A Room Not of One’s Own
Rental Bang in South Korea’s Landscape of Love
Yewon Hong 11718536
Thesis rMA Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Niels Niessen Second reader: Murat Aydemir
Contents
Introduction ... 2
Chapter 1: Rooms of Practicing Love ... 10
Chapter 2. Rooms of Making Love ... 27
Chapter 3. Rooms of Performing Love... 42
Introduction
Contemporary South Korean cities are invaded by romantic love. Obsessive coupleism dominates many aspects of urban quotidian lives where people are constantly asked whether they are in love, and, if not, to immediately fall in love. Casual conversations between friends, family members and even strangers in the street and on public transportation mainly revolve around people’s dating lives. Advertisements, various discount deals for couples, popular songs, and TV programs all appeal to the desire to be together, to become heterosexual, monogamous, or, otherwise, normative couples. Love is consumed as
entertainment and, especially for young women of marriageable age, treated as a reliable investment that faithfully returns happiness and stability for a lifetime. At the same time, love remains important, almost sacred and indisputable, as it is associated with more conservative values, such as marriage, family and filial piety. Love, in other words, exists as an object of fetish at the juncture of conflicting imaginations and desires in Korean society.
The specific brand of love in Korea, as well-outlined by Yong-Soon Seo, is generated by the tripartite relationship between (romantic) love, marriage and family. Seo suggests that love does not necessarily result in the formation of family, as well as that the creation of family does not require love as a prerequisite (54). However, love and family are still strongly connected, particularly in Korean culture, while marriage, as an institution,
potentially mediates the relationship between the two concepts (Seo 54). The model of love descried by Seo seems to resemble Western traditions, especially since the rise of bourgeoisie society and the industrial revolution where love, marriage and family were given new roles. What Seo neglects to mention, perhaps by taking it for granted, is the great emphasis put on protecting and reproducing families in Korea. Indebted to the strong Confucian influences combined with Christian values, introduced by American missionaries during and after the Japanese colonial rule, the significance of family strengthens the solidarity between love,
marriage and family, producing the hegemonic narrative of love specific to Korea. Here, love is an instrument for marriage, which rightfully creates a family, the ideal social and
consuming unit, and it renders marriage a crucial part when discussing love in Korea. The important position marriage occupies within the discourse of love, and of family, inevitably pervades the urban dating culture of young adults who often express and confirm their romantic feelings for each other through various rituals that, in some way, emulate marriage.
These ritualized expressions of love dictate the timeline of love for young couples. The rhythm of these rituals is calendarized, literally controlling the schedule of love by making couples celebrate the 22nd day since the start of their relationship, or “two-two”, which focuses on coupleness by emphasizing the meaning of the number two; 100th day anniversaries; and many other commercialized “days” on the 14th day of each month on which they exchange specific types of gifts or visit certain locations in the cities. Love, as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim suggest, is a new faith and religion in contemporary society. Their quote has an eerie connotation especially in Korea’s urban landscape which many people humorously remark is covered by both neon red church signs and love motel signs, potentially reemphasizing the Christian influences in contemporary Korean culture and reaffirming Seoulites’ sexual liberality, the open secret that nobody wants to fully acknowledge (Figure 1).
Figure 1 - A love motel and a church face each other in one of the back alleys of Seoul
However, unlike Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s description of love as “a religion
without churches and without priests” (117), Korea’s highly structured dating model demands its own urban sanctuaries, which has helped the proliferation of the culture and industry of rental bang [hangul: 방], which literally translates into the English word “room”, in the cities.
These rooms provide a space for dating and intimacy, something that the typical and conservative domestic environment does not allow since many young adults in Korea live with their parents or even their grandparents up until they marry. In this thesis, bang and room are used interchangeably since both “bang” and “room” are frequented and almost synonymously used in conversation. In addition, in Korean grammar, plural forms are not considered a systematic category, and many prefer to omit the plural suffix. Hence, instead of
bangdeul, or bangs, this thesis uses bang as both singular and plural noun to indicate rental
The rental rooms or bang are business that lend a semi-private space for an hourly rate while also selling snacks to the visitors and, not so rarely, providing sexual services. The business ranges from norae-bang, or Korean Karaoke, maybe the most well-known type of bang, to its disreputable counterparts, such as room-salons where hostesses and prostitutes may accompany the customers, to less explicit rooms, such as DVD bang, multi-bang and, to some extent, motel rooms where couples visit for “quickies”, and, finally, relatively
innocuous and the most visible versions, such as PC rooms, or Korean internet cafés, and room-cafés for friends and lovers. Presumed to be originated from Japanese Karaoke, the phenomenon of norae-bang, a compound word using norae, which means song, and bang, a room, started in the early 90’s in Busan Metropolitan City, and is most likely a precursor of the culture of bang that has become a quintessential element of the quotidian lives of Korean urbanites, changing the material surface of cities (Park 9).
This thesis focuses on romantic bang or “love bang”, a genre of bang often used by young adults that accommodates the specific narrative of love and intimacy that curiously revolves around marriage and its conceptual baggage, such as stability, adulthood and family obligations. In order to examine how the dominant understanding of love is (re)shaped around the bang industry, the thesis selects three main typologies of rental love bang – room-cafés, love motel rooms and wedding halls1 – and examines the strange partnership between the transiency of the rental love bang and the conceptualization of love in Korea which is associated with eternity, stability and comfort. These love bang loosely follow the three conventional milestones of modern heterosexual dating culture, namely the initial romantic but platonic or non-sexual phase, the developmental stage through sexual play, and, finally,
1 Commercial wedding halls may not be normally considered as part of bang culture, as they differ in scale and
ostensible social function. However, it can be argued that they are an extension of the bang industry and culture as they operate by the hour to affirm young couple’s togetherness, often displaying a similar type of spatial aesthetic that revolves around romanticized images of the West or the exotic and feminine fantasies. Along with other more general love bang, wedding halls also are part of a greater network of love bang in the urban landscape, standing at the intersection of (sur)reality and virtuality of love in Korea’s dating culture.
the denouement of marriage and wedding ceremonies. This typical chronology of love reflects and consolidates the hegemonic narrative of love in the cultural institution of bang. At the same time, this thesis aims to demonstrate that these bang serve as spaces for youth culture to resist or compromise the dominant discourse of love. The analysis of the respective rental rooms and their roles in writing the discourse of love, both individually and
collectively, will show that bang culture in Korea strengthens, but also complicates, the concepts of love and intimacy, especially in the age where they are questioned, commodified, consumed and conveniently resorted. The following chapters closely analyze the narrative of love created by the love bang industry.
