[Culture Op-Ed] Is “What Is Most Korean Is Most Global” Really True of Culture?

For a long time, it was a phrase I heard so often my ears nearly wore out: “What is most Korean is most global.” Roughly from the early 1990s, beginning in the final years of the Roh Tae-woo administration and then really blooming under the Kim Young-sam administration, this slogan transformed all kinds of social and cultural scenes of the era. Alongside this concept, the line “What’s ours is what’s best,” used in a TV commercial, became a hugely popular catchphrase, and before long the concept and term “sintoburi” (身土不二) also began to spread.

The same was true in popular culture. As society as a whole kept shouting that “what is most Korean is most global,” it naturally had an effect. People became obsessed with “the most Korean” things.

Im Kwon-taek’s 1993 pansori film Seopyeonje, released immediately after the Kim Young-sam administration took office, achieved the remarkable feat of breaking the all-time Korean box office record. Bae Il-ho’s song “Sintoburi,” which directly borrowed that catchphrase as its title, became a major trot hit and even won a top lyrics award that same year. Even Seo Taiji and Boys, then phenomenally popular among teens and people in their twenties, drew attention with the title track “Hayeoga” from their second album by combining the sound of the traditional taepyeongso horn with metal music. That second Seo Taiji and Boys album sold some 2.2 million copies.

Social and cultural phenomena that seemed to fit the slogan “what is most Korean is most global” were erupting everywhere, and modified hanbok fashion also began to appear more frequently on the streets. Popular culture, too, conformed to that slogan and tried to win global sympathy through what was most Korean.

But did that methodology really work?

Korean popular culture achieved global success by pursuing universal emotions

Now let us look at the present day, nearly 40 years later, in 2020. Fortunately, in the meantime Korean popular culture really has become global. K-pop has reached No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard charts, and K-dramas, from the late 1990s onward, gave birth to the term hallyu (韓流) and soon conquered all of Asia. Now they have spread even to Latin America, where cultural sensibilities are relatively similar to Korea’s, and to the United States, where the Hispanic population continues to grow. The reputation of K-movies is represented by the film Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and four Academy Awards including Best Picture. It is true that we now live in an age when “what’s ours is good.”

But this is completely different from what the slogan “what is most Korean is most global” originally symbolized. At its core, that slogan was a motto built on a nationalist foundation. It sought to awaken people to the value of “our traditional culture,” and ultimately claimed that Korean cultural products could be globally recognized only insofar as they inherited from or were connected to traditional culture.

The current situation, however, is far removed from that. Consider BTS, the boy group that has repeatedly topped the Billboard Hot 200 album chart in the United States. Their music is based mostly on hip-hop, R&B, and Latin music from South America. In that music, it is virtually impossible to find any meaningful connection to Korean “traditional” cultural forms.

And this is not unique to BTS. It reflects the overall tendency of K-pop as it spreads around the world. In the realm of so-called “world music,” it consists of mixtures of globally shared musical forms—dance pop, hip-hop, R&B, electronica, Latin music, and so on. So the success of K-pop is fundamentally the result of adapting well to “world music” trends and combining them with the idol system and distinctive synchronized choreography. It has nothing to do with preserving or linking to traditional culture. Even the idol concept itself is, at bottom, a direct import of a popular music product model that was perfected in Japan in the 1980s. In other words, the success came from accepting part of Japanese culture—the very thing nationalism so detests. In practical terms, it is a success story achieved from the exact opposite direction of those slogans.

The situation is no different with K-dramas. From the outset, they began as a Korean adaptation of the Latin American telenovela—that is, serialized dramas built on extreme emotional conflict and implausible plot developments. Then, in the early 1990s, a series of Korean dramas heavily influenced by Japanese trendy dramas such as Tokyo Love Story, especially MBC’s 1994 drama Feelings of Love in Your Embrace, started gaining popularity in Chinese-speaking regions such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. That was the beginning of hallyu. Aside from exceptional cases in China—where, under its strict birth control policy, viewers became enamored of large-family dramas such as MBC’s What Is Love? and KBS2’s Men of the Bath House out of a kind of longing—the popularity of K-dramas fundamentally belongs on the same continuum as the popularity of modern trendy dramas.

