tourist distractions by youngmin choe

8/20/2019 Tourist Distractions by Youngmin Choe

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T O U R I S T D I S T R A C T I O N S

T R A V E L I N G A N D F E E L I N G

Y O U N G M I N C H O E

I N T R A N S N A T I O N A L H A L L Y U C I N E M A


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T O U R I S T D I S T R A C T I O N S

T R A V E L I N G A N D F E E L I N G

Y O U N G M I N C H O E

I N T R A N S N A T I O N A L H A L L Y U C I N E M A

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S D U R H A M A N D L O N D O N 2 0 1 6


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© 2016 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper ∞

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

ypeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Choe, Youngmin, author.

ourist distractions : traveling and eeling in transnationalhallyu cinema / Youngmin Choe.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

978-0-8223-6111-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-6130-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7434-3 (e-book)

1. Motion pictures—Korea (South)—History—21st century.

2. Cultural industries—Korea (South)—History—21st century.

3. Popular culture—Economic aspects—Korea (South). 4. ourism

in motion pictures. 5. ravel in motion pictures. I. itle.

1993.5.64844 2016

791.43095195—dc23 2015036266

A different version o chapter 2 appeared as “Affective Sites: Hur

Jin-ho’s Cinema and Film-Induced ourism in Korea,” in Asia on

our: Exploring the Rise of Asian ourism, ed. im Winter, Peggy

eo, and . C. Chang, 109–26 (New York: Routledge, 2009). An earlier

version o chapter 5 was published as “Postmemory in South

Korean Cinema, 1999–2003,” Journal of Korean Studies 18.2 (2013):315–36. Reprinted by permission.

Cover art: Detail rom a tour-site marker depicting an image

rom the lm April Snow. Photo by the author.


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F O R M Y M O T H E R A N D F AT H E R


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C O N T E N T S

A C K N O W L E D G M E N S ix

I N T R O D U C T I O N . Distracted Attractions 1

PA R T I . I N T I M A C Y

1. Feeling ogether: Pornography and ravel in Kazoku

Cinema and Asako in Ruby Shoes 31

2. Affective Sites: Hur Jin-ho’s April Snow and One Fine

Spring Day 59

PA R T I I . A M I T Y

3. Provisional Feelings: Te Making o Musa 89

4. Affective Palimpsests: Sudden Showers rom Hwang

Sun-wŏn’s “Sonagi” to Kwak Jae-yong and Andrew Lau’s

Daisy 112

P A RT I I I . R E M E M B R A N C E

5. Postmemory DMZ: Joint Security Area, Yesterday , and

: Lost Memories 143

6. ransient Monuments: Commemorating and Memorializing

in aegukgi Korean War Film ourism 166

C O N C L U S I O N . K-hallyu: Te Commodity Speaks in Kang

Chul-woo’s Romantic Island , Bae Yong- joon’s A Journey in

Search of Korea’s Beauty , So Ji-sub’s Road , and Choi Ji-woo’s if

197

N O T E S 205 B I B L I O G R A P H Y 229 I N D E X 241


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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Te earliest drafs o this book were written as a dissertation at the University

o Caliornia () Berkeley. My time there was ormative, and I owe much

gratitude to my doctoral advisors. Chris Berry and Nelson Graburn have been

models o the kind o scholar I aspire to be, and also o the kind o mentor

I try to be. Without their guidance, my scholarship would not have been able

to take on the orms that it eventually did, and I thank them or their continued

encouragement, support, and riendship. My thanks also to Andrew Jones, or

his advice over the years, and or being a wonderul teacher and riend. I am

grateul to Lydia Liu, Jiwon Shin, Alan ansman, and Bonnie Wade. Soyoung

Kim, whom I rst met when she was a visiting proessor at Berkeley, con-

tinues to be a source o inspiration. Te Berkeley ourism Studies Working

Group allowed me to participate in the exchange o scholarship through which

I could vicariously travel to places in ways I might otherwise never have gone.

Te year I spent at the University o Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (), as

a Korea Foundation postdoctoral ellow was a tremendously productive one.

I eel privileged to have been able to revise the book under the mentorship o

Nancy Abelmann, whose insightul reading o my manuscript was vital to the

shape o its nal orm. I am also thankul to Poshek Fu, Jungwon Kim, Rob-

ert Cagle, Jin-Heon Jung, and the Center or East Asian and Pacic Studies,

who welcomed me into their midst that year. My chapter on “transient monu-ments” beneted rom eedback I received at the Korea Workshop, and

aspects o my introduction were ormed at a roundtable discussion on pan-

Asian cinema with Poshek Fu, Stephanie DeBoer, and Michael Raine.

I am most grateul to my colleagues in the East Asian languages and cul-

tures department at the University o Southern Caliornia (). As chairs,

Dominic Cheung, David Bialock, and Audrey Li have been generous in their

support o junior aculty. I thank Brian Bernards, Geraldine Fiss, George

Hayden, Namkil Kim, Satoko Shimazaki, and Andrew Simpson or a conge-nial environment to work in, and Christine Shaw or everything she does or

our department. Special thanks to Bettine Birge, Sonya Lee, and Lori Meeks


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x A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

or their guidance. Above all, I have beneted enormously rom the intellec-

tual engagement, mentorship, and riendship o Akira Mizuta Lippit, Kyung

Moon Hwang, and Sunyoung Park. I also thank David James, Stanley Rosen,

Panivong Norindr, Aniko Imre, and Ruth Chung. David Kang and Elaine Kim

at ’s Korean Studies Institute have ostered an inviting research commu-nity at the Dosan Ahn Chang Ho Family House, as has Grace Ryu at ’s

East Asian Studies Institute. I thank Joy Kim, Sun-Yoon Lee, and Ken Klein

at the Korean Heritage Library or ceaselessly drawing my attention to new

additions to an already wonderul collection. I also want to acknowledge the

ormer and current graduate students Crystal Mun-Hye Baik, N. race Cabot,

Melissa Chan, Wooseok Kang, Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer, Gladys Mac, Jinhee

Park, Young Sun Park, Yunji Park, Myoung-Sun Kelly Song, Chad Walker,

Shannon Zhao, and the visiting scholar Jinim Park.

Many riends and colleagues have shared their thoughts through collabora-

tions and conversations that helped shape this book: Jinsoo An, Charles Arm-

strong, Chua Beng Huat, Michelle Cho, Steve Choe, Kyeong-hee Choi, Steven

Chung, Stephen Epstein, Chris Hanscom, odd Henry, ed Hughes, Kelly

Jeong, Alice Kim, Kyu-hyun Kim, Su-yun Kim, Youna Kim, Nayoung Aimee

Kwon, Jin-kyung Lee, Nam Lee, Sohl Lee, Hyung Il Pai, Aaron Magnan-Park,

Albert Park, Hyun Seon Park, Michael Robinson, Youngju Ryu, Andre Schmid,

and Jun Yoo. I am grateul to Suk-Young Kim and Clark Sorensen or their criti-

cal comments on individual chapters, and to Christine Yano and David Desser

or extensive comments on the entire manuscript. I am greatly indebted to

Kyung Hyun Kim or his indispensable criticism and caring support. I thank

him not only or the many opportunities he gave me to present chapters-in-

progress at Irvine, but also or the chance to work together on something

larger than my own monograph. Te book’s clarity and readability is thanks to

the sage advice o Courtney Berger, my wonderul editor at Duke UniversityPress, with whom I eel ortunate to be working. Christine Riggio, Amy Ruth

Buchanan, and Danielle Szulczewski also deserve special thanks.

Te writing o this book was made possible by generous nancial support

rom the Berkeley Center or Korean Studies, the Berkeley Institute or

East Asian Studies, the Berkeley Department o Asian Studies, the Korea

Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the 2008 Korea Foundation Postdoc-

toral Fellowship, a 2008 Northeast Asia Council ravel Grant, the Academy

o Korean Studies Grant (AKS-2010-R-23), and at , the Korean StudiesInstitute Faculty Research Grant, the Sejong Society Research Grant, and the

2013 James H. Zumberge Individual Research Award. In its nal stage, it was


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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S xi

supported by the Yonsei University Future-leading Research Initiative o 2015.

I thank Noh Suntag or his generous permission to reprint photographs rom

his “reallyGood, murder” series, and Lee Mun-woong, proessor emeritus in

the department o anthropology at Seoul National University, or sharing pho-

tos rom his abulous archive o exhibition photos.I reserve my deepest gratitude or my amily, Sehyo Choe, Youngjae Choe,

and my parents, Jun-seok Choe and Soon-nyu Choe. My parents have shared

their love o travel with me or as long as I can remember, and I thank them

or their sustained interest in the places and orms o travel I have ound on

my own. My ather especially has been my greatest intellectual supporter, and

it is thanks to my mother that I have never questioned the possibility o having

both amily and work. I also thank my parents-in-law, Sang Joong Jeon and

Chung Ja Jeon, or their kind support. My lie with Joseph Jeon is inscribed

in various ways throughout the book. His boundless intellectual generosity

and unstoppable quick wit enlivens and grounds our every day together. And

Izzi—I know you can read this now—I am most thankul or you.


