The Grand Narrative

( Soa Lee/이소아 )

While I did say recently that I wasn’t going to confine my newfound interest in Korean art only to examples actually in Korea, I confess that that was still always my preference, as I’d really like to go to some exhibitions and maybe even meet the artists for myself some day. Also, I wrote that before I checked out the “Korea” section of the startdrawing.org site again, and now that have I realise that I’ve got hours of gallery-viewing of just the Korea-based artists’ works there to do, let alone those of Koreans based overseas! And if I looked at non-Koreans’ works too? I’d be in front of the computer for weeks. Check this out for instance, which is all over the internet at the moment. For someone who knows little about the Asian art world like me, there probably isn’t a better portal site out there.

The most recent post in the Korea section is this one about 3D computer artist Soa Lee, whose work I took an immediate liking to, especially the skin tones and curves of her mostly female subjects. Normally when I write about an artist I prefer to begin the post with examples of the artist’s work rather than a picture of the artist him or herself (no matter how photogenic this particular one happens to be), but then if the following graphic gave me reservations about editing this post at work, then I can hardly inflict it unannounced on your own screens! Because of that I did consider choosing a slightly less risqué example of Soa Lee’s work to accompany this post instead, but then it proved impossible to find an example that I personally liked that was also more work-friendly, as it’s pretty representative of what she does.

( “Redyan”, 2006 )

If you like it, there are more pictures and plenty of links to galleries and interviews of Soa Lee available in Josef Lee’s original post. My own personal favorite is this nude (NSFW), but which in all seriousness I think the clothes in the lower half of the image detract from; if the image is cut off just under the navel like it is here (also NSFW), then I think the final result is far superior.

I’ll be the first to admit that at first glance her works possibly don’t appear as original and creative as others I’ve mentioned on the blog, but then those are quite subjective terms really, and for all I know about computer art she may well be quite innovative. Regardless, creative or not, I’m afraid that writing about Korean art that I simply like is going to be a regular feature of the blog from now on!

Update: Here’s another graphic that I also liked, although in this case more for the background than the woman herself. It reminds me of the realm of Oneiros in my favorite computer game Undying, which I talk about in part three of this extremely long and meandering early post of mine. Unfortunately, since I copied it from Soa Lee’s homepage last night she seems to have closed the site down.

( “Elenean Archer’s Eyesight” )

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( “PERMA N STANT 6″ by displace)

In my quest to find the original, creative and/or quirky in Korean life, I’ve decided that I’m not going to confine myself just to examples in Korea, which would deny me the opportunity to write about the numerous examples of Korean art exhibited outside of the country by Koreans too. While I’d be the last person to pretend that Korea is well-known for fostering original art, it being telling that most of the Korean artists mentioned here and here are based overseas for instance, some of them do still live in Korea, and would be good starting points for further investigation into the Korean art world. I also think that there’s much more out there than just what’s available in English too, and I’ll try to find and hopefully translate more Korean-language sources on art from now on.

( “PERMA N STANT 5″ by displace)

Today’s pictures, from the Korean “PERMA N STANT” display at the 2006 Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition, actually I found just while surfing through Flickr. Below is an abstract of the Korean display that the photographer provided:

The practice of architecture and urbanism in Korea, as is the case with any other typical contemporary society, are engaging more and more closely with reality, in a much more complicated way than before. In this regard, we find that Cities, Architecture and Society, the theme of the Biennale, parallels our particular concerns to summarize the ways current architectural and urban issues involve our society. This year’s participating architects took part in numerous debates and sessions before extracting the following thematic phrase for the show: ‘cumulated time, and instant events in the old places’; or other words, ‘perma n stant’ (possibly, permanent + instant).

As one of the oldest modern metropolitan areas with more than 600 years of history, Seoul still energetically thrives as a huge buffer where the old ideas and substances collide every hour with the most updated ones. This city with its self-conflicting nature should consequently integrate largely unpredictable, unexpected patterns of townscapes and lifestyles. So here one could not help but witness all the mutated, temporary versions of urban scenes and events, and how intriguingly the recognitions and emotions of its occupations work. The city exposes its marginal layer of time-cumulated strata when the innumerable thin layers of instant events incessantly tints its surface.

The first part of the theme perma supposedly epitomizes all the characteristics and fundamental geographical elements the city has with relatively constant nature, while the latter part, n stant could suggest all its present momentary and adaptable images and shifts.

The teamed-up project is a combined display of large scale sectional models and moving pictures taken from five different sectors of the city. Its size and population have provided numerous documents of how its extreme topographies have been overcome. In one of the five individual projects, a modernist architect shows how he perceives a traditional district and has painstakingly adapted his works to it over the decade; the second one, with the theme of ‘city in a city’, diagnoses insecure alterations deriving from the fringe of the city. The third interprets volatile properties of urban surfaces, while the fourth, with the theme of ‘catalog city’, makes various indications about futuristic housing based on the ways today’s commercial housing suppliers acutely interact with their customers. The last one takes on the intricate urban web of artificial nerves and sensory devices and their everyday data, being accumulated and analysed through its dwellers who can never avoid being constantly exposed to the systems.

There’s only 7 pictures of the display available on Flickr, beginning here (and 89 of the exhibition itself here), but the photographer links to this site with more.

( “PERMA N STANT 1″ by displace)

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(Source)

History or art? Most people would probably say the former, but then the mountain ranges and valleys in the map above have little relation to reality. Still, I think it’s an…ahem…simply beautiful piece of work myself, but unfortunately don’t know where it’s from. Can any museum-visiting readers help out?

