East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave

5. Re-Imagining a Cosmopolitan ‘Asian Us’: Korean Media Flows and Imaginaries of Asian Modern Femininities

Re-Imagining a Cosmopolitan ‘Asian Us’ 91 1. Introduction The new millennium witnessed increasing transnational flow of Korean popular cultural content including TV dramas, movies and pop songs and Korean stars have been remarkably well received in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other East and Southeast Asian societies. This sudden frenzy about Korean pop culture in Asia has been regionally dubbed ‘the Korean Wave’ (‘Hallyu’). While Hallyu has aroused critical response from both public and intellectual discourses, pointing to legitimate concerns about the potential rise of Korean cultural domination in Asia (alongside the long-existing popular cultural influences of Japanese and Western media), Lin, Kwan and Cheung (2004) pointed out the Koreans’ unique contribution to contemporary exploration of Asian modernities — exploring different ways of being modern, and being a modern woman in Asian societies, especially in the areas of familial relations, gender relations and sexuality ethics. In the first section of this chapter, we will review some of the major studies on Korean media flows, particularly the consumption of Korean TV dramas. In section 2 we shall present our audience studies of Korean drama fans in Hong Kong and Singapore. In section 3 we shall discuss imaginaries of ‘Asian’ modern femininities that seem to be emerging from these women’s drama consumption practices. In the final section we shall discuss both potential uses and dangers of the ‘Asian values’ discourse when women located in different Asian societies try to imagine and negotiate their own ways of being modern women in Asia. 5 Re-Imagining a Cosmopolitan ‘Asian Us’: Korean Media Flows and Imaginaries of Asian Modern Femininities Angel Lin and Avin Tong1 92 Angel Lin and Avin Tong 1.1 The Korean Wave: Rising Transnational Popularity of Korean TV Dramas in East/Southeast Asian Societies In cosmopolitan cities in East/Southeast Asian societies, many people are consuming globally circulated, trendy cultural products, regardless of their origins. This seems to be a kind of transnational cultural flow that highlights both cultural resonance and asymmetry, with Japan as the leading source of cultural media flows in East and Southeast Asia, replacing or coexisting with Western media influences, under what Iwabuchi (2004) called the decentering processes of globalization. Robertson (1995) emphasized both the global production of the local and the localization of the global: this cultural dynamic refers to the (often commercial) appropriation of local culture in transnational cultural adaptation and commodification, which results in constant interpenetration of the global and the local through cultural hybridization. The success of Japanese dramas in the 1990s in many Asian societies reveals the importance of this (cultural industrial) strategy of transnational cultural adaptation and cultural hybridization. According to Iwabuchi (2004), the most appealing elements of Japanese dramas include the subtle use of music, superior organization of plots, and sympathetic representation of urban youths’ experiences. The Japanese TV dramas’ depictions of stylish, cosmopolitan lifestyles readily invoke cultural resonance among audiences (particularly urban youths) in many fast urbanizing Asian societies. Negotiating with Japan’s influence on drama production styles, Korean and Taiwan television industries have developed their own genres of youth trendy dramas. Their representation of the ‘here and now’ in Asian urban contexts has transnational appeals in a different way from those of Japanese dramas (Iwabuchi, 2004). Korean television culture began to develop in the 1960s when a full-scale modernization project was started by the government. From the early 1970s, Korean TV dramas began to experience a boom in popularity in the domestic market. In the early 1990s, a new form of TV drama genre called ‘trendy drama’ emerged. It became an active agent in creating a craze for South Korean pop culture across Asia since the late 1990s (Lee, 2004). In the early 2000s, concerns about Korean dramas as cultural phenomena have arisen. ‘Hallyu’, or the transnational circulation and consumption of popular Korean cultural/media products (in particular, women’s genres such as melodramatic soap operas), has swept across Asia, i.e., regions and societies that share a socio-cultural history of having been under some form of influence from traditional Confucianist familial, social and cultural values (e.g., China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore). Re-Imagining a Cosmopolitan ‘Asian Us’ 93 1.2 Pleasure of Drama Consumption: Audience Studies on Korean Dramas Among different themes of TV dramas, romance is one of the few populist issues that tugs at the hearts of the majority, and it enables the viewers to take...