Disastrously Creative K-Pop, Virtual Nation, and the Rebirth of Culture Technology Suk-Young Kim

Disastrously Creative K-pop, Virtual Nation, and the Rebirth of Culture Technology Suk-Young Kim SM has always been searching for ways to create a nexus among music, video, and SNS in the age of robots. — Lee Su-man, Chief Creative Producer, SM Entertainment (in Sim 2015) The proscenium stage at COEX Artium succumbs to dark silence, clearing the way for some- thing extraordinary. The audience expects nothing less than extraordinary in this state-of-the- art theatre in the heart of the prosperous Gangnam district, which gained worldwide fame with Psy’s 2012 hit song “Gangnam Style.” An onscreen projection unveils a rainbow-colored DNA structure rotating and evolving into colorful cells. The gyrational movement is accentuated by Figure 1. Human bodies wearing masks that make them appear uniform at the unveiling of SM Entertainment’s new boy band Neo Culture Technology (NCT) in SMTOWN: New Culture Technology, 2016. (Screengrab by Suk-Young Kim; www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky5NvWsXnn8&t=1574s) Suk-Young Kim is Professor of Theater and Director of the Center for Performance Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea (2010); DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border (2014); and most recently, K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance (2018). Her research has been acknowledged by the James B. Palais Book Prize (2013) and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book Award (2015). [email protected] TDR 64:1 (T245) 2020 https://doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00894 22 ©2020 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00894 by guest on 29 September 2021 sleek and languid electronic dance music that gradually picks up tempo to make listeners’ hearts race as the fluid cell structures congeal to form an image of the Earth. The globe then opens out into a 2-D world map, at the center of which “NCT,” an abbreviation for “Neo Culture Technology,” appears in bright blue neon light. At this climactic revelation, the dizzily paced electronic music halts to highlight the epic birth of the new era. Three brightly projected letters are presented as heavy male choral music playing in the background emphasizes the monumentality of the occasion. Radiating stage lighting reveals dozens and dozens of young people — garbed in impeccable white shirts and pants with matching white and silver masks — marching out from backstage into the aisles of the auditorium. Looking more like machines than humans, their bodies simulate cyborgian ges- tures, and their corporeal uniformity is accentuated by the horizontal green and blue laser lights that cut across their bodies (fig. 1). This is the vision produced in the music and dance studios of Lee Su-man, the chief artistic producer of SM Entertainment, whose namesake company for over two decades has been the undisputed industry leader in the highly competitive world of Korean entertainment. The name that Lee bestowed upon SM Entertainment’s latest boy band, Neo Culture Technology, better known as NCT, promotes the term Lee has been credited with coining as his company’s central modus operandi, “culture technology,” born out of the marriage of cultural and technologi- cal innovation. Five years prior to this 2016 unveiling of NCT, Lee had already proclaimed in a 2011 speech at the Stanford Business School: The age of information technology had dominated most of the nineties, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next. SM Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology. (in Seabrook 2015:152) Lee characterized his vision as a force enabling a seismic transition to a new era where “robots and celebrities are going to be at its center” (in Sim 2015). Whereas the age of information technology brokered unprecedented change in the ways digitally transmitted information orga- nized societies and created new social networks, Lee postulates that culture technology posi- tions robots and celebrities as the central force behind the creation of such organizations and networks. The white-clad cyborgs, in Lee’s vision, embodied this futuristic ambition by fusing the machine (robots) with the human (celebrities). Rather than projecting them as two antithet- ical forces — human celebrities as agents of individual creativity versus robots as mere machines whose only use is to provide mechanical work1 — SM Entertainment hoped to diffuse this dichotomy by promoting images of robots as creative and laborers as mechanized. If the gist of culture technology is to envision robots and celebrities as interchangeable laborers that will dominate creative endeavors, then we have to ask: what happens when the irregular, and often imperfect, human performance is dominated by the precision of robots? The question might be a futile one in light of the irreversible mechanization of human labor that has already been taking place with automation. Given the K-pop industry’s proclivity for disposable human labor — teen performers who quickly age out of their roles — what does the trajectory of one of SM Entertainment’s latest boy band, NCT, tell us about the neoliberal labor practices that have plagued not only Korean but also global marketplaces? And finally, how did SM Entertainment’s aspirational move to implement new culture technology pan out in the broader context of the South Korean government’s pursuit of a creative economy policy Disastrously Creative (2013–2016) that aspired to enhance the nation’s soft power through creative projects while dis- guising troubled labor relations? 