As you can probably guess, I’m quite a fan of maps (I’m not alone!), and have about 20 or so just of various parts of Korea. I used to have two laminated, detailed maps of my local area hanging up in my kitchen, but I took them down once I discovered a nice, secluded park 10 minutes from my apartment, which the maps had deprived me of visiting for three years because the park isn’t on either (places to get some quiet and seclusion are very rare and precious here!). In their place, I’ve been combining my interest in Korea, history in general, geography and near-future science-fiction by looking at maps of how what Northeast Asia will look like in the near future as the sea-level rises, what it looked like 20,000, 19,000, 18,000…(and so on) years ago, and how the whole world will look like with a 100m sea-level rise. And don’t get me started on the supercontinent of Pangaea Ultima due to appear in 250-400 million years time!

(Update: A big thanks to Jer, who tells me where he got the original shot from here)

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I’ve been so caught up with Korean women’s bodies recently (hey, it happens) that I’ve only just realised that I haven’t posted about original, creative, and/or quirky Korean art for a while now. Let me try rectifying that, starting with this cool painting made using a paintball gun: 

Found at Mongdori here, which is quite a treasure trove of interesting videos like that.

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Creative and quirky, and actually in Korea this time:

(Photo from AussiE-media)

I originally read about this building at AussiE-media, which says that it has ”an Ann Demeulemeester shop on the ground floor, a restaurant above, and a multi-shop below,” but unfortunately not much else besides swiped, conveniently non-copyrighted pictures (although after ranting about being splogged recently, I made sure to only “take” one in turn).

Fortunately a quick search took me to Deezen, with many more exterior and interior photos, and lots of information about the architect Minsuk Cho and his Seoul-based company Mass Studies, which was founded in 2003 ”as a critical investigation of architecture in the context of mass production, intensely over-populated urban conditions, and other emergent cultural niches that define contemporary society.” Most important of all, Deezen also has an address and directions for finding the building in Gangnam, and I may check it out the next time I’m in Seoul.

But before I do, have any Seoulites seen it for themselves? If so, is it worth the trip, or do the photos at Deezen pretty much cover everything?

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First found via London Korea Links, which has a lot of information about Korean artists and exhibitions there, and I recommend checking it out if you find this and similar recent posts of mine interesting. And not just for those of you in London: many of the artists and performers mentioned are merely visiting, and are actually based in Korea.

All of the videos in today’s post are by unfortunately named artist June Bum Park, who seems to have been making similar works of people and things being manipulated by giant hands since at least 2000 or so:

To my own credit though, that was a much longer and better quality version of “I Parking” than the original available on YouTube. I also managed to find one of “II Building” below too, and even of a short, but also high quality version of “III Crossing” below that. Although they’re obviously a series, this post may well be the first and only site on the internet to have all three in the same place!

Finding and embedding all those took well over an hour and a half by the way…as a bare minimum, I expect a round of applause for my efforts.

Update: In hindsight, five minutes was much too long for the first, as it gets a bit repetitive. For that reason I much prefer the second, but all three are still in serious need of some accompanying music. Also, sorry if it’s just this blog, but this is the first time I’ve used googlevideos - is it normal to be unable to watch them full screen? 

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And here is the first of many posts where I point out “the interesting, inspirational, original, creative and wonderful in Korea,” or at least try “to look at what was previously ordinary and mundane in a new light.” By no means am I going to confine myself to art in the traditional sense of the word, but it’s a good place to start.

(Drawings by Jun Seo Hahm)

The art in this post comes from Startdrawing.org, in it’s own words “a web resource portal for Asia’s artists and drawings,” which started “with the aim of showcasing and sharing drawings from talented artists in Asia, and in the process, promote the joys of drawing.” It features all kinds of drawings, from architecture to comics, and the artists whose works featured hail from 13 Asia countries; I found these works by Jun Seo Hahm and So-yuen Lee on the first page of the “Korea” category.

(Drawings by So-Yuen Lee)

True, both of those artists were born in Korea but moved overseas to pursue their work, and so rather than countering the cynical charge that few Koreans are creative, the fact that so few artists featured on that website are actually still in Korea arguably merely strengthens it. But there are some Korea-based artists featured, and I’m not denying that Korea would be a difficult place for artists with original ideas. Probably for artists in general too. For now though, I’m putting that aside and merely enjoying browsing through the pictures.

Update: As I was typing that, the pages were taking a long time to load, so I gave up looking further. But they’re working now, and actually there’s more works by Korea-based artists there than I first thought. For example, here is some definitely original - and slightly indecent - work by Yuji Yun:

(Drawings by Yeji Yun)

There’s grittier and/or more erotic ones on the website, but which are a little NSFW. Make sure to show them to the next person that claims Korea is a conservative country!

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(Photo by Bad Comrade)

Sorry for the five days since my last post, a long time for me. First up, some quick admin:

• My job situation is a bit up in the air at the moment. Naturally I can’t say much more than that online, just that if all goes well I’ll be working at another branch of my present company come April, but unfortunately have a lot less freetime available for the blog. If so, that won’t be disastrous, but it will mean less frequent, but hopefully higher quality posts. I’ll keep you posted (no pun intended).
• They may not sound or look like much, but I’ve followed some blogging advice and decluttered and made many small changes to the blog, mostly to my sidebar. I won’t bore you with the tedious and very very time-consuming mechanics of them, which I’m still in the process of, but the biggest changes are that I’ve renamed and reduced the number of post categories to 20, and also have only assigned posts to categories if they directly discuss those subjects, rather than just being vaguely related like before. After all, some of my earlier posts weren’t that bad, and the world would be a better place if more people read them, but the previous alphabet soup of categories was making them difficult for even me to find them.

And now for the 4th and final part of this series, easily the shortest but ironically probably more popular than the other three combined!