The first chapter discusses room-cafés and other similar rooms of practicing love. The aspects that are focused in the analysis include the cutification, or a possible infantilization, of spaces and of people occupying these spaces, the emulation of marriage or general “adult” lives, and the widespread usage of foreign words and images of the romanticized West. Close reading of the discourse of love promoted by these bang reveals that the escapist fantasy is the most dominant theme, often expressed through the language of cuteness and childishness. The cute, infantile and “girly” aesthetic of room-cafés, however, ironically exposes the desire to imitate what is considered mature and adult-like in Korean society, namely getting
married, having one’s own home, or even following the utilitarian logic that dominates the marriage market in the dating scenes. Dating, in other words, becomes some sort of “practice round” to try out love, but, in some sense, these trials are what love is for young adults in Korea. The consumption of the images of the romanticized and exoticized West in these room-cafés also adds another layer to the theme of escapism.
Continuing with the preoccupation with the exotic spatiality and the sense of escapism it entails, the second chapter addresses the non-place or heterotopic aspect of love motels or rooms of making love in the urban landscape. These motel rooms are often a collage of
different spaces by merging rooms of different functions together or putting different global landmarks in one room. These motel rooms appear to resemble Marc Augé’s concept of non-place since couples only temporarily occupy the space, using it as a passageway that leads to marriage, the ultimate destination of any proper love in Korea. These rooms’ transiency prevents stability, while their hybridity becomes a strategic resource for young adults to construct their own love stories and sexual experiences. The commodification and temporalization of love offered by the love motels, therefore, is not only a symptom of urbanization and globalization, but also a type of compromise for young adults to practice love without disturbing the social gaze that still largely disapproves of premarital sex.
The final chapter discusses commercial wedding halls as the ultimate room of love where fantasies of romantic love and familial obligations are on full display. Using Soo-Ah Kim and So-Yeon Lee’s semiotic approach to modern Korean wedding ceremonies, marriage is understood as a combination of the Western(ized) or modern myth of love and Confucian or traditional ideologies of family. The aspect of ritual that has dominated Korean dating scenes becomes even more visual, in which the methodical wedding ceremony resonates with Eva Illouz’s conceptualization of love as already scripted out emotion indebted to preexisting cultural associations and fantasies. The element of costume or role play further emphasizes the aspect of script and performance in the narrative of love created by wedding halls, which can be closely investigated through the concept of dollification. Wedding halls and related industry actively generate the romantic and feminine images of love that highlight mainly the emotional benefits of romantic partnership. However, the disparity between the reality of marriage and the fairytale of princes and princesses that the wedding halls suggest reveals that these wedding halls are yet another transient love bang.
In combination, the three chapters thus examine the narrative of love proliferated by the bang culture. Throughout these chapters this thesis argues that the three different yet
similar love bang each create narratives of love that challenge and compromise to the Korean hegemonic narrative of love that often revolves around family, love and other relevant
concepts. However, this thesis also argues that, in the end, these rooms and the idea of love they accommodate become quintessential elements in consolidating the dominant discourse of love in Korea.
In order to analyze and observe the discourse of love (re)produced by these spaces, this thesis makes use of Western theories on urbanity, home and romantic love, as well as Korean literature on bang culture, marriage, family and love. A variety of everyday objects, including advertisements, Instagram accounts, literature, animations, TV programs and photographs, both from external and personal archive, are used to explicate the ideology of love in Korea. Therefore, this thesis is presented as an example of cultural analysis, putting different objects and theories in dialogue in order not to perfectly master but to question and recognize the complexity within the objects and theories. Mike Bal suggests that the project of cultural analysis starts from “making the positions of first, second and third person in the discursive sense” (10). This softens the “rigid relations of authority, mastery among
expository agent, viewer/reader, and exposed object” (Bal 10), thus allowing conversations between objects, theories, medium and readers. Likewise, this thesis project aims to take part in the conversations between three different types of love bang, Korean and Western theories of love and home, and many other relevant cultural artifacts.
This thesis project concludes with a rumination on why the love bang – room-cafés, love motels and wedding halls – rarely become the fetish object and remain transitory whereas the idea of love is desired and fetishized by transposing Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economy into the Korean context. Although mainly focused on the affective economy of fear in the Western political discourses, her description of the circulation of emotions is productive in understanding the dissemination of love in Korea that, similarly,
results in success through failure. Ahmed suggests that a body or an object fails to capture affects because affects are the results of “movement between signs, as well as bodies” (121) that has accumulated meanings throughout time. In other words, failing to perfectly contain the affects in a specific object promotes the diffusion of the said affects. Following the same framework, the tension between the transiency of these bang and the eternity or stability that love seems to promise perhaps is a symbiosis that encourages the obsessive proliferation of bang. Love drifts over these spaces and collects different cultural meanings, enriching and complicating its definition, which demands rethinking of the concept of liquid love suggested by Zygmunt Bauman as “drifting” love in the Korean context, in which the affects of love drifts around these love bang without the sense of destination or origin. The phenomenon of bang, therefore, shamelessly display what the hegemonic narrative of love that underpins room-cafés, love motels and wedding halls is reluctant to admit: love is not romantic nor spontaneous, but an accumulation of desires and imaginations of Korea’s complex intersection of dominant social values and modern morals.
Chapter 1: Rooms of Practicing Love
Located around Uijeongbu Station on Line 1 of the Seoul Metro, Bless You is a type of a room-café whose theme is a (virtual) wedding studio. The room-café lends wedding dresses and tuxedos mostly to heterosexual couples in their early twenties and, not so rarely, groups of young female friends who wish to take “friendship” photos while wearing pretty and glamorous dresses. Climbing up a narrow staircase between an old pharmacy and a franchise noodle restaurant, visitors find themselves in a small room decorated with a red plastic bench that spells “love”, a sky-blue window frame, a cherry blossom tree and a cement wall covered with a flower mural, all of which they can pose in front of to make memories in the most literal sense. The room-café provides several props for the photoshoot, such as bouquets, flower headbands, a director clapper board that says “Love Story” and cute sigh boards saying “Number one groom material”, “Queen of wifely assistance”, and “My half” (Figure 2 and Figure 3). In the middle of the Seoul’s grey urban landscape, Bless You becomes a magical room of love and friendship where young adults can transform themselves into number-one-groom-materials and queens-of-wifely-assistance, wearing lacy dresses with flower headbands while sitting by the sky blue window under the cherry blossom tree.
Figure 2 – A picture of a couple posted by the official Instagram account of Bless You
Figure 3 – A picture of two friends posted by the official Instagram account of Bless You
Bless You is not the only space that is frequented by young urban lovers in their early stage of dating and groups of young female consumers. In fact, Korean cities are covered with similar room-cafés that provide semi-private spaces and photogenic backgrounds along with sweet drinks and colorful desserts. What makes this particular room-café, Bless You, as the departing point of the chapter is that it clearly demonstrates and encapsulates the narrative of love that these room-cafés create. The narrative of love propagated by these room-cafés challenges and consolidates the hegemonic discourse of love in Korean society that still places a great emphasis on marriage as a sole romantic partnership while also reminding the lovers of financial and social responsibilities marriage or love demands. In order to
understand how this specific genre of bang comments on and actively reshapes the dominant narrative of love, it is necessary to first analyze Korea’s unique dating culture that is highly
structured and, consequently, emulates marriage which occupies an important position in the general narrative of love.