To this day, there has effectively been only one globally successful drama tied to traditional culture: MBC’s 2004 drama Dae Jang Geum. After its success, some argued that Korean dramas, too, should move toward “what’s ours is what’s best,” but that argument was effectively buried once it became known that MBC’s Hur Jun recorded abysmal ratings in Hong Kong that same year. Many interpret Dae Jang Geum’s success as stemming from its food and cooking theme, a concept that works well anywhere, combined with the Japanese manga-style cooking battle format. In fact, the drama’s writer, Kim Young-hyun, has said herself that she was influenced by Japanese cooking battle manga. That is quite different from the simplistic logic that “our own” culture succeeds simply by virtue of being ours.

Meanwhile, there is perhaps no success story less related to tradition than that of K-movies. From the beginning until now, there have been very few cases of global success achieved through that traditionalist route. Im Kwon-taek’s 2002 film Chihwaseon did win Best Director at Cannes, but many saw it as essentially a career achievement award for Im Kwon-taek himself. And Chihwaseon has, at this point, been largely forgotten by the global film world.

Modern crime thrillers such as Oldboy, Memories of Murder, The Chaser, and I Saw the Devil played the leading role in introducing Korean cinema to the world, followed by dramas depicting contemporary Korea such as Poetry, Thirst, and On the Beach at Night Alone. Strictly speaking, the global success of Korean film stems from its use of American-style genre conventions, while grounding itself philosophically in a Western middle-class moral framework. From there, it added distinctive color through ideas borrowed from such sources as Japanese manga, as in Oldboy.

At this point, one thing becomes easy to infer. The key to the global success of Korean popular culture—K-pop, K-dramas, and K-movies—lies in a methodology that is in practice the exact opposite of the slogan “what is most Korean is most global”: gathering trends from around the world, from the United States, Europe, Latin America, Japan, and elsewhere, extracting global universality from them, and packaging that effectively. In one sense, it is precisely because people did not believe that “what is most Korean is most global” that they ultimately obtained “what is most global.”

Where did the slogan “what is most Korean is most global” come from?

So how did that grandiose slogan—“what is most Korean is most global”—come into being in the first place? A closer look shows that the atmosphere in early-1990s Korea was actually quite complicated.

First, let us look at its “prototype.” The slogan appears in many respects to be a variation on the great writer Goethe’s famous line, “What is most national is most universal.” But Goethe’s sentence in fact carries almost the exact opposite nuance from “what is most Korean is most global.”

If the Korean variation was a nationalist slogan meant to inspire pride by emphasizing the excellence of Korean national culture, Goethe’s original was closer to a defense of cultural diversity. It spoke to the value of the existence of many different cultures around the world, and argued that such varied values themselves should become universal values. It was not a vision of one superior value conquering everything, but rather, in a sense, one in which a chaotic field teeming with many different cultural values should itself become the universal value. It was absolutely not a competitive claim that Korean culture is superior and therefore enjoys comparative advantage.

Yet there was a reason this statement about “diversity” became fodder for baseless nationalistic self-congratulation.

The mood of Korean society in the early 1990s was subtle. The Korean economy was on the path from developing country to advanced nation, and most people were proud of that fact. At the same time, pent-up stress from “the years before” began to erupt. This was the stress of having long been pressured by media narratives that constantly criticized the backwardness of Koreans and insisted that the country had to hurry up and catch the global standards of advanced nations. That was not entirely wrong in itself, but the stress of wounded national pride and self-esteem began slowly exploding around the time of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The sentiment was something like: “We were not such an inferior people after all, and so what belongs to us is actually remarkable too.”

At the same time, the orientation of left-wing student activism on university campuses also changed. As Soviet-style communism collapsed and the Cold War ended, the leftist movement, which had effectively lost its way, soon gravitated toward nationalism. On campuses, the People’s Democracy (PD) faction, which adhered to orthodox Marxism, gradually lost influence, while the National Liberation (NL) faction, based on nationalism, came to dominate. As a result, among the broader youth population centered around universities, nationalist slogans such as “What’s ours is what’s best” and “What is most Korean is most global” became rampant. They rode the mood of the times.

On top of that, the Kim Young-sam administration that took office through the 1992 presidential election was, in effect, the most openly nationalist administration in Korean history. It began by dismantling the former Japanese Government-General building in Gwanghwamun, and even local governments began responding to anti-Japanese conspiracy stories such as the “iron stake” myth by turning them into policy. The disaster that emerged when this line combined with the “globalization” policy championed by the Kim Young-sam administration was precisely the slogan “what is most Korean is most global”—a slogan that deliberately distorted Goethe’s original statement.