To quickly recap: part one was first about some Japan-themed art I liked, the inspiration for the series, then discussions of cyperpunk and its relationship to how Westerners view Japan and Korea; part two was about trance music - with many free samples for you to listen to - and the thoughts and feelings it induced in me; and finally the first part of three was very academic, dealing with popular culture, McDonaldization, and the dance party industry, but then it turned highly personal, discussing the cynicism that came with realising how base, capitalist, and manipulative were those things, like the vibes at dance parties, that I’d previously held so dear. In hindsight, that was a very depressing and misleading note to end on, because the whole point of the series, after all, was to show how I plan to overcome that cynicism and rediscover some of my youthful passion for life, and for living in Korea. Better late than never.

(Photo by Full Frame Chris) 

To warm up, let me quote one of my favourite books, a short-story collection called Personals: Dreams and Nightmares from the Lives of 20 Young Writers (1998). Sorry to keep referring to it, but then so few people have read all of the previous posts in the series that most people wouldn’t have noticed. I’m using the book again here because, without readers knowing what the writing of this series has meant to me personally, then the solution to my above “problem” might make less sense, and editor Thomas Beller puts it so much better than I could:

Some of these essays function as an elaborate mechanism by which the author removes, or at least scratches at, a particular thorn in his or her side. (p. ix)

With 12,000+ words already spent on the topic, I certainly do have something to get off my chest! He goes on:

Part of growing up, beyond finding your life’s career or the ideal relationship, is understanding that the forces that shape you and the forces that compel you are not always within your control. Sometimes you cling to control as tightly as possible, and sometimes you casually fling it away (p. xi)

Realising that is precisely what my whole epiphany described in part three was about. And although it meant a lot to me at the time, and still is, fortunately I’ve come to terms with the fact that on one level it was just a normal part of growing up like he says. Strictly speaking though, with that quote he’s introducing the stories in the collection about drug addiction, one of the authors of which:

…is particularly good at describing that uncomfortable moment when the complex, private, and at times contradictory truths of one’s own inner life smash up against forces that have no facility for ambiguity…(p. xi)

I’ll come back to that later. He concludes the whole introduction by saying:

Reading these essays, you will want to get to know their authors well, sometimes more than you might want. If in some cases you draw back, surprised by the odd turns someone’s life may have taken and the sense that they have made of it, so in others you might lean in closer, sensing a kinship with the conscious being unfurling on the page and wanting to know more. (p. xiii)

Okay…at least I wanted to know more. I am indeed surprised that at 32 (today!) I’ve ended up…ahem…a sad, cynical, miserable bastard, and find it difficult to get passionate and interested about things as much as I did in my early twenties. That’s not unusual for 30-somethings, but living in Korea has compounded things, as living as an expat for a long time in any country, particularly one in which you don’t speak the language, ultimately makes even the bubbliest and most vivacious of us prone to cynicism and negativity all by itself. By coincidence, to me my Korean ability epitomises all of that, as on the one hand I so desperately want to acheive fluency, but on the other find it so difficult to get motivated enough to put in the time required. How to change?

At this point, I invite readers to pause for a moment, and think: what would you do? Remember that I have a wife, child, and 8 week-old foetus to support - suddenly dropping everything and moving jobs and or cities is out of the question. Despite those constraints, I think anyone can relate to my solution, which hopefully makes this post more than being just about me.

A Manifesto for A Korean Fantastique

After that build-up, readers may justifiably expect something inspiring and revolutionary, but actually it’ll be quite the opposite. Which is kind of the whole point.

(Photo by Digitalnut)

Again letting more gifted writers do my speaking for me, two years ago, in my never-ending quest to get out of ESL, I bought my first-ever self-help book, the What Should I Do With My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered The Ultimate Question (2003), a US Bestseller by Po Bronson. As you’d expect, the 55 or so chapters in that book are each about people who’ve attempted to change their circumstances and surroundings, although not all how they intended and/or successfully. In the conclusion, Bronson acknowledges that the success stories paradoxically look both exceptional and easy in hindsight, and that ordinary people often feel that they don’t have enough money or time to do the same. To which he responds: 

Never enough time? On the contrary - the saving grace is time. The people in this book didn’t fix their situation overnight. For most, it took many attempts over many years. When I began my research, I thought this was a weakness in their stories; I wished they had exhibited more commanding control over their changes. Now, I admire their patience, and I find it more interesting that they’ve made their changes despite lacking control.

Now I wonder - why was it supposedly more admirable for someone to have made their change cleanly and overnight? Why did I ever want stores that weren’t clouded by luck, pain, and ghosts? Why was that the kind of story I thought I wanted to hear? Answer: Because that’s the story-telling convention. The Self-Made Person. We’ve been boxed in by that myth. We’ve edited our lives to sound more like that myth. We’ve judged ourselves negatively because we haven’t measured up to that myth. We’ve stopped trying because we know we don’t have mythic strength. (p. 390)

Reading that reminded me of myself nearly a decade ago, making excuses for a late paper to a demanding but inspirational lecturer, to which he responded along the lines of: ”The world is full of smart guys, but there are very few disciplined ones.” He was right, and I wish I’d realised that much closer to when he said that rather than years later, when I began to suffer the consequences of my (in)actions. That is another reason why I want to become fluent in Korean, because it is a symbol to me - unless I’m speaking it 24/7 then there’s no other way to achieve that other than by the hard slog and discipline of daily, often tedious study that he describes, and if I do, then I would seriously feel that there’s little else I couldn’t achieve.