The preoccupation with marriage and wedding ceremonies is manifested in various dating rituals, from one of the most common couple practices, such as exchanging rings and using the specific appellation following that of married couples (e.g. yeobo, which is used for both husbands and wives, or manura, an informal or rather coarse way of calling one’s wife, usually used by middle-aged men), to more contrived performances of having a professional photo shoot while wearing wedding dresses and tuxedoes, or any other matching costumes, in these room-cafés. In other words, Bless You, like many other dating mannerisms, exhibits the centrality of the imaginaries surrounding marriage and wedding ceremonies in South Korea’s dating scenes. Room-cafés like Bless You let young lovers recreate or pre-enact marriage or married life by emulating, mimicking, imitating or, to some extent, playfully mocking the “original”.
These rituals may be explained as a part of the consumption-oriented tendencies most apparent in the earlier stage of dating when young adults experience excitement, tension, passion and other relevant affects through performing cultural repertories (Oh and Park 237). Under the uniform and consumerist Korean society where consumption and entertainment are interchangeable, performing these rituals which mostly consist of consuming to imitate wedding ceremonies or married life, may be one of the very few options left to young adults to pursue love and dating. However, understanding the engrossment with symbols of
marriage as young adults’ assertion to the right to romance as middleclass normalcy and stability yields far more nuanced and productive analysis in investigating the narrative of love created by room-cafés in Korea’s urban areas.
The imitation or emulation of cultural forms of the other or “elsewhere”, of course, is not unique to young Korean lovers. James Ferguson examined a similar behavioral pattern
among young urban African lovers in the late 1930’s. Although heavily involved with racial and (post)colonial politics, Ferguson’s observation on the comparable fascination with costumes and performance among young couples in urban Africa may be useful in analyzing what causes young lovers in Korea to imitate marriages and wedding ceremonies. Ferguson understands the fascination with European ballroom dancing, a symbolic cultural form of the West, among African young adults, in which they re-enact the ballroom by wearing formal evening gowns and participating in European-style dancing, as a claim for a “right to the city”, or for recognition “to be full and equal citizens of a modern society” (555). What lies in the core of the phenomenon of imitation is the claim for “institutionalized forms of social and economic membership” (Ferguson 559). Following Ferguson’s conceptual framework that interprets imitation or mimicry as an issue of membership, the couple rituals of Korean dating scenes that emulate marriage and wedding ceremonies can be thought as young adults’ claim to the normalcy, stability and other values that marriage appears to promise. Laurel Kendall’s anthropological study on Korean wedding ceremonies and their functions as a source of “membership to the adult universe” (7), or as an integral part of normal lives (4), further strengthen the argument by suggesting that these rituals of young couples show the
significance of marriage and wedding ceremonies in the general discourse of love in Korean society.
The desire to be recognized as financially, emotionally, socially and sexually fully functioning adults is intensified due to the bleak economic conditions created by the post-2008 financial crisis which left many young adults remaining financially reliant and
emotionally attached to their parents with little possibility of being accepted as independent individuals. Many of these young adults cannot afford a middleclass marriage involving a luxurious wedding reception and consequent “decent” apartment in one of the (sub)urban areas, and some are increasingly becoming skeptical of marriage itself, questioning or even
rejecting it as a coming-of-age rite. At this transitional moment where ideas around marriage and love are shifting, room-cafés offer a brief taste of the “membership” by providing a space that feigns marital partnerships, or, fundamentally, the sense of one’s own home or
domesticity through commodifying the pleasure of playing house and romantic or friendly intimacies. The commodification of the sense of home or domesticity satisfies the ones who cannot afford to, or who actively refuse to, earn membership through traditional means, namely marriage.
The unquenchable demand for homely feelings from a generation raised in identical Corbusien concrete apartment complexes in (sub)urban areas contributes to the success of room-cafés that provide the feelings of domesticity and homely comforts it entails. These desires for one’s own home or independent spaces are well-reflected in the room-café’s interior designs or props by offering semi-private spaces filled with mass-produced plastic props that say “home”, soft objects and (artificial) plants (Figure 4, Figure 5 and Figure 6). Besides, these rooms often instruct visitors to enter after removing their shoes, recreating the average or typical house in Korea.
Figure 5 - A room in a room-café which is decorated with cute and girly props
Figure 6 - A room of a room-café which is decorated with a wallpaper that says “Just Married”
The homeliness of these cafés explains the usual demographic of the room-cafés, even Bless You, that consists of young heterosexual couples, who wish for a future
home of marital partnership, and young women with a general wish for a private and personal space that they can occupy without involving marriage or consequent familial and marital obligations. Room-cafés may also provide a rare moment of intimacy for homosexual couples who remain invisible and under-represented in Korean society; however, the industry remains to cater primarily for heterosexual romance and desires for young adults.
Instead of fully following and faithfully reproducing the norms of intimacy practiced by middleclass families, Jung and Lee observe that young adults are often rewriting the discourse of home through various means, such as repetitive relocation and negotiating with the members or home or family (140). Room-cafés should be considered as one of the means young adults choose to negotiate their place in the rigid social atmosphere where they can repose and, though passively, reject or temporarily disregard the dominant narrative of love and home in Korea.
Understanding the phenomenon of room-cafés in Korea as enactment of fascination and imaginations surrounding the idea of home naturally leads to the theorization of home as the everyday space, most notably in Rita Felski’s book “Doing Time”. In her book, Felski demands to (re)imagine the home as a center of everyday spatiality, as a place of practicing familiarity and power struggles with porous boundaries that blur the social and the personal realms, transmitting the “broader social currents, attitudes and desires” into what is often believed to be private and personal (87). Felski’s claim, although mainly based on homes in the Western context mediated and theorized by Western scholars, can be helpful in explaining how these room-cafés are becoming a type of home for young adults in Korea. The transient rooms of room-cafés that recreate the feeling of home accommodate the craving of young lovers and young adults who cannot yet secure a domestic or private space of their own, possibly reinventing the meaning of home in Korea.
Room-cafés encourage the reimagination of home and family, however, at the same time, they do not fail to remind the visitors that the spatio-temporality these bang provide always comes with a literal price or cost. The superficiality of the spatial aesthetic of Bless You seems to well depict the apparent commercialization and temporalization of these spaces: blue window shutters open only to reveal a blank wall, flowers on an artificial cherry blossom tree never fall to bear cherries, and the cement wall with a flower mural is only a print on the wall paper. Room-cafés offer an alternative means to rethink intimacy and home, however, they also act as an outlet of desires that prevents the possibility of disruptions from young adults. In other words, room-cafés serve as a lubricant of the preexisting systems of normative family, home and love by allowing temporal spaces for young adults to release their dissatisfaction and antipathy towards the dominant narrative of love and family. The emulation of marriage through room-cafés seems only to assert the infallible position of marriage in Korean society that excludes those who cannot or do not want to conform to societal norms.