Finally, there was also the issue of the Uruguay Round, the multilateral trade negotiation that began in 1986 and produced an agreement in 1994. The group expected to be hit hardest by the resulting changes was farmers facing the opening of agricultural markets, and in 1990 the Korean Peasants League was launched as a protest organization in response. In that process, the slogans that emerged were again “What’s ours is what’s best” and “sintoburi.” They functioned as agitational slogans claiming that Korean agricultural products suited Korean bodies and that the country therefore must not give up self-sufficient agriculture. In that process, the cultural logic of “what is most Korean is most global” also gained momentum. Agitation, after all, can itself be seen as a form of cultural approach.

What is interesting is that sintoburi, in fact, is itself a false concept. It was explained as a phrase derived from the Donguibogam’s theory that medicine and food share the same origin, supposedly to provide a nationalist basis. But no matter how hard one looks, no such phrase exists in the Donguibogam. At most, it contains a passage to the effect that “human flesh is like the soil of the earth.”

The real story is even more absurd. Sintoburi was actually first introduced domestically when a Korean translation of Japanese agricultural scholar Hasumi Takeyoshi’s The Road to Cooperative Community was published in 1989. The concept originally appeared in the 1910s through the Shokuyo-kai, an organization associated with figures such as Ishizuka Sagen. In other words, activists from the National Liberation (NL) faction, who were at the time promoting the Korean Peasants League, extracted the concept from there and then forged its origin into something “nationalist” before presenting it as sintoburi. It was a nationalist slogan born through the least sintoburi-like route imaginable. And so a concept that was itself far from “most Korean” went on to produce the cultural slogan “what is most Korean is most global.”

The current shift away from grandiose nationalist slogans toward the “discovery of the individual”

So what about now? Are there still people today who proclaim things like “what is most Korean is most global”?

Up until around 2012–2013, there definitely were. When Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became a global sensation, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard chart in the United States, some scholars even argued that “Gangnam Style,” too, inherited Korea’s traditional madangnori culture and traditional rhythmic patterns such as jajinmori. To anyone in the K-pop industry, this would sound utterly ridiculous, but in any case, the stubborn logic that this all happened because our traditional culture was so inherently excellent still survived until about then.

After that, it gradually faded. This began as internet memes such as “Do you know” mocking such nationalist obsession became popular. The cultural current of the 2010s was, on the whole, strongly post-nationalist. And as that happened, “what is most Korean is most global” also began to change into another slogan. The following comes from a February 2015 interview in the Broadcasting Journalists Club bulletin with the younger-generation pansori performer Lee Jaram:

“You’re asking me what I think of the saying, ‘What is most Korean is most global’? I say this instead: ‘What is most like me is most global. We have all lost what is Korean.’ If you stop people and ask them what ‘Korean’ means, everyone will give a different answer. What is most ‘like me’ is what is most contemporary, and what is most contemporary is the ‘me’ that contains that society, and that is what works abroad too. That is what I think being global means.”

This came not from some other genre, but from a pansori singer—someone engaged in one of the forms closest to sintoburi itself. In that light, Bong Joon-ho’s acceptance speech last March, when he won the Academy Award for Best Director for Parasite and quoted a comment by the great Martin Scorsese, carries a similar meaning: “The most personal is the most creative.” It is evidence that a new generation of cultural artists is now moving away from grandiose nationalist slogans and gradually shifting its motto toward the “discovery of the individual.”

Of course, the concept of “what is most Korean is most global” still survives here and there in the realm of official events and public discourse. One example is the Korean Food Globalization Grand Festival, which held its 7th event last November. It is hosted by the Korea Hansik Forum and sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government, among others. Its slogan is “Hansik to culture, to the world, to the economy.”

In reality, however, although the event is structured around traditional Korean cuisine, the response among actual food service operators has been lukewarm. They already know that what people around the world are enthusiastic about are samgyeopsal, seasoned fried chicken, cheese dak-galbi, and the like. Many of these are things that Koreans themselves would hardly even recognize as hansik, yet that is how they are received overseas. In the end, “what is most Korean is most global” now survives only as the sort of inflated event slogan typical of official discourse. Its vitality, like nationalism itself, is stubbornly persistent, but it has little to do with the world we actually live in. That has always been true, and will remain so. There was only a brief period when people insisted otherwise.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] 문화는 '가장 한국적인 것이 가장 세계적인 것'이다?

Author: Mun-won Lee

Date: 2020-05-04

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=8&idx=22599