(Photo by theturninggate)

Hence, although I woke up 32 today, and…ahem…cut out all the pages in my diary up to today (March birthdays are good for re-resolutions!), I’m not going to pretend for an instant that I’m not the same, cynical, jaded, lazy person that I was last night. And unless I nearly die in a car accident say, albeit entirely possible in Korea, then indeed my personality never will change so soon. Hmmm…no, it has changed quickly before, so to be more precise, I can’t force yourself to become a different person overnight, I can certainly do things to help, but like Po Bronson demonstrated, the change will still probably be a slow gradual process, and all I can do is begin it and stick to it. At least, I’ve already come to terms with this reality for getting out of the ESL industry, which is why I quoted Thomas Beller earlier, as my job pretensions certainly do ”smash up against forces that have no facility for ambiguity,” a more poetic way of describing the bizarre lack of demand here for BA graduates that can’t speak Korean. But as for my 30-something angst? Finishing this series of posts marks my beginning to seek out the interesting, inspirational, original, creative and wonderful in Korea, or at least trying to look at what was previously ordinary and mundane in a new light. If you didn’t “get” the photos in this post, that was their theme, and hence the title of this series.

(Photo by june1777)

And that’s that. Frustrating, anti-climatic…but a lot like real life? I did actually intend to finish on a more positive, active, carpe diem note through giving some examples, I have a good 20 to go through as I type this, but now I realise that those would fit ackwardly onto the end of this 1800 word post. Instead, I’ll do that in the next post, probably up on Sunday. Fortuitously, this new project of mine will mean a lot of very short posts drawing people’s attention to them - maybe only 200 words long, I kid you not - and these will hopefully be a nice balance to the rather academic subjects I’ll be covering soon.

On that note, off to VIPS now…no luxury spared for this blogger on his birthday!

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 (photo by Brocco Lee)

When I innocently began writing this post about some of my favourite artists back on Monday, I never knew that it would develop and transform to the extent that it did, ultimately morphing into something quite unexpected. Revealing what that is now would spoil the ultimate message I think, but I can say that as a result of writing it, I now look at life in Korea in a new and much more enchanting light than I did five days ago, and hopefully some of that new-found sense of mystique (and also carpe diem) will rub off on you too.

Unfortunately, having come to some realizations and conclusions as a result of writing, rather than having them before the writing process started like normal, the result was…well, a grand narrative. Which is all well and good, but from a blogger’s perspective it’s a nightmare, for it means that the chronological order must be stuck to, every part is essential, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and parts can not be readily broken down into separate posts that can be chopped and changed and rearranged. So while the original result was what I think is some of the best stuff I’ve written ever, albeit more for the ideas than for the eloquent prose, it ultimately came to about 5500 words, and the hour and half or so required to read it would have been just a bit too much to ask of readers. Hell, even I struggle to do the odd 3000 word post of mine in one sitting.

Despite appearances, I don’t think I could reduce the word count much more than I already have. And so, after about a day and a half of unsuccessfully grappling with this issue, I found myself relaxing by looking up rude words and sexual positions on Wikipedia instead. But then some chance link suddenly reminded me of a similar issue with easily the best fantasy book in the world: Imajica, by Clive Barker. Sold as a 825-page epic when I was given a copy in 1991, the publishers then decided that it was just too damn big, but Barker was adamant that there was nothing that could be cut. The compromise solution? He picked a random page something like 413 pages in, and henceforth it was sold in two volumes.

Following this example of the one of the greats, I too have accepted cruel reality, and, not counting this explanation, will present the original post in a series of three or four smaller ones of roughly 1500-1800 words each. That leaves me with posts that make no sense by themselves, and although this first one in particular is still interesting, I hope, it is (literally) far removed from the ultimate, majestic conclusion. But despite that, it does feel good to get things rolling again after five days, and sorry for the delay. 

Intro/Copyright Issues

Last week, I wrote in passing that finding the Tokyo “online design magazine” PingMag had rekindled a fledgling interest of mine in Japanese pop-art, and, suitably inspired, that I would be putting up a post about it soon. But in truth, it simply reminded me of the pictures by artists Francisco Perez (a.k.a. pacman23) and brothers Michael and Cyprian Chomicki of Studio Qube that I have sitting on my hard drive, and that what I really wanted was the opportunity to talk about them. And so I originally began this post thus:

Although none of them are based in Japan or are of Japanese descent, or in Perez’s case even seem to have work with Japanese subjects, to my untrained eye all of their artwork (galleries here, and here) simply screams “Japan,” as do their favorite works of other artists (see here and here). Here are some examples:

(”oO Vic Oo” by Francisco Perez)

(”oO 123 Oo” by Francisco Perez)

(”Fade to Red” by StudioQube)

So far, so good. But then I hit a brick wall, because the deviantART picture-hosting site where I found their pictures is very amibigous about copyright issues. The first and third pictures above have a “download” option with them, so indeed download I did, and the second has a big ugly watermark across it, so I have no qualms about putting that one up too, especially as I’ve just shelled out…ahem…US$41 to have an unadorned 61×90cm print of it shipped to me from America (thinking it was a photo, my wife was quite angry at my choice at first!). But as for all the other pictures I’ve saved…?

Personally I think it’s pointless to consider copyright issues on a site that allows a simple right-click and save of images, whereas Flickr, for one, has a number of options for users to determine what viewers can do with their images, and if users are so inclined (and all too many are), then there are various devices on there that prevent all but the most computer-savvy viewers from saving images that are intended to be for display only (just try right-clicking and saving this cool one of Hachiko Crossing in Shibuya for instance). Korean portal sites like Naver have been doing something similar in recent months too (see this one of Lee Hyori for example), not allowing an increasing number of images found from image searches to be saved. Most of these “protected” images are from Korean blogs that normally you would need a password to view, so I sort of understand the rationale from the bloggers’ perspective, but then I can’t see the point of an image search which doesn’t allow you to save the images you find: what, pray, am I supposed to do with them once I find them?

