{"id":4976,"date":"2020-03-29T19:05:55","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T02:05:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4976"},"modified":"2020-03-29T19:05:55","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T02:05:55","slug":"korea-blog-everything-turns-into-asmr-in-korea-even-cultural-heritage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4976","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: Everything Turns into ASMR in Korea, Even Cultural Heritage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Last weekend I took my first trip to Korea\u2019s Jeju Island, a vacation spot popular enough to make the air route between it and Seoul the busiest in the world. But I wasn\u2019t going on vacation, nor, strictly speaking, was I going to Jeju: my destination was Gapado, a much smaller island off Jeju\u2019s south coast, the kind of featured now and then on\u00a0Travelogue Korea<\/em><\/a>. There the conglomerate-owned credit issuer Hyundai Card, known for exclusive cultural facilities in Seoul like the\u00a0Hyundai Card Music Library<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Hyundai Card Design Library<\/a>, has spent the past eight years remodeling buildings throughout the island\u2019s depopulated village. When an architectural magazine asked me to go have a look at the project\u2019s results, I dug into the available promotional materials and found, among other things,\u00a0Gapado-themed ASMR videos<\/a>. This may surprise you more than it surprised me \u2014 or at least it may if you live anywhere other than South Korea.<\/p>

Most in the English-speaking world have by now heard the term ASMR; some even know that it stands for \u201cautonomous sensory meridian response.\u201d Even among those of who\u2019ve never watched a single ASMR video, many know that such productions involve whispering, brushing hair, tapping wood, crumpling plastic wrap, and other actions that generate the kinds of sounds ASMR enthusiasts find pleasurable. \u201cIts triggers were as varied as watching someone fill out a form, listening to whispering sounds or seeing Bob Ross paint landscapes on TV,\u201d\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u2018 Jamie Lauren Keiles writes<\/a>\u00a0of early discoveries of ASMR. The term itself was coined in 2010, displacing such less scientific-sounding also-rans as \u201cbrain-gasm.\u201d Soon thereafter, deliberately ASMR-inducing videos exploded as a genre unto themselves on Youtube, where, Keiles writes, \u201clegions of (mostly female) creators release, by my count, around 500 new videos each day.\u201d<\/p>

Though a notoriously trend-sensitive society, Korea developed its own ASMR scene later than much of the word did. Last year\u00a0The Korea Herald<\/em>\u2018s Choi Ji-won\u00a0profiled the country\u2019s acknowledged first \u201cASMRtist,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0a young lady named Yu Min-jung, known on Youtube as\u00a0Miniyu<\/a>. \u201cIn 2013, Yu, who had longed to become an actor, was having a hard time after graduating with a degree totally unrelated to her initial goal,\u201d writes Choi. It was then that she discovered the foreign world of ASMR on Youtube and began making her own contributions in Korean. Some ASMR videos use not just sound but actual language, or at least the kind of role-playing ASMR videos Yu makes \u2014 and that have subsequently succeeded here \u2014 certainly do. \u201cFrom a late-night barber to a dermatologist, then from a scalp therapist to a caring friend removing makeup from a roommate\u2019s face,\u201d writes Choi, \u201cYu becomes a \u2018healer\u2019 for those craving sounds of comfort.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I took my first trip to Korea\u2019s Jeju Island, a vacation spot popular enough to make the air route between it and Seoul the busiest in the world. But I wasn\u2019t going on vacation, nor, strictly speaking, was I going to Jeju: my destination was Gapado, a much smaller island off Jeju\u2019s south […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4978,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4976\/revisions\/4978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}