The Elements of the Korean Style: Parasite and the Synthetic/Syncretic, Korean Aesthetic

The Elements of the Korean Style: Parasite and the Synthetic/Syncretic, Korean Aesthetic





The Elements of the Korean Style: Parasite and the Synthetic/Syncretic, Korean Aesthetic


Michael Hurt
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Feb 12 · 22 min read




A young paepi mixes categories and modes of fashion seamlessly and seemingly without sartorial effort, even as her perfectly applied, makeup artist-level skills and adds up to a composure that radiates an apparently natural and easy “found” beauty in the “street” fashion of Seoul Fashion Week in March, 2019. Her effortless cool belies the skills and labor that actually go into learning fashion shoot-level makeup to the point it looks like effortless, as well as the bravado of genre/code mixing that she practices. Image by Dr. Michael W. Hurt


A TRIUMPH OF GLOBALITY

Korea’s had a global mindset since the beginning of modern Korean identity. And while yes, the last week has indeed been a wild ride for South Korea, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking Korea’s mindset has somehow undergone a radical shift, akin to some birthing into a global mindset. And I do not mean to downplay the impact of Parasite landing four Oscars and Bong Joon Ho being crowned as the King of Korea right now. Indeed, ALL the Korean Newseses have been doing a touchdown dance on behalf of the “Great Empire of Korea” — from the KBS to the SBS, the MBC to the JTBC, and every other letter combination of legacy broadcast media here. It’s a huge win in a cultural industry shot through with the sadaeju-ui (a “deference to greater power”) that powers the feeling of triumph every time South Korea makes a cultural slam dunk in an international field. When PSY straight broke YouTube it was a paradigm-shifting moment in a modern Korean history marked by national elation at breaking the USD $10,000 GDP per capita income level in 1994 (when I first came to Korea on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship and would stay on it until 1996), and also punctuated the painful “IMF crisis” that began in 1997 and dipped the nation back under the 10,000 mark in a psychically weighty way. Before that, the 1988 Seoul Olympics was a national debutante ball that allowed South Korea to bask in the all-vindicating and all-validating spotlight of bona fide globality that had actually been only imagined by a burgeoning Korea in the shadow of modernity (but far from actually modern) as early as the beginning of powered flight. Indeed, this year has been the time of the local CGV (the big Korean movie chain, a multinational joint venture between Korean conglomerate CJ, Chinese Golden Harvest, and US-owned Village Roadshow) and the Korean Film Commission (KOFIC) running spots everywhere lauding 100 years of Korean cinema. And then the Academy dropped the BONG on us. In terms of neat, round, little numbers, it has been just perfect.
The Korean Film Commission has created a series of 100 young directors to celebrate 100 years of Korean film. 1919 was a significant year in Korean history, marking the beginning of the independence movement and the birth of modern Korean identity as a nation. All that in the background makes this a big win for Korean cinema, but also a win tinged with larger, symbolic meaning.

And this all makes sense — Korean national identity itself formed against the looming spectres of the larger nations that were the shot-callers in the 1890s to the first couple decades of the 20th century and wanted a piece of Korea— that’d be mainly China, Russia, France, Japan, and the USA — well before a Second World War would cleave Coreé in two across its mid-section. In that sense, Korea had always had to see itself in an international context and has always measured itself by international concepts and metrics, since Korea’s mode of contact with other countries has always been in terms of thirsty, more powerful nations coming to size it up. And as circumstances would have it, Korea ended up getting colonized and exploited in a modern way by imperial Japan, which would force modernization on it for its own benefit. Then the Pacific War (what Americans call WWII) happened Hiroshima and Nagasaki disappeared, causing the Japanese to surrender on August 15th, which the former Allied call “VJ Day” and Koreans celebrate as Independence Day. But the USA was now (an apparently benign) occupying force, which it would be from 1945–1948, when the independent Korean republic would officially come into being, but only get a short start out that gate before the Korean War (1950–1953) would leave the country in tatters and twain in two. So, as South Korean modernization kicked into high gear under first Japanese imperial exploitation, then American military occupation, before it was focused through decades of (US-influenced) domestic military dictatorship, followed by actually democratic, civilian government only from 1992(!), South Korean great expectations have always been global in their imaginings, measurings, and vindications.