Yes, maybe I should have rephrased that. In the meantime, I decided that I have no moral qualms about copying a freely-available image and using it on a non-commercial blog, provided that it isn’t altered and that it is attributed (ie, as if it had the most common creative common licence), but after debating that with my sister, who has quite a network and her own (not half bad) photos on deviantART herself, then I’m (reluctantly) going to respect her wishes not use images from the site here, however amateur I think its approach to copyright is. Naturally, that makes writing a decent post about the artists near-impossible, so I had to give up on my original plan. But this proved quite serendipitous in the end, because it made me realise that, well…although I plan to rectify this, at the moment I know too little about Japanese pop-art to write about the pictures anyway, at least something meaningful. What I am qualified to write about though, are the feelings and realisations about life in Korea and East Asia that the pictures (re)evoked in me. Admittedly not a very high bar, but still, regardless of however pretentious and/or full of typical 30-something angst the following section will may be, readers should be used to that from me by now.

My Cyberpunk Baggage

(Photo by bhophoto)

(Photo by shymita)

Like most expats here, the reasons I came to Korea pretty much boil down to a combination of sex, money, youthful rebellion, sex, exotic locations, sex and sex. But despite my priorities back then, I’ll wisely avoid discussing the sex aspect for now, and focus on Korea as an exotic location instead. Yes, really, because even the most jaded and cynical readers amongst you would at least once have found Korea to be an exotic and amazing place. Of course, by definition it was to all of us before we came, but that disguises a lot of what can be very personal and unique baggage. In my case, although I was largely unaware of him back then, mine was a vision of Korea that echoed that which William Gibson had always had of Japan. 

He outlined that vision succinctly and very eloquently in a short article for Time magazine he wrote in 2001 entitled The Future Perfect: How did Japan become the favored default setting for so many cyberpunk writers?, and if you’re still reading this post by this stage, then I highly recommend taking a time out and spending the next 3 minutes reading it before you go. His historical argument is sweeping and generalistic, but basically true, and considering that most SF authors historical knowledge is a little lacking, gave me a new-found respect for his intelligence. I would quote it to save you the mouse click, but it reads awkwardly broken up, and is too long to quote in full. This alternate article from the 9 September, 2001 issue of Wired (interesting date) is also good though, and shorter and easier to work with:

Is Japan Still the Future?

That depends on which Japan you mean. Let us hope it’s not the prosaic one that lives in a decade’s grim headlines. Since the bust of the early 1990s, Japan’s financial levers have stopped working. Politicians have been rendered impotent by scandal and voter disillusionment, major banks humbled by the markets. Even in the splatter of America’s own burst bubble, Japan’s bottomless reservoir of bad news seems too dark a model for all but the most dyspeptic futurist.

But there is another Japan: Japan-as-metaphor. This is the Japan that represents hypermodernism in all its dimensions, from advanced technology to individual alienation to urbanization run amok. This stylized notion took root in the ’80s amid the country’s economic boom. It was a time when Japanese business models, money, and products seemed like irresistible forces. Neuromancer launched cyberpunk onto the streets of a future Japan “where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company.” William Gibson’s imagined Japan was not the shiny future-perfect of yesterday’s world fairs, but instead a hard-edged tomorrow where giant conglomerates ruled and silico-, nano-, and bio- were the main denominations of value. Gibson’s message was that disruptive technology would bring with it disruptive social change. And it read like prophecy.

(Photo by bhophoto)

In hindsight, we know that although the cyberpunk vision anticipated many of the social pathologies that would emerge as Japan’s economy collapsed, it did not anticipate what has surfaced as a greater threat to Japan’s place in the future: irrelevance. The past 10 years have seen a depressing parade of disposable prime ministers, metastasizing concrete, and bankruptcy. And the last time we checked, there were no holograms over Tokyo. Yet it would be wrong to count Japan out just because the future is not what it used to be.

We persuaded William Gibson to go back to Tokyo to have another look. He found, to his own surprise, that his sense of Japan hurtling ever forward has subsided, only to be replaced with a new sense of permanent, yet well-tolerated, chaos. This, Gibson suggests, is the future for all of us. And furthermore, so what? Despite the fact that the country’s political and economic institutions lie in shambles, Japanese innovation and creativity continues unabated.

Two years ago, the notion that America’s future, then a glowing path of endless prosperity, had anything in common with Japan’s was risible. Today, post-Nasdaq, it is less so. Alan Greenspan is starting to feel the pain of his neutered Japanese counterparts. A controversial election cast a cloud over America’s political process, and an evaporating surplus is limiting government’s clout. Meanwhile, almost $5 trillion of national wealth simply disappeared. Our cyberpunk future has been put on an indefinite hold. But perhaps today’s Japan - the Japan beyond the dreary headlines - can reveal more about the shape of things to come than that shimmering vision ever did.

- by Chris Anderson

Admit it, remove the reference to Neuromancer, which every intelligent person knows was set in Japan, change the dates from early-1990s to 1997, switch the “Japan”s to ”Korea”s, and no-one would so much as raise an eyebrow if they read it in the Korea Herald tomorrow morning. Okay, the creativity may be a long shot, at least outside of the electronics industry, but the disruptive social change is spot on: it’s even more marked in Korea than Japan, and my interest in that social dynamism is, after all, what keeps this blog going. But actually this interest came well after I arrived, as did my reading and love of cyberpunk fiction and of the works of (to my mind) cyberpunk-influenced sociologists like Manuel Castells. Instead, what writing this post has made me realise is that the visions of Korea that I brought with me were largely derived from my love of, well, Trance music, or to be more precise the dance party scene and associated paraphernalia. I kid you not.

(Photo by Bjar9)

And on that note, I’ll jump straight into a discussion of Trance music tomorrow, which if you’ve read this far, I think you’ll still like and learn from even if you hate all forms of dance music (most of it is actually about popular culture). And for anyone still paying attention, I’m sorry that my plans for the blog in 2007 ultimately were delayed by about 6 weeks, but my series on developmental states will be coming after the big holiday from Feb 6-8. Not coincidentally, Manuel Castells mentioned above figures prominently in that.

