Model Citizen: Hanna
She is the unicorn many claim doesn’t exist: the truly edgy, IDGAF Korean female model-cum-performance artist.
When some people ask after “what the younger generation in Korea is really like these days,” the problem with describing them doesn’t simply lie in access or things like political bias per se. It’s about sampling and method.
It’s about representation. And when it comes to talking about people in large groups in large societies, it always is. It is about whom one picks to be the spokesperson, the representational exemplar, for the group. In the 1990s, was it the voice of the disaffected and disgruntled generation, as expressed in the aesthetic queerings that were the grunge sounds fronted by Kurt Cobain? Or was it the pop pap of Ace of Base, UB40, and N-SYNC? Or perhaps if one deigns to include non-whites in the examples, it was perhaps Ice Cube? So why is it that when media retrospectives on the 90s harken back to look at a certain “voice of a generation,” they tend to be look a certain way? Going in the direction of not just men, maybe it was Madonna or Courtney Love? Or even feminist rapper Yo-Yo, who briefly became the focus/locus of a national conversation about censorship and artistic freedom that even President Bill Clinton decided to weigh in on back in 1994.
Put simply, the trick lies in a large-as-possible dataset of examples that, seen together, define a pattern that we generally call a Zeitgeist or the spirit of the times. If one wants to talk about the 1990s in the USA, it is nigh-impossible to not have a conversation about disaffected youth across many demographics, as well as the music they used to express said disaffection, along with many conversations about the much-vaunted (and challenged) notion of Freedom of Speech in America, alongside huge shifts in notions of gender roles, sexuality, and more political expressions of feminism.
In such a Zeitgeist, one can easily point to Kurt Cobain and Ice Cube as varied expressions of Angst from the youth of the time. And link that back up with Madonna and Courtney Love before circling back to Yo-Yo and 2 Live Crew. So, while it’s hard to pick just one example to represent the all of the period, it’s somewhat easy to pick a group of people to define the category.
As a model, Hanna lies well outside the bell curve of what is acceptable, of what is publically palatable in the present moment. She proudly asserts her size, sexuality, and sizzle in all her pics, and can strike a powerful pose just about anywhere. She has a haughty chutzpah that many other Korean women like her only fantasize about having since that’s on the cutting edge of cool now. On that level, Hanna’s chutzpah is in intense resonance with the bold and brazen musical/visual productions of K-POP superstar Jessi, or previously CL.
They’re definitely on the same wavelength, in harmonic resonance of a sort, in-sync. But the next, inevitable question becomes — what does Hanna do? Is she a pole-dancer, K-POP performer, or some kind of other sultry worker? Surely, this must be the case?
As a matter of fact, Hanna is a chef by training, both in school and by a long stint in the kitchens of Outback Steakhouse, and is one of the people who likely cooked up your last Toomba Woomba Pasta there. She’s presently formalizing all that into a degree in Culinary Arts, which makes sense as a next step forward in her formal career path.
But that’s the trick. It isn’t all about the formal path forward for a lot of youngsters these days. In this new, hypermodern moment in which identity is as malleable as it is digital and hence downloadable, screened expressions of identity can be personally satisfying and liberating, just as they can be lucrative as sources of profit. They can be “just for fun” (hobbies) or they can become entire vocations (an Instagram “pay model” in Korea).
Which is why Hanna and I are happy to report back here the results of her first commercial photo shoot, a collaboration with a small, handmade jewelry brand called Rudely. Since I was already impressed by Hannah's modeling abilities and how she's also out to mix a visual point as much as I am, she was the perfect choice out of my group of great and unique models to propose as part of a collaboration with a jewelry brand that was also hoping to move forward cutting sharp flashes against the fabric of the universe. In this one, we made sure to use a make-up artist if you do more subtle blush and cover than what we were capable of, and the brand owner brought his assistant to help out, I need to send to go with it “messy kid at home” kind of theme.
What's interesting about shooting this kind of campaign in the Korean context is just how radical it is to suggest that a (Korean) woman is sexually active, and that she is taking active part in said sexual act. One thing I wanted to do in this ad is to literally center one of the biggest and strongest pieces from the brand, while placing the viewer into the moment even as that moment is strongly implied to be right before the actual sexual act. But one thing I tend to do much time is not graphically depict any actual acts of intimacy, since I prefer them outlined by implication rather than graphic depiction. This works stronger anyway, since the image you construct in your mind actually tends to feel stronger than something easily and cheaply placed before your eyes. And in the image above, on top of this heavy implication you were made to stand clearly and obviously higher than Hana, and quite close to her, which has a specific kind of implication that oral sex may be about to happen here. Since that's almost an inevitable assumption here, I decided in the moment to push it over the top, as I imagined a sort of public service announcement-style message that makes this entire moment make a bit more sense in terms of the media we are used to. So I decided to make a visual test, especially for the purposes of the seal and the flash come so I asked Hana to pull out one of her packs of gum from her purse and simply act like she is ripping it open, before making any direct requests of the brand and model.