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I N T R O D U C T I O N

Distracted Attractions

Tere is a moment in Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area (Kongtong ky ŏngpi

kuy ŏk, 2000) when the routine duties o choreographed conict are disrupted.

Soldiers stand guard at the heavily guarded Panmunjŏm, a cluster o buildings

that orm the demilitarized zone () between North and South Korea. A

group o oreigners on a guided tour o the southern side are surveying the

Military Demarcation Line that runs through the middle o the , separat-

ing the two sides, when a sudden gust o wind blows a baseball cap off one

o the tourist’s heads, and over the 38th parallel into North Korea. A NorthKorean soldier picks the red cap up and stretches his hand out to return it,

while the American military tour guide reaches over the demarcation, takes

the cap, and thanks the soldier. Te lm’s perspective switches at this moment,

rom a close-up shot taken rom the point o view o the cap’s owner to an

aerial view hovering directly above the demarcation line (see g. I.1). Just as

the U.S. military guide retreats, leaving the rame, a tourist abruptly rushes up

to the line, taking photographs, which are prohibited. We see a South Korean

I.1 A tourist gazes through his camera across the border

between North and South Korea. Joint Security Area.


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2 I N T R O D U C T I O N

soldier leave his post at the lef o the rame and move toward the center to

block the tourist’s gaze by holding his hand in ront o the camera. Te tour-

ist keeps clicking in spite o the warning until the soldier nally pushes him

back toward his group, who are outside o the rame, and then returns to his

position. Witnessed aerially, with only the sound o a camera shutter audible,the scene then ends with a return to a long shot as the tourists leave the site.

Te signicance o this scene, in which the gaze o the tourist and the per-

spective o the lm camera overlap in a site o conict and surveillance, is not

apparent until the end o the lm. Te lm’s end is signaled by a return to the

shot o the North Korean soldier returning the cap and the sound o the cam-

era shutter. Te lm reezes at this point on one o the tourist’s photographs,

and proceeds to zoom in to various elements o the image, panning rom

gure to gure within the otherwise still shot (see gs. I.2–I.7). Te photo-

graph ades gradually rom color to black-and-white, and in the panning we

see a condensed version o the story that the lm has just narrated. Joint Security

Area ( J.S.A.) as a whole chronicles a murder investigation in the demilitarized

zone in which both North and South Korean soldiers are implicated. In the

repeated close-up shot over the U.S. military tour guide’s shoulder, the North

Korean soldier who has just handed over the cap is recognizable as Sergeant

Oh Kyŏng-p’il (Song Kang-ho), the older o the two North Korean soldiers

who beriend two South Korean soldiers throughout the course o the lm;

behind him to the right, captured in mid-march and mid-smile, is his ju-

nior comrade, Chŏng U- jin (Sin Ha-gyun), one o the men who gets killed

when their raternization with South Korean soldiers is discovered by a North

Korean commanding offi cer. Te camera continues to pull back south o the

demarcation line and out to the lef, where we see Private Nam Sŏng-sik (Kim

’ae-u), the soldier who instigates the bloodshed in the lm’s climax by ring

at the visiting commanding offi cer. Te shot pulls urther back to the handthat had blocked the tourist’s camera, which belongs, we now see, to Sergeant

Yi Su-hyŏk (Lee Byung-hun), the South Korean soldier who had originally

initiated the border-crossing riendship. Finally, the shot ends with a ull view

o the entire picture taken by the tourist, an alternate version o the scene that

we had witnessed earlier rom an aerial angle. Tis photograph seen at the

end o the lm displaces our limited view o the North as mediated by the U.S.

military presence with a more revealing view remediated by the tourist gaze.

Prompted by an accident (the gust o wind blowing the hat) that distractsthe tourist rom the regulated course o the tour, the tourist’s picture becomes

a privileged object, having unknowingly captured the reconciliation underway


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I N T R O D U C T I O N 3

between the our soldiers stationed at this embodiment o cold war tension. It

offers a transormative view o an otherwise amiliar political environment: what

had seemed a photo o hostility reveals itsel as one o riendship. Trough the

tourist’s photograph, we see how easily hostility and riendship can be mis-

taken or each other, a point o the lm that becomes clear not in the photo-graph itsel, but in the lm’s narration o what has occurred in the orbidden

exchanges between the our soldiers. Te tourist’s photo, as it is remediated

within the lm, comes to rame the lm’s larger narrative o inter-Korean rec-

onciliation and hints at the problematic relationship between visibility, truth,

and reconciliation.

In addition, the intervention o tourist photography ollows the literally

transnational exchange o an object, namely the red cap, which, blown by the

sudden gust o wind across the border and then returned, reies in commod-

ity orm the border crossings undertaken by the two South Korean soldiers

earlier in the narrative. By the end o the lm, however, we know that the

civil exchange o the cap is markedly different rom the exchange between the

soldiers, which erupts in atal violence. Te trope o cross-border exchange

recurs throughout the lm: in the playul exchange o spit by the soldiers as

they try to maintain their serious poses; in the letters that they attach to rocks

and hurl at each other across the 38th parallel; and also in the mass-produced

sweets and magazine cutouts that the South Korean soldiers bring as gifs to

the North. Like the soldiers themselves, these literal and gurative commodi-

ties circulate across this national boundary, stand-ins or the perpetual move-

ment o human bodies across all different kinds o boundaries.

From the perspective o those tourists at the 38th parallel, this crossing o

boundaries is what we more commonly call travel. And it is the experience

(and many ramications) o this movement across boundaries that brings us

to the heart o this book. Much o our understanding o South Korea todayemerges rom the much-discussed phenomenon o hallyu, reerred to in En-

glish as “the Korean Wave.” Te term commonly reers to the widespread con-

sumption o Korean popular culture overseas starting in the late 1990s. Here

I attempt to nd some clarity within this overused and increasingly overde-

termined term, and within its abundant meanings, by ocusing on one par-

ticular slice o hallyu creations (lm) and one particular theme that abounds

in hallyu (travel). In hinting at the links between travel and commodity ex-

change, all under the rubric o tourism, J.S.A. embodies a crucial character-istic o what I will term hallyu cinema. I use hallyu cinema to differentiate a

specic group o lms that is inormed by the dominant characteristics o the


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I.2–I.7 (above and opposite) A closer look at a tourist’s photograph

taken at the border. Joint Security Area.


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larger hallyu, or Korean Wave, phenomenon. Tese lms are distinct rom

the broad, undifferentiated category o new Korean cinema that has been

subsumed under hallyu. Within these lms, we will see the repeated ways in

which human travel speaks to the ows o capital, material goods, and cul-

tural products that epitomize the hallyu phenomenon, and vice versa. Just asclose examination o a tourist’s intervening gaze and snapshot reveals a more

complicated story, travel in hallyu cinema becomes an optic through which

to understand the beguiling possibilities and anxious perils o regionalism

and transnationalism, two trends essential to the structures o sof power that

characterize millennial Korea in an era o more exible, border-crossing citi-

zenship. By underscoring negotiations with the colonial and Cold War past on

one hand and the neoliberal East Asian present on the other, hallyu cinema

will thus help us understand key shifs in the South Korean culture industry,

emerging approaches by South Koreans to Cold War history (especially their

history o national division), and rapidly changing reimaginings o the East

Asian geopolitical scene.