On the other hand, the room-cafés also present a somewhat paradoxical tendency of playfully mocking or entertainingly consuming the marital life instead of coveting the unattainable membership to middle-class adulthood. The propensity towards the play that encourages the cutification and infantilization hints at the fact that these “play” or games that young couples enjoy may not be about longing for the membership of normative adulthood but about escaping it. The room-café’s spatiality that emphasizes and exploits cute or girly fantasies and feminine ideas about romance and friendship displays a completely different imagination of love that seems to promise young adults that they can escape from the reality that often asks for responsibilities and obligations. Many of the room-cafés are characterized by the presence of plastic or girly props and, curiously, Western-themed décors, such as faux marble columns, stuffed animals, artificial plants and lacy drapes, making the room-cafés
resemble doll/playhouses or a fictional girl’s bedroom of budding romance and giggly sleepovers.
The discussion of play and ideas of childhood lead to the reflection on the close relation between cutification and infantilization. The two concepts have been associated with each other by many scholars, including Goffman (1979) who understood infantilization as a culturally produced expression of femininity, and Lorenz who proposed the concept of baby schema, or Kinderschema, in the ethological context in 1943, in which cute or infantile physical features invite the desire in others to take care of or to protect, and are even considered attractive and charming. In her article on cute aesthetic, Sianne Ngai discusses that cuteness, which is often characterized by having exaggerated eyes and a diminutive or even non-existent mouth, makes an object both loveable and helpless (816). The
characteristics of cuteness suggested by Ngai also resembles the general infantile facial features, hinting at the close connection between cuteness and infantility.
In the context of dating in contemporary Korea, the peculiar partnership between infantilization and cutification is more visible in the form of the behavioral pattern called
aegyo [hangul: 애교], or performed winsomeness, mostly between lovers but also between
family members, colleagues and, sometimes, even strangers. Aegyo is used to gently demand favors but also to reject social obligations and demands, often “replacing common politeness” (Puzar and Hong 337). Puzar and Hong theorize aegyo as “a layered articulation of
behaviours, gestures, vocal and linguistic adjustments, narratives and fashion that serve to enact child-like charm and infantilised cuteness” (332). In their definition, infantilization is not a “direct emulation of child-bound behaviours”, and they often use the term “secondary infantilization” to describe aegyo. The predominance of cuteness and (secondary) infantility in dating culture can explain the cute and child-like spatial aesthetic of these rooms that accommodate girly and childish romantic fantasies. The role of (self) cutification and
infantilization in aegyo is to maintain the “sense of social ‘harmony’” while diluting the “negativity caused by human interactions” (Puzar and Hong 337). The cushioning effect of cutification and infantilization displayed by aegyo is also applicable in room-cafés with cute spatial aesthetic which serve as a refuge for young adults while remaining only a temporary and non-serious alternative from the social demands, thus consolidating the dominant social orders.
The proliferation of items in the room-cafés that reminds the visitors of childhood or the foreign space asserts the escapist fantasies through the language of cuteness and
childishness. For instance, Ann House, an outdated prototype of room-cafés in Korea that was popular in early 2000’s, claimed to be a “café where a princess from a fairytale lives” which, either ironically or unironically, comments both on the aspect of domesticity and of cuteness in these bang of love (Figure 7). A café with gaudy plastic chandeliers, colorfully decorated sugar-ridden drinks, ready-made pasta dishes and dirty sofa with a floral pattern can never be a sustainable place of residence for people, let alone a princess from a fairytale (Figure 8). However, the room-café still gives the impression that the visitors can escape the busy streets of Seoul filled with cigarette butts, used plastic cups and drunken middle-aged men in suits, and become princesses and other fantastic fictional beings living in fairytales.
Figure 7 - The signboard of Ann House that reads “a café where a princess from a fairytale lives”
Figure 8 - Interior layout of Ann House
These cutified and girlified spaces display the girl aesthetic and feminine fantasies of romantic love that are also dominant in the discourse of love in Korea. The costume or role play aspect is also frequently found in these spaces, adding a layer of play to the narrative of love created by these room-cafés. Briefly escaping the reality or the theme of escapism in
romantic fantasies is expressed in these spaces through the language and aesthetic of cuteness and infantilization. The aspect of play in these room-café implies potential liberation and playful rebellion. For instance, Bless You offers a certain sense of autonomy to young adults to turn the symbols and ideas around marriage and love into their plaything and props, treating marriage as entertaining role play. Likewise, room-cafés that provide transient bang to enact marital life allow young lovers to play out their fantasies without consolidating the hegemonic narrative of love. In other words, there is a double understanding of practice in the room-cafés: a trying out or practicing of love but also an enactment itself, or the practice of love.
However, the room-café also implies the curious retreat to the traditional symbols of love, not to mention the apparent commercialization and capitalization of young adults’ playful rebellions. These details of the room-cafés that involve concepts such as play, childhood and/or girlhood contribute to the process of taming and domesticating young adults. This prevents the outbursts or resistance that can drastically transform the hegemonic narrative of love in Korea. Instead, these spaces smoothen the process of reproducing the dominant and oppressive narrative of love that not only romanticizes love but also reminds young lovers of the financial and social responsibilities and burdens that romantic partnership entails, precisely the things that young lovers would like to escape from.
The spatial arrangements and use of plastic décors and costumes in room-cafés that cutify and girlify not only the physical spaces but the narrative of love appear to challenge the hegemonic discourse of love that focuses on the marital partnerships and domesticity. Room-cafés often are promoted through social media according to how photogenic their spaces are, which is often decided by the aesthetic quality of the décor, costumes and, sometimes, food, mostly French(-themed) patisserie. The so-called “instagrammability”, or the obsession towards the appearance of the room-cafés reveals the new emerging attitude towards love in
Korea that treats love as part of “self-technology”. Kim, Lee and Lee use JTBC’s talk show “Witch Hunt” as an example of many other popular media in Korea, such as magazines, social media and TV programs, as a manifestation of the new understanding of dating among young adults who interpret relationship breakups as valuable life experiences that provide skillsets for self-development, rather than as a failure of romance or love (45). Through the language of self-enhancement, “Witch Hunt” suggests that a relationship that results in the “growth of self” is a “good relationship” (Kim, Lee, and Lee 45). In other words,
self-enhancement, rather than traditional values such as sacrifice and patience, has become central in the narrative of dating.
This modern or neoliberal understanding of love found in various popular cultural products present a stark difference to the traditional idea of love in Korea by thinking of these emotions and experiences of love and dating as a resource separate from oneself. While heartbreak is now considered as an external stimulus that has a potential to improve the individuals, in the field of Oriental medicine, it has long been considered as a pathology or a symptom of imbalance in energies that demands treatment by medication. Instead of thinking of love as affects that can possibly have bodily consequences on the individuals, the greater emphasis on oneself as a separate being that can be improved and developed is noteworthy, especially in the age where self-promotion and beautification through social media is not only accepted but wholeheartedly encouraged.
