[KS] Kisaeng

J.Scott Burgeson jsburgeson at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 19 00:03:06 EST 2006


--- Pete Morriss <pete.morriss at nuigalway.ie> wrote:
> Intrigued by all the publicity about the filming of
> Memoirs of a Geisha, one of my students asked me if
she
> could find out more about the Korean equivalent.


I would like to stress that there are at least three
distinct
moments or periods of gisaeng culture in Korea, and
that the final
or current phase offers an interesting contrast with
Japanese
geisha and modern (or postmodern) Korean approaches to
traditional Korean culture. There was the pre-modern
gisaeng period, up til the start of the 20th century,
the colonial period moment and then the
post-Liberation moment. The Japanese modernized and
streamlined the gisaeng system in order to regulate it
commercially, health-wise and so on. Many Korean
nationalist historians argue that this was a
perversion of the "true" or "pure" spirit of Korean
gisaeng culture (as if any culture were such a static
"essence"!), but one could argue that the gisaeng
system
would have been forced to undergo streamlining and
regulation with the coming of modernity regardless of
whether or not the Japanese were the driving agents of
such change. The gisaeng system was officially shut
down after Liberation out of desire to appear more
modern and progressive on the part of South Korea's
new leaders, many of whom were inspired by Christian
and Americanized notions of shame and morality. The
gisaeng 
tradition, as it were, survived unofficially and in
debased form, and even
persists today in limited traces.
   In contrast to the film Memoirs of a Geisha, which
one might argue is an
Orientalist representation of traditional Asian
femininity adopted from a
Western perspective, contemporary Korean gisaeng might
best be described
as a self-Orientalized simulacrum of traditional Asian
femininity adopted
from a Korean--rather than strictly
Western--perspective. Unlike in the past, gisaeng of
today lack any sort of training in the arts or
letters, and are merely chosen as attractive models on
which to hang a few signifiers of "traditional"
culture--hanboks, hair pins and the like. They
represent a sort of depthless embalming of traditional
culture that could only be derived from a profound and
radical alienation from that same traditional culture.
As a result, few wealthy modern Korean men see gisaeng
as very interesting or appealing, and prefer instead
to go to top-class room salons in Kangnam where the
hostesses are far more sophisticated than the average
contemporary "gisaeng" (and of course tend to be far
more "enhanced" physically through the supplements of
plastic surgery in its myriad forms). Thus, the last
remnants of gisaeng culture will slowly fade out and
disappear altogether, if foreign tourists cannot be
counted on to hold up and support the industry on
their own--which many might consider a sort of living
death in any case. In fact, the last gisaeng house or
yojong in Insadong was shut down last summer, and
replaced with a parking lot no less!
   A triumph of Westernized modernity--and the
automobile, of course!--over Korean tradition! RIP!
   --Scott Bug


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