It seemed to work and Hanna seem to be catching what I was throwing down. So at that point, I asked the brand owner to if he could have his assistant run to the convenience store and buy any pack of condoms because I wanted to make this image make sense even as we're looking directly at the heart of the frame almost at the item that should be the center of our attentive focus — the platinum hammer.
I was looking at Hanna as I said it and she signaled her assent, and the assistant to the brand owner was off like a shot as soon as the shock collar himself had reconfirmed to me that he was all about the edginess and that this wasn't going to be something over-the-top for even his purportedly edgy brand. (I've had several experiences in my history of working with brands and designers in which they claim to be all about pushing social boundaries and edginess, but when it actually gets focused into a concrete image that will be produced and that will rep their brands, they all back out and show their true colors as wanting to play it very, very safe.) Much to my prize, the brand owner was quite eager to do this picture, and seem to himself relieved that my commitment to edgy pictures wasn't just talk, apparently.
But we weren’t quite there yet. Since Hanna is a true model and is all about the final results and isn't so obsessed with just looking at the absolute prettiest or every element of her visage having to look perfect and attractive, I decided to grit things up in POST. So I went into face app and pushed up the structure slider far past anything usually acceptable, and then matched that by pushing of sharpness, which is something you really shouldn't do in a portrait very much, and then added some grain. All of this served to make things very clear and brought out details down to the pores also something you don't necessarily want in a portrait, especially a commercial one.
But that's the goal here, which is to make everything hyper-sharp and hyper-real, so much so that you're not even sure if you really like it, since it may be a little bit too edgy for even the most vocal Edgelord’s tastes– which is exactly the brand image of the product we were repping — RUDELY.
They liked it.
The effect is a bit harsh, and the front plate of the hammer is in shadow, but you do see the shape defined by shiny highlights, and the brand guy said it was fine by him, since the photo is strong overall (and “there’s shadows in life, baby”). I felt we’re not losing any detail really on the hammer, so this one was a GO.
I also like the fact that we can see her pupils very clearly, which becomes more powerful in this version of her posing and her expressions in which her face isn't so overly sexual but more neutral and possibly even looking into the viewer for whether things were OK. There's a lot more complexity in the last image, on top of the fact that she isn't so pretty and perfect in the way that post-production should have made her view. She's pretty and a bit sweaty and her hair is definitely out of place from when she came out of hair and make up from the very talented Marcelarin86. And in this version of the picture, you can see a lot more details in her eyes come and the place on her hand where she has apparently wiped off her lipstick for the obvious action about to happen (but actually was just testing lipstick colors as she was fixing her lips after having made her way in from the makeup artist’s place).
The subtle differences in this picture make the overall message and image and the instant much more full of sexual tension as well as ambiguity, since what was about to maybe happen wasn't going to be just a function of the viewer's desire but hers as well. The way I see it here, she's kind of confirming consent and what's going to happen as well as affirming her own desire for what's about to happen. Importantly, the viewer here is implicated in this impending action, even as the model makes herself less an object of the gears since she's looking directly into the camera lens. Generally, when we talk about female bodies and people being objectified in cameras, they are gazed at and they don't gaze back. I think that's a big part of what makes this kind of modeling moment actually a bit radical and actually and truly edgy. I feel like our mission here in conveying the brand message of RUDELY was accomplished.
Which is what actually proves Hanna is such an amazing model in the end. It takes quite a bit for an average person to see themselves as the characters in the frame place where actors occupy. The culture in which one's representation of self please very important, especially in the heavily fraught, gendered space that women screens here, it is quite a brave and bold thing to publicly imply that one may be not only a brazen woman, but a woman who is possessed of sexual agency, and perhaps even actually has — gasp! — sex herself.
Thoughts on the final results, True Believers?
PHOTOGRAPHY: Michael Hurt (@seoulstreetstudios)
MODEL: Hanna Yun (@yunhanna8663)
HAIR&MAKEUP: (@marcelarin86)
BRAND: (@rudely_official)
