Coolness, Consumption and the New Playground — Korean Spatial Regimes and the Production/Propagation of Hallyu

The CGV in Vietnam is a youthed, fantastical space of transnational yet quite glocalized cosmopolitanism. I am told that the cinema itself was seen as a pretty fancy and expensive thing. As I try and make sense of what the cinema even MEANS in Vietnam, I am told that the price of a cinema outing has remained about the same even as quality has skyrocketed, meaning that as Vietnamese earn more, quality has risen even as ticket prices have fallen, relatively speaking. No wonder this is a place to dress up and be seen for and by young people. It’s interesting that a KOREAN space has ushered in a form of glocalized cosmopolitanism in Vietnam.

“The New Playground” in Saigon

These days, and as a sociologist who has become quite entranced with places pregnant with Koreanness, I have become interested in the idea of how social influence is both produced and propagated through space. While this sounds pretty fantastickal and fancy, I do not mean outer space, nor do I even necessarily mean place space, since my notion of space can also include virtual or imagined spaces, as in not real, physical places.

The Varegiation of Korean Pop Culture Forms

When one looks at most types of Korean popular culture texts, it easy to see variegation. Some scholars may call this “cultural hybridity” or “cultural impurity” in the case of so-called musical “K-pop”(Jin et al), or the “multimodality” of built spaces such as Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza (Shumacher), the mixing of unusual cinema genres in the works of directors such as Bong Joon Ho or Park Chan Wook, or the hybridic layering of different sartorial codes in Korean street fashion looks. But in the end, musical, spatial, filmic, and sartorial texts in Korean cultural fields are all easily described as possessing high degrees of variegation. And similar to variegation in botany, true variegation is actually quite rare.

Variegation - Wikipedia

Put simply, “Variegation is the appearance of differently coloured zones in the leaves, and sometimes the stems, of plants…”

text.

KOREAN MODES

Compressed Modernity

“Flexible Sociality”

“Multimodality”

Korean spaces are full of compressed modernity and flexible sociality, as well as “multi-modality” (Shumacher), all mixed with a discursively complex relationship with notions of Tradition that occasionally manifests as brief bouts of nostalgia. Real nostalgia as an existential concern seems to be part of the growing pangs of modernity. In hypermodernity, Nostalgia is just another trend that speaks to the affectation of affection for an Original.

It occurs to me that the purposeful deployment of multimodality in the DDP structure as a theoretically interesting design imperative is similiarly produced in the space of the Korean cinema, as formalized and franchised into consistent reproduction by chains such as CGV. Indeed, cinemas in the modern era have long been spaces that have heralded more advanced stages of modernity and even postmodernity perhaps, with hypermodernity becoming a mode as well with the advent of their Korean formations. Cinemas have long been spaces of mixed social uses that simply make sense together — concession stands, arcades, and sitting areas, for example. But they have always been united by necessity and the exigencies of waiting, killing time.

Truly Korean Spaces

The DDP

The CGV
However, the typical CGV mixes much more disparate social uses in more completely integrative ways — complete coffee shops blend in smoothly with “claw machine” and video game arcades, which morph effortlessly into picture booth/ticket customization/souvenir-making areas, along with benches and other seats at the periphery to merely sit and wait for time to pass. Notably, the CGV is a space that brings together varies social use spaces that are often their own kind of commercial, social spaces, entities unto themselves. Coffee shops, “claw machine”/video game arcades, restaurants, noraebang/karaoke rooms, the occasional art exhibition, and even the wide, open areas of parks or the Korean madang all come together in the Korean CGV. Within the Korean theater, seating style varies widely to accomodate a variety of social uses. The only thing the CGV seems to lack is live performaces, although this occasionally happens. Even waiting areas are varied; from high tables and high, long bench-style seats that one might find in a bar, to coffee shop tables and chairs gathered in clusters, modes of social sitting vary quite widely.

I would argue that the CGV is the most multimodal social space in any South Korean setting, which matches the “flexible sociality” inherent to South Korean, hypermodern society.

High Theory

On Ernst Haeckel

Korean spatial regimes are pregnant with the processes that made them in that they are a spatial ontogeny that recapitulates the phylology of Korean compressed development. Ernst Haeckel famously postulated that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” — that the evolutionary history of a species is recapitulated in the embryonic development of each individual organism of that species. Or one might understand this in terms of the similar biological concept of neoteny, which postulates that the adult form of an organism takes as its final shape that of an increasingly younger version of that species form. [reformulate this]

Fantastic Universes

Rhizomatic, Hypermodern Space

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

The space in which BTS moves, from stage to stage, is hyperspace — a rhizomatic, hypertext version of the normal spaces music videos often place themselves in. Take a normal, spatially conservative music video that functions in the fantastic world of the music video, say in Nikki Minaj’s realm of (sexual) fantasy in “Anaconda.”

It’s a fairly conservative text, actually. Beginning with the founding 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 pinapples, coconuts, and 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.

V-POP, which is the Vietnamese re-channeling/re-interpretation of an unmistakable K-POP aesthetic, demonstrates this fantastic, rhizomatic visual world, demonstrates the Koreanness of the virtual space it creates.