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Apologies to all those of you who have read the original version of this post, but the sloppiness of the writing in it really bugged me, and it didn’t help that the second half was completely off-topic either. This version is much the same, but hopefully much easier to read, and I decided to move the second half to the (impending) next post.

Still, a grave blogging faux pas for sure, but ulitimately I decided I’d rather not have something heading my blog that I was, frankly, quite embarassed to have written. From now on I’m definitely going to have to try and restrain myself from publishing as soon as I’ve finished typing the post up: after all, who cares if the original post gave the blog 636 “hits” yesterday, if 602 of them were for less than 5 seconds?

As a reward for those of you that do read the blog, be warned that the next couple of centimetres of the picture below, which marks the beginning of the original post, may be just ever so slightly NSFW. If you are at work, you might want to take care to scroll quickly past it.

(Photo(?) by naiyokaonkeitkokoraben)

To refresh people’s memories, I’ve already briefly discussed the historical background to this, and later I was happy to see fellow blogger Kevin take up some of my points and discuss them in more depth here. I’ve also mentioned the short-sighted and unsustainable way in which the Korean Wave was promoted (in contrast to its Japanese counterpart), and flooding the market with shoddily produced, repetitive Korean dramas may well have put East Asian audiences off them for the next decade. But then I saw the following post from the Korean Studies Discussion List, and it reminded me that there are still a myriad of small and subtle factors involved that never receive media attention, but the effects of which surely add up over time:

The 16th Cultural Program for Foreign Students and Scholars in Korean Studies

Nansook Jung yojh@aks.ac.kr wrote:

The Academy of Korean Studies is pleased to announce its 2008 Cultural Program for Foreigners. As an important part of the mission of AKS is to cultivate scholars and young leaders who can contribute to the development of Korean studies,…

Qualifications and Application Requirements: 1. Undergraduate students of second year or above and/or graduate students in Korean studies…

To which J. Scott Burgeson <jsburgeson@yahoo.com> replied:

One wonders if these kinds of programs would not be
more effective if  the limit to students and academics
were not opened up to include independent scholars,
critics, journalists, novelists and other writers
outside the academy but still professionally dedicated
to the field of Korean studies. Ditto for research and
language-study grants here, which are also almost
always strictly limited to academics.

Is it any wonder that number of books on Korea and
Korean culture aimed at a wider and more popular
audience in the West is so relatively impoverished, in
comparison to those produced about neighboring
countries like Japan and China, for instance?

Just my two cents, of course.

(Illustration by Aquarius-Campio)

Yes, I’d be very very surprised if that wasn’t the same J. Scott Burgeson who wrote the hilarious but informative Korea Bug, and I couldn’t agree more. It reminds me of strands of International Relations Theory I learned while I was doing my MA called Institutionalism and Constructivism, but strangely neither article in Wikipedia mentions what I was taught was the core component of the former especially, namely how the effects of state elites of various countries often going to the same overseas universities, learning the same things, making networks there and maintaining them throughout their careers and so forth, is to provide the shared ideas, contacts, and exchanges that are in practice the oil that greases international trade and diplomacy.

Sure, that is mere common-sense, and the thought of various lackeys in Trade Ministries going on a bender with their overseas counterparts every now and then may sound like a somewhat trivial aspect of international affairs, but then consider the effects of Korean economics students in the 1960s starting to go to American rather than Japanese universities: the tension between relatively neoliberal young Turks in upper levels of the state apparatus, and the dirigisme of older officials at lower levels, and of the Korean population as a whole, is crucial to understanding much of Korean politics today. One fact little known by many Koreans (understandably), is the extent to which many junior officials in the Kim Dae-Jung government welcomed and encouraged the liberalisation wrought by the IMF in 1998. Heresy for sure, but I can provide sources which demonstrate that they not only relished the opportunity previously denied them by their (now much-subdued) Japan-educated superiors, but even added to the IMF loan stipulations, feeling that they didn’t go far enough.

For a clearer, albeit non-Korean example, consider what the Economist says about the effects of shrinking UK-EU networks due to Britain’s Costly Disdain for the EU, which will surely have big impacts on relations in the coming decades as current old Europe-hands will lack suitably-qualified younger replacements.

(Illustration by Peter Schrank)

In short, ideas, exchanges and networks matter, and when I first read about the cultural program before I read Burgeson’s reply, I too was annoyed that I was technically excluded because I’d recently discontinued my MA: just in case you hadn’t noticed, I do still consider myself someone who “can contribute to the development of Korean studies,” and a good start would be reminding those few visitors still reading this post to sign up for the Korea Studies Discussion List that inspired it. Sure, much of it is announcements of public lectures in Tokyo or Washington that most readers wouldn’t be able to attend, but as you can see, events in Korea are mentioned time to time, and of course the discussions are still interesting. I’ll put it up in my blogroll as soon as I finish editing this post.

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(Update: Now that I’ve read it, I won’t discuss Robert Koehler’s post here like I planned, because even without the 52 comments to it there isn’t too much I can add that Robert didn’t cover already. But thanks for the comment surin2sayan, and Korean horror movies have never really appealed to me either. But in the process of writing my latest post for ZR5, I did find two called Whispering Corridors (여고괴담) and Memento Mori (여고괴담 두번째 이야기) that sound very good, and which I’ll definitely watch when I get back from my vacation. If you’re interested, you can find more information about them here)

Great minds do indeed think alike!

