Kitsch – [mass noun] art, objects or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality

The weekend before last I visited Gyeongju, the ‘historical Capital of Korea’, as part of a DMOE (Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education) organized cultural trip for native teachers. The trip was fantastic; although we left on Friday and returned Saturday afternoon I don’t think I’ve done so much in a weekend since I arrived here. We started out visiting the tombs of the Kings of the ancient Silla Dynasty. These tombs swell up from the ground, striking an eerie balance between looking natural and man-made, reminding me (I’m not all too sure why) of crop circles. The idea is to symbolize that the King has returned to the ‘womb’ of the Earth. One of these tombs has been excavated, reconstructed and opened for tourists. In this tomb we were treated to National Treasures numbers 188, 189, 190, and 207 (a saddle-flap). After looking around this tomb we made soap in the shape of local National Treasures, used a Korean tracing technique to draw various National Treasures, and made a pencil case or mirror with an insignia from the most famous local National Treasure (the Millennium Smile). When we were finished we went to a Confucian Academy (though I think it was more of a ‘dvblinia’ historical reenactment centre than an academy in any real sense) where we were treated to a traditional tea ceremony and Important Intangible Cultural Assets number 5 (traditional music).

In Korea you’re never more than a ten minute walk from a national treasure, which could be anything from a beautiful palace or temple, to a piece of stone believed to have once been part of a rudimentary sundial. It’s a bit of a running joke among waygooks (foreigners) out here; you know you’ve been here too long when you’ve just been designated National Treasure number 7349. It’s amazing the amount of time, money and effort this country puts into tourism. Even more amazing is the fact that 99% of tourists here are Korean. It’s like going to visit the Blarney Stone and seeing thousands of Irish people queuing up to buy shamrocks blessed by Saint Patrick, or fridge magnets bearing ‘traditional Irish blessings’.

The number one tourist destinations for waygooks and natives alike are without a doubt the Buddhist Temples. Some people use them for prayer, but the number of tourists is so high that the Buddhist monks who live there wake up at 3 am, and finish their prayers, rituals etc. by 8 O’clock, just as the crowds begin to descend. One of the highlights of my Gyeongju trip was Bulguksa temple. This is one of the largest temples in the country and draws a huge crowd. Being tucked away in the mountains, far from the city below it has an atmosphere of calm which is extremely rare in a country as crowded as this. As you can see, the temple is beautiful, but I was a little disappointed when I got up close and actually touched the buildings; they’re made out of the same type of material that you’d expect to find on a movie set. Even the statues are made out of a hard, hollow, plastic material. This is something you get used to over here though.

Bulguksa is designated as a National Treasure, though the structures themselves are new. Almost all of the temples in the country have been rebuilt, which is hardly surprising as Korea seems to have been one continuous bonfire since the Japanese first invaded in 1592. During the 1960’s and 70’s, under the dictator Park Chung Hee, most of Korea’s cultural heritage sites were rebuilt. The Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea, which was charged with doing this, is the reason why pretty much anything of interest – and quite a lot which isn’t – is numbered, catalogued and signposted all around the country. Whereas in the West, most credible restoration projects would at least attempt to use materials similar to the original building, here they’ve got no qualms with using whatever’s cheap and easy. Once you visit enough temples you get the feeling that Ikea was put in charge of this project. Pretty much every temple around the country is identical, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could order your very own-boxed-up-and-ready-to-go Bulguksa online if you knew where to look. This might have something to do with the economic constraints Korea was facing at the time all of this work was being carried out, but I think it points to a deeper difference between East and West, which for me is one of the most interesting things I’ve noticed out here.

To get a taste of a nation’s capacity for kitsch, one need look no further than its sleaze love motels, and Korea gives even Vegas a good run for its money in this department. Pictured below are some pretty good examples of what I mean. (Credit for the photos goes to Sam at Via Korea. (I couldn’t leave a comment and couldn’t figure out how to send a message on wordpress so I shamelessly stole them)

It’s not just the love motels over here though, it’s everything; from respectable hotels to cafes, from stationery to tv commercials to speeches, newsletters and slogans in English, everything is flashy and garish. Westerners can’t help but notice it, and I think it leads a lot of people to make unfair judgements about Koreans being ‘naive’; phrases to the effect of ‘God bless their little cotton socks’ is one of my personal favourites. Seeing something which so blatantly violates the most basic tenets of taste embraced by an entire nation should really give you pause for thought though. Where did our idea of kitsch come from? Is it as natural a concept as it at first appears to us? Why exactly does it seem a little silly to us to reconstruct a historical site out of material little better than plastic? Answering this question requires us to take a brief look at one of the most important concepts in Western philosophy, essentialism.

The theory of essentialism was used by one of the first great philosophers, to answer a question that still has us disagreeing today. Take a look at these pictures:

It doesn’t take long to work out that you’re looking at pictures of dog(g)s. It’s a lot more difficult than you expect, however to work out exactly how you know that. What is it that they all have that you can confidently say ‘this is a dog’. Each of these dogs has a different face shape, a different coat, a different body shape, they’re a different size, a different colour etc. For pretty much any characteristic of dogs you can think of there will most likely be at least one breed or one individual that breaks the rule. How about going for something fairly fool-proof, like ‘all dogs have 4 legs’; this seems fine at first glance but what about the individual dog or two you must at some stage have seen in your life that only has 3 legs? You wouldn’t hesitate in naming that a dog too. Furthermore, if you had to go through each of the features, ‘two ears, two eyes, woof or yelpie kind of sound, tail, etc etc’, you’d be standing looking at the dog for a very long time before working out what exactly this strange creature facing you was. No two dogs are the same, yet from an incredibly young age we find it very easy and are very quick at classifying animals, why is this? Think about this for a while, and when you’ve convinced yourself that there’s no fool-proof rational explanation, read on.

