Perspectives on Contemporary Korea. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018. ix, 254 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-472-05377-3.
This edited volume by Juhn Y. Ahn explores the changing concept and phenomena of transgression in Korea from the Koryŏ era to the present. By dictionary definition, the word “transgression” means to cross over or go beyond legal, moral, or social limits. In his introduction, Ahn questions whether transgression is such “a self-evident concept” (4) and refers to Michel Foucault to discuss the complex ways in which concepts like the limit and the transgression can become interdependent, though “mutually exclusive” (6).
Nine chapters contained in this book offer pluralistic and playfully quirky accounts of transgression. It is divided into three chronological parts—premodern, modern, and contemporary—covering wide-ranging topics: Buddhist iconography in Koryŏ; trickster and cannibalism in Chosŏn; lesbian double suicide in colonial Korea; the film The Housemaid (1960); political identities of post-1990’s Christians; pop-cultural influence on teen values; anti-teenager films; and director Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy. One must commend Ahn for bringing together scholars with such diverse agendas and disciplinary insights.
Ahn begins his introduction with a captivating anecdote about the Sewŏl ferry tragedy, South Korea’s neoliberal capitalism, theories on transgression, and a summary of individual chapters. The gravity of the topic presented in the first two pages gives an impression that the book may be a social critique of contemporary South Korea containing at least one chapter on the Sewŏl ferry sinking. However, there is no such chapter. The Sewŏl tragedy is mentioned only in passing, because it concerns “transgressions” (wiban) of various laws and safety regulations. The transgressions in Sewŏl are life-threateningly real, while those studied in this book are representational. Considering that the book is a cultural studies project concerning film, popular culture, folklore, and art history, one wonders if it is sensible to juxtapose them with the Sewŏl tragedy. Are fictional transgressions in contemporary films comparable to real-life transgressions that drowned 304 people? If so, doesn’t Sewŏl deserve more than a couple of pages?
Authors of this volume demonstrate that transgression is a variable concept—to the point that transgression is not always transgression; it can become the norm. In her chapter, Karen S. Hwang discusses in detail the ways in which Koryŏ painter No Yŏng tried to render T’aejo Wang Kŏn’s dethroning of ill-reputed King Kungye as a justifiable act of political subversion within the order of the universe. No’s paintings function as political allegories designed to normalize Wang’s history-making act of transgression. In a similar vein, Se-Woong Koo also entertains the possibility, where acts of gross transgression—such as cannibalism—can receive social approval and become normalized. To prove this point, he discusses the logic of filially pious cannibalism in Chosŏn, where authorities praised those who offered their own flesh to cure their sick parents. Koo points out that, despite the outrageousness, few people tried to contest the myth that human flesh may have beneficial effects on health. In fact, the myth has been rationalized and preserved over centuries, as is evident in the “spike in demand for human placentas” in contemporary South Korea (97).
If Hwang and Koo focus on the normative aspects of transgression, Charles La Shure and Jennifer Yum highlight the social liminality of transgressive subjects, such as tricksters and queers. According to La Shure’s study of Chosŏn era folklores, tricksters appear during political crises and natural disasters, breaking social boundaries and taboos. Despite having close interactions with society, tricksters remain perpetual outsiders. In the twentieth century, queers occupy the position of transgressive subjectivities. Yum’s chapter on lesbian double suicide situates the dilemmas of same-sex couples in a broader narrative of “new women” in colonial Korea. Echoing the tension between mainstream feminism and queer studies in the West, Korea’s new women discourse showed limited possibility for queer women, who were treated as liminal subjects. Yum’s topic stands out against the generally hetero-normative orientation of Korean gender studies. However, her approach is safely conventional in the sense that she revisits a well-known history of new women and critiques conservative male ethos of colonial Korea without tackling fundamental questions about queer suicide and double suicide.
The latter half of this volume consists of film and pop-culture analyses. According to Ahn, this project was originally conceived during a dinner conversation about South Korean films as to why they are “so violent, sexually deviant, and yet so successful” (235). Following this line of thought, Se-Mi Oh skillfully dissects Kim Ki-yŏng’s 1960 film The Housemaid through the lens of “sex and violence” in the interim period before Park Chung-hee’s coup d’état. Traversing the theories of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, Oh’s chapter eloquently exposes middle-class hypocrisy surrounding the housemaid’s moral transgression of “domestic sanctuary” (126). However, questions remain: did 1950s South Korea have a sizeable enough middle class to feel anxious about challenges to its moral values, or was the film’s caricature of middle-class Korea director Kim’s Hitchcock-wannabe moment? The themes of sex and violence are more explicitly addressed in Ahn’s chapter on Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy, which “rely on the idiom of cruelty, violence, and transgression to reflect critically on the neoliberal restructuring of post-IMF Korea and raise important questions about moral agency” (216). Accordingly, Ahn provides a descriptive analysis of Park’s films as a grand metaphor and critique of South Korea’s neoliberalism and capitalism. Ahn’s reading of social and political allegory in Korean film is compelling, but whether Park is genuinely critical of capitalism is debatable, considering that he has become a commercially-oriented auteur, who exploits sex and violence in films—like Quentin Tarantino—because they sell.
A short review is not enough to do justice to a book with nine authors. The chapters by Myung-Sahm Suh, Peter Y. Paik, and Bonnie Tilland—though not discussed in detail here—are insightful works that explore political and social transgressions, and demonstrate admirable levels of disciplinary expertise. Overall, the entire volume is a thought-provoking collection of essays suitable for specialized undergraduate courses on Korean society and culture, film and visual studies, gender studies, and youth culture.
Su-Kyoung Hwang
The University of Sydney, Syndey, Australia Su-Kyoung Hwang