Of all the works of art I saw at the Kwangju Biennale, and all the names of artists and works that I scribbled into my notebook, only one has come up at all on my internet searching: a work called “The Pin-up Girl Project”, or, in Korean, “Pin-up girl 되기” (Becoming a Pin-up girl”. I’m feeding these photos from a news article on Naver.com because, seeing as this is a work of art by someone who assumably cares what is done with her images, I’m not going to copy them and provide them on my own page. (Unless Naver asks me to do so.)
I actually was pleased, if I couldn’t get access to any other works, to at least find something about this one. The images and setup in the installation “Pin-up Girl Project” grabbed me, not because I found myself looking at pictures of a pin-up girl so much as because I found myself confronted with a kind of mini-encapsulation of what it is to be in a culture where pin-up girls exist by the logic of the culture.
For it seems to me that, more still even than the Western world of Maxim and FHM and the rest, there really is a pin-up girl culture here in Korea. There’s not the same kind of shame that American stars have doing ads for Western consumption, so you see movie actors and actresses in ads for cell phones, jeans, water-purifiers, washing machines, bands of cosmetics, and so on. Though some of the links at the ads index at Soompi.com aren’t working, browsing the page shows how some stars don’t even see a problems being a spokesperson for competing companies: Jang Nara has apparently represented both KFC and Popeye’s Chicken. (Then again, I figured she was a sellout when I learned that her stage name is a kind of pun on “Best Nation”, obviously implying Korea as such. Making money off jingoism—not patriotism, but outright jingoism—is doubly foul-scented in my opinion.)
So you have the iconic pin-up girl, the fashion queens (or, princesses, at least), and you have the magazines swarming around them. Whether they marry or not becomes a big issue. [There’s a big court case—big as in on the front of the tabloids—because it was falsely claimed in some tabloid that Ji-Hyun Jeon, a huge popstar here (here are some pics put up by a fan, some of them very “girlish” meaning cutesy and kiddy in the way I’ll discuss in this post), would marry someone in November (I forget how, but it sounded suspiciously like Celine Dion’s very weird and convenient marriage). She’s suing over the falsehood.] Their ethnicity matters. People form strong opinions about these stars, either loving or hating them. A lot of the young women I’ve known in Korea have confessed to me a vile hatred for Jeon-Ji Hyun, for example.
And then you have young people. Now, look, I’m not deconstruction Korean adolescence, or condemning it compared to what I saw in Canada. In Canada, the standard thing would be a lot of seeing photos of Raquel Welch and Christie Brinkley, and understanding the implicit message in them, which is, “This is what a sexy woman looks like.” But the thing is, they were not so everpresent. They weren’t all in movies, or in TV ads. That “sexy woman” thing was what happened in magazines. (And sometimes a boy would steal a dirty magazine and we’d get some sense that, oh, that’s what sex involves.)
I remember my mother taking me aside once, I don’t remember why but I think I said the word “Playboy!” or something like that. She told me, “Look, what happens in those magazines; that’s not like real life.” I think she was perhaps thinking of hard-core magazines, to be honest, since really, Playboy is all about some pretty girl taking her clothes of and trotting around, posing in different ways, on her own. But the message was sensible to me, anyway. Real life is not all shiny and glamour and very big breasts and no brains.
The thing is that even the “soft-core” porn of Playboy is not legal in Korea; you don’t get magazines showing the kinds of poses you saw in North American magazines, when, as a kid, you went, “That’s what it looks like?” The pubic region is off-limits. But far more important to the formation of young peoples’ sexual consciousness, I think, is the fact that in so much of advertising and film, there’s a kind of “innocent, cute, wonderful” vibe that is used to portray the young, nubile female characters positively. It’s almost a kind of cipherporno, the kind of thing moms and sisters look at and think, “Hey, those sweat pants look really comfortable, and that Ji-Hyun Jeon is so cute, 
I wish my skin was nice like hers,” where the men in the room, without exception, are thinking to themselves that they know exactly why the woman won “best butt in Korea” on Internet polls. But look at the picture to the right. Doesn’t that strike you as astonishingly childlike for a woman who won a poll for best ass in the country? Not to be unfair, for she has gotten racier lately, but a lot of her ads are still full of a childlike iconography like this.
Did you hear me right? Yes, she did win that award. It didn’t go to any pageant winner, nor to a straight-out model whose name is unknown to the majority of people, nor even an ero movie star (whose butt might actually have been seen by someone). No, it went to a movie/TV/pop star who dances to “Woolly Bully” on jeans commercials. You can view the ads here if you want to compare notes… the Woolly Bully one has a thumbnail of her with a boxing helmet on, and the most recent one (first in the list) was banned from Korean TV. Why? Because it’s too overtly sexual, and set in a bar. She is a sex symbol even though government regulations prevent her ads from being “too sexual”, as The Marmot reported a while back. What this actually means is that the government demands that advertisements be strictly cipher-sexual, for better or worse.
This is the extent to which pin-up girl culture, no matter how cute and pre-sexual it tries to render itself, is absolutely and blatantly ciphersexual. For example, see Ji-Hyun Jeon’s cosmetics commercial, where she acts like a little girl and sings a kids’ song, while gyrating her hips and acting like an adult acting like a kid.
All of this ran through my mind when I stood before the installation at the Kwangju Biennale, this “Pin-Up Girl 되기”. The installation itself was simply a bed, assumably a teenager’s bed (that was the impression I got) and a swathe of photos and mock-up magazine clippings featuring pictures of the artist, who I think goes by “Ren” in English, plastered all over the wall, so thick than you couldn’t see any wallspace behind the bed. For me, it was clearly a comment about the inescapability of this pin-up girl culture, and how deeply sexualizing it is.