From the perspective of the Asian colonial underdog mindset, there have been two major moments of upset in which an Asian, non-white, underdog has come out of the blue and beat the White West at its own game, on an international field of competition. The first was when Japan beat the Russians on the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, which was a huge upset that brought the Natural Order of Things into question. It also happened to be a war fought partially in and over what was Korean territory. But more than being bad news for Korea, it was an unexpected case of the West not having won. And clearly, I’m going to call the Bong Bombing of the Oscars that second moment of upset. For the eternal underdog and developmental Wunderkind South Korea, it was like winning the lottery, getting into Harvard, and sucker punching the schoolyard bully all at the same time.

I think we all felt like Marty watching his Dad lay Biff out in the ultimate payoff of 80s Hollywood spectacle cinema. In a single instant, the feeling of surreality expressed on George, Marty, and the movie audience’s collective faces encapsulate that weird, unexpected moment of surprise, relief, and elation that I felt watching Bong and company win, again and again, and seeing them all feeling the same thing reflected on their faces. THAT was all of South Korea Tuesday afternoon at lunchtime. The whole world was gawking in disbelief, breathily wondering, “Is that George McFly?!?!”


Yet, that all being said, this is not to imply that recognition by the Bright, White West is the goal of all projects.


Because despite the fact of sadaeju-ui in the Korean, cultural background, the assumption that concrete recognition itself is the end goal of all artistic endeavor can be pretty insulting and go off the rails, especially if tinged with a particularly American kind of chauvinism.

Still, if one looks at South Korean history, the big elephant in its history is the fact of Korea’s popular culture heterogeneity and technocultural hybridity. And if you really think about it, Korea is likely the only country on ERF to have been on the business end of colonial (or neocolonial) influence by both eastern and western powers (Chinese suzerainty, Japanese imperialism, and US neocolonial control), making Koreans a people with an extra-special kind of postcolonial identity. Koreans are a people for whom scrappiness breeds happiness, the copying and cutting and repasting of memes like THISISHOWUMAKEAJEEPENGINE and ROCKMUSICISPOWER or even WHITESKINMEANSGOODNESS can create wealth and power, and for whom the American boogieman of cultural appropriation is merely an effective survival technology.

THE HOST (2006) was much like PARASITE in terms of it being a heterogeneous genre mashup — varying parts creature feature, social commentary, parody, and black comedy, which all get tied up in a bow as a family drama/tragedy, and for which (full disclosure) I did the subtitles.


THE KOREAN STYLE

I’ve explained the elements of Korean style before, though. This is a little ditty I wrote from when BLACKPINK was likely first in yer areas.

BTS, Blackpink, and the Elements of Korean Style

Strange and wonderful things are afoot at the circle “K.” Indeed, if I had gone back in a time machine to just over two…

medium.com

Therein, I talked about several of the things I will outline below. I’m going to use visual exampes to talk about the theory, and use clothing style as the concrete way of talking about Korean style in general. SO, my interest, orientation, and bias as South Korea’s first, full-on, full-time street fashion photographer will become apparent in the visual examples and my use of sartorial style as both concrete examples and explanatory metaphor. So, as you read through the enumerated points below, pay close attention to the picture captions if you want to follow the argument, since a lot of the action is in those captions, especially in the street and runway pics I took.
#1 — It’s Da Remix!

See, if you hadn’t noticed, Korean fashion, beauty, aesthetics, errythang is super hot right now. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at VOGUE, TeenVOGUE, HighSnobiety, or ANY major fashion media outlet in the last 5 years around March or October.

