In Eleana J.Kim’s reading Producing Missing Persons: Korean Adoptee Artist Imagining (Im)Possible Lives, she lists several different artists that delved into the notion of the cultural identity crisis for Korean oversea adoptions. I was especially interested and drawn to Kate-hers Rhee’s artworks and performance arts as it implicitly lead the audiences in thinking about their own identity but also creates a queer link between pop culture and the media to adoption and cultural identities.

In Kate-hers Rhee’s artwork Missing Persons Project, she performed an act of sticking missing persons posters of herself around the hospital at which she was born in. Of course, she was not missing but it ironically shows her struggle of being a forced immigrant as she finds herself lost in her triple identity as she was an oversea adoptee herself as wanders around her Korean, American and German identity.

While raising awareness of the danger and risk of oversea adoption, she also focuses on how media and pop culture have potentially helped many families to reunite. As technology and pop culture emerges and works together, media platforms become the dominating space for an adoptee to connect and possibly reunion with their birth parents. This in a way also ironically reflects the despair within the Missing Persons Project. In a way, Rhee is aware that no one will be able to identity or actually “find” the girl (herself) printed on the paper. Not only because it was herself, it also shows how dependent we are on alternative methods of reunion through the failure. The project can also be viewed in a rather cyclical way as it shows how much the society is being commercialized where even the finding of people becomes a story to be made exciting for the audience.

Not only does Rhee raise the awareness of Korean oversea adoptees and how it interconnects with the media, she also takes a step further in challenging her korean identity. In another interactive performance piece Transkoreaning, Rhee presented a transformation process of herself from a rather western thinking (as she have stayed in Germany for over 10 years) to being embedded with South Korean culture through the use of social media. Through the employment of the internet and social media in particular (such as vlogging and blogging), she had made the audiences rethink how to approach the notions of cultural identity and “modern South Korean identity cliches and stereotypes” as it have been “further perpetuated by the popularity and dissemination of Hallyu”. Narrating in her non-native level of Korean, over the three months, she have not only transformed her communication ability in becoming an “authentic Korean” but have also showed the progress of how she changed her ethnicity and image of being an Korean woman through the influence of cultural presentations on the internet and from her surroundings. What makes this performance appealing and exciting is because it not only engages with herself as an individual but also deals with herself as the “other” by explicitly showing the struggle of embodying a transnational cultural identity.

*CF, also known as Commercial Film, is a term used by Koreans to refer to any type of television advertisements.*

After the 1997 IMF crisis, as businesses started to adapt to the neoliberal restructuring, a shift on marketing strategies started to emerge in South Korea. Rather than having a product-centered approach, most goods and commodities are advertised with a consumer-centered approach. The consumer-centered approach mainly focuses on building the brand and promoting a lifestyle rather than selling specific products. This shift especially utilized the involvement of celebrities as brands start to merge with entertainment to attract the mainstream audience’s attention. This, therefore, connects Korean advertisement to popular culture.

Popular culture, according to Stuart Hall, is defined through “its rootedness in actual material conditions and lived experiences”. He believes that “popular” is about “wide circulation and commerciality” whereas “popular culture” can be often understood in relation to “manipulative consumerism” and is said to be an ongoing process.

Incorporating popular culture, the primary purpose of CFs have grown to seem less advertising-like as it is more about telling a certain story or demonstrating an ideal lifestyle that engages with the audience in ways that may allow them to feel relatable and entertained. In particular, k-pop idols have made music videos and songs specifically for brands and products that they are advertising for. One well-known example is Big Bang and 2NE1’s collaboration on the song “Lollipop”.

The song was released for the promotion of LG CYON’s Lollipop phone. Not only was the song often considered a song from an actual album, but it has also boosted 2NE1’s popularity before their actual official debut.

Songs and lyrics were created in relation to the product and brand image to not only entertain the audience but for the song to be stuck in their head. This “musical advertisement” allows the audience to immediately associate the song with the brand and product promoted even when it is not on sale anymore; this not only raises the popularity of the idol group but builds on the brand image as well. Another recent example of brainwashing CF songs is Heechul (A member of Super Junior) and Seohyun (A member of AOA)’s addictive Gmarket song. It is known to be the “Korean PPAP” where they repeatedly hammer keywords like “hot, hot, hot”, “specials, specials, specials” and “sales, sales, sales”. Gmarket, with the effect of this song, took the lead in 2018’s summer sales as users are continuously exposed to the brand.

Overall, Korea’s use of compound advertising, “praises the commodity indirectly by the use of models and stories that are tied to the brand”, have not only successfully “moved people’s hearts” as the audience started desiring the lifestyle and values of the brand (rather than the product itself), it has also outstood other countries’ advertisement effects as they packaged the CF industry as a form of popular culture itself.

Referenced sources:

http://seoulbeats.com/2013/04/k-pop-as-a-means-of-advertising/

https://soranews24.com/2017/07/14/korean-shopping-sites-commercial-series-is-brain-washing-in-more-ways-than-one%E3%80%90videos%E3%80%91/

https://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2011/07/stuart-hall-notes-on-deconstructing_22.html

Olga Fedorenko, 2014, “South Korean Advertising as Popular Culture,” The Korean Pop Culture Reader, 341 – 62.