Anyway, if you want to try navigate the artist’s site, the hardest bit is the front page. You can find links to galleries and such if you hover the mouse around the woman in the picture, who is, by the way, the artist. She doesn’t yet seem to have shots up from the project I’m talking about, but there are other things, including a very weird piece called “Gay Sex Education” with pictures of Smurfs in it.
gord!
my mother said exactly the same thing to me about playboy.
– it’s not real – women aren’t like that in real life –
i’ll tell you the feeling i got.
it was like being told that santa claus didn’t exist, or any of those other myths. the scales fell from my eyes so to speak.
now it didn’t stop that kind of imagery working on me but it did shed light on what was going on ‘ behind the curtain’, so to speak.
the pinup and porn are different in key ways i suspect. pornography has been a part of human culture for a very long time and very prominent in particular cultures, playing a similar though nuanced role in each culture, from japan to china to india to the middle east to europe and beyond.
what’s peculiar to europe and has spread from there to other cultures is the pinup. here’s why i think – get ready to shoot me down.
around the turn of the first millenium the church lost some of it’s vehement hatred and disgust of woman, her being the root of all evil and the path to hell, fit only for procreation and abuse. women became idealised in the virgin mary, literally idolised. woman had to be perfect, under certain conditions, if she was able to bring forth the saviour. the cult of mary within christendom was huge, from jerusalem to finland, from ireland to the far edges of the holy roman empire. women had become a pinup. what’s interesting is the visual element to this rehabilitation, icons of the blessed virgin, of her perfection, we everywhere, she and other women of relgious note even became fodder for the relic industry.
i suspect that perfection (- look at giotto, duccio, lorenzetti, masaccio, fra angellico, signorelli, bellini, her piety is what the have in common -) as we moved further along in the centuries, became embodied, literaly. paintings began to reveal a breast when suckling the child. other women, figures from history, allegory etc. were painted, there to represent some established more acceptable to society as a whole and the flesh that male patronage felt more and more comfortable with seeing publicly. the northern european renaiscence can vouchsafe breakthrough paintings of this type. but europe as a whole was shifting it’s assumptions about the perfectability of womankind to different aspects. the ‘physical aesthetic’ has always been malleable but it would be safe to say that not until say 150 years ago did the ‘physical aesthetic’ in non-pornographic material become an end and focus in itself. renoir, maets(his olympia while tentatively an ellegory [and ‘copy’] is all about the body), ingres – what we see is the use of the semi-naked and naked female form used in and of itself.
modern pinup culture seems to owe more to that tradition than to porn, porn has hardly changed in its styles and while it may inform pinup doesn’t define them. pinup culture has become a tool of consumerism and industry, why? because it’s about the promise of satisfaction rather than the pornographic act of satisfaction. porn could never sell anything other than more porn, the promise embodied by a thousand years of pinup tradition can pretty much sell anything, to eiother sex.
what i’ve said is thin but there’s not that much room in a comment box ;-)
That’s fascinating, Rob. I’ll have to think about it and get back to you. It might be worth crossposting a kind of melange of my post and your comment over at NSA, maybe? It again ties in to the question of what goes on when people look at “art”, even when it’s just commercial pop depictions of this or that star being used to sell this or that product.
Glad to see someone put my coverage of Korean tabloid crap to much more intelligent use.
Hey Marmot,
I’ve always enjoyed your coverage of Korean tabloid crap on its own merits, to be honest. Brings out into perspective of the bizarreness of this place we’re living in. Which is a fun thing…
white people they think they know all that pfft asians lived longer than them hahahaa
Rez,
Wow, I think you might win the “idiot of the year” prize for that comment. Let’s see:
How are you a moron and an asshole? Shall I count the ways?
– not responding to the contents of my post
– ad hominem dismissal of me and my commenters, and even better, on the basis of race (or your assumption, no less); which makes you a bigot… congratulations, and welcome to the dregs of the species
– insulting assumption about what white people think they know, from a post that dared to be critical of the place of women in a society where women have less power than almost anywhere else in the developed world… must be crazy.
If you want to engage the topic, cool, or call me on errors in observation, great. If you wanna dismiss or insult people on the basis of race, and proclaim the superiority of Asians, there are web boards for fellow bigots and lunatics who will chant and cheer and agree with you. But for the record, this post is eight years old and I may not even agree with what I wrote then anyway. Or did you not notice that from the date in the url?
In fact, the only reason I published your post was to mock your ignorance in the second half of your comment:
Pray tell, how’s that? Are you one of those morons who doesn’t “believe in” Darwinian evolution? (As if evolution were any more a matter of “belief” than gravity or photosynthesis are?)
Asians are humans, just as are all other races of humans on Earth. We trace to a common (African) ancestor, and I even remember reading somewhere that some degree of phenotypical diversity among early humans seems to have existed all the way back to when we were all in Africa. Sure, there were phenotypical differences that arose during historical time: the genetics of Asian facial features and perspiration seem to have been affected by a long existence in cold, desertified regions, for example. But unless you think Asians evolved independently, and are another species, then “Asians” have exactly the same length of “living” as every other human group.
Similarly, the origins of Asian cultures date back to about the same times and the origins of Western cultures — Asians trace back to ancient China, Westerners to the Sumerians.
It’s kind of pathetic to confront this genetic-superiority fantasy being tossed around by Asian morons, the way it was tossed around indiscriminately by Western morons more commonly in the 19th and 20th centuries. You’d think Asians, having had to listen to white idiots say this shit, would have learned it weas shit. But nope, idiots copy idiots, and now you’re spouting the same moronic race-fantasy trash that, a century ago, was putting (unfairly) your race near the bottom of the global racial hierarchy.
Just goes to show you, stupid ideas are endlessly transposable, and endlessly appealing… to idiots.