The Best Street Style From Seoul Fashion Week Spring 2020

Fashion month isn't over yet! Spring 2020 shows are taking place in Seoul this week, and the street-style looks…

www.vogue.com

These Five Designers From Seoul Fashion Week Should Be on Your Radar

We may have Paris, Milan, London, and New York for seeing what's up next for big fashion houses like Valentino, Gucci…

www.teenvogue.com

South Korea's Accessory Game is Next Level at Seoul Fashion Week

Location: Seoul Season: FW19 Key Looks: Swipe to slide #12 for oversized orange-dyed polo neck styled with an usual…

www.highsnobiety.com

Much to everyone’s surprise, Korean “street” style has made Seoul one of the most influential style hubs in the world. WWD (Women’s Wear Daily) just opened a branch in Korea, i.e. that’s a big, fucking deal. Everyone is looking in Korea’s direction (has been for several years now) for its aesthetic cues. Yet, all this tends to fly under the radar, unnoticed and unfeted. That is until a Korean wins a Grammy, Cannes honor, Golden Globe, or Oscar. I recently interviewed Paris Hilton about her opening her new Micro DNA skincare line in Korea to succeed here first because doing well in South Korea actually adds street cred to any future US launch, because Korea is just that cool now. But the field of fashion doesn’t have a prize quite like the Oscars or the Emmys to capture and display.

In this shot from the runway show of Graphiste Man.G at Seoul Fashion Week, layered and interleaved materials, types, and feels of clothing and accoutrements add up to neon stockings worn with fishnets, banners and knit sweaters, a name tag as a graphic, chains and pearls, along with less-than-demure “MY POETRY“ leather choker to pair with the Harley Quinn transgressiveness that has become its own “bad girl” trope. [Image credit: Dr. Michael W. Hurt]


Paris Hilton or Beyoncé wearing a Korean designer’s dress is Kool and the Gang, but it ain’t an award or a statue. While it caused a furor for those following fashion in Korea, something like a Beyoncé moment has an influence that is far more diffuse; yet it exerts a strong influence you might have caught wind of, but never consciously put your finger on.

Image from US Magazine, 2018.

No pants, No problem! Stars Who Have Stepped Out Without Bottoms

What this girl needs is a pair of pants. The pop star stepped out twice in one week sans bottoms, first for a dinner…

www.usmagazine.com
#2 — Hypermodern Transgressiveness

I’ve argued elsewhere that Korea is the first culture to quietly embrace a hypermodernity in which old, traditional categories of self such as boy/girl, teacher/student, Korean/foreigner, hetero-/homosexual, or even one’s occupation-as-identity are blurring or even dissolving away, replaced by categories in which individuals can pick and choose, alternate between, or even remix in different ways. Although Korea’s conservative Confucian values supposedly define the culture, that culture code is not the firmware being run by a younger generation that sees themselves as consumers first, whatever other interchangeable identities second. A 20-year-old Korean is much more likely to see herself as a Marvel movies fan, Webtoon aficionado, or feminist; if this were 1970, that same kind of Korean person might see his identity through the business card he carries, the status and position he holds, or other assigned social categories. Nowadays, a new generation of Koreans is defining itself according to its own ways and means.

In the traditional Confucian view of a previous age and generation, one’s own body and skin were not really one’s own to do with as one pleased; however, nowadays, one’s skin is just another canvas for expression, much like clothing is. Which is why tattoos and piercings have become acceptable amongst younger Koreans. The degree and extent of tattooing is a matter of personal taste, but the very idea of a tattoo or piercing arouses little surprise from most people under the age of 30. I do think this shifting feeling of positionality/identity is what allows films like Bong’s to occupy a position outside a simple nationalism, which is a space within which to enjoy a film that vigorously interrogates society like PARASITE does. [Image credit: Dr. Michael W. Hurt]

#3 — The Synthetic as Technocultural Aesthetic

Of course, that sounds like a mouthful. Techno-whaaaat? I can already see people thumbing their apps close and hopping over to Instagram. But I assure you, “technoculture” or even “technocultural studies” is a thing. This section is long, but actually fun — and has lotsa pictures. I assure you it’s worth sticking in for.