Perhaps not coincidentally then, J.S.A. embodies a larger trend surrounding

Korean cinema, starting in the late 1990s, in which the creation (and con-

sumption) o lm was intrinsically linked to travel, not only in its represen-

tation o the tourism, but also in the material legacy o its production. J.S.A.’s

border scenes were not shot on location, as ongoing tensions at Panmunjŏm

have made any such lming nearly impossible since the signing o the 1953

Korean Armistice Agreement brought three years o war to a truce. Rather, it

was lmed on an outdoor set at the Namyangju Studios in Yangsuri,

South Korea. Furthermore, the producers lef the abricated “border” at the

complex long afer the lm was completed, since it drew tourists interested

both in the lm and in the historical tension between North and South Korea;

those tourists who gathered in Yangsuri thus uncannily doubled the aoremen-tioned scene in the lm itsel. At Yangsuri, both lm and history conspired to

induce tourism, and the practices o tourists, who there (and only there) were

ree to walk back and orth across the 38th parallel, reenacting the trans-

national itinerancy o the red cap.

ourism is thus doubly relevant, both as a critical thematic in J.S.A., and

also in the aferlie o the lm, as its box-offi ce success unexpectedly generated

a good deal o travel, both to the actual and to the simulacrum as well. As

the J.S.A. example demonstrates, the complicities between lm and tourism—specically in their relation to reconciliation efforts in Northeast Asia—are

maniold. I the lm suggests that the solution to historical antagonism is


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travel across boundaries, and thematizes this travel via the movement o com-

modities and other objects across the 38th parallel, then the tourist response

has seemed to take up this combination o transnational political reconcilia-

tion and transnational commerce with great enthusiasm. Tus, since the late

1990s, the thematic o travel became a way to consider, beyond just broachingthe problem o North-South Korea relations, broader shifs in an era o Asian-

ization. By Asianization, I reer to the increased regional cooperation o ofen

ormerly antagonistic nations, particularly in East Asia, aimed at obtaining a

competitive advantage in the global marketplace. In various orms, tourism

in this period speaks to the evolving transnational political relations that such

a regional transormation entailed.

In ourist Distractions I explore South Korea’s venture into trans-Asian

cinema production and distribution in the late 1990s, and its relation to

the emergence o hallyu, the undifferentiated general term or the popular-

culture phenomenon in which Korean entertainment and cultural products,

including lm, tele vision drama, and music, ound enthusiastic international

reception. By ocusing on the explicit representation o travel in these lms in

relation to the practices o travel that emerged in relation to lm spectatorship,

I examine the ways in which aspects o Korean popular cinema were slowly

adapted according to the hallyu market, in which lms became an integral part

o the ancillary market generated by Korean tele vision dramas, and in which

consumption practices associated with hallyu, such as travel, came to reormu-

late aesthetic concepts and shared affects with deep roots in the nation’s history.

I narrow the eld o inquiry by ocusing on hallyu cinema and set aside other

orms o cultural production because hallyu cinema offers a particularly useul,

sel-reexive perspective or viewing the complexities—the anxieties, tensions,

and celebratory gestures—o a new East Asian affective economy. Precisely due

to the nebulous and inclusive boundaries o hallyu, we need to explore the par-ticular relationship between popular Korean cinema and hallyu, in order to

contemplate the production and consumption o lms in a world where new

media challenge lm as the dominant mode o mass culture. And thus, perhaps

the largest ambition o my study is to transorm hallyu, which has become rst

and oremost a marketing category, into a bona de critical term.

o this end, I ocus on the links between lmic orm and transnational

commerce. In this context, one o the most notable eatures o hallyu’s rise,

especially in East Asia, was a convergence o the lm and tourism industries.In much the same way that Dean MacCannell saw in tourism a new way

o theorizing the leisure class in the postindustrial age, I identiy travel and


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tourism as an important critical lens through which to examine the affec-

tive capabilities o South Korean national cinema as part o a larger project

o recalibrating the nation’s position within the rapidly changing landscape

o postcolonial East Asia. As the region becomes increasingly disconnected

rom the painul histories, bitter conicts, and political rivalries that shapedaffective experiences along national lines or the better part o the twenti-

eth century, tourist lms and lm tourism become part o a larger project o

orming the transnational emotional bonds that contribute to the shaping o a

newly imagined East Asia and that might presage more concrete transnational

economic bonds between nations that were airly recently antagonistic.

I thereore think o Asianization not primarily in the political and eco-

nomic terms that are most requently mobilized to speak about the phenom-

enon, though these concerns o course underlie my analysis. Rather, my aim

is to enlarge our vision o what Asianization encompasses and how it shapes

contemporary lie in East Asia. More specically, I hope to answer Lauren Ber-

lant’s question about historical sense or the present context: “How does a par-

ticular affective response come to be exemplary o a shared historical time, and

in what terms?” I am most interested in the ormation o a shared affective

experience that transnational cooperation requires in order to build its net-

works or the exchange o products and capital, a sense o what Giorgio Agam-

ben reers to as the “con-sent” at the heart o riendship. By emphasizing the

etymological elements o consent, which in the original Latin iners “eeling

together,” this ormulation in the context o contemporary Asianization sug-

gests the need or a shared sense o affective experience in order to turn once

rival nations into cooperative riends. o this end, I am not merely interested

in the dissemination and ow o cultural products that Asianization entails,

o which hallyu serves as an example, but more signicantly in how these

cultural ows are suffused with affective ows. Given the tumultuous modernhistory o northeast Asia, Asianization demands not only these political and

economic orms o partnership, but also a newly emergent eeling o coopera-

tion and the production o an affective economy to underlie the nancial one.

Hallyu-lujah!

Hallyu did not come to the attention o South Korean cultural critics until

early 2001, when dispatches rom China on the “Korean Wave”—or “Koreamania,” as it was also reerred to—set off similar reports rom Hong Kong, ai-

pei, and Vietnam. Te apparent spontaneity with which hallyu had emerged


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in China in 1997 was in stark contrast to the measured and careully thought-

out cultural liberalization policies South Korea had been implementing since

1998. In the wake o the devastating nancial crisis, South Korea had started

looking to its neighbors or interregional collaboration as a part o its recov-

ery process, which had entailed much postcolonial negotiation and symbolicreparations. Te intellectual labor o working toward an understanding o the

hallyu phenomenon, taking place about our years afer the wave’s emergence,

in its belated recuperation o the period essentially redened a signicant

period in the initiation o interregional cultural cooperation and collabora-

tion in lm production as one marked by an unoreseen surge in Korean sof

power, namely the rise o hallyu.

Te element o surprise, viewed in hindsight, has become a cornerstone

in the study o hallyu, a central task that has entailed chronicling and inves-

tigating the underlying conditions and reasons that enabled the surprising

phenomena to emerge. In act, one theory o the etymology o the term hallyu

suggests that it comes rom the aiwanese media, expressing surprise over the

popularity o Korean dramas and K-pop (Korean popular music), and speci-

cally their use o the phrase hail hallyu, a local expression that translates as

“winter ice storm in summer” and reers to unexpected and unlikely events.

Te serendipitous nature o the phenomenon’s origins, however, is posed in

hallyu discourses more as a windall and less as a problem, the question being

“Why did it happen?,” rather than “Why didn’t we notice?”

Hallyu thus began not as a careully orchestrated enterprise, but rather as

a serendipitous cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s when the Korean cul-

ture industry realized that its products were beginning to have regional and

international appeal. It continued in subsequent years, not only as an attempt

to continue and replicate this success in cultural orms and media other than

K-pop and dramas, but also in the sel-conscious transormation o the tradeand circulation logics that characterized the initial phenomenon into an ex-

plicit aesthetics, which attempted both to make sense o the early surprising

success and to capitalize on it. Hence, I argue that tourism becomes a central

trope in the lms o this period because it literalizes the orms o circula-

tion that inhere in its international success. ravel, in other words, serves to

make sense o the more diffi cult to perceive networks o circulation that made

hallyu’s rise possible in the rst place, and in this context, travel and tour-

ism become interchangeable terms because the movement o bodies throughunamiliar spaces (what we call travel) is inseparable in these lms rom the

commercialization o such behavior (what we call tourism).


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Hallyu, the generic term that is usually rendered in English as “Korean

Wave,” has more recently been subdivided into a series o sequential waves.

Te general consensus is that the rst wave started circa 1997 and lasted until

2003, with the unexpected impact o the tele vision drama Winter Sonata.

Tough the term hallyu, which was coined in the Chinese press (according tosome accounts), was supposedly inspired by a compilation o Korean pop-

ular music, the rst wave was actually dened by the popularity o Korean

tele vision dramas. Beginning in 2003, the second Korean Wave (also reerred

to as sin hallyu, or the New Korean Wave) was led by K-pop, and bolstered

by the continued popularity o tele vision dramas and by the growing popular-

ity o Korean lms and video games. In addition to the growth in the types

o products between these waves, the other major transition was in the types

o distribution. In the rst wave, these cultural creations were circulated via

tele vision and cable broadcasts, s, and s; in the second wave, that dis-

tribution expanded to include social-network ser vices. In this transition, the

audience also expanded, rom predominantly middle-aged women to both

male and emale children and teenagers.