The culture of self-enhancement works hand in hand with the cute and feminine aesthetic of the room-cafés which works as the perfect background to the “selfies” posted on various social media, such as blogs, Facebook and Instagram (Figure 9 and Figure 10). Selfies, or pictures taken, for instance at Bless You, while wearing lacy dresses and colorful flower headbands, or posing next to cute décor and soft objects with one’s lovers or friends encourage creation of the never-ending loop of exhibitionism and voyeurism, where the
self-presentation feeds the obsessive demands for newer and trendier room-cafés but also desires and, maybe, pressure to display one’s attractiveness or marketability in the dating scene. Young couples in Korea are both collecting and disseminating information and norms of dating scenes through social media, while ensuring that they present themselves as attractive, marketable and well-functioning members of society. Social media, in this sense, become a metaphoric window that helps spread the narrative of love created by room-cafés.
Figure 9 – An example of couple picture in a room-café with cute and infantile aesthetic
Figure 10 – An example of a picture in a room-café with girl aesthetic
The growing tendency to think of dating as a part of self-technology among young Korean adults can be related to what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid love,” understood as a way of loving and constructing human relationships under liquid modernity. Bauman suggests that in a liquid (post-)modern capitalist society, relationships are being replaced by “connections” that come without the responsibility that has been traditionally associated with
human relationships. Borrowing words of one of Bauman’s interviewees, people now “can always press delete” (Bauman xii), being free of the responsibilities while still being connected, or so people believe. The observation on liquid love by Bauman is useful in explaining how the narrative of presentation can so easily turn into the effort of self-enhancement in the dating and, in the end, marriage market in Korea. Combined with the concept of liquid love and the observation of Kim, Lee and Lee on the messages given by Korean popular culture, it can be speculated that relationships are ‘good’ as long as they are beneficial to one’s self-growth and can be “deleted” or “disconnected” once they are
considered not so resourceful. The toolkit achieved through the dating experience is now a strategy that allows young adults to secure better marriages or, more valuable “connections” in the future.
Supporting Bauman’s examination on liquid love under the liquid modernity,
Anthony Giddens offers a somewhat different yet comparable angle on a similar phenomenon in the West where (romantic) relationships and consumptions help the construction and representation of the self in late modernity, inviting the rise of narcissistic selves. The narcissism, or “the preoccupation with the self”, only allows the individual to associate the outside world through one’s own needs and desires (Giddens 170). The narcissism, then, makes the commitment necessary for the intimate relationship obsolete, since it is now considered an obstacle to the possibility of self-enhancement (Giddens 170). As one of the explanations for the ritualized and uniform dating patterns among young adults offered by Oh and Park was that the consumption-driven society allows the limited ways of experiencing affects related to love, Giddens’ analysis on the rise of narcissistic selves that points at the relationship and consumption appears useful. His observation can be implicated with the desires for self-portfolioization of young adults in Korea by suggesting that narcissism, which may or may not be understood as internalized neoliberal pressure, is also another important
impetus to the proliferation of cutified room-cafés and consequent selfie postings on social media. For instance, various images and information about love and dating are clustered around #lovestagram, the hashtag or search word on social media, popular in the Korean web. It converges the narcissistic exhibitionism and voyeurism of social regulatory gaze prevalent in the Korean dating scenes.
Turning the spatiality of room-cafés into resources for self-promotion may not be so surprising when everything— from emotions, one’s appearances and abilities, to family background— are already shamelessly exploited to present oneself more attractive. It is important to note that a large part of dating still operates under the same logic that runs the marriage market. Blind dates between friends and acquaintances rely heavily on individuals’ appearances and prospective occupations, which are influenced by gender and age. For instance, male medical students have more options in these settings as they will likely graduate as doctors, but also because they are likely already affluent as their parents were able to invest so much in their education. Following a similar logic, female students studying art, such as painting and dancing, or child education have more choices as they are
considered more feminine and obedient. In this regard, young couples may not be in love with each other, but, rather, in love with the images of themselves in love, returning to Giddens’ point on narcissism. What the similitude between the engines that run the dominant discourse of love in both dating scenes and the marriage market adds to the observation is that the young lovers in Korea are in love with the possibilities of self-growth and future stability that these romantic relationships can, or, at least, are supposed to offer.
The narratives of love created by room-cafés in Korea question but, at the same time, secure and even consolidate the dominant discourse of love and intimacies. Room-cafés provide moments to reimagine the meaning of home and domesticity that has long been associated with marriage, which has been the central theme of love or romance. However,
room-cafés do not necessarily support the total delinking between the ideas of domesticity and marriage and only act as a temporal refuge for young lovers and young adults in Korea who, nevertheless, live under the conservative social gaze. Room cafés, no matter how appealing and comfortable they are, can never be an acceptable alternative to home nor proof of one’s adulthood or maturity, as the rights to claim home and adulthood still comes with marriage which seems to emphasize the melodramatic outlook of love and marital
partnership. The childish and girly spatial aesthetic of room-cafés may also encourage the escapist fantasies of denying home and adulthood to young adults by making them, or simply encouraging them, to happily succumb to the hegemonic feminine fantasies that romanticize love and intimacies.
Closely investigating the phenomenon of room-cafés in Korea exposes not only the ideas of love proliferated by these room-cafés but also how these ideas, ultimately, adds on and strengthen the already-existing discourse of love in Korea that is hugely indebted to imaginations and desires surrounding marriage. The following chapter analyzes love motels, another type of bang in Korean cities that accommodates the escapist fantasies within the dominant narrative of love. Along with room-cafés, love motels demonstrate how the hegemonic narrative of love is (re)shaped and possibly challenged by the phenomenon of bang in Korean society, especially when pre-marital sex and sexual desires are involved, which remain taboo despite that more and more young adults are becoming comfortable in discussing these matters in both private and public settings.
Chapter 2. Rooms of Making Love
“INN” is a three-story building crawling with fake vines and always decorated with a Christmas tree in the lobby. The tacky Christmas lights perennially blinking, dolefully trying to convey holiday spirit, are blinking especially hard today as if to turn actual Christmas into a lie. He knows what sort of place this inn is although he’s never been inside. It doesn’t take an especially active imagination to figure that out. Inns are all predictable from Seoul to Jeju Island – the architecture, the frequenters, the activities. However, predictable things always have a certain magical allure. One is compelled to confirm their unsettling predictability many times over until one is fully convinced that they are, indeed, predictable. He walked past this place every day, each time vowing not to stare, and never failing to stare. Then, afraid someone might be staring at him staring, he would hurry on.