Technoculture

Technoculture is a neologism that is not in standard dictionaries but that has some popularity in academia, popularized…

en.wikipedia.org

Because human society’s understanding of science and technology is a thing. And the way societies think about technologies, linked to the ways those technologies enter society (or certain societies), inform the way those technologies actually get used, how they affect our daily lives. I’ll offer a concrete example to start with:
“The future is not set.” But our imaginings of it are sure pretty rigid, steeped as they are in fear of technology, automation, specifically. Given the lack of actual experience with any real AI in the 80s, it was merely fear of robotics as a labor threat that caused so much suspicion of fictional AI and robots. This unfortunate technocultural bias against robots extends throughout popular culture, with the “killer robot” taking shape as a dramatic trope because of the unique way robots entered our technoculture in actuality as a thing to replace us. It is apropos to that bias that the climax to Terminator I was set in an automated factory.

The Art of Artifice

In a very big way, our ongoing, changing relationship to artifice (artificiality) itself is part of an ongoing conversation about how society changes culture. Every time we hear people talking about the bygone “good old days” when singers sang songs, band members played real musical instruments, boys were boys, girls were girls, etc., when things were clear and real. We’ve been lamenting change in the technoculture that brings in doubt about musical virtuosity itself, in the days since the sampler, synthesizer, and vocoder were invented. Actually, the conversation about this huge technocultural shift should have started well before people started hearing that Autotune™ was being used to adjust bad singing in the 90s. A new technocultural reality had already started obviously and as far back in the 1950s, with Ray Charles singing with himself, but it was seamless and no one noticed, so no one minded.


In a similar way, the South Korean technoculture surrounding beauty technologies, photography, and its related digital tools has come to terms with the reality of unreality, and is OK with it. The US, for example busies itself fretting over being true to oneself and “real” beauty campaigns, and loves to fake-shame Korean stuff just for fun (I’m looking at you, Buzzfeed plastic surgery storyfests), while Korean society just has tended to accept it as a part of its new normal.

The Korean Pageant Contestants Who Look Insanely Similar Finally Competed

Without photoshop getting in the way, we can see just how similar these young women look without retouching. So, is…

www.buzzfeed.com

One doesn’t have to like it to accept it, but it simply needs to become a part of everyday life. In this way, one can pine for the days of homegrown garage bands all day long, but the days of The Beatles or N.W.A. are over. Technology has moved on and in. Autotune is expected, and it can be done live. The more you lament this, as though technologies and the cultural adjustments around them (the technoculture) can be undone, the more of a “boomer” you are. (How funny and convenient there is a word for that). In fact, the more fretting there is over something, the more it tends to be a sign that the thing in question is about to be really settled into the technoculture. Complain all you want about “fake” versus “real” music and your old grandas CDs. The semiotic soup of hypermodernity is here, and K-POP is its prophet. You can’t escape.

By throwing the baggage of reality out the window, by simply putting down the load of guilt about fantasies of the old ways, Korea has embraced the digital, accepted artifice itself. Nowhere is this more apparent than beauty and fashion.

This photograph looks pretty real, but only looks ok in a certain way because it is a product of the technoculture — of a variety of technologies and productive processes that allow us to enjoy this picture as “real.”


For our fun technoculture example, let’s dive in deep, starting with the obvious and then moving down to the hidden and obscure layers of the technocultural reality of a picture. In the picture above, we see an attractive, young, Korean model frozen in time, laid bare before the Canon 6d MKII [digital] single lens reflex (DSLR) camera with Wifi capability, its lens and imaging sensor, then written to a MicroSD memory card as an 8-megabyte JPEG that I transferred directly from my DSLR into my iPhone via the Canon Connect™ iOS app. That’s just the facts. Let’s do a technocultural analysis of what that all meant in the making of the photograph and how we consume it.

First of all, let’s start with the not-all-that-old technology of photographs themselves. I’m not gonna get all deep into the history because we don’t have the space here, but the first photograph of a human being was taken in 1838 by Louis Daguerre and exposed the guy getting his shoes shined quite by accident as one of the few humans and objects to stand absolutely still during the minutes-long exposure.
First picture of a human EVER. The street looks empty because nothing stayed still long enough to register during the super long exposure. It was a super fluke. [Credit HERE]

But starting with just that, photo tech evolved to allow freezing people in time in what is actually an unnatural way, frozen in mid-jump, mid-gesture, in a way that lays out every aspect of a moment for slow, leisurely inspection. This is not how reality works inside our mind’s eye. Video actually works more like our brains do. Photography works and sticks around as a technology precisely because of its inherent unnaturalness. If you think about it, the photograph itself is artificiality-on-a-plate. But we just got used to it. In fact, we learned to love photographs.

