Plastic Orientalism: Surface Logic and Cultural Technique in K-Pop

Abstract

This article proposes the notion of “plastic Orientalism” as an emergent cultural phenomenon in recent K-pop music through a textual analysis of BTS’s 2018 music video “Idol.” The music video features a yellow pavilion structure vaguely resembling the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, but with a two-dimensional flat appearance and a derealized space imposed with computer-generated special effects. By taking a signifier conventionally coded as Oriental(ist) in dominant visual representation and returning such an image ironically with extra saturation, the yellow pavilion is characteristic of plastic Orientalism as a reflective and reflexive cultural technique that radically performs the logic of the surface. “Idol” reclaims the overdetermined associations of “the East” with inscrutability and excess by aligning itself with the architectural facade, offering a conception of subjectivity as routed through objecthood. I argue that plasticity as a visual rhetoric and reparative reading practice allows a renegotiation of the politics of hegemony and resistance for an ethnic-racial identity that disrupts and modulates among the discourses of Orientalism, techno-Orientalism, and ethnonationalism.