I’ve been blogging on Korean women in bikinis issues for five months now, but I only mentioned the Korean Wave for the first time two weeks ago because a book on the Japanese Wave I bought rekindled an interest in it. But ever since, I’ve been simply deluged with references to it on the internet and newspaper articles such as this, and then even came across a podcast by the Korea Society that took a rare look at its impact in the US. But notably absent in my posts on it so far have been Korean perspectives, so I’m very happy to say that I’ve just found Robert Koehler’s translations of two articles from the Chosun Ilbo to compensate.

Unfortunately, I’m a bit swamped tonight, so I highly recommend you read the translations and Robert’s comments yourself for now, and I’ll give his post a proper look and discuss it tomorrow as soon as I can. But in the meantime, given the exaggeration and hype with which I mentioned that the Korea Wave has been reported on by the Korean media in the past, I’ve got to say it’s refreshing to see a Korean newspaper give what appears to be such a frank account of the reasons for why the Korean Wave was so short-lived, but that of evil Japan’s has been sustained, with none of the nationalistic BS that normally accompanies articles comparing Korea to Japan.

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I wish I had seen a sunset like this while I was in Seoul, but I did get to see one behind the 63 Building on the right while I was on a leisurely boat ride on the Han River on Sunday evening. And later I got to see the same view as the picture twice from the subway, on Line 1 heading over the river North towards Seoul Station. Millions of commuters see the same thing everyday, but for a country bumpkin living in a city of only(?) 3.5 million people, and who hadn’t been to Seoul in 2 years, I was suitably impressed.

For those of you that I met in Seoul, thanks again for the lunches, coffee and drinks, and it was great meeting you all, but after taking the subways all over Seoul most evenings while I was there I didn’t feel much like exploring the city the next day! But on Wednesday afternoon I braved the cold to buy some books, and first went to Whatthebook? in Itaewon, naively surprised while en route that even at 2pm in the middle of winter upon seeing me Juicy Girls would open their “bar” doors and encourage me to come inside…I guess I haven’t lost my touch. After beating them off with a stick, the store was easy enough to find a little further up the hill, but nothing like I’d imagined: I’d ordered online from them many times, but the physical store itself was mostly second-hand books. That’s not a bad thing at all, but already having too much stuff to carry back home to Busan meant I was planning to buy just a few, probably new books, not about the 30 or so second-hand ones I could easily have walked out of there with if I lived in Seoul. Here’s the 3 second-hand ones that I did buy from there in the end, in no particular order:

1. Agricultural Cooperatives in Korea (1998), by the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation.

Hey, I said I went to Seoul and just bought books, that should have told you how much of a geek I am. Seriously though, even I don’t consider it bedtime reading, but like I’ll talk more about in Part 3 (I’ll link to that once I write it), there are big gaps in English language sources on many aspects of Korean social sciences, and it’s good to have something to study the Korean agricultural economy with when I’ll need it. And considering how important it figures in Korea’s FTAs, that might be sooner than I think. Before this, all I had was Chapter 7 of Korea, the Land and People: The Organizing Committee of the 29th International Geographical Congress (2000), not enough for that topic but which is still a great (and the only) introduction to Korean Geography in English. To any scholars in the future who have found this post by googling the title of the book, which may well happen considering it’ll be the only relevant hit they’ll get once I post this(!), let me be even more helpful by pointing you in the direction of the pdf file Improving the Agricultural Finance System: The Changing Role of Agricultural Cooperatives in Korea (2004), which shouldn’t be too out of date yet.

2. Recentering Globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism (2002) by Koichi Iwabuchi

Given the Korean Wave only really got started after this book was published, then it too is maybe a little out of date. But actually I thought that that that was a blessing in disguise, because it looked like a pretty good introdution to the economics of the Japanese Wave, and I plan to read it and then see to what extent the same things it mentioned applied to the Korean Wave, the index showing that knowledge of the latter didn’t influence his (or her?) take on the former. Despite their complete absence in my blog so far, I’m actually very into the economics of Japanese popular culture (and Korean too, if there was anything on it), and have gone so far as to have on my bookshelves, in chronological order, Postmodernism and Japan (1989), edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures (1998) edited by P. D. Martinez, and finally Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (also 1998) edited by Stephen Vlastos. Sure, I may not have actually opened any of them until I just put them down next to my laptop as I type this, but I think I’ve got good excuses for the first one (despite the blog’s title, I hate postmodernism of any stripe, and agree wholeheartedly with Noam Chomsky’s take on it), and given how recently I blogged about invented traditions then Vlastos’s book may finally see the light of day relatively soon.

It’s kind of ironic then, that I thought like that on Wednesday, only to read an article in the English Chosun Ilbo today about how the Korean Wave was just a flash in the pan, much of it copied from Japan (see the examples the article claims in the picture, which include 200 Pound Beauty) and why the Japanese Wave just keeps on coming. But neither is any great surprise, and was apparent to virtually everyone a few years ago except seemingly the entire Korean media, the government, and by extension all too many Koreans. Despite the Chosun Ilbo’s apparent about face, and the useful related links available if you click on the article, it too was guilty of grossly exaggerating the Korean Wave’s success as recently as September, which you can see for yourselves with titles like “Korean Computer Animators Rising to Challenge Hollywood” and “D-War Director Returns Home Triumphant.” The public clearly has yet to get the message too, considering netizen’s reactions to a televison debate about D-War and one of the few Koreans daring to criticise the monstrosity.