Put that unnatural time slicer into a smaller box x because of dry (vs. wet)-plate negatives, you change the camera from an oversized crate to something that can be carted around from room to room, so you go from people holding still in studios to handheld cameras and as it goes from large paper film to 35mm with sub-second shutter speeds, you get street, documentary, fashion, and all kinds of photography in areas you couldn’t socially “see” a mere century prior. Of course, cameras keep getting smaller until they fit into a small, handheld computerlinked to the Internet, which Steve Jobs sneakily tricked us into believing was something called a “phone.” But Apple being a computer software company, had actually created a Trojan horse for another Apple computer operating system (which it again could not adequately protect legally) and people got used to having a camera in their pockets. Which changed nearly every aspect of our lives, especially with the advent of social media and the easier-to-code-and-create “app” environment.

Here’s that pic again just do you don’t have to scroll up and down so far.

The very lovely Original. Jisu (Instagram @kittenish_moon) is a first-time model whom I met at last Seoul Fashion Week (she’s a clothing design major with an amazing fashion sense) and she just has an intensity aand lack of fear of the lens that few people, save models, have.

Here we’re talking about Instagram’s social sharing of picture-and-text posts, hashtags, and augmented reality programs like Snow™ or Meitu’s MakeupPlus, combined with PhotoShop-like programs such as Snapseed, along with Adobe’s Photoshop. Before even getting to the digital makeup and face-shaping power of MakeupPlus, the texture-maxing and exposure evening power of the High Dynamic Range (HDR) filter in the Snapseed app, we need to talk about the fact that the ringlight I used was not something photocivilians had access to for under around USD $1500.

$74.00??? This is a game changer.


It was a technology for big ballers and industry professional shot callers, not for mere mortals. And they looked cool precisely because you and I could not afford them.

This video could have been easily called “We have RINGLIGHTS! We have RINGLIGHTS! Just like Destiny’s Child and Madonna!” Merely the using of them on dollies and staring/singing at the camera within them was very 90s technocultural moment. But now, YouTubers have even big ones for $80.


And then you have that $50 hair extension piece that is so cheap, real-looking, and ubiquitous that it raises the bar of looks and styles, this also marks another direction of technological convergence, So, altering the model’s hair profile was another base layer of artifice available to us before even opening the digital toolbox. But this is just another part of the aesthetic landscape.

So with our beginner model — this was her first pro photoshoot — once she had had her hair did and was in her official fancy outfit for the shoot, we moved with our light and portable ringlight into the corner of the Vietnamese joint we were in and used its nicely painted, minimalist-industrial look to make some nice pictures. And since I was shooting with MakeupPlus in mind, I tried to keep the hair off her face and eyes as much as possible so as not to create weird or jarring overlap effects.
A similar cut, but the MakeUp Plus program puts on a watermark if you haven’t paid, so I used Photoshop to deal with it, albeit rather crudely.
My crude edit of her arm, where that watermark inconveniently overlapped with. So I clumsily used the Spot Heal Tool because I suck at manual tools in Photoshop. But it was enough.

And the final product in Instagram, where at normal sizes, the clumsy arm fix is fairly unnoticeable, and Instagram’s blue-leaning Clarendon filter at 50% kept the model from getting too warm-toned and made the light look harder, which was enhanced by directing the model to continue looking at the camera like she was scared of it. The makeup scheme was a preset but the eyeliner was called “Bold” and I enlarged her right eye (her left) in Photoshop because it’s natually a TAD smaller than the other— but the point here is that no one piece of artifice is any more or less “fake” than another, the reality of which Korean technoculture has simply accepted.


