JIWON CHOI

PW : 1111

 

My thesis, ‘Idol-ogy’, is a video that deals with Korean popular culture and its impacts socially, politically and personally. The video is presented by a digital flâneur, an artist who is an observer and researcher of consumerism and alienation and lives in the postmodern urban city. Specifically, I am aiming to introduce viewers into K-POP, a Korean popular music culture that is example of how popular culture extends beyond its own subjectivity, and is an example of the blind mechanism of propaganda, and the ways that the dominant media is built on avid consumerism. The work intends to broaden the viewer’s awareness of how K-POP is involved in the construction of the meaning of real life.

 

The video essay unfolds through segments that compound Korean culture, on the social, political, cultural interaction of everyday life intuitively connected. The work borrows its form and stimulates the style of the modern the television industry and social media, using its techniques as fast cuts, disjunctive editing, voyeuristic camera, the use of text and of methods of provocation that are incorporated in the entertainment industry. In parallel with this form, it is also the opposite to the aesthetic of television, editing of moving image as the object, by using parts of screen, compositing the screen, screen as a canvas, challenging the dimensions of the video space. Presenting images that are once harmonious and then continuously contrasting.  With these performances demand slower observation, with poetic gestures of self; who is questioning a consumer, producer, and critic.