1. The word “robot” is derived from the Czech noun “robota” (forced labor or compulsory work) and first appeared in Karl Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. 23 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00894 by guest on 29 September 2021 Triangulated forces sustain SM Entertainment’s new culture technology: the K-pop industry, South Korea’s national policy, and the morphing discourse on culture and technology in the postindustrial era. At each vertex of this dynamic triangle lie probing questions about neoliberal labor practices in the K-pop industry, the South Korean inflection of the creative economy, and the unique pursuit of cyborgized celebrity culture that emerged as a collaboration between private entertainment companies and the South Korean state. The case study of NCT presents fully the convergence of these forces. As performance studies scholar Lee So-Rim has remarked: “Neo Culture Technology as an idol group signals the departure from considering the idol as mere performer, but as a vessel that carries [...] the very technology of their production process and formula to their own success” (Lee 2018:203). Looking closely at the narratives behind NCT’s formation and the creation of their debut song and music video invites broader discussions of what it means to replace human labor with automation and how that process both reinforces the problematic tenets of techno-orientalism, a view that often projects Asian bodies as machines devoid of humanity, and valorizes the state-led neoliberal initiatives carried out under the banner of promoting creativity. What emerges as a central paradox in this process is how the Korean state and private enterprises collaborate to present cyborgs as prime agents of creativity rather than mere mechanical forces. In the Western academic tradition, creativity is conventionally associated with the human. For example, Richard Florida claims that the “creative impulse” is “the attri- bute that distinguishes us, as humans, from other species” (2012:5) and Andrew Ross proposes that “we need to see creative work as a basic human right, or entitlement, of the workforce” (2009:47). More specifically, creativity is a characteristic of theindividual human: “Members of the Creative Class exhibit a strong preference for individuality and self-expression” (Florida 2012:56). The Korean variant of the creative economy has no trouble imagining cyborgs as crucial proxies of creativity. In the case of SM Entertainment, the strategic branding of a private corporation became deeply mired in the nation’s fraught ambition for its creative economy — ultimately revealing the irony that touting creativity can be the flip side of masking anxiety over posthuman labor relations. SM New Culture Technology Just a few moments prior to introducing the white-clad cyborg figures in the COEX Artium, Lee Su-man unveiled five new projects of SM Entertainment’s initiative on new culture technology (SMTOWN 2016b). Lee’s futuristic presentation, which easily rivaled the launch of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 or any Apple product in its hi-tech dazzle, began with highlights of the company’s past. Contextualizing the historical significance of the announce- ment, SM’s major achievements were projected onto a screen in a version of Star Wars’ opening. Among the company’s milestones, rolling up from the bottom of the screen and disappear- ing off the upper edge, the translated subtitles name SM as “the first entertainment company to be listed on the KOSDAQ [Korean stock trading market]” in 2000 and proclaim “BoA the first Korean artist to achieve 1st place on Oricon Chart with 1st Japan album [LISTEN TO MY HEART]” in 2002. As the last achievement was rolling up, Lee Su-man strode onto the stage and asked a rhetorical question: “Have you seen the path that I’ve just walked out from?” With a broad smile that sealed his self-congratulatory tone, Lee proclaimed culture technology (CT) as the backbone of SM Entertainment’s success: For a long period of time, over two decades, SM has kept its own Culture Technology, in other words “CT” technology, as its own producing technology.

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