Paris in Korean Cinema: Fraudulence and the Female Form in Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals

Abstract:This article explores how and why fraudulence and deception get coded as feminine in Korean politics and popular culture. Focusing on the processes whereby deception gets conflated with the female body, it examines filmic articulations of physical and rhetorical attacks—ranging from subtle to overt—against works of art about the female body, in which aesthetic judgments take on a moral character. The article begins with a discussion of Kim Soyoung's new woman: her first song (2004), which locates the possibilities for subject formation that the figure of the new Korean woman exemplifies in deformations, ruptures and breakages. The article then turns to a pair of films, Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day (2007) and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals (1997), which explore the threat and possibilities that such a model of feminine subjectivity offers. The article then closes by way of reference to Jeon Soo-il's A Korean in Paris (2015), in which the possibility of formless subjectivity becomes disavowed within a paranoid vision of the new Korean woman as a fraud. In all of these films, the misogynist tendencies within contemporary Korean society are specifically displaced onto the distant location of Paris, which is not coincidentally regarded as the origin point of the new Korean woman. Generally, in Korean cinema, Paris has been featured both as a site of authenticity and formal experimentation in art and also as the scene of sexual awakening for women. The films discussed in this article foreground questions of aesthetic style around the figure of the female body, and in the process, the female subject's engagement to art becomes conflated with and assessed by questions of morality, becoming divorced from the more relevant aesthetic contexts.