Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1464-9373 (Print) 1469-8447 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riac20

Urban commoning for Jarip (self-standing) and

survival: subcultural activism in “Seoul Inferno”

Hyunjoon Shin

To cite this article: Hyunjoon Shin (2018) Urban commoning for Jarip (self-standing) and
survival: subcultural activism in “Seoul Inferno”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 19:3, 386-403, DOI:
10.1080/14649373.2018.1497899

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2018.1497899

Published online: 01 Oct 2018.

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INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES
2018, VOL. 19, NO. 3, 386–403
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2018.1497899

Urban commoning for Jarip (self-standing) and survival: subcultural

activism in “Seoul Inferno”*
Hyunjoon SHIN
Institute for East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University, Seoul, South Korea

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This study investigates the spatial practice of a subcultural activism of the Common/communing;
“young radicals” in Seoul, South Korea through the lens of urban subculture; activism; urban
commoning. As a cohort of people born after the 1980s, these young spaces; Seoul/South Korea
musicians, artists, and cultural activists have endeavored to create, produce,
and transform urban spaces through involvement in a series of anti-eviction
protests. In particular, this study investigates how and why radical musicians,
artists, and their associates have negotiated the chasms among their
personal lifestyle, collective subculture, and political activism by pursuing
their spatial practices for self-standing and survival over the past 10 years.
Although not necessarily place specific, several cases are drawn from a group
that relocated to the central area of Seoul since the mid-2010s, making its
urban activism a subcultural (and transcultural) formation.

Prelude: an (inter-)Asia gathering, convergence and divergence

In mid-September 2017, “No Limit 2017: Seoul Autonomous Zone” (hereafter “No Limit Seoul”), a
cultural-cum-political event that attempted at making inter-Asia connections, was held in Seoul
(Figure 1). The first event was launched at Gyeongui Railway Commons that had been (and still
is) occupied or “squatted”1 by the activists in an area located at the northwest part of Seoul. Accord-
ing to the publicity, the event was a gathering of “the rebels from East Asia” who “have sought ways
to create self-standing cultural sphere to make fun of and stand against this system (of governments
and capitalists).”2 Musicians, artists, and activists from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China,
Malaysia, and Indonesia came to Seoul without any financial support from the hosts.
The size of the gathering would have been too small to bring about significant impact to the pub-
lic. Mostly comprising young and poor musicians, artists, and cultural activists from East and South-
east Asia (hereafter Asia), the participants looked marginal, minor, and subaltern. Practical reasons
were noted on why the event could not mobilize more participants, as a few venues that were
expected to join the event already arranged other schedules. The plan to “occupying different

CONTACT Hyunjoon Shin hyunjoon.shin@gmail.com Institute for East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University, 320 Yeondong-ro,
Guro-gu, Seoul, South Korea
*About the usage of the Korean language: This essay uses the “Revised Romanization of Korean,” which is the official Korean-language
Romanization system adopted by the South Korean government. Although the system allows for very limited use of the hyphen, it is
used for certain words to enable non-Korean readers to get back to the Korean scripts. In Romanizing Korean names, the system is not
strictly applied when a few names have already been established internationally or chosen by the authors or artists themselves. In terms
of the order of the names, surname is placed first followed by first name in the conventional Korean and East Asian order. When used in
citation and bibliography, however, Korean authors’ names follow the English order, i.e. first name first and surname last.
© 2018 Hyunjoon Shin. All Rights Reserved.
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 387

Figure 1. Poster of “No Limit 2016” (left) and “No Limit Seoul 2017” (right). No Limit Seoul is the second chapter
after “No Limit 2016: Tokyo Autonomous Zone.” The main program comprised a talk show, live music, movie
screening, exhibition, and rally for peace.

areas of Seoul per day one by one” (see Figure 2) ended up becoming one of the numerous small-
scale underground inter-Asia encounters that have proliferated since the 2010s. However, “No
Limit Seoul” was less successful than its first chapter at Tokyo in 2016 in terms of size, impact,
and connections.

Figure 2. Plan of “occupying” Seoul based on the idea of “No Limit 2017” organizers
388 H. SHIN

Based on such event, arguably, a new type of radical activists in Asia have encountered. As impli-
cated in the quotes and the images above, the ideological orientation, cultural sensibility, and esthetic
disposition of the participants differ from the mainstream society and organized social movements.
These practices of subcultural activism developed from the idea of “cultural activism” (Buser et al.
2013; Cassegård 2013), which is elaborated in a later part of this paper. Such event creates, produces,
and constructs spaces for the survival of participants in the urban areas of Seoul, which is under
intensifying threats of rampant “redevelopment” and/or “regeneration” (Park 2014). Even the “can-
dlelight revolution,” which is said to recover democracy in South Korea, did not stop the organizers
from continuing what they were doing, which is producing spaces for their activisms/activities.
Rather than going into detail about the inter-Asia connections, encounters, and gatherings (see
the papers by Egami and Iharada in this issue), this study focuses at Korean participants who directly
organized or are indirectly associated with “No Limit.” This study pays attention to the spatial prac-
tices by the actors of subcultural activism because creating commons through squatting (or occu-
pation) would be an extreme, unusual, and uncommon case of the practices