The Korean Media Aesthetic of ‘O-ba’ — Or, The Cultural Politics of the Overwrought Style

André Kim’s signature style was that of a self-described, Konglish affection of “elegance” and an unstated but obvious Overwrought Style. This is from the “André Kim Remind Show” earlier this month, the first major re-launching of his brand since his death in 2010.

A young André Kim lays it on endearingly thick in his passion to find the right fabric for women of elegance in the film Ode to My Father (국제시장).

I begin this essay by quoting Korean rapper/K-POP star CL in “Bad Girl” quoting ur-rap group Run-DMC in their song “Peter Piper” as I point out that I am talking about “bad” in the sense of “not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good.” If one were to apply the notion of “overdoing it on purpose” — or what Koreans would call “o-ba” for “over” and the kids call “extra” today — to fashion, André Kim’s entire clothing line, runway show style, and even use of models could rightly be described as “extra.”

It is something well beyond the accepted boundaries of the genre or social norms of normal comportment. Dropping overpronounced English loanwords into everyday talk in a Korean traditional market in Seoul might be begging for a “kimchi slap” even today, let alone in Busan in the 1960s. But delivered not as an affectation designed with the annoying goal of social climbing but as part of projecting an affectation of a front, a style that is part of an overall image — this is something far less odious and can even be entertaining. Put simply, it’s not meant to be taken at face value, as anything more than one part of a colorful package.

The much-memed “kimchio slap” in its original context.

Which kind of perfectly describes the K-POP aesthetic, which also functions in the Realm of the Overwrought and Overdone.

Indeed, nothing is understated here, even as nothing is really meant to represent any mode of comportment that could be considered normal. Videos such as this becoming popular in this putatively “conservative” and “Confucian” culture might seem somewhat strange, although there seems to be a place reserved for just this kind of aesthetic norm-transgressive cultural production. And I suspect that this kind of aesthetic norm violation is exactly what invites the categorization as “art” in the first place, despite it in fact not being “art” at all. Surely, it is “artistic” in that it seems like art and simulates actual, older, and more traditional forms of art quite well. But far from being a form of self-expression that originates from a particular person or an identifiable creator to which we can assign authorship, the cultural texts of K-POP production are made by not only committee, but as part of an industrial process.

It is part of a “culture industry” that functions exactly like any other industry with an inherent interest in producing not only products or even the market itself, but in producing needs and desires that can never be fulfulled by anything other than that industry. In so doing, it does social harm. That’s how they work, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that K-POP and/or K-Dramas, for example, rely on the Overwrought Aesthetic as a part of the genres themselves, since they create not only the entertaining hooks of kitsch and controversy, but they also invite the categorization into Art itself.

I am not saying that the Overwrought Aesthetic itself is a marker of being part of the culture industry, but rather that perhaps so much of the OA is a side effect of the particular way in which Korean popular culture production is forged in the factory style of the culture industry? Maybe now it is such a big part of how so much of the Korean pop culture “sausage” is made that it has become a marker of Koreanness itself?

And maybe that’s why things such as aegyo, a performance of exaggerated, dramatic “winsomeness” that is often scoffed at by many, Korean and non-Korean alike, yet which involves a certain amount of pleasure in its doing, as well as being accepted part of being Korean itself. Maybe there’s something there, maybe not. Yet, I think that overwrought expressions of desire, disgust, hate, love, lust, and loathing being not only such a big part of Korean cultural and artistic production but even markers of being Korean itself is more than a mere coincidence. Being or doing o-ba seems to be a guilty pleasure part of Korean popular culture and even identity itself. Maybe that is what makes the “kimchi slap” Korean, besides just the obvious fact of the kimchi. Althought the Overwrought Style and the performance of o-ba, as both joy and pain of the Korean mode of being, seems to be here to stay, it is still important to think about how this came to be.