Korea has simply accepted artifice as part of artforms, or perhaps an artform unto itself. Indeed, in the hypermodern world that equates all signs and symbols — all aesthetic elements — into an alphabet soup where no one part is more significant or special than the other, who cares where stuff comes from, what the Original is? We live in a digital world where a copy is the same as a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, so who cares who made the first copy of that illegally downloaded file of The Mandalorian? Or that car engine? Or that cool dress I saw om the Internet? It works, right? I look good in Instagram, don’t I? You don’t like plastic surgery cuz it ain’t what you were born with? But why? Especially if you can make your meat-self look like the digital version of your ideal self? We have the tech to do it seamlessly, so why not make the Original look like the superior copy? Korean technoculture just tends to shrug its shoulder art at such meaningless conundrums.
#4 — Postcolonial Pluck and a Syncretic Aesthetic

Put simply, Koreans are used to mixing things up, and as identity has become more malleable, more admixture seems not only possible, but proper. [Image credit: Dr. Michael W. Hurt]


There is a Korean style in (cultural) production’s willingness to use/repurpose anything to make things work. As a country that has learned to live in the shadow of either outright colonizers such as Imperial Japan or under the influence of other big brothers with very large cultural sticks, South Korea learned to be at ease with outside cultural influence. Korea calls this tendency (for better or worse) sa-dae-ju-ui or “deference to the greater.” This general mode of comfort with combinations that might otherwise culturally/aesthetically offend as outside, dissonant elements that “shouldn’t go together” is what allows them to occur in the first place.

And as a coherent Korean style solidifies, it becomes itself easier to mimic in the global cultural appropriation machine. 2019 V-POP (Vietnamese K-POP — cuz yes, that’s a thing) faithfully imbibes what’s hot in K-POP now, with hip hop/indie-style artist collabs.

The Vietnamese are copying the NEW masters of the pop culture universe, the Koreans, since Koreans have appropriated various strands of musical performance into its own formula, its own, new gumbo recipe that itself is easier to copy than doing it from scratch oneself.


So, I’m going to end this long essay on Korean style inspired by the BONG & Co. wins in cinema with more talk about K-POP after having anchored this conversation with examples from sartorial style. But note that whether it’s actual clothing, music videos, or film, those same factors of 1)the remix aesthetic, 2)hypermodern transgressiveness and 3) postcolonial pluck/ a syncretic aesthetic can all be applied to not only seeing heterogeneity in Korean cultural products, but explaining how they actively cohere to become a discernible Korean style. Or did you see that Parasite birthday ending coming, along with the resultant drain bamage it would cause, both onscreen and in your seat? Yeah, thought not. Which is why, if you think about it, even putatively raunchy, raucous American cultural products are BOOMERIFICALLY boorish and basic now, by newer, Korean standards. While booty shots and fabulous twerkiliciousness may seem edgy, you can see it is actually quite clichéd and obvious. Now, in this example, I’m not singling out Nikki as tired, but American sensibilities for ever finding this edgy or shocking, cuz really — BANANAS and COCONUTS and an ANACONDA??? On the nose much?




Because, you see, “Anaconda” is actually a fairly conservative text. It is a Newtonian understanding of space and employs an antiquated semiotic/symbolic logic. It is quite linear and thematically narrow — sex, sex, sex. Beginning with the establishing metaphor of the “anaconda” (long, thick penis) that is introduced with the Sir-Mix-a-Lot sample from “Baby Got Back”, from which Minaj’s video directly riffs, the logical mise en scéne is that of the jungle, where the anaconda lives. And from there, the extension of that placement in video space moves on to include pineapples, coconuts, and, of course, bananas. Of course, there are jumps into fantastically empty, symbolic spaces such as a lap dance chair or a completely empty, white fantasy space in which to highlight lascivious dance moves, but the majority of the video’s spatial imagining is squarely in the realm of the narrowly interpreted, organizing metaphor of the jungle, with expected references to wildness, sexuality, sweating, and brazen sexuality. While the hypersexual representations on screen are indeed socially provocative, the video itself is quite semiotically conservative, nearly staid and artistically safe in its basicness. Now, for the Korean style and why it’s actually far more interesting. If you take a heaping helping of hip hop, a bag of already-defined K-POP genre conventions evolved from group acts ranging from Motown to NSYNC, then throw in some newer musical trends such as the subsonic bass and triplet syncopations of trap music, and then wrap it all up with inspired art direction, you might get something like Blackpink’s smash hit “Kill This Love.”