– Kim Ae-ran, Christmas Specials Love motel rooms are another love bang in the Korean cityscape that write their own narrative of love and dating. Young couples use these bang for sexual pleasure, making these spaces an essential part of dating. Motel rooms create a type of heterotopic space for young lovers by exploiting exotic or foreign images, merging different types of rooms in one bang and, most importantly, only allowing the lovers to occupy the space briefly. The sense of otherness or the spatiality of elsewhere apparent in the motel rooms, or, the rooms of (quite literally) making love, implies that the theme of escape, which was articulated through the language of childishness and cuteness in the room-cafés, also dominates the narrative of love created by love motel rooms. In order to understand to what extent this spatiality of love motels supplement and elude the hegemonic discourse of love in Korea, it is first necessary to observe how these love motel rooms assume the spatiality of the non-ordinary by employing global markers and fusing different bang in a single room.
The preoccupation with the exotic continues to be visible in the motel rooms, reflected in the names of love motels which frequently refer to the names of foreign cit ies, foreign words, compound words and made-up words that do not necessarily mean anything and sound non-Korean. For instance, the popular choices of motel names include foreign words such as “sugar”, “sky” or “ciel”, “banana”, “palace”, “Agape”, “Venus”, “Prada”, “Cindy” and “Rexy”; names of foreign, mainly Western, cities, such as “Cancun”, “Milano”, “Oslo”, “Prague” and “Roma”; and made-up words that sound exotic to Korean ears, but not necessarily signifying anything, such as “Novios”, “Antive”, “Celint” and “Amabille”.
The overuse of foreign words, however, is not limited to love-related industries, as many domestic businesses prefer to have foreign or foreign-sounding names. The popularity of foreign words among businesses seems to stem from the consensus among Korean
consumers that foreign words convey more a luxurious and glamorous image than the native tongue, which leads business owners to choose foreign words for their brand names (S. Lee 107). While meticulously categorizing the types of foreign word abuses in businesses and brand names, Lee warns that associating foreign vocabularies with high-quality services and goods may cause linguistic toadyism, or a groundless preference towards the foreign while disregarding one’s own (116). Lee’s concern for preserving the Korean language is
understandable, especially in her position as a lecturer of Korean language and literature who publishes a paper for an academic journal part of the National Institute of Korean Language. However, shifting the focus from claims for linguistic purism to considering the proliferation of foreign names as a starting point of the investigation on imaginaries of “elsewhere”
predominant in consumptions may yield fruitful discussion on the narrative of love created by love bang.
Not only the business titles but also the interior designs of the love motel rooms embody the desire for the exotic by, for instance, as Ae-ran Kim accurately described in her
short story “Christmas Specials”, placing a Christmas tree or its equivalent inside or in the vicinity of the motel rooms. In fact, Kim’s short story takes place at Christmas when a young couple wanders around Seoul to find an empty motel room to celebrate and join the
festivities. Christmas in Korea is predominantly a couple-centered holiday because it is associated with the fantasies of winter wonderlands, both foreign and surreal. For instance, September 27th, 100 days before Christmas, is considered one of the best days to start dating, so Christmas can be the couples’ 100th day anniversary. By using Christmas tree and
Christmas itself as tropes, the short story alludes to not only the centrality of imaginaries of the West, but also the strange collaboration of Western influences and Christian ideologies in Korea’s popular culture. In other words, the Christmas tree represents more than just
Christmas in Korea.
Common strategies employed by the love motels include having Western-style décors, kitsch items and global landmarks and putting English words and texts, such as “love” or, again, “home”, on the walls, hinting at the fantastic spatiality of “elsewhere” (Figure 11 and Figure 12). Along with the widespread use of Western-styled props, the theme of girly fantasies prevails, often manifested as lacy drapes above the bed (Figure 13),
decorative vanity tables and artificial plants and flowers, reaffirming the centrality of
feminine fantasy in the discourse of love, which is also visible in the room-cafés that couples visit during their initial stage of dating. The motel rooms reveal that the consumption of love, and maybe sex, remains both young and female.
Figure 11 - A motel room in a metropolitan area is decorated with English texts
Figure 12 - Another motel room in Seoul is (un)ironically decorated with English texts that refer to Christian ideologies, such as “lord”, “faith” and “baptism”, highlighting the close relationship between Western
Figure 13 - A motel room in the metropolitan area is decorated with lacy drapes and colorful wallpaper, accentuating the feminine or “princess” aesthetic in these spaces
The apparent exploitation of the exotic and, quite frequently, the feminine in the love motel rooms demonstrates the centrality of escapism in the narrative of love generated by the motel rooms. The association between the foreign and the romantic fantasies and
imaginations may be the result of Korea’s strict passport control in the past that prevented overseas travel for the general public as part of the various anticommunist policies employed. Until the travel ban was fully lifted in 1989, overseas travel was only allowed for
governmental officials, journalists and a selected few who went through anticommunism education beforehand, which could have encouraged many to link the foreign with luxury and privilege. On closer inspection, the commodification and consumption of foreignness reveal another dominant theme of hegemonic love discourse that considers that love belongs to the realm of fantasy, the extraordinary and the luxury, instead of the everyday.
Focusing on the media representation of romantic love in Korean reality TV shows, Jia Hong points out the importance of a virtual space disconnected from reality in completing the narrative of romantic love expected by society. By letting the virtual celebrity couples, who are young, attractive and capable, live in spacious and impeccable apartments in the city center, which many young adults cannot afford, the reality TV shows downplay the everyday labor that such a lifestyle demands (Hong 597). Romanticizing and fictionalizing love
through disconnecting it from the real space transforms love into a melodramatic event instead of considering it as an everyday practice, consequently justifying the material and time consumption required to actualize the romantic fantasies of love (Hong 597). In other words, the specific brand of love promoted by Korean society has no space in the real life because love must transcend the reality.
Love motel rooms are not as luxurious and spacious as the studio apartments provided to the virtual celebrity couples by the broadcasting company. However, these rooms still give an illusion of non-everyday by being physically enclosed from the outside and, returning to the widespread imaginaries of global cities and the exotic fantasies, implying the spatiality of “elsewhere”. The countless Romas and Milanos in Seoul’s back alleys seem to promise to take young couples outside of Korea where they can, although briefly, escape from the conservative social values that often disapprove of premarital or extramarital sex. However, precisely because the dominant narrative of love demands romantic elopement, the motel rooms fail to let the lovers escape from reality, only allowing brief moments of deviation for lovers but then beckoning them back to the larger social order.
The superficiality or tackiness of motel rooms exposes another interesting spatial challenge these rooms of lovemaking propose to young urbanites in Korea. The escapism in romantic love does not need the real Rome or Milano, or, better put, all the counterfeit becomes as important as, or, more “real” than its original. Thus, the doleful Christmas lights
in the lobby of “INN” can turn the real Christmas into a lie. Through decorating these spaces with global(ized) markers, the global landscape becomes a playground for young urban consumers. The predilection towards the consumption of the foreign is also apparent, for instance, in Itaewon, a foreigners’ district in Seoul set around the U.S. military base, which has become a popular weekend destination for young couples and groups of young female friends. By visiting exotic restaurants and cafés in the area, the young adults literally consume the foreign, while having no ability to afford, or not necessarily desiring to encounter, the original.
