WEDNESDAY NIGHT, Metropolitan Museum of Art guards wore orange to mark the museum’s year-long partnership with Sulwhasoo, a traditional Korean beauty brand currently rolling out its amber-themed campaign, Tilda Swinton, featuring “I am Ginseng”. Korakrit Arunanondchai aptly wore a rhinestone-embellished copper velvet tracksuit, while artist Diane Severin Nguyen, Paris review Editor-in-Chief Olivia Kan-Sperling, and I opted for black silk and ruffles with a hint of pink lip gloss, in honor of Sulwhasoo’s international ambassador Rosé, BLACKPINK’s unnamed star, the megawattage K-pop phenomenon that can be called any number of superlatives – the highest-ranked, best-selling, most successful, and biggest girl group in the world. It was a bit of a fluke that we ended up there; Diane was supposed to be in Paris for a solo exhibition at La MEP until her passport got lost in the mail and my press trip to cover the Gwangju Biennale was canceled thanks to the PR policy. I thought covering this event of Korea coming to New York might be a kind of rendition (if that’s the right word), and so there we all were, wandering through Tutankhamun’s tomb at 9 p.m. one school night, champagne flutes in hand.
“It’s so crazy that they are real! we murmured, already altered by the bubbly.
As we approached Dendur Temple, the smell of the ocean began to sting my nose, probably from the Korean cuisine prepared by star chef Junghyun Park for the evening’s VIP celebrities, including the actress Oscar-winning Korean Yuh-Jung Youn, Charli XCX, Emily in Parisof Ashley Park, Victoria’s Secret model Georgia Fowler and rapper-singer Anderson .Paak. Upon entering what was until recently known as the typically serene Sackler Wing with Kevin Roche’s windows flooded with daylight, we saw that it had been transformed into something of a cross between the prom and an Upper East Side bar mitzvah. 2000s hits by Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake boomed from the DJ booth as strobes flashed across a sea of glitter, sparkles and gelled hair. Don’t get me wrong, the guests looked fabulous, and after all, as art graduates, did we really drop out of high school?
Armed with our ginseng-infused cocktails, we settled into a seated alcove just below the Temple, where I assessed the possibility of climbing the Isiac monument with Willa Nasatir, a regular at Brooklyn’s VITAL bouldering gym. From the downtown set, we spotted artist Maggie Lee, Raffaella of fashion label Lou Dallas, and gallerists Jenny Borland and Matt Sova, who performed Oli London’s song “Koreaboo” to me, internet personality and K-pop superfan. (London is known for having undergone eleven plastic surgeries in one day in an effort to transform into a member of Korean boy band BTS Jimin.) When I told her I was writing a diary, Jeanette Hayes shared that ChatGPT helped him write. ChatGPT, write a art forum gossip column about a high-end event at the Met featuring K-pop stars: “K-pop stars in attendance included BLACKPINK, EXO and TWICE, all of whom mingled with guests and posed for selfies. The sight of these superstars in the hallowed halls of the Met was certainly surreal, but it was clear that they were having as much fun as the guests..”
Good enough, but I’m not sure Rosé really has the right to have fun in public – we only caught a glimpse of her as she walked past, impenetrably flanked by her masters. Diane wondered if the star remembered a conversation they had in a Versace salon for a Frieze Seoul afterparty a few months ago; as Krit predicted, we never had the chance to find out.
The party ended abruptly at midnight, and by the time we were ushered to the locker room, we had sadly missed the gift bags filled with what I can only imagine was the promise of a Korean glass skin in a bottle. The word “biopolitics” did not appear anywhere in the invitation or press release for the event, but that night we had essentially witnessed a powerful execution of it, riding the crest of the “K- World Wave” or, as it is called throughout Asia, Hallyu (incidentally the subject of an ongoing showcase at the V&A in London – sponsored, of course, by Korea’s Ministry of Culture and Hyundai’s “luxury” sedan model, Genesis): skincare, music pop, cars, movies, dramas. Like artificial intelligence (not to mention Purdue Pharma), they are culture, corporate and softcore warfare technologies and tactics with the power to expand and truncate mind and body – chemicals and machines we enter and exit, blurring the boundaries of our worlds.
One thing that AI won’t be able to replicate anytime soon: our subconscious. If we consider the global situation in which we live as a kind of eternal night, it should be remembered that in Freud’s vision, the death drive is a primary process of all living beings – we desire the frustration of non- life as much as the invigorating pleasures of satisfaction. We could view our fascination with pop icons, symbols and princesses in these terms – the people we flatten into lifeless, cold statues bathed in light – as symptoms of a fantastical desire to seize a lost illusion of a golden age, a world without the tearing of fractures and divisions, in a state of impossible stasis.
— Hiji Nam