Put quite simply, this video is out of this world. I mean this not just figuratively but also literally. They’re on other planets, in other worlds. They’re in their own cinematic universe. They in rhizospace. Yes, I just said that. Cuz rhizomes are cool. They also mark how hypermodern people think — not linearly, but in hyperlinked, random direction branches that can lead you off into oblivion, or right back to where you started. Chew on this:

Rhizomatic learning

Rhizomatic learning is a variety of pedagogical practices informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari…

en.wikipedia.org

And by the end of the video, we have Blackpink members shooting arrows at themselves, and dancing within the giant, metal maw of a fantastically gargantuan beartrap. Wow. In this video they are not on Earth. They are not in space. They are in a different fantastic universe.

And now, if we were to talk about BTS, we easily could, since they exist in rhizospace, too. In the better K-POP vids, they are barely-related vignettes, which don’t follow a plodding, tired set of logical jumps, as in banana/penis cuts to pussy/peaches, cuts to jiggling butts. It’s sun goddesses snaps to trendy Instagram studio snaps to stylized scene from Deathproof to “dirty” back alley goes to the maw of a giant bear trap (what?!). Every jump cut of a Korean music video is as logically unlikely and surrealistically thrilling as watching Je-Shi-Ka get knifed in the fucking heart at that birthday party. She didn’t deserve that and didn’t “have it coming” (which would be the closed-loop, moral logic of a Hollywood film, in which one doesn’t kill dogs, kids, or the otherwise innocent). But back to BTS:

Watch this video. They are not on Earth. They are not in space. They are in a different fantastic universe.


A rhizomatic visual logic here jumps around from one logical point to another, like hyperlinks on the web, to which we have become quite accustomed. The better K-POP music videos, like the K-Fashion that parallels (and helps define) its style, move rhizomatically. This is one of K-POP videos’ trademark moves, besides the extreme precision of the choreography, which the “Kill This Love” video only got to as a perfunctory afterthought to remind people that this is, after all, a K-POP video.

That rhizomatic randomness is alive in this Korean street fashion look as well.

And again, speaking of rhizomatic jumps, back to BLACKPINK. In what just might be the first K-POP video of the post-#metoo/Burning Sun Age of Revelations, the video is noticeably devoid of the standard oversexualizing genre conventions of K-POP music videos involving writhing, lithe young women. Devoid of distracting butt, breast, or lascivious lip licking shots, the video is a tour de force of fantasy depictions of super female Übermenschen. But girls this time. Holy. Godlike. The video begins with silver brass actually heralding their imminent arrival in a Cathedral of Holy Bling. Then they appear as Ameterasu-like sun goddesses who figuratively hold human hearts in their hands as clutch purse accessories. And then, they literally kick in the door in a visual assault of colorful kitsch as powered by the same kind of studios now popular with Korean Instagram influencer-models that serve up American-style cereal boxes and shopping carts-as Pop Art that would make Andy Warhol or Ray Liechtenstein squee in delight. After the head nod to Korean Instagram and another appearance of the sun goddess Ameterasu, we are presented with a remix of the cinematic cliché of the girl revving her American power car and running down her weaker self in a Tarantino-in-Deathproof effort to kill the kind of clichéd love that is the topic of the song. And that’s before even getting to the standard K-POP-perfected display of kinaesthetic hip(g)nosis that comes with the de rigeur, synchronized dance routine that is a genre staple.

Syncretism

Syncretism () is the combining of different beliefs, while blending practices of various schools of thought. Syncretism…

en.wikipedia.org

But if we want to really talk turkey, it is time to ditch the word “hybridity.” To be frank, it only seems to be a keyword in Korean Cultural Studies because it was grandfathered in by a few theorists who pointed out the multi-layered, heterogeneous nature of K-POP videos in the theoretical terms they remember from the 1990s. (Thanks for pointing this out, Yongha). “Hybridity” works, but it implies the obvious in a purely descriptive way, akin to saying “the sky is blue” but not explaining why. A “hybrid” thing simply has multiple constituent parts, but a “syncretic” set of relationships implies a varied number of elements that have adapted, adjusted to one another. It is often used to describe how indigenous elements live on even in religions that come to subsume them, albeit not completely. Much like Korean animistic rituals of giving offerings to dead ancestors live on syncretically within even many practicing Christians in Korea, syncretically co-existing elements within a category of social practices or aesthetically-defined genres can wrap around and reinforce one another, complement one another, or even just agree to disagree and exist alongside one another without interfering. The elements acknowledge one another and more actively form an organic, new whole.

