| Andre Kim's signature style was that of a self-described, Konglish affection of "elegance" and an unstated but obvious Overwrought Style. This is from the "Andre Kim Remind Show" this month, the first major re-launching of his brand since his death in 2010. |
By Michael Hurt
I begin this essay by quoting Korean rapper/K-POP star CL in "Bad Girl" quoting ur-rap group Run-DMC in their song "Peter Piper" as I point out that I am talking about "bad" in the sense of "not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good." If one were to apply the notion of "overdoing it on purpose"― or what Koreans would call "o-ba" for "over" and the young people call "extra" today—to fashion, Andre Kim's entire clothing line, runway show style, and even use of models could rightly be described as "extra."
It is something well beyond the accepted boundaries of the genre or social norms of normal comportment. Dropping over-pronounced English loan words into everyday talk in a Korean traditional market in Seoul might be begging for a "kimchi slap" even today, let alone in Busan in the 1960s.
But delivered not as an affectation designed with the annoying goal of social climbing but as part of projecting an affectation of a front, a style that is part of an overall image — this is something far less odious and can even be entertaining. Put simply, it is not meant to be taken at face value, as anything more than one part of a colorful package.
This more or less perfectly describes the K-Pop aesthetic, which also functions in the Realm of the Overwrought and Overdone.
Indeed, nothing is understated here, even as nothing is really meant to represent any mode of comportment that could be considered normal. Videos such as this becoming popular in this putatively "conservative" and "Confucian" culture might seem somewhat strange, although there seems to be a place reserved for just this kind of aesthetic norm-transgressive cultural production.
And I suspect that this kind of aesthetic norm violation is exactly what invites the categorization as "art" in the first place, although it is not "art" at all. Surely, it is "artistic" in that it?seems?like art and simulates actual, older, and more traditional forms of art quite well.
But far from being a form of self-expression that originates from a particular person or an identifiable creator to which we can assign authorship, the cultural texts of K-Pop production are made not only by committee, but as part of an industrial process.
It is part of a"culture industry" that functions like any other industry with an inherent interest in producing not only products or even the market itself, but in producing needs and desires that can never be fulfilled by anything other than that industry. In so doing, it does social harm. That is how they work, and perhaps it's no coincidence that K-Pop and/or K-Dramas, for example, rely on the Overwrought Aesthetic as part of the genres themselves, because they create not only the entertaining hooks of kitsch and controversy, but also invite the categorization into "art" itself.
I am not saying the Overwrought Aesthetic itself is a marker of being part of the culture industry, but rather that perhaps so much of the OA is a side effect of the particular way in which Korean popular culture production is forged in the factory style of the culture industry? Maybe now it is such a big part of how so much of the Korean pop culture "sausage" is made that it has become a marker of Koreanness itself?
And maybe that's why things such as?aegyo, a performance of exaggerated, dramatic "winsomeness" that is often scoffed at by many, Korean and non-Korean alike, yet which involves a certain amount of pleasure in its doing, as well as being an accepted part of being Korean itself. Maybe there is something there, maybe not.
Yet, I think that overwrought expressions of desire, disgust, hate, love, lust, and loathing being not only such a big part of Korean cultural and artistic production but even markers of being Korean itself is more than a mere coincidence. Being or doing?o-ba?seems to be a guilty pleasure part of Korean popular culture and even identity itself.
Maybe that is what makes the "kimchi?slap" Korean, besides just the obvious fact of the?kimchi. Although the Overwrought Style and the performance of?o-ba, as both joy and pain of the Korean mode of being, seems to be here to stay, it is still important to think about how this came to be.
| Michael Hurt. |
Dr. Michael Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies and started Korea's first street fashion blog in 2006. He researches youth, subcultures and street fashion at as a research professor at the University of Seoul and also writes on visual sociology and cultural studies at his blog and book development site Deconstructing Korea.