Whereas the rst wave is considered to have occurred spontaneously, the

second was created by private entrepreneurs, supported by government initia-

tives, who harnessed the perceived potential o Korean popular culture. Sin

hallyu included a conscious attempt by the Korean National ourism Organ-

ization to bring the consumption o hallyu home to Korea, in the orm o in-

bound tourism and shopping catered to tourists, an attendance at Korean pop

concerts, and travel to drama and lm locations. Tus, in addition to diffusion

through social-networking sites, the second wave witnessed an expansion in

the nature o hallyu consumption. In 2012 Culture Minister Ch’oe Kwang-shik

called or a “third hallyu” that would consist o “the Korean culture overall—

the content, the core,” which would include in particular the marketing otraditional Korean culture abroad. Whether or not the distinction proves

useul remains an open question; more pertinent to the present discussion

is the way in which Ch’oe’s initiative demonstrates the extent to which hallyu

in recent years has become the name o an explicit enterprise. Now an even

more unwieldy term, hallyu in this context not only reers to all manner o

Korean consumables, but also to the production o a highly marketed and

globally distributed culture that is quite deliberately conceived o as an export

commodity.Part o the reason or hallyu’s ambiguity as a term is the way in which the

business model o these cultural creations increasingly encouraged hybridity.


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Jinhee Choi has described how the demand or Korean dramas that charac-

terized hallyu’s rst wave provided the Korean entertainment industry with

signicant crossover opportunities into other entertainment media. Fol-

lowing success in tele vision dramas, actors such as Jun Ji-hyun, Choi Ji-woo,

Lee Byung-hun, Jang Dong-gun, and Kwon Sang-woo crossed over to the lmindustry, which beneted immensely rom the popularity o these actors, as

demonstrated by the demand in other countries or the rights to distribute and

export Korean cinema. Tese trends were urther buttressed by the ubiquity o

lm stars in music videos and advertisements as well as the rising presence o

K-pop idols starring in lms and dramas, or which they also ofen provided

original music or the soundtrack. ourism to drama and lm locations ol-

lowed, as did remakes o a ew Korean lms in Europe and the United States.

Perhaps more than any other hallyu text, the drama Winter Sonata (2003) set

the standard or the crossover and tourist potential o hallyu texts, motivat-

ing consumption that ranged rom spectatorship to tourism, both o which

oregrounded affective experiences such that the more mediated experience

o watching a tele vision drama cohered with the haptic experience o visiting

the sites where it was lmed.

Such opportunities were not lost on tourism promoters: the “Dynamic

Korea” advertisement released by the Korean National ourism Organization

in 2003—a diffi cult moment or the tourism industry due to the outbreak o

(Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), the Iraq War, and the North Ko-

rean nuclear controversy—eatured then president Roh Moo-hyun and em-

phasized the senses: “Listen. Can you, can you hear them? Look. Can you, can

you see them? Now eel. It eels wonderul! Come eel it. Korea.” From images

o Korean traditional culture and ood, it jumps to the roaring crowds o the

Red Devils rom the 2002 World Cup, gesturing to the affective energies

it is attempting to generate. Te dynamism o the advertisement is an exampleo the “Korea o shinmyoung ” (shinmy ŏng ) concept that the government was

promoting at the time as its national brand image, which along with shin and

shinbaram, are affects that might translate as “exhilaration, delight, excitement,

hilarity, joviality, and enthusiasm.” Afer 2002 and the ervor surrounding

South Korea’s success in the World Cup, it was used to describe the energy

and enthusiasm o soccer ans, but here in the advertisement, it is associated

specically with travel.

Te Korean National ourism Organization started its explicit hallyu cam-paigns shortly afer the World Cup, in its 2003 tourism campaign, going on to

designate 2004 as the year o the Korean Wave, appointing stars as ambassadors,


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and maximizing the use o celebrity images everywhere rom newspapers to

electronic billboards. Most signicantly or the present study, it used drama

and lm ootage to draw tourists, and encouraged the development o new

tour programs that highlighted lm locations. Extending rom these strategies

were concerts and an meetings in Korea, and the organization o an clubsinto region-wide networks that could be utilized as an expansive marketing

base. By 2005, tourism marketing campaigns ocused on creating “a structure

o consciousness and eeling through which South Korea could make itsel

known to the world.” Te concept o “eeling Korea” encapsulated this e-

ort, which attempted to mobilize the affective impact o the circulating cul-

tural products by maximizing the ancillary nature o the hallyu market. Te

association o eeling with affect induced by the postcinematic and touristic

becomes directly palpable in the 2006 tourism ads or Southeast Asia, Japan,

China, Hong Kong, and China, launched with the slogan “Korea, something

more!” In the advertisements, a emale tourist arrives at Inch’on Airport,

where she is met by the pop ular actor Ryu Si-won. She attends a Rain con-

cert, where she is superimposed standing alongside Bae Yong- joon in a scene

rom the lm April Snow, in which he plays a light technician or K-pop con-

certs. Te emale tourist takes in the serene urban nocturnal landscape o

Seoul side-by-side with Jun Ji-hyun in a scene rom the lm Windstruck (Nae

y ŏ jach’in’gur ŭl sogaehamnida, 2004), and the wintry nights o rural Korea

trailing behind Jeon Do-yeon and Hwang Jung-min in a scene rom the lm

You are My Sunshine (N ŏnŭn nae unmy ŏng , 2005). She walks the elds talk-

ing to Son Ye- jin in a scene rom the tele vision drama Summer Scent (Y ŏr ŭm

hyanggi, 2003), and is a guest at a palatial ceremony in the drama A Jewel in

the Palace (aejangg ŭm, 2003), as well as in a home in the drama Wedding

(We-ding , 2005).

Te prominence o tourism in these marketing efforts is symptomatic oa national desire to represent, in aesthetic terms, the mobility o hallyu com-

modities—an example o what Arjun Appadurai describes as the social lie o

commodities. Te problem with the current critical discourse about hallyu is

that it ignores what Appadurai describes as “the constant tension between the

existing rameworks (o price, bargaining, and so orth) and the tendency o

commodities to breach these rameworks” due to the act that “not all parties

share the same interests in any specic regime o value, nor are the inter-

ests o any two parties in a given exchange identical.”

By characterizing andpopulating the networks o hallyu’s transnational circulation with the actual

movements o actual bodies, the lms examined in this study make visible


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these rameworks as well as the points o their breaching. Such dynamics are

especially important considering the various postcolonial or otherwise asym-

metrical power relations o the region in which these products circulate. Te

social lie o hallyu is inseparable rom this regional history.

In this context, I attempt to historicize the phenomenon by ocusing onthe production and circulation o lm rom 1998 to 2006, a period toward the

end o which the Korean lm industry began to suffer rom a downturn and

tourist sel- consciousness in its cinema begins to decline. Sketching the inter-

section during this busy period—dened by the surge o hallyu, a renaissance

in Korean lm, and Korea’s interregional reconciliation efforts—I examine the

way lm both represents and negotiates this changing terrain along with what

is at stake as hallyu rapidly morphs rom a descriptor o a specic phenom-

enon into a generic term that applies to all things Korean. Te lms examined

herein are situated in and speak to the development o the hallyu moment, as

marketing begins to subsume history. Hallyu cinema both responds to and

takes advantage o the hallyu phenomenon, but in so doing, it also tries to

think about what hallyu is and its relationship to the new orms o inter-Asian

communality emerging in the period.

Korean lm has not been the progenitor o any o the subwaves within hal-

lyu, and it is air to say that, as a whole, Korean lm’s ascent is not directly in-

debted to hallyu. o indiscriminately incorporate directors associated with the

socially conscious lms o the Korean New Wave cinema emerging in the late

1980s, or the noncommercial auteurs connected to international lm-estival

circuits, and even some o the “high-quality” directors o the “Korean lm

renaissance” or “New Korean cinema” garnering renown abroad as commer-

cially appealing mainstream lmmakers within hallyu is to suspend critical

evaluation o the relevance o the term hallyu and to buy into the con venience

with which it has become a catch-all phrase.

It is only later, and gradually, thatthese various starts rom different corners o the cultural industry converge

and begin to cohere under the category o hallyu. Paradoxically, to eschew or

minimize mention o hallyu at all in analyses o contemporary Korean cinema

now is also to risk treating the cinema industry as i it were insulated rom the

inuences o hallyu that now reach beyond the cultural spheres into the social

and historical.

I thus regard lm as a microcosm o larger phenomena and argue that

hallyu’s aesthetics sel-reerentially reects its own transnational distribu-tion, constructing out o this reection an affective sensorium that validates

emerging transnational economic relations through the positive emotions


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one associates with travel. Tat tourism induced by tele vision dramas, lms,

and music has become a dening hallyu characteristic is not coincidental or

merely the outcome o successul marketing o destination images; rather, it

is the maniestation o a tourist imaginary produced in the interregional dis-

courses serving postcolonial reconciliation in East Asia ollowing the 1997 -nancial crisis, specically the lms and dramas coproduced by different coun-

tries as part o larger efforts to promote riendship, intimacy, and increasing

mobility across borders. In this context, the desire to travel becomes insepara-

ble rom an economic desire or increased transnational exchange o goods and

ser vices. In turn, the hallyu aesthetics o travel affect makes transnational con-

sumption appealing, helping to uel the demand or hallyu cultural products.