David Harvey’s understanding of simulacrum in the contemporary city explains the predominance of the exotic and global spatiality not only in general consumption (of food, drinks, goods and others) but also, especially, in the love bang. Harvey claims that this consumption of the global or the exotic in the world of simulacrum has real effects on the world and the urban, resulting in a whole new type of spatial awareness among urbanites (301). The consumption of foreignness places the consumers within the greater world order and reshapes the urban landscape into a coherent and frictionless unity by disconnecting the exotic objects from their origins (Harvey 300). Following Baudrillard, Harvey makes it clear that the simulacrum is not a mere copy or vicarious experiences but a truth. Thinking of motel rooms as urban simulacrum, these motel rooms are not the representations of the original that exists somewhere else, but spaces of their own.
As these motel rooms are not interested in perfectly replicating the original, they also do not provide the distant promise of the real to the visitors, nor do visitors expect to discover the real in these rooms. Along with the concept of simulacrum, kitsch as an aesthetic category of the cheap and the mass-produced is also helpful in explaining the apparent tackiness of the motel rooms, possibly unveiling the close relationship between love and consumption in Korea. Kitsch, according to Walter Benjamin, is an art form that is recognized by its
“absolute and instantaneous availability for consumption” (395). In other words, kitsch may demand “fully matured cultural traditions”, however, this is only to exploit them by drawing the power from the “reservoir of accumulated experience” while re-stylizing the original (Greenberg 10). Through kitsch, the mass can fully enjoy the object without effort or the mastery of culture and history behind the object (Greenberg 10). While the idea of
simulacrum highlights the insignificance of the original in the modern urban world, kitsch focuses on the process of capitalization and mass-production of the original. Both concepts suggest the insignificance of the original and focus on the multitude of truths, which can explain the role of motel rooms within the grand narrative of love. Motel rooms provide a space for young visitors to consume and experience the romantic fantasies and pleasures of love while recreating the urban and global landscape. Thus, Motel Roma is as romantic and fantastic as Rome in Italy, and Rome becomes as tacky as Motel Roma with a flickering neon sign, as long as both spaces promise a moment of romantic escapade.
The spatiality of the non-everyday among the love motel rooms in Korea also becomes manifest through the peculiar spatial arrangement of the rooms as a collage of different rooms in one single bang. An increasing number of motel rooms combine different spaces which makes the motel rooms everywhere and nowhere at the same time, or, a type of heterotopic space in the Korean cities. Most of the time the motel rooms are comprised of a bedroom, their foremost important space that allows couples to have sex, and a bathroom, which sometimes is not physically separated from the main room, for instance, by placing a bathtub in the middle of the motel room without walls or a door (Figure 15). In addition to this, many motel businesses are promoting their “heterotopic” interior designs by installing high-speed internet with the latest desktops, perhaps reproducing PC bang, large-screen TVs and various movie DVDs, following DVD bang, and disco balls or dancing poles, recreating clubs or bars (Figure 14).
When using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to understand the phenomenon of motel rooms among young adults, An-na Lee focuses on its aspect of being an isolated yet open space. Lee suggests that motel rooms resemble such characteristic of heterotopia as these rooms are completely separated from the outside when the door is closed (50). However, these motel rooms are also an “open” space flooded by waves of visitors (A. Lee 51). Lee points at the potential liberty these spaces offer to young adults, as these spaces are no longer strictly for the act of sexual intercourse, but are increasingly becoming bang of multipurpose where the visitors can decide and invent the significance and value of the space accordingly, as can be seen with the motel’s attempt to merge different spatial functions in a single room (A. Lee 51). The versatility of motel rooms is usually taken as advantageous and resourceful by young couples (A. Lee 50), instead of being considered as lacking identity. Using the heterotopic aspects of motel room as a resource, young adults autonomously decide how they are going to experience and make meaning out of these spaces of sexual freedom, although limited to a few hours (A. Lee 68). By being a space isolated from but closely related to the outside, motel rooms help young lovers negotiate Korea’s conservative values and social gazes that still largely condemn premarital sex.
Figure 14 - Many motel rooms begin to incorporate features of PC room, such as high-speed internet and desktops, and home theater system to attract more visitors
Figure 15 - Some motel rooms remove the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom, creating a different and a new sense of spatiality
Thinking of motel rooms as heterotopic space that embodies everywhere by being nowhere in itself can also be related to Marc Augé’s concept of non-place created by supermodernity. Augé explains a non-place as an “opposition to the sociological notion of place” (34). A place is “defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity” while a non-place, its opposition, is not relational nor historical, with no identity to be involved (Augé 77-78). The rooms of love motels, despite their effort to improve and differentiate from each other, are often understood as homogenous and anonymous, or, “predictable from Seoul to Jeju Island – the architecture, the frequenters, the activities”, resembling the
description of non-place. For instance, in line with Augé’s characterization of non-places “measured in unit of time” (Augé 104), a place that spatializes time, the motel rooms are also priced based on the duration of occupancy. The fact that the young lovers only temporarily occupy the space makes the comparison between Korea’s love motels and Augé’s non-place appropriate. In addition, non-places diminish the visitors into the roles they are playing (Augé 104). A passer-by of non-places is only what he or she is doing and experiencing as
“passenger, customer or driver” (Augé 104). Likewise, the identities of couples entering the motels are rarely questioned, replaced with the role of being lovers who are going to make love. The apparent anonymity of the users of the love motels likely stems from the role play they participate in these spaces, which also coincides with the characteristic of the users of non-places.
Motel rooms also serve as a figurative non-place or place “there to be passed through” (Augé 104), like the common examples used by Augé, such as highways or airports, in this case, leading to marriage, the ultimate destination of any proper love and romance in Korea. Motel rooms can never be the final purpose of love but serve as a device to complete the dominant discourse of love where marital partnership remains the primary outcome of love or dating. It appears convenient to juxtapose the concept of non-place and Korea’s love motels.
However, it requires a more contextual understanding of love motels as love bang before thinking of them as a subgenre of supermodernity’s non-places which will only highlight how motel rooms collaborate with the general narrative of love in Korea and downplay their potential to disrupt and possibly rewrite parts of it.
While non-place is largely characterized by the textual instructions (as Augé
classified: prescriptive, prohibitive and informative), either directly or vaguely, of some sort of instructions, love motels in Korea do not need these instructions because certain cultural meanings and values are clearly attached to these spaces and are shared by not only the young lovers but also by the general public, thus these spaces are, as Ae-ran Kim described in her short story, “predictable”. The predictability or familiarity to these spaces among the younger generation contradicts the general discourse of love that demands fantastic spatiality. Many young motel-goers describe motel room by referring to banal and ordinary spaces, such as apartment for the newlyweds, a studio without a kitchen, or a condominium without a garden (A. Lee 55), which reiterates the meaning of motel rooms as they are, instead of considering them as transitional, extraordinary spaces. In addition, the anonymity in and around the love motels does not necessarily overshadow the possible disaffections, such as awkwardness, embarrassment, cringe and guilt felt by the young couples when encountering the part-time workers at the motel receptions or confronting other couples in the corridors or the lifts, or even being observed around the motel districts. The strange pressure of staring and being stared at in the vicinity of motel rooms makes people “hurry on”, differentiating love motels from non-places.
