Artists of color have their special meanings for mediating the transnational subjective and connecting the separated dots of identities throughout the continents. Nam June Paik, who is well known as a media artist, was born in Seoul, South Korea during the Japanese colonial period. At the time, there were many diasporas moving to other countries like China and Japan to escape from the political chaos. Paik’s family has also moved to Japan before the Korean War was started. He studied Aesthetics and Composition in Tokyo University and moved to Germany after his graduation to continue his study for Philosophy and Musical History. In Germany, he met John Cage, an American composer who once participated in the Fluxus Movement, and got inspired by his liberal spirit and his unique destructive approach toward the music and sound. Paik then does his active work as an outstanding performing artist. 

Paik’s famous works include: <존 케이지에게 보내는 경의: A respect sending to John Cage>, which he performs to smash a piano with an ax, and <피아노 포르테를 위한 연습곡: An etude for piano forte>, which he cuts the necktie that John Cage was wearing. Paik himself says he has expressed the clusters of the ideas about an impact, a climax, and an astonishment, calling his whole performance works are created under the expressionism and the romanticism. He continuously shows an iconoclastic installation works to show the avant-garde characteristics of his own, and in the 1960s, Paik does a work named “Opera Sextronic,” where he tries to put sexual connotations into the musical performance. 

During this work, a cellist Charlotte Moorman tries playing her cello with her naked body. She actually gets caught by the New York State officer for the misdemeanor charge, but this incident then triggers to amend the New York State federal law that the state cannot punish the nudity in the artistic scene. Allan Kaprow, a famous American performance artist, called Paik as a “cultural terrorist” came from Asia since Paik has broken all the cultural border lines in the field of art by representing his unique Korean diaspora identity to the foreigners and addressing the ontological problems as an artist of color. 

I see artists who work transnationally as global-nomads, who pursue purposeless freedom and do their best to show their complex identities. We should feel thankful to their hard work as opening up the new opportunities for the others to set their foot into the multicultural society and reconstruct their misinterpreted identities as colored people. When Paik says, “Art is not the Olympic, and the cultural patriotism wins the political patriotism,” he should have meant that people from various cultures should step up to show their diverse identities in a more aggressive way since there are no such things as dominant ideologies of nation, race, gender, or anything people categorize the others into. 

Just like an emergence of the term “Global Contemporary,” created after Kate-hers RHEE’s art exhibition in Germany, artists from transcultural backgrounds should never succumb to the dominant cultures, but try to narrate incessantly their unique identities to strike the preexisting cultural norms and stereotypes that have been put upon the faces of artists of color .

After the K-pop dance music videos have become a huge phenomenon amongst those YouTube viewers across the world, the fandoms of each K-pop idol groups began to make reaction videos for their fan groups. This was another a huge wave risen in the YouTube culture as a byproduct of the K-pop popularity. A lot of YouTubers began to create various reaction videos: videos reacting to the dance covers, viral parodies of the K-pop music videos, or to the “Jikcam,” which are the videos taken individually by the fans of a certain idol member of the group, and etc.

What’s more interesting is that these reaction videos are recently started to aim Korean movies too. As K-pop industry expands throughout the teenagers around the world, Hallyu began to strike the world and made people turn their interest into various other Korean cultures, and the Korean cinema has been taking a big part of it. Park Chan Wook is a Korean movie director well renowned for his previous work Oldboy (2003) and Thirst (2009). He had also founded his own movie production company, the Moho Film, in 2002. This company has been marketing their movies in an aggressive way, and YouTube was one of their significant marketing methods. There is this clip of two people reacting to one of Park’s movie trailers, The Handmaiden (2016), and these two show how the transnationalism is starting to become real.

The woman in the video says, “We had those dolls when I was growing up” (at 3:36),  or “My girls used to go through over that” (at 7:23), which clearly show that she can somehow connect to these scenes with her Asianness. Although there are many other non-Asian YouTubers reacting to Korean movies, they still can somehow share the commons when watching the video since the universality of human emotion leads people to sympathize easily with the movies when they portray cross-cultural themes in the scenes. Through reacting, people feel a sense of kinship, and a pure satisfaction by receiving a confirmation from others that what they are feeling right now are exactly what others are feeling right now too. This is how people re-identify themselves, and further re-unify with others through watching the scenes, and this is where the transnationalism begins to extend since the borders of nationality are blurring off through people’s empathies.

Further, the author of Pop Cosmopolitics and K-pop Video Culture, Michell Cho, says in her reading, “The talent agency YG entertainment shows no hesitation to give away content for free on YouTube knowing that the sort of devotion that marshals the resources evident in the dance cover video leads to acts of consumption far greater than the purchase of pop singles as commodities” (254). Just like YG, the Moho Film is trying the same thing for its movies like, distributing several clips of the movie for free along with the trailer in the YouTube, before the movie launches officially in the market. By doing this, the YouTubers who react to Korean movies get to have a chance to do more of their reaction videos besides the trailer, and those who watch YouTube movie trailer reaction videos will get to have another chance to look up the other various clips of the movie that they are interested in.

The whole combination of the dynamics of intimacy and the various commodification methods are helping this Korean cinema industry to actualize the transnationalism more than ever. Thus, people from other countries start to look at the historical backgrounds of the Korean movie. The Handmaiden, for instance, people start to pay attention why people in Korea were wearing all the mixed versions of Japanese traditional clothes and the Korean’s, or why all the interiors of the Korean houses are jumbled up with the Japanese and European styles, and why the movie has the scenes of a Korean man trying to entertain Japanese aristocrats. Then, at the end of the movie, people finally realize that it was actually in the period of Japanese colonial, and there was a history where some opportunists in Korea earned a lot of money through enacting pro-Japanese actions, and justifying the Japanese annexation of Korea.

The whole nationalistic idea that is portrayed in the Korean movies are making people who make reaction videos and people who are watching their reaction videos to be more curious about the Korean history and culture, and gradually question themselves how to accept the cultural intentions put into the Korean movie industry, and further expand their personal ideas transnationally. Commodifying the Korean movies through the accessible, affordable, and dramatic marketing device like YouTube, has led to the production of various reaction videos for the Korean movie trailers, and these reaction videos have also led the interconnection of individuals and groups beyond the state boundaries to be more close than ever, and commodified the people’s empathies in a smart way, which finally played a huge role in expanding the essence of Korean nationality under Hallyu-hwa.