(Update: Just found this rather precient post of Michael Hurt’s entitled Why the Korean Wave Will Ebb, originally written in 2005. If you’re interested in the above, I recommend you check it out)

3. What’s So Good about Korea, Maarten? (2005) by Maarten Meijer

I usually avoid books like this like the plague, because after you’ve read one random expat’s book on Korea then you’ve read them all (although The Koreans (1999) by Michael Breen is pretty good), and Meijer seemed to have no qualifications to write the book other than having lived in Korea for 5 years and many other countries previously. Hell, he can’t even speak Korean…if he can make money writing a book about Korea, then I sure as hell should too. But then I’d been thinking a lot recently about something I read in Scott Burgeson’s hilarious Korea Bug (2005) a while back, when he interviewed Ken Kaliher, who’d lived here for 25 years…

…which compared to my meager 9 months at the time made me wonder if I had any business selling him literature that purported to “explain” various aspects of Korean culture. But he was very nice and didn’t cop an attitude at all, which he was certainly entitled to do. Actually, a lot of expats I’ve met in Korea and Japan who’ve reached that 4-5 year mark can be fairly standoffish towards relative newcomers, but I’ve found most “Old Hands” to be quite chilled out about such temporal jockeying and one-upmanship. After you’ve clocked in 15 or 20 years, you’ve pretty much seen it all and done it all. You ain’t got nothin’ left to prove. (p. 257)

I’d be one of those expats with an attitude, but I’ve been slowly admitting to myself that I don’t know everything about Korea, and I was recently very humbled by my score in my latest Korean/TOPIK test, which is why I’ve slowly started linking to and reading newbie blogs like Stranger in Suwon to get a much-needed fresh perspective on the place, although with that particular one I chose unwisely because she has just left Korea (and she never linked to me anyway, damnit so I’ve removed it from the blogroll). So I figured what the hell, it was only 6,000 won, usually 12,000 it said on the back cover (although I later found new ones, without pages falling out, for 9000 won at Kyobo) and I might learn something.

From the 72 pages I’ve read so far, I did indeed learn some titbits: pp.35-36, for instance, showed me that there are so many Kims, Lees and Parks in Korea because those were the names of some royal clans in the Silla period, and people wanted to disguise their occupational backgrounds by adopting those royal names. There are one or two others, but unfortunately I’m not sure that I can read anymore for, in short, this is the most sycophantic, outdated, incoherent crap I’ve ever read about Korea, and this is coming from a geek who has bought virtually every book he can find on Korea for the last 7 years.

The book started off well enough. I actually saw it’s Korean edition in bookstores two years ago well before I ever saw an English one, and when Meijer claims that he’ll be “painfully direct” and “straightforward,” and while “there will be no Korea bashing in this book” that this does not mean that the nation lacks problems or that it’s people have no flaws” (p. 12), you sense that he is directly talking to Korean readers. But I was already regretting the waste of money, the cost of a Black Russian, by the time I got to page 15, where he begins to aruge that criticisms of Korea are the result of a biased, ethnocentric world-view. After admitting that Scandinavian nations score “extremely high in empowerment of women,” for instance, he claims that “what exactly constitutes ‘female power’ is an issue of debate,” and defends Korean women’s extremely low empowerment by the fact that:

In many cases, the deck is firmly stacked against the inherent conservatism of Korean society and culture. Frequently, one can find western commentators complaining of the “authoritarian,” “hierarchical,” “unreasonable,” or “chauvinistic” character of the Korean male, for example. The underlying idea is that men nowadays should be democrats: egalitarian, rational gents who are in favor of absolute gender equality. Such assumptions, however, are popular notions of how society ought to be ordered based on a fundamentally wester worldview.

No, they’re not, and like I said in my introduction to this recent post, that “Asian Values” argument is at least a decade out of date. Later, on pages 33-35, Meijer again shows how out of touch he is by mentioning Koreans’ preference for sons leading to abortions of female fetuses and skewing the birth rate, but which I’ve demonstrated here is something that was indeed a big issue 10 years ago, but has since has been resolved and is not at all a concern to Koreans. Not surprisingly then, the English book hasn’t exactly gotten stellar reviews, and if you click here and then on “next message” you can read Scott Burgeson’s (the Korea Bug guy above) criticism of the factual errors in it and Meijer’s response. I’m also happy to say that, despite the somewhat biased Dutch Business Club Korea’s claims, given that “as far as [they] were told it is the first book about Korea by a Dutchman published locally,” Koreans don’t like it either!

(Update 2: I’ve just found a review of a new book called Korean Consumer Report by Scott Burgeson, which I remember also seeing the Korean version of in Korean bookstores this year, and which I fully expect in my sock this Christmas (you have been warned). The review briefly mentions Burgeson’s opinons of Meijer, and it sounds like he criticises him a great deal in that book too)

I’m not claiming at all that producing Korean versions of books automatically makes authors sycophantic, and Tariq Hussain’s Diamond Dilemma (2006), which I plan to finish and review after I get back from my vacation, seems to acheive a good balance. But it must surely be a temptation for the sake of sales, and although I can’t find the link for now sorry, in his blog Michael Hurt has mentioned how it is tedious and bizarre for non-natives but natural for Koreans to say “Our Country this,” “The Great Korean Republic” that, and “Our People,” whereas we’d just say “Korea” and “Koreans” in English, and this would surely have a subtle influence on English editions of what were originally Korean works too.

As for me, I think I’ll throw mine away to make sure it doesn’t get into an impressionable newbie’s hands! In the meantime, I did buy 3 more books that day which I intended to talk about in this post, but you’ll be happy to know that I’m going to try to stick to a limit of 1500 words per post from now on, and while this post’s 2000 words means that I’m not off to a good start, it’s much better than the 5248 one I did recently. I have some thrilling blog tidying-up to do as well, but I’ll still try to do Part 2 tomorrow, and it’ll probably be much shorter because all 3 books are very good and so I have less to rant about. After that I’ll try to do Parts 2 and 3 of Flatting, Premarital Sex and Cohabitation in Korea next week as promised, but I also have to write my next 6 posts for ZR5 Asian News before I go on vacation, so sorry, but that means that there won’t be time for many pictures of attractive Korean women for a while. If you can’t wait though, you could do much worse than checking out my second post there on Han Eun-jeong/한은정.

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