A video that recently hit the internet may well turn out to be the year’s most effective piece of Korea-promotion — if not the decade’s most effective — and Korea’s official promoters had nothing at all to do with it. Titled “seoul_wave,” the seven-minute production presents a day in the life of Korea’s capital as hyperkinetically shot and painstakingly edited by an American “nomadic filmmaker on an endless world tour” named Brandon Li. This might not sound like high-priority viewing for those who actually live in Seoul, and I might never have watched it myself had not seen it praised by other expatriates here. Not the easiest group to please, they keep their knives perpetually out for cynical or ignorant Korea-boosting — in other words, for much of the Korea-boosting done to date.
Take, for instance, the Korea Tourism Organization’s “Have You Ever… ?” campaign. In its teaser video, published the very same day as “seoul_wave,” members of the boy band EXO ask questions like “Have you ever slept?” and “Have you ever been to a restaurant?” To which a variety of non-Koreans, mostly Westerners, provide responses, to the best of their ability, like “I’ve never slept like that” and “Never been to a restaurant like that.” Presumably they mean they’ve never slept like they could in Korea and never been to a restaurant like the ones they could go to in Korea, but the generic, not especially Korean-looking backgrounds against which the speak only muddy the meaning further. But the awkwardness goes deeper stil: the EXO boys’ words have clearly been dubbed over, a risky choice given the obsessiveness and hypersensitivity of K-pop fan bases.
“The ad resurrected memories of other embarrassing promotional campaigns,” writes the Korea Times’ Jon Dunbar, “most notably the city’s three-year-old slogan ‘I.Seoul.U’ and 2008’s cringe-worthy national tourist slogan ‘Korea Sparkling.’ And I almost forgot about the doomed slogan ‘Creative Korea.’” One might well wonder why official Korea, in the development of ostensibly Westerner-targeted ad campaigns, apparently consults no Westerners. “Actually, they do,” writes Dunbar, who for a couple of years worked for the culture ministry’s Korean Culture and Information Service (KOCIS), a body originally formed in 1971 as a propaganda apparatus under strongman Park Chung-hee. “The problem is, they don’t listen. They come looking for a rubber stamp, often late in the planning stage when it’s too late to change anything.”
Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.