Exploring K-Spaces: The New Playgrounds of Seoul
Back in 2015, after a conference presentation in which I likened the new use of public spaces in Seoul to “noriteo” (놀이터) in terms of their social use, a prominent and obviously conservative Korean sociologist came up to me and told me I was completely wrong, and that I misunderstood the way the word was used in Korean. I chalked up this bit of K-splaining criticism to him simply being an old and inflexible, curmudgeonly Korean sociologist.
From Golmok to Noriteo
I’ve held onto my working model of the “playground” ever since, since the idea occurred to me as the result of talking with a frankly much better sociologist than that pompous, stuffed suit of distinguished letters at that conference. Legendary Korean street photographer Kim Ki Chan — likely the closest thing to a legend of pure street photography one will find on this side of the pacific — talked about the fundament of Korean identity as something found in the spatial concept of the golmok (“back/side alley”). Spatially speaking, the small, cramped shacks in the golmok across every part of pre-developed Korea defined a very different warp and woof of life in the big city. One could smell what one’s neighbors were cooking for dinner, hear what they bickered about, know how often they had sex, and feel how hard they beat their kids. It was uncomfortably, involuntarily intimate and yet familial. One knew one’s neighbor. And the familiarity bred…jeong.
Spatial Politics
A lot of Koreans talk about jeong (a feeling of familar connectedness and unconditional affection) defining Koreanness, as if it were a naturally-occurring resource, writ into Korean sociobiological DNA.
But the feeling is really a result of larger social structures. And literal, physical structures. Jeong is and was largely the byproduct of space. Or at least, only possible within a certain kind of spatial environment.
Last I checked, a “playground” was defined as a “place of play.” As it is in Korean — a “teo” is a site or place on the ground, and “nori” means “play” in Korean. There is hardly any better example of a nearly complete and easy trasnlation from Korean to English: play+ground. I can only imagine this prominent korean sociologist was uncomfortable applying the concept of play to anyone other than children. Because adults do. Not. Play. Or do they?
Public Play Spaces
Because adults do also “play.” But differently. Children play with toys or simple games. Adults play in the space of consumption, with discretionary income. In leisure time. And while consuming. This is one of the social uses of space in (hyper)modern Korea.
And the idea of “play” is arguably much broader in colloquial Korean than in my native tongue (North American English), since any activity that isn’t “work” is typically described as “play” (hence the idiomatic expression “놀러가다" or literally “to go play” when doing anything such as meeting a friend, going to read in a coffee shop, or watch TV). So, the conceptual ground for considering Korean public spaces as ones of social play is wide and fertile, especially given the fact that most things that Koreans do outside of economically productive work are already quite firmly considered to be “play.” Given this fact, are not the spaces in which play is done not considerable as play spaces, i.e. play grounds?
And indeed, in the spirit of cutting the Korean Sociologist Curmudgeon in question a bit of slack, I freely aadmit and acknowledge that no, children’s “play” in sandboxes and with specific toys (jangnanggam/“play things”), and adult “play” in leisure spaces and largely through consumptive acts such as shopping or sports are not one and the same thing.
But both things are play. And it’s my observation that such modes of consumer play — formed as they have been within the cauldron of Korea’s engagement with consumerism from an experience of rapid, compressed development that was initially hostile to youth, play, and subcultures before beginning to see them as key parts of the formal economy — are being exported to places such as Vietnam, where they meet with eager and avid consumption and their own forms of localization in their new environments.
The Repurposing of Public Space
Spatially, both Vietnam and South Korea have similar experiences with certain spatial regimes, or systems/ways of doing things, usually imposed from above. The spatial regimes related to the public use of space tended to be quite strict in Communist Vietnam and order-obssessed South Korea after their respective, nation-rending civil wars and subsequent periods of development. Formal and informal rules for dress, and comportment were often strictly enforced. For example, in Korea, it wasn’t too long ago that it was thought of as extremely unsightly to be seen walking and eating, or for couples to hold hands in public. Similarly, in Vietnam, the changing role of urban space from one reserved only for official, state activities into one of unofficial, and once even illegal activities (e.g. street food vending) is a marker of the increasing importance of civil society’s norms and even institutions, according to Vietnam urban studies scholar Mandy Thomas. Especially when it comes to the bustling Vietnamese cafes with patrons spilling out onto the street,
In both Vietnam and South Korea, public space was not a space for private enjoyment. It was truly a commons in which one adhered to certain standards. It was not like now, where public space is seen as an empty, social “outer space” — a relative vacuum of social norms and rules — in which individuals can travel around inside their own, individual social bubbles. The spatial regime of public places in South Korea has shifted completely. Things that would be completely normal twenty years ago are no longer acceptable. An older man would be risking a lot by slapping an unaccompanied women smoking out in public not under the cover of a roof. Young, uniformed student couples regularly do the unthinkable by holding hands in public. Young, unmarried couples regularly kiss and show romantic affection in public.