Film tourism is a particularly useul way to examine the transnational ows

implicit in hallyu not only because it helps us think about the movement o

bodies and cultural products across national boundaries, but also because it

oregrounds the multivalent practices o consumption on which the hallyu

phenomenon depends; such practices involve economic transactions, every-

thing rom the purchase o movie tickets, s, airare to lm sites, and entry

passes to lm theme parks, as well as affective transactions, in which con-

sumers cathect to once-oreign emotional states. In this context, lm tourism

becomes a way o guring both the material transnational ows o hallyu as

well as the equally signicant immaterial ows that reconnect, realign, and

reimagine the networks that connect Korea to the world in late capitalism.

In addition, the lms examined herein seem to anticipate the travel o their

audiences, who would subsequently become tourists, ofen presented as i to

a non-Korean audience. Although it is too much to say that hallyu is unda-

mentally about tourism, it is not too much to say that understanding the tour-

ist imagination is crucial to understanding hallyu.

Te emergence o hallyu is not the story o the emergence o a coherentstyle or content that subsequently nds audiences abroad, but rather the story o

a developing style and content that emerges because o its surprising transna-

tional appeal. Its distribution and circulation outside o Korea is undamen-

tal, not ancillary, to its very being, and we might say that it sel-reectively

speaks to its own “commodity situation,” which Arjun Appadurai has de-

scribed as “the situation in which its exchangeability (past, present, or uture)

or some other thing is its socially relevant eature.” We know in retrospect

that hallyu was a highly unplanned, consumer-centric phenomenon driven bythe mass production o commercial culture. Although they are ofen cited as


23/41


an explanation or the rise o hallyu, the government’s cultural liberalization

policies starting in 1998—which offi cially lifed the (already porous) ban on

the import o Japanese popular culture, in place since Korea’s independence

rom Japanese colonialism in 1945—were inherently political , and were mo-

tivated by a need to resolve latent postcolonial issues as part o recuperationefforts ollowing the region’s nancial crisis in 1997. So though they helped

provide conditions or the increased exchange o cultural products and the

orms o cooperation that made possible the 2002 World Cup, which

was jointly hosted by Korea and Japan, they were ar rom a highly pre-

meditated cultural policy intended to exert the global sof power o Korean

popular culture.

Te category o hallyu has become too vague. Tat hallyu’s breadth is now

being extended, or example, to the Asuka period (A.D. 538–710) in Japan, in

order to acknowledge the inuence o Korean art on Japan’s art and architecture

through cultural exchange during the Baekje period (18 B.C.–A.D. 660), sug-

gests the degree to which it has become unmoored rom its original context.

But as Michael Levenson suggests about his central term in the opening lines o

Genealogy of Modernism, “Vague terms still signiy.” Although the term ofen

obscures more than it elaborates, hallyu remains useul or thinking about the

Korean culture industry in a moment o unprecedented transormation pre-

cisely because its history reveals how a historical designation devolves into a

state-sponsored marketing term, the usage o which has become so broad that

it now seems to signiy any Korean cultural export. I thus wish to historicize

hallyu, separating it rom its generic contemporary usage and returning it to

its original logics, politics, and aesthetics, all o which emerged within partic-

ular circumstances. I will then attempt to locate lm, and what I am calling

hallyu cinema, within this more specic context.

In his account o virtual hallyu in relation to contemporary South Koreancinema, Kyung Hyun Kim invokes “cinema’s modernist ambitions,” which

played a “subconscious” role in hallyu’s otherwise more populist interests.

Whereas Kim posits these modernist cinematic aesthetics in opposition to

populist entertainment—arguing that popular lms (as hallyu lms tend to

be) “ailed to establish an aesthetic standard in the local lm culture the way

the lms o Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Hong Sang-soo, or Lee Chang-

dong did throughout the 2000s”—my study attempts to articulate the aes-

thetics of these popular orms and the way in which they reect the termso their own popularity. Kim’s notion o “virtual hallyu” thus reers to “a


24/41


reection o both the modernist ambition to engage cinema as a technological

tool that could challenge language and literature as the principal mode o cre-

ative expression and the postmodern ailure to extend cinema’s power beyond

populist entertainment.” He is skeptical o Korean cinema in this era “where

only ahistorical (that is, postmodern) lms thrive” to “render an aestheticthat is still socially relevant.” Hallyu unctions like the Deleuzian virtual-

actual in Kim’s ormulation, positioned within the gap between modernism

(associated with auteur aesthetics, political allegory, and the sublime) and

postmodernism (associated with market orces and the ahistorical); hallyu’s

“virtuality” lies in its ability to collapse the two, blurring and crossing through

“the boundary between ‘the way things are remembered’ and the ‘way things

really were’ ” through “the massive repository o images collected over the

past decade.” Kim’s recognition o the Deleuzian virtuality o Korean cinema

is not a reusal o the past in its multiple rewritings and reconguration o the

multiple conditions o the past, and in its coexistence with the present, an ac-

knowledgment o its state in a condition o possibilities. But because his coor-

dinates are more ontological and epistemological, Kim is less concerned with

the material history o hallyu—the primary concern o ourist Distractions—

than he is with its possibilities as a theoretical gure o being and expression.

Like Virtual Hallyu, ourist Distractions is interested in cinematic aesthet-

ics, but my study is more primarily interested in the way in which these aes-

thetics inect cultural and historical phenomena. In particu lar, the affect and

aesthetics o tourism become important because o tourism’s inherent concern

or making local products available or global consumption. Reecting on

both the various locations o non-Korean consumers as well as the itinerancy

o the cultural products themselves as they travel, I argue that the aesthetics

o tourism and travel affect that characterizes hallyu cinema is an aesthet-

ics o distribution.

Tat is, hallyu cinema not only thematizes the ows thatcharacterize the circulation o hallyu products as narratives o travel, but also

adopts a lmic aesthetics, as or example in the aorementioned ending o

J.S.A., that places the lm’s stylistic elements in ser vice o producing a series

o affective ormations that accompany hallyu’s material networks.

In particular, the characteristic o exportability gures centrally in hallyu

cinema’s distribution aesthetics. In export-centric views, the success o a cul-

tural product with oreign audiences is a prerequisite to its categorization as

hallyu.

Te basis o such categorizations relies, or example, on the dramaWinter Sonata, which aired domestically to higher popularity in its rebroad-

cast in April 2005 ollowing its success abroad in Japan than in its initial run in


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2002, a process in which, as Jeongmee Kim describes, the program, the stars,

and the director “became Hallyu.” Kim suggests that “perhaps it is more

protable to think about the term less as a generic denition that signies the

‘Korean-ness’ o cultural products, but rather as a nationalistic sentiment that

essentially means ‘successul in Asia.’ Korean cultural productions that attaingenuine global success are seen as something else entirely and not labeled

hallyu even though they may contain as much ‘Korean-ness’ as a hallyu prod-

uct.” Te slippage in these comments between “Korean-ness,” “successul,”

and “protable” all under the rubric o “hallyu” is striking; the slippage speaks

to an uncanny desire to recode economic prosperity in aesthetic terms.

Because they are commodities, it is tempting to view cultural products in

the same way that one views other exports. Te sociologist John Lie, or ex-

ample, in reerence to the appeal o K-pop, suggests that “the appeal o K-pop

to non-Korean audiences—both across Asia and beyond—is in a pattern with

South Korean export products, such as Samsung or Hyundai, that have broad

appeal precisely because o the combination o reasonable price and depend-

able quality.” But when we talk about cultural products, hallyu and other-

wise, as commodities not unlike other exports, we must also acknowledge

their unique capacity, not only to circulate, but also to unction as carriers in a

regime o affective value; hallyu is built on nancial exchanges, o course, but,

just as important, it is built on affective exchanges. Tis history o hallyu thus

needs to be a history that maps not only the ow and distribution o Korean

cultural products, but also one that shows how these ows and distributions

become inscribed in the emerging aesthetics o hallyu’s visual commodities.

Tourism in a State of Distraction

Returning or a moment to the tourist scene in J.S.A., we recall that the crucialphotograph that ends the lm was taken at a moment o distraction, and the

revelation o its true content, a picture o riendship not antagonism, depended

on this divergence rom the usual course o the guided tour. In theorizations

o Western modernity, distraction has become understood in a similar vein,

not as interruption o attention, but rather, as Walter Benjamin suggested, an

alternate mode o attention that emerges within the context o the increasingly

ragmented, disorienting experiences that dene modern popular culture,

what he terms “reception in a state o distraction.”

