeon Jy-hyun’s” at clinics (or so The Marmot’s Hole said many years ago), but for some reason Song Hye-gyo in particular does get criticized for them. According to my wife, this is because many Korean women resent such a short woman being both famous and considered attractive by men.
Bebel,
Oh, I don’t know. I sometimes find myself drawn to male nudes (of any ethnicity), and am bold enough to admit that there may well be a subconcious homoerotic element to my liking them in an aesthetic sense. I can also appreciate and be jealous of some bodily features of Korean men that most Caucasians like myself lack, including their jet-black hair and olive skin-tones making them look particularly good in white clothing; they drain colour from my own face, and so when I’m somewhat richer than I am now I’ll be investing in some suits that don’t require white shirts to go with them. Probably Korean advertisements and commercials for male cosmetics don’t do it for me simply because of a cultural gap, as I’m usually quite unable to connect with the man I’m supposed to emulate by buying the product.
Ironically though, I felt sexually liberated coming to Korea, although I dare say I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been coming from anywhere but New Zealand.
Like many former settler societies, New Zealand was a male-dominated society for much of it’s short history, and the result now is that the majority of New Zealand men and women retain a very narrow definition of masculinity that isn’t all that different to the colonial era; ironically that of femininity is much more malleable. Hence as a man: with short hair; who regularly worked out; who preferred Black Russians to beer; who had no interest whatsoever in rugby or cricket; who liked trance music and went to dance parties; who generally preferred talking with friends in coffee shops to drinking; who had an equal number of male and female friends…then I was simply a flaming mincing homosexual to most New Zealanders, and it had a serious impact on my love life.
Sure, living with gay prostitutes for two years probably didn’t help either, who also thought/wished I was gay for much of that time (I had a good body back then), but suffice to say that, for all my intellectual pretensions, because of all that I primarily came to Korea to meet women. And once I was here? Korean women treated me as the generally nice, not entirely ugly and not entirely boring heterosexual man that I am. Not much to ask for, but which New Zealanders patently failed to do.
And the first person to ask me in Korea if I was gay? None other than the first New Zealander I met here six months after arriving, and within 10 minutes of meeting me too (albeit while slightly drunk).
Quite the confession and rant today then! Of course, I’m generalizing, and I suppose that I may personally have been at least slightly responsible for my miserable love life in New Zealand (although I don’t think so really!). But it saddens me when I read of New Zealanders demanding that especially East Asian immigrants embrace rugby (and its attendant heavy drinking culture) to get New Zealanders to accept them, and overall a healthy reminder that some supposedly more liberal and socially developed Western countries can also have some different but ultimately equally flawed notions of gender.
James,
I have never heard of a Western man envying any aspect of Asian men — ever!
Asian men are called short and weak by Western women, while some Asian women overseas think the same as well.
It’s so great to see that you appreciate the good of both Asian and Western culture. :)
Lana,
Do you have any evidence that Song Hye Kyo is manufactured? Or is this one of those things women say purely out of jealousy?
As a Korean, whenever I read the expat blogs, i cannot help but think that foreigners observe Korea as if every thing that does not agree with their senses are because of “Koreanness”. As a person who has lived in 10 different countries on 4 different continents for extended period of time, and speak 5 languages fluently, i can assure you that the world is a lot more similar than most people try to think. People with limited international experience, especially people who have only lived(not traveled, lived) in one or two places, tend to generalize everything that they see in that country as derived from the country’s unique culture. However, when one lives in many different countries, one will realize that most of the social phenomena are derived from human nature, not unique culture.
Jake,
you may well have a valid point, but…hell, are you sure you even have the right blog? I’m at a loss as to where I or any commentator in this post mentions “Koreanness”, nor where I or they are “generalizing everything that we see in that country as derived from the country’s unique culture”. Moreover, in the blog as a whole I’m usually at great pains to stress the similarities between Westerners and Koreans, and don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I have a reputation in the blogosphere for doing so either. With a readership as large as mine, I can’t afford (and don’t really feel the need) to simply rant about Koreans and expat life in the same way that expat bloggers do in blogs that only their friends and family read.
For someone complaining about generalizations, it’s strange how you seem to be tarring all expat blogs with the same brush in your own comment. Certainly it was made completely regardless of the actual contents of this blog.