To get around this problem Plato borrowed an idea we still use in maths. Take the concept of a triangle. A triangle is a three sided shape of which the angles add up to 180°. Any triangle you can think of has these qualities but also has a size and a colour. What that size and colour are is not important; for it to be a triangle, it must have 3 sides and add up to 180°. The ideal triangle cannot be experienced by our perception as it has no size and no colour; it is something we can only think about. Plato took this idea and applied it to the world around us. ‘Dogs are dogs’, he said, ‘because they all have one characteristic in common, they all possess dog-ness’. This sounds like a bit of a cop-out, but Plato actually believed that there was such a thing as dog-ness which truly existed. He believed that there was an ‘ideal’ world. The world we see around us, the world of perception, is just an imperfect copy of this ideal world. In the ideal world, there is a single, ideal, perfect dog, and every individual dog we see is an imperfect copy of this ideal dog. All the unimportant parts of ‘being a dog’ will change from individual to individual, but the things which are essential to being a dog will remain unchanged. (This is where the word essential, as in necessary comes from). These essential qualities are not perceived by us, but our minds, being rational, are somewhere halfway between the world of perception and the ideal world, so we can sense, or recognize, these qualities, if you like, even though we cannot see them clearly.

This might sound a little familiar to you; an unperceivable yet fundamentally important, eternal part of you which ‘lives’ on a higher plane of existence and basically constitutes who you are. Plato’s thinking, and the works of those who came after him were hugely influential on the early Christian Church. Most of what Plato said about essence and forms made its way into the Christian concept of the soul. Someone’s outward appearance and individual acts began to be seen as less important than this unknowable, semi-divine essential quality of a person. It allowed for dissenters within the Church to argue that as each soul is fundamentally good regardless of the acts of the person, and the essence of a thing is by far its most important part; all souls would eventually be saved. The idea that appearance is not all there is to an object had taken root.

With the advent of modernism in the late 19th and early 20th Century, a lot concepts previously found mainly in a religious context were applied to art. The idea of martyrdom became the idea of the tortured soul hell-bent on self-destruction, which is possibly at the root of our contemporary rock ‘n’ roll drug culture. The idea of asceticism – self-denial – manifests itself in the bare language and sparse poems typical of writers like William Carlos Williams. The idea of the ‘initiation’, the exclusivity of knowledge, is seen in a huge emphasis on referencing and writing for the learned. One of the concepts which found its way into our aesthetic was this idea of essence. People began to write and paint in weird and experimental ways, experimenting with symbolism, stream-of-consciousness, surrealism etc. in an attempt to capture, not the way things seem to us, but the way things actually are, deep down. People began trying to write create art showing the essential qualities of the world around them, rather than its superficial, outward appearance.

This idea of the two worlds has had a long tradition in English. I believe it is so fundamentally ingrained in our thinking that it is extremely difficult for us to understand a way of thinking in which reconstructing your most famous historical sites out of plastic and other such materials is a good idea. The material seems to represent its essence to us; at any rate, it is more fundamental than the purely visible appearance; there is nothing as disappointing as touching a huge and impressive 20ft Buddha statue to find out it’s made of a plastic shell no more than a centimetre thick. We seem to have an idea that buildings absorb this history around them; when visiting a particularly old historical structure, we think of ‘what these rooms have seen’, or something to that effect (I do, anyway; a bit of a silly belief, but one that most of us can’t help). The hollowness of the temple walls serves only to remind us how little history these temples have ‘absorbed’, the development of the DSLR camera is probably about the height of it. The baseness of the material makes the gaudiness of its colour and its pretence, its hypocrisy even, at impersonating a 500 year-old-structure, all the more off-putting. This, I think, is why the kitsch typical of Asia grates on us so badly.

This tradition of essence doesn’t have the same history over here as it does back home. Korea is a traditionally Confucian culture which is not a theistic religion like Christianity, Judaism or Islam. I looked the word kitsch up in the Korean dictionary and the result it returned was a term to the same effect, but one that can only be applied to people. Perhaps ‘hypocrite’ or ‘two-faced’ would be a better match. I’ve asked my co-teachers and as far as I’m aware there’s no word for kitsch that can be applied to aesthetics. The idea that the interior should match the exterior (or perhaps even the idea that there is an interior at all) is alien to this culture; which makes you realize, in spite of how strongly you might feel otherwise, how arbitrary an idea it is for us.

One of the things you hear dissatisfied waygooks (foreigners) complain about the most is the ‘superficiality’ of Korea. Which is more superficial though; embracing the belief that outward appearance is everything; or proclaiming essence to be more important, yet striving always to represent it, to externalize it, to reduce it to something we can see?

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Credit for the above photo goes to Accidental Chinese Hipsters. There’s plenty more where that came from!

Credit for the philosophers cartoon goes to Savage Chickens.