The syncretic (and yes, hybridic), elements do seemingly jump around rizhomatically yet not randomly since they are thematically bound together by the text (the video/film/clothing look) itself so they are in fact (and by definition) not random things bouncing around for no apparent reason. They are made to cohere by being placed into something by a Creator. There’s an active, conscious agency to force a coherence among things that would seem to not make sense together. The syncretism is as forced as it seems natural. And that tension created by the natural, centripetal tendency for things to fly apart yet they don’t because the artist’s vision that keeps them strapped together — that tension is where the surreality lives, where the freshness, the thrill of K-Things comes from. This forced coherence of the seemingly disparate moments of everyday life combine with what Korean urban sociology scholar CHo Myung-rae has invoked as the reason everyday life in Seoul is marked by a “flexible sociality” that is a very, very Korean thing. All of these things, from the colonial history and deferential relationship with a powerful and superior West that is imagined to be white (and superior), combined with the surreality of Korean everyday life that finds expression in the funky cultural products that the new, cool kids produce, all cohere into a Korean style that unites all K-Things together.

Depending on whom you ask, Korea is either defining or riding the forefront of the “big ugly 80s shoes” retro trend. And it also makes sense that two sisters from Finland convinced Dad (not pictured) to take them to Seoul Fashion Week in October of 2017, where they could experience, channel, and display as many Korean fashion trends as possible all at once, especially Disruptors from Fila, which has been a Korean brand since 2007. They rolled in ALL the Korean “street” trends into one look. Or did you not already know that FILA is a Korean brand now? [Image credit: Dr. Michael W. Hurt]


Actually, you can catch this style in the storytelling skill of this character from what I consider Bong’s best moment of screenwriting/directing/casting — my personal fave, even including Parasite. And much like Barking Dogs Never Bite, or A Higher Animal (two separate Engish titles that come from seemingly conflicting thoughts about how to translate the title that most easily can be translated as Flander’s Dog (플랜더스의 개) is really like 10 movies interleaved and rolled into one:
a genre horror flick
a black comedy
social commentary and critique of corruption
a mystery
social documentary
a farcical sports film
a soapy, Korean (couple) drama
The OG moment when you tell a ghost story from the horror story of Korean rapid, pell-mell development in order to scare away the guy who wants to share the soup you’re about to make from the dead dog you just FOUND as the apartment complex janitor, cuz you want to enjoy it all by yourself. It’s just a bullshit story, yet it’s “true.” Anyway, it’s Maximum Bong.
But don’t take MY word for it. This review was made long before you likely knew nuthin’ ‘bout a Bong.
Pretty good Bong, but actually only the best that had subs on YouTube.

About the author:

Dr. Michael W. Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies and started Korea’s first street fashion blog in 2006. He researches youth and digital subcultures along with street fashion culture as a research professor in the SSK Center for Glocal Culture and Social Empathy at the University of Seoul and also teaches Cultural Theory and Art History at the Korea National University of the Arts. His PR/image curation company Iconology Korea also engages in an effort to positively shape images of Korea, construct a positive, outbound face for Korea-based clients, while conducting fine-grain, ethnomethodological research for Korea-interested, inbound clients. Dr. Hurt also teaches Ethnomethodology and Technomethodology-grounded market research techniques while continuing to use the camera as both field recorder and artistic tool of access to digital subcultures in Seoul.



Kore
Parasites
Korean Cinem
K Cinema
Korean Style


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Michael Hurt
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A visual sociologist writing, teaching, and shooting in Seoul since 2002.




Deconstructing Korea
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A theoretical consideration of Korean pop culture and society.

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