With the distracted atten-tion o the lm viewer serving as a quintessential example, Benjamin implies

that distraction is not the opposite o attention, but an alternate version. In a


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similar vein, Jonathan Crary suggests that in the technological environments

that dene contemporary lie, “it’s questionable whether it is even meaningul

to distinguish between conscious attention to one’s actions and mechanical

autoregulated patterns.” And pulling Benjamin in a more radical direction,

Paul North makes a case or what he calls non-attentional distraction, which is“released rom its subordination to attention, to perception, and to the subject.”

For North, the nal value o distraction is not the synthesis to which a good

deal o modern thought aspires, but dissolution, “an internal dissipation that,

brought about through new media, will lead to an uncommon politicization. . . .

Where philosophy, criticism, and art theory are traditionally concerned with

principles or the ormation o things, distraction is concerned with their de-

ormation, disintegration, and ceasing to be.”

At a moment in Korean history dened by dramatic change—the Interna-

tional Monetary Fund () crisis, the election o the ormer political dissident

Kim Dae- jung, the rise o posthegemonic anti-American ervor, the renewed

prospect o reunication in the orm o the Sunshine Policy, and the possibil-

ity o new regional integration and reconciliation with ormer adversaries—the

critical view o hallyu gathered rom an analysis o hallyu cinema disturbs the

nationalist pull toward a progressive narrative. Hallyu instead offers a moment

o distraction that interrupts the story o development and orces a reection

on what has escaped attention. It is in this sense that I use the term distrac-

tion in the title o this book, ourist Distractions, a play on the term tourist

attraction. As epitomized by the tourist in J.S.A. who loses her hat to an un-

anticipated gust o wind, the experience o the tourist in unamiliar locales

gures this model o productive distraction. In the logic o Culture Minister

Ch’oe and others, the surprising success o hallyu validates Korea’s rise rom

Tird to First World, a trajectory that has dominated national discourse in

the second hal o the twentieth century; sof power reects hard power. Inthe late 1990s, the position o South Korea’s cultural industries, once regarded

as secondary to postwar efforts to develop the industrial economy, radically

changed as their products were placed on equal status with traditional ex-

ports like automobiles. But the serendipity o hallyu, the act o its surprise

emergence, while no one was paying attention, suggests that hallyu embodies

not seamless continuity with the twentieth-century discourse o political and

economic ascension, but rather a moment o readjustment, crisis, and rupture

when, according to North, “politics needs to be repoliticized, that is, dissolvedonce again into a war o elements against wholes.”


27/41


By “tourist distractions,” I reer to moments within a visual text or in its

widespread consumption in which images and practices associated with travel

or tourism abruptly intervene or interrupt, thereby disturbing the very “image

or the idea o society” that is presumed to be generated by “the collective act” o

sightseeing at tourist attractions. Implied in Dean MacCannell’s notion hereis the idea that the “orderly representation o the social structure o modern

society” is itsel motivated by the act o sightseeing. However, the prolierat-

ing, sel-reexive integration in hallyu cinema o the tourist imaginary into

the very abric o visual texts goes beyond the mere categorization o such

images eaturing attractions as destination images or reproductions.

I trace the unexpected ways in which the tourist imagination ound orm

and practice, placing a particular emphasis on Korea’s lm collaborations

with Japan, China, and Hong Kong going back to the period o 1998 to 2002.

I argue that the trope o travel eatured in this intercultural cinema, initially

intended to promote cross-cultural understanding, also became a means to

propagate a lm’s affective experience beyond the screen, and to provide er-

satz historical experiences o political and historical negotiation, ones that

paradoxically distract rom the task o collective historical memory endorsed

by the state, even in texts whose production and distribution were enthusias-

tically aided by the state. I seek to show then how the unanticipated distrac-

tions rom the state-sponsored narrative can alert us to the ways in which new

structures o eeling interrogate and redene the new Asian order. I we take

distraction as a starting point, it becomes possible to conceptualize hallyu as

an affective aesthetic ormed by the particularities o the conditions under-

lying its emergence, as opposed to articulating it using the terms prescribed

in the process o marketing national culture. Driven by nationalist interests, the

deployment o hallyu coincides with the coming-o-age o a generation with no

direct memory o Japanese colonialism, Korean War trauma, the effects o post-war poverty, or democratic struggles against authoritarian regimes. Although

these traumatic events and experiences remain lodged deep within the nation’s

psyche—and have instilled palpable, and collective, emotions like humiliation,

anger, shame, and han (unresolved sorrow and regret due to suffering)—these

once dominant emotions no longer dominate. I distraction is understood as

an adjustment o the eld o perception, then it also entails a new sensorium o

affect, engendered by new structures o eeling. Within the context o crisis and

change in the late 1990s, the ground shifs beneath Korean eet and thus shifsto what Sara Ahmed calls a “cultural politics o emotion,” which acknowledges


28/41


the “doing” o emotions as opposed to merely questioning what they are.

Circulating between bodies and working “through signs and on bodies to

materialize the suraces and boundaries that are lived as worlds,” emotions

are bound up in specic histories, and not only show but also open up new

possibilities.

Hallyu Cinema and Transnational Collaboration

Te intercultural interest in hallyu cinema as demonstrated in Korea’s collabo-

rations with other countries has decades-old roots in the intercultural recon-

ciliatory lm collaborations initiated between Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and

China. From as early as 1957, with the Korean director Jeon Chang-geun’s (Chŏn

Ch’ang-gŭn) melodrama Love with an Alien (Ikukchŏngwŏn), made in collabo-

ration with Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers and Japan’s Mitsuo Wakasugi, the Ko-

rean lm industry, ailing in the afermath o the Korean War, had looked to

other Asian nations as a way o promoting cultural exchange while maximiz-

ing resources and market potential across Asia. Te Japanese hand in Korean

lm production, orcibly implemented under Japanese colonialism in the early

twentieth century, had continued to make its mark in such coproductions

even afer Korea’s national independence ollowing the Second World War, but

went publicly unrecognized in compliance with Korea’s ban on Japanese pop-

ular culture. Furthermore, in the relationship between Korea’s Shin Films and

Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers, or example, which yielded a number o successul

epics, including Te Last Woman of Shang (1962), Te Goddess of Mercy (1966),

Te King with My Face (1967), and Tat Man in Chang-an (1967), the reliance on

Chinese historical material tended to render Korea’s participation invisible. Tis

problem o a “denationalized” cinema resulting rom coproductions persisted in

their cooperation with Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest, a lm production, distri-bution, and exhibition company, on martial arts lms in the 1970s. With the

problem o how a burgeoning Korean cinema could reconcile the contradic-

tory desires o pursuing the transnational without relinquishing nationalist

pride lef unresolved, coproductions gradually ceased.

More recently, however, the rigid barriers o regional politics—such as

the postcolonial past that turned the Korean lm industry away rom Japan

and toward Hong Kong, or the Cold War that closed mainland China to Hong

Kong’s lmmakers, orcing them to search or China in Korea—have largelybecome a thing o the past. (Te relatively deant isolation o North Korea rom

its neighbors is, o course, the one notable exception to this historical shif.) Te


29/41


late 1990s saw a resurgence o intraregional lm collaborations, capitalizing on

South Korea’s “China Fever,” China’s “Korea Wave,” and aiwan’s “Japan Fever.”

Current East Asian cultural regionalism, however, distinguishes itsel rom the

ventures into intra-Asian collaboration in the 1960s and 1970s, reecting the

shifing regional dynamics o cultural trade afer the 1997 Asian nancialcrisis. From 1980 to 1998, intraregional trade in cultural goods in East Asia

grew exponentially, concurrent with the integration o Asian national econo-

mies, as China emerged globally as one o the “Big Five” cultural importers

and exporters alongside Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and

Germany. Region- wide cultural liberalization policies offi cially lifed the last

o the trade restrictions on Japanese pop culture imposed at the end o the

Second World War. In Korea, globalization, localization and the new media

technology wrought major changes in the perceptions and value o the culture

industry across the 1990s. Popular culture was no longer marginal but now a

dominant industry, bolstered by the boom in the Asian multimedia and au-

diovisual industries, such as lm and tele vision, which gave a major boost to

interregional cultural ows.