What is interesting is how different forms of socialization, subcultures, and other social formations grow and evolve in the space many Koreans call “play.” And all this play that evolves into groups and social institutions is actually a way to make sense of larger problems and contradictions in society, such as socially stigmatized, individual behavior that finds legitimization in the formation of new identities around notions of rights (as found in the recent flowering of queer cultural expression and activism in Korea). Or take the example of the street fashion culture that has exploded in Korea, which is really a social media-focused community that started out as an avid fashion fandom and became a community marked by a creative mode of consumption and not the notion of consumption as lemmings following the program as written by marketers and culture industry controllers. All of this takes place in the space of “play.”
Public spaces in Korea have ceased to be socially regulated as spatial regimes of government control, or even spaces filled with Confucian norms of comportment. They are increasingly play spaces that allow for the “flexible sociality” that urban sociologist Cho Myung-rae described all Seoulites already possess to live in the schizophrenic spatial environment that a compressed and fractured modernity has created in the city. Yet, I would add to Professor Cho’s theory by saying that it is not merely the multiplicity of dimensions in the built environment that characterizes the “flexible sociality” of Seoulites, but it is also the fact that individual uses of public space vary so widely and according to each person (or couples, really) that they have to be flexible to the changing uses of the spaces they inhabit with others. When one goes to the CGV, with full-blown coffee shops overlapping with video arcades, screens blaring visual information in every direction as people lounge in waiting areas, and even eat gourmet food with beer and wine as people wait for the next show — it is difficult not to have to adapt to the way individuals and couples use these spaces as places to catch up on the day, kiss, or even just relax playing on their smartphones.
Hypermodern Space, Consumption as Play
Now, we simply have to talk about Pierrot Shopping. In Hypermodernity, where signs and symbols get mixed and remixed to the point that the originals they once pointed to have become irrelevant, a copy of a copy of a copy is about the same as the original. And in such a society, in which one can choose to say the original doesn’t matter anymore, one can make one’s meat, actual, physical face into the the likeness of the image that has been Instagrammed and Photoshopped into something unreal — and if this becomes a normalized practice and people and are interacting with virtual represenation of real people more than the originals, why not just make the originals look more like the digitally-altered copies? If I can shape my actual face after the K-POPPED version in the SNOW™ app, why not? Isn’t the fetishization of the original just an old-fashion, modern concept, like race, nation, and other old-fashioned, analog-era notions and outdated social fealties?
It seems that Seoul, with all its flexible sociality and multi-modality, has gotten just such as hypermodern play space. And if consumption is play, then the frenzied, hyperbolic space of retail absurdity known as “Pierrot Shopping” is its ultimate manifestation.
Pierrot Shopping is an unabashed, unadulterated, schizophrenically insane version of shopping.
But as always, the best way to experience these hypermodern play spaces is to be in them, to do things within them; to experience as they were intended (and not intended) to be used. This is why one has to actually walk through the amazing space of the DDP — it is not special because of its shape at a distance. It is an important space that one simply gets — groks — by doing social things inside it, by moving through it.
What is truly interestin as I’ve begun my drifts through the DDP, CGVs, and other multi-modal spaces of Seoul is how many times Koreans try to offer the correction that Pierrot Shopping is just a “copy” of the Don Quijote chain in Japan. But my reply is that in an age of hypermodern reproduction and glocalization (localized adaptations of global ideas), why is there such a reverence of the original? Who would disagree that K-POP has its own, signature style, albeit one that is an amalgam of western boy and girls bands in general, and rap, Motown, and the stylings of the Jackson 5 and countless others? Or that E-Mart isn’t the first and only big box store in Korea? Or that even the much-vaunted CGV isn’t itself a triumph of glocalization, since the very letters belie the trace of the chain’s globality — the “C” comes from CJ Group, while the other two quarter partners are the “G” for the Golden Harvest group out of Hong Kong while the “V” comes from Village Roadshow out of Australia. So, despite the undeniable Koreanness of the CJ •Golden •Village theater chain, CGV is its own thing. As is Pierrot Shopping. But one can only discern the key, qualitative difference directly. This is where the power of ethnography, of walking through spaces, of recording the social interactions of the actual people on the ground, becomes important.
Which is why Seoul is designed to be experienced and understood by drifting through it, by way of the dérive that members of the Situationist International and theorists in psychogeography (yes, that’s a real thing) thought was the only way to really know urban spaces and the city. I am doing psychogeography these days, so if you’d like to understand Seoul city more, you can join our little group on a dérive as we go on a drift through the DDP, CGVs, and other areas of multi-modality. I believe that Seoul is one of the most unique and rapidly-morphing urban centers on planet Earth. And I plan to continue socially mapping its hypermodern spaces and cultures. This research is done better in small groups, so I hope to see you out on the streets of Seoul!
