The New Playgrounds of Seoul: Fashion, Consumption, and Hypermodernity
This book is not about the past, a look at Korean history through pictures. This book takes a different approach to understanding contemporary life in Korea — it looks to Seoul as the future, as a future already in motion right now. But it also examines the very idea of past, present, and future in the Korean sense. For too long, Korea defined itself as the past-still-in-motion, as a “backwards” nation and culture still in need of “catching up.” Often, places such as Japan or Tokyo are seen to define the future, and the term “futuristic” has often been applied to the Tokyo streets. Alternatively, places such as New York City, Paris, or Chicago define normality, a proper way to be modern, hip, or whatever other positive term is applied at the time.
But I would like to posit a view to Seoul/Korea as a true glimpse of the future, and by this I don’t just mean shiny buildings or neon lights; I posit that Seoul/Korea has come to define a new mode of multi-faceted existence that blends together old and new, rustic and modern, developed and undeveloped, natural and constructed. Focused through the dictates of a consumer culture in which identity is defined by what you buy and one’s power as a consumer, public space has increasingly become defined as a stage for private desires.