Bilateral lm coproductions between Korea and Japan, Korea and China,

and Korea and Hong Kong began to gather momentum afer 1998. In April

2000, the Hong Kong director Peter Chan launched Applause Pictures with the

director eddy Chen and the distributor Allan Fung, in the hopes o attracting

Asian talent to produce pan-Asian lms. Te lm Chan produced under Ap-

plause Pictures in 2001, One Fine Spring Day (Pomnal ŭn kanda, 2001), became

a model o trilateral collaboration, involving the cooperation o three lm

industries—Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong—in the orm o joint nancing to

maximize impact on the Asian market. Tree (Saam gaang , 2002), a horror

lm collaboration eaturing several short, thematically linked segments by the

directors rom each participating country (Kim Jee-woon rom Korea, PeterChan rom Hong Kong, and Nonzee Nimibutr rom Tailand), was also pro-

duced around this time, presenting a different model or collaboration. By

2006, multiple trilateral pan-Asian productions on a much larger scale,

such as sui Hark’s Seven Swords (Qī Jiàn, 2005) and Chen Kaige’s Te Prom-

ise (W ú J í , 2005), were de rigueur, and the concept o an “East Asian cin-

ema” seemed to exist beore it had adequately been conceptualized. Te tourist

imagination that emerges in this period, especially in Korea’s jointly produced

pan-Asian lms, reects the rapidly changing terrain o regional cultural pro-duction and exchange in Northeast Asia and the unprecedented, relatively ree

movement across political and cultural barriers that nurtured such possibilities.


30/41


In addition, the emphasis on touristic motis provided these lms with a way

o working around the denationalizing tendency o collaborations, a way to

perorm cultural nationalism and appreciation while simultaneously advocat-

ing the transcendence o boundaries. Trough an ideology o tourism, these

lms thus offered a non-antagonistic way o negotiating between competingnational interests, a cinematic means to reconcile a complex past.

Although the connection between lm and travel is ar rom new—the

metaphorics o virtual transportation to unamiliar locales and different times

is as old as the medium itsel—the use o travel in these recent Korean, pan-

Asian coproductions departs radically rom its predecessors in Korean cin-

ema. In the 1980s travel in Korea charted a path toward social and historical

consciousness; yet starting around 1998, travel became complicated by the logic

o commodities as cinema began to address the emerging conditions o trans-

national commerce. Nationalist discourse may underscore the work ethic and

corporate structures that enable a highly effi cient and rewarding production

process, but in the end, it is its reach in distribution and uid circulation that

gives hallyu and its products value as an export. ravel in the hallyu realm

imagines what it is like to be a commodity in regional and global circulation.

One prominent location, or example, that is deeply connected to the g-

ure o the tourist—“the road” in Korean national cinema—is described by

Kyung Hyun Kim as the site o “heartbreaking emotional chords because o

the violent modern history that orcibly separated amily members or more

than a generation afer the war.” A gure o loss and homelessness, “a per-

manent site or many thousands o reugees who have lost their homes and

amilies,” the road shatters hopes o any possibility o nding a route toward

reedom or escape. Prior to hallyu, that was certainly the case. Park Kwang-

su’s 1988 Chilsu and Mansu captures this kind o immobility in its depiction o

Mansu’s home, where the pool lounge and blown-up plastic palm tree signalhow displaced dreams o leisurely travel are part o the grim social reality o

Seoul. As in the video game Chilsu plays in the arcade, imagining himsel in

a convertible driving down a palm-tree-lined U.S. coastal highway until he

crashes and burns, or as with the billboard o the suntanned blond woman

in sunglasses drinking a cocktail that Chilsu and Mansu must paint, travel

imagery indexes the displacement o the characters, ironically indicating the

unavailability o actual travel. Jang Sun-woo’s (Chang Sŏn-u) documentary

Cinema on the Road (Kilwiŭi y ŏnghwa, 1995) similarly encapsulates the unc-tion o the travel trope in the socially conscious lms o Korean New Wave

cinema, especially the association o travel with a quest mired in national


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history. Finding Seoul void o inspiration and unable to nd anything worth

lming, Jang, on a “quest or the core o Korean cinema,” heads to the oothills

o Mount Baek, the site o the 1894 onghak Peasant Revolt, then proceeds to

Kwangju, the site o the May 1980 uprising. ravel here is nostalgic historical

consciousness, a way to re-immerse onesel in a violent past.More recently, with increased mobility and emerging cultures o leisure

among younger generations, travel comes to connote the reedom and escape

reminiscent o the amiliar holiday or travel lm genre, in which travel and

leisure stand in opposition to work and social lie, rather than or political

reedom and historical oppression. ravel ceases to be directly related to na-

tional suffering, and comes to be more about the sel and one’s access to a hap-

pier and reer state o lie. In the decade between Cinema on the Road (1995)

and April Snow (2005), a lm that amously yielded signicant lm-inspired

tourism, travel in its relation to Korean cinema was drastically transormed.

Te trope o travel in late 1990s Korean lm, as it turns to interregional pro-

duction and distribution, is critical in the recalibration and reormulation o

Korean cinema in its ascent alongside and, later, as part o hallyu, as the rame

shifs rom national to transnational and the concerns rom the historical

traumas o the past toward the new economies o the uture.

Sightseeing, Site-Seeing

My methodology reects the intertextual nature o my subject matter, bring-

ing together tourism studies, visual and cultural anthropology, cultural studies,

and lm studies. In order to account or the way in which hallyu cinema makes

Korean popular culture an actor in the larger world system, this method builds

on the anthropologist George E. Marcus’s brand o mobile, comparative eth-

nography, “multi-sited ethnography,” which “takes unexpected trajectories intracing a cultural ormation across and within multiple sites o activity.” I

thus examine tour sites as extensions o logics rooted in lm texts and vice

versa.

In addition to tracking the transnational cultural exchanges implicit in tour-

ism, my ramework also attends to the transnational affective sensorium that

results rom such exchanges. My attention to the overlapping logics o touristic

and cinematic space thus nds inspiration in Giuliana Bruno’s critical reor-

mulation o the voyeur gure into that o the voyageur, or “a passenger whotraverses a haptic, emotive terrain.” In Atlas of Emotion Bruno conceptualizes

in cinema a “haptic space o ‘site-seeing,’ ” a shif rom the ocularcentric act o


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“sight-seeing” that has been the long- standing ocus o lm theory. As Bruno

explains, the haptic, implying contact with the skin and thereore the sense

o touch, “constitutes the reciprocal contact between us and the environment,

both housing and extending communicative interace. But the haptic is also

related to kinesthesis, the ability o our bodies to sense their own movementin space,” and thus the haptic, ultimately, helps map “our ways o being in touch

with the environment.” As a challenge to ocularcentrism and the assump-

tion that lm is solely a visual medium, Bruno suggests a shif rom the “old

cinematic voyeur” to a “lm voyageuse,” in which travel through motion pic-

tures constituting “a spatial orm o sensuous cognition” becomes possible.

Crucially or the present context, Bruno argues that these “psychogeographic

journeys,” or “site-seeing,” allow or “mapping a geography o intimate space

itsel.”

But though I borrow rom anthropological ideas and methods, I employ

no interviews with tourists (or lm viewers) or empirical observations about

the practices o specic tourists and moviegoers. My study sidesteps the quan-

titative methodology and analysis that has been predominant in studies o

hallyu screen tourism (primarily the tele vision dramas Winter Sonata and

aejangg ŭm); those studies have suffi ciently established through questionnaires

and interviews with tele vision program producers, viewers, and tourists that,

in the instances o hallyu television-drama tourism, “personal attachment with

the lmed locations as a metaphor o sense o place represents an emotional

or affective and positive bond between viewers and certain places/locations in

the process o consuming tele vision drama. Similarly . . . when viewers visited

lmed locations this kind o personal attachment with the locations would be

partially understood as ‘symbolic memory’ or ‘nostalgia’ which is a longing or

the locations’ meanings or them and a ondness or possessions and activities

associated with the days o experiencing the programme which has been over.”

Tese ndings echo those o Leshu orchin, which are based on tours in

Manhattan, namely that rsthand amiliarity with the program reerenced at

the lming location is crucial to accessing the multiple symbolic layers being

reerenced there. Film as a category in hallyu studies is all too readily and

uncritically subsumed into larger, undifferentiated general categories o popular

texts; while such studies, or instance, acknowledge the presence o unspecied

visual “attractive elements” and “production values” in popular texts that con-

struct, contextualize, and guide consumption inuencing touristic experiencein diverse ways, the text’s specic capacity or any sel-reexivity on the cultural

and social impact o these values do not get acknowledged or explored, and the


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questions that have driven screen-tourism studies in the West (traced back to

literary tourism) are not brought to bear specically on hallyu cinema (or hal-

lyu texts) within the context o Korean cultural history.