This specific (dis)affective exchange between strangers in and around love motels has provoked the development of mobile phone applications, such as Yanolja and Yeogi-Ottae, which can be considered as a reaction from the younger generation against the general discourse of love that turns a blind eye to sexual desires and pleasures in dating lives. These
mobile applications help couples locate empty motel rooms, possibly lessening the chance of having an awkward promenade in the motel districts and changing the rituals of courtship which used to comprise a huge part of dating culture. These rituals, especially ones including embarrassment and pretended innocence, were likely reflecting the dominant love discourse that does not talk about sexual desire, especially of young women. The layouts of these apps are colorful and cute, often using pastel pink and blue and andromorphic characters, and their advertisements mainly use comedians, young and attractive female celebrities and catchy songs (Figure 16 and Figure 17). The cute and feminine aspect of these mobile applications, again, may be connected to the predominance of childishness and cute aesthetic in the narrative of love and romance. On the other hand, the approachability and accessibility of these applications manifested as cute, feminine and funny may hint at a certain degree of autonomy and liberation for young women in their sexual decisions.
Figure 16 - Hani, a famous idol singer well known for being a natural beauty with an easy-going personality, became a model for Yanolja, one of the major motel reservation applications
Figure 17 - Another major motel reservation application, Yeogi-Ottae, uses a character with a cute appearance as its mascot
The crusade of lovers in the disreputable motel districts thus has been replaced with tapping and clicking on smartphone screens, sparing the couples the waves of displeasure originating from the stares and gazes from others. Also, although through the language of childishness and possible infantilization, the digitization of these dating rituals can be interpreted as empowerment for young adults. The potential to subvert the hegemonic narrative of love through virtualizing a part of the urban landscape, however, is gained at the cost of conforming to social norms. These smartphone applications have essentially made these dating routines invisible or unseen from the “stares” instead of questioning or rebelling against such gazes. In that respect, the rise of motel reservation applications may be taken as a demonstration of the continuing disapproval from society towards the young motel-goers.
The phenomenon of motel bang is not only a symptom of urbanization and
globalization, but a type of compromise of young adults to practice love without disturbing the social values and gazes that tout a hegemonic narrative of love. Motel rooms position themselves between the two options of fully acknowledging one’s sexual desires and resisting the conservatism, and entirely giving up the sexual aspects of dating, and become convenient
and necessary bang for young adults in the urban landscape (A. Lee 62). Rather than resisting or subverting the hegemonic narrative, the love story created by love motel rooms adds layers and enriches the dominant discourse of love in Korean society.
Examining the love motels and how young adults make use of these spaces in order to (make) love has revealed that the spatiality of the motel rooms both reflects and
undermines the predominant discourse of love in Korean society. Love is supposed to
transcend the everyday, the ordinary and the banal, even though the clusters of love motels in various parts of Korean cities suggest otherwise. Sexual desires and pleasures, despite having already been firmly established as a crucial part of dating among the younger generation, are still considered taboo among most Koreans. The following chapter investigates wedding halls, the ultimate love bang in the chronicle of love in Korea where the final fantasies of love are materialized, to understand how they accommodate and propagate the hegemonic
narrative of love that somehow bridges the strange gap between Western(ized) romantic fairy tales and the “reality” of the marriage market and industries.
Chapter 3. Rooms of Performing Love
Korea’s commercial wedding halls are the final room of the three typologies of love bang. They generate their own narrative of love that evades but, at the same time, conforms to or even expands the popular discourse of love. Young couples’ love seems to be finally realized and materialized in the wedding hall; however, it is also fantasized and ritualized. On the one hand, wedding halls display the princess aesthetic that was also apparent in the two previous rooms of love, highlighting the continuum of the romantic escapist fantasy in what is imagined as love in Korea. On the other hand, they also remind the visitors of the
limitations within the escapist fantasies through demonstrating the (neo-)Confucian familial, social obligations and the transiency and superficiality of the space itself. In fact, Korean wedding ceremonies in typical wedding halls consist of two ceremonies: a “modern” part with Western-styled decorations and props, such as, most emblematically, the wedding gown, that is open to all guests and a “traditional” part for immediate families which takes place in a smaller, enclosed room where brides and grooms wear traditional attire. By accommodating the two very different yet related love fantasies in Korea, wedding halls expand and enrich the concept of love bang. In other words, wedding halls are a transitional space where young heterosexual couples are finally acknowledged as “adults”, and where intimate and personal emotions transform into public and social affect. These transitions challenge the concept of bang and enable the hegemonic narrative of love to thrive.
In order to examine how wedding halls let lovers escape but, in the end, confine them to reproduce the dominant discourse of love, it is essential to first observe the spatial
arrangements and ritualized expression of love in the wedding halls by focusing on an example, W Square, a commercial wedding hall in Pangyo city.
W Square is a multi-storied rectangular building in the middle of Pangyo’s dynamic tech company district, or, as it proudly claims in its promotional website, “an ancient
European castle in the center of the city” ("Wedding Hall."). W Square provides two
ceremonial halls, a cafeteria, bridal preparation rooms, spaces for a traditional ceremony and parking spaces. The most visible spaces of W Square, the main ceremonial hall, or Chapel Hall, and a bridal preparation room next to it, exhibit and reiterate the centrality of the theme of escapism in the hegemonic love discourse, mainly through exploiting feminine fantasies and the aspect of costume or role play.
Chapel Hall is decorated with real white flowers, chandeliers, drapes, faux marble columns, ornamental chairs and other similar props to produce a fantastic spatiality detached from reality (Figure 18 and Figure 19). Wedding halls should remain surreal, sacred and spiritual because they are spaces where love, something that is supposed to transcend reality, is being actualized (Kim and Lee 54). Likewise, W Square’s Chapel Hall offers the imagined spatiality of an “ancient European castle”, which evades both the time and space of the present urban background, for young couples to take refuge from the urban reality, not to mention its name hints at strong Western and Christian influences in the general wedding ceremonies in Korea. What is achieved through the language of cuteness and childishness in room-cafés and cheeky and playful kitsch aesthetic in love motel rooms is being
accomplished in the wedding halls with props that emphasize the surreality and sacredness of love and feminine and fantastic spatial aesthetic. The specific spatial arrangement of wedding halls that underscores the unworldliness of love suggests that these rooms also follow the dominant discourse of love that encourages the romantic elopement.
Figure 18 - White flowers are often used for the decoration of the wedding halls
Figure 19 - Chandeliers are frequently used by many wedding halls to allude to “Western” or “European” spatiality