Why the lm April Snow? And can the touristic phenomenon surround-

ing April Snow be presumed to be the same as was generated by the tele visiondrama Winter Sonata? I believe that it is not. While I do look at affects asso-

ciated with travel, they are affects inscribed into the textuality and spatiality

o and in between sights and sites, not people. In my effort to make sights

and sites the subject o our exploration, I am ollowing the daring example

o John Dorst. Against what he perceives as Levi-Strauss’s overly quantita-

tive sensibility—“Tere is just too much stuff—orces, institutions, social re-

lations and roles, and so on”—Dorst proceeds to reormulate ethnography’s

limitations instead in qualitative terms. Te problem postmodernity poses

to ethnography, as Dorst sees it, is the problem o objectivity: “o put it in a

ormula, the culture o advanced consumer capitalism or, less acceptable but

more ashionable, postmodernity, consists largely in the processes o sel-

inscription, indigenous sel-documentation and endlessly reexive simulation.”

Te practices o ethnography become, in short, absorbed into the very practices

o culture: mass marketing, to take one example, engages in ethnographic re-

search and generates ethnographic texts as part o its primary unction. Te

consequence or ethnographic practice is severe, rendering the proessional

ethnographer superuous. As a “post-ethnographic” response to this dilemma,

Dorst proceeds with a methodology in which there are no subjects. Reading

instead the “place” o Chadds Ford, a suburb and tourist site in Pennsylvania,

which he signies with the capitalized word “Site,” Dorst’s Chadds Ford is thus

“an assemblage o texts” that produces its own “auto-ethnographies,” which

represent and interpret the Site’s own cultural production. Accordingly,

tourism is not just a phenomenon or ethnography to decode, but is also it-sel a mode o ethnography. Dorst’s ethnographic method eschews the task

o describing “the culture, values or world view o a certain set o people.”

Instead, his study attempts to document the way in which the Site generates

its own ethnography.

By tracking the spatial and affective contours o such psychogeographic

journeys through physical and lmic sites, I attempt to conceptualize an ap-

proach to hallyu cinematic texts that incorporates hallyu’s intermedial and in-

tercultural breadth, maniested in sites and practices beyond the screen, whilepaying close attention to the intricacies o narrative and aesthetics in each lm,

as well as the sociopolitical conditions underlying each lm’s production and


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consumption. Methodologically, I combine spatial ethnographies o relevant

lm locations with close readings o lms, placing particular emphasis in both

cases on the production o affective networks and distribution aesthetics that

reect and acilitate these emergent networks o exchange. Fundamental to hal-

lyu cinema is an aesthetic that collapses the task o the voyeur and voyageur. Asa result, viewing a lm and traveling (particularly o the lm-inspired variety),

become synthesized under the broader effort to map not only the increasingly

complex circuits o exchange that characterize the new East Asia, but also the

affective sensorium that both validates and underlies those circuits.

Te organization o ourists Distractions reects the connections I am mak-

ing between hallyu cinema and the intercultural roots o its tourist imaginary,

which I trace back to the intercultural collaborations o the 1998 to 2002 period.

Te book consists o three parts; each part juxtaposes two chapters organized

around an emotion that begins to stir and attract attention in the late 1990s

intercultural coproductions, then later gets rearticulated and ully eshed out

through various maniestations o tourist distractions in the 2000s under the

inuence o hallyu. Te three parts and their ascribed emotion are also or-

ganized by Korea’s relationship to its neighbors: intimacy between Korea and

Japan, amity between Korea and China, and remembrance in relations be-

tween South and North Korea. Te trajectory o these affects moves, rst,

rom the backward-looking questions o intimacy in the context o Korea’s

vexed historical relationship with Japan to the orward-looking issues aced

by Korea-China collaborators, with the possibility o a new Asian economy

centered around China’s economic emergence hanging in the balance; and

second, to South Korea’s relationship with North Korea, which in much con-

temporary discourse has been reied into the spatial and seemingly atempo-

ral coordinates o the . Te lms I examine in the rst chapter o each

part o this volume is thus rom the period 1998 to 2002, made during a timewhen hallyu was not yet sel-reexively reected in the lm creation process,

since the hallyu discourse does not emerge in Korea until 2001. In the second

chapter o each part o this volume, I look at lms and their extended enter-

prises, including supplementary s and tour sites, rom the period 2003 to

2006. Tese second chapters are meant to respond to the limitations the col-

laboration lms exhibited in centralizing certain emotions, and to reveal how

hallyu and travel recontextualizes these emotions.

By 2008, with the release o Romantic Island by Kang Chul-woo, Ko-rean hallyu cinema as I have described it—characterized by its critical, sel-

reexive registering o the touristic impulses inspired by the circulation o


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hallyu commodities—ceases to reect on the phenomenon and instead ully

embodies this orm o global circulation and commodication. Te lm stars

the actor Lee Min-ki and the singer Eugene, a ormer member o Korean girl

band S.E.S., which lasted rom 1997 to 2002, in the role o a K-pop singer ed

up with the demands o her hallyu stardom. It chronicles six Korean tour-ists, including the singer, who travel to the resort island o Boracay in the

Philippines. Te K-pop star’s hallyu work does not cease with her escape to

Boracay; in act, her discontent and withdrawal rom the demands o her job

merely serve to reinorce her initiation into a orm o affective labor (which

constitutes the main plot) that involves her traveling to a place where she is

relatively unknown and returning home to Korea as a better, upgraded version

o hersel, namely one in which her perceived, robotic public persona is capa-

ble o conveying genuine emotion. Instead o intervening in disjunctive, un-

anticipated ways, the touristic images rom the Boracay trip get absorbed into

the very abric o hallyu production, either via social media or projected onto

electronic billboards. Romantic Island gives ull representation to the hallyu

commodity as embodied by the tourist. In contrast, the gure o the traveler,

as explored in hallyu cinema, in search o distractions against the mundane

repetitions o the amiliar and everyday, maps the affective routes that will

serve as the emotional inrastructure or uture transnational relations.


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N O T E S

Introduction

1 Tis discourse has roots in early twentieth-century visions o northeast Asian re-

gionalisms, by Japan, China, and even Korea, which were designed to resist West-

ern imperialism and ofen to acilitate sub-imperialisms, most notoriously in the

Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the days o Japanese empire building.More recently, a new cluster o conceptualizations o Asianisms have emerged,

meeting a need to provide explanation or the continuous domestic economic

growth in East Asia’s our Newly Industrializing Countries (s)—South Korea,

aiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—which were modeled afer Japan, and to give

denition to an Asian identity. Tese discourses were subsequently destabilized in

the wake o the nancial crisis that swept Asia in 1997 and 1998. In addition, the

rise o phenomena such as hallyu called into question the undifferentiated status

o postcolonial nations within the region as South Korea gained momentum as a

neo-imperialist and sub-imperialist cultural power. Most recently, questions oAsian regionalization have been coupled with the analysis o globalization. Much

critical analysis o hallyu, as a broader category, has been based, on the one hand,

on ideas o globalization and regionalization, as articulated by Koichi Iwabuchi and

others, and, on the other, cultural nationalism, neoliberalism, and postcolonial-

ism, as illustrated most notably by Cho Hae- joang. Te ormer underscores the

denationalization o cultural products as the dominant underlying success actor,

while the latter identies cultural essentialism as shared across the discourses

variably rooted in national pride, national marketization, and national culture,

respectively. Following rom such work has been the advancement o ideas o lo-calization, ows, and cultural hybridity, drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s notions o

hybridity and “third space,” or instance, to critique notions o homogenization and

cultural reductionism. See Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization; Hae- joang Cho,

“Reading the ‘Korean Wave’ as a Sign o Global Shif,” 148–49; and Bhabha, Te

Location o Culture.

2 Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect , 2–10.

3 MacCannell, Te ourist .

4 Berlant, “Intuitionists,” 845.

5 Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? , 36.

6 Hae- joang Cho, “Reading the ‘Korean Wave’ as a Sign o Global Shif.”


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206 N O T E S T O I N T R O D U C T I O N

7 Tis is well documented in the Korean sociologist Hae- joang Cho’s 2002 semi-

nal essay surveying the initial discourses that eventually emerged on the Korean

Wave, which highlights “the reexive learning process o people living in the semi-

periphery o the world system” and, more specically, the way in which news o

hallyu “enabled Koreans to develop a new sense o globalization, the culture indus-

try, and a newly orming Asia in a short time span.” Cho reuses to reproduce any

uncritical ascination, and instead ocuses on how South Korea, initially surprised

by the transnational regard or its cultural products, developed a sense o partici-

pation in a global system through the serendipity o this experience. See Cho H.,

“Reading the ‘Korean Wave’ as a Sign o Global Shif,” 148–49. (Originally pub-

lished in 2002, this essay was revised and reprinted in 2005.)

8 Jeongmee Kim, “Why Does Hallyu Matter?,” 47.

9 In undermining the merits o debating the origin o the concept o hallyu

tourist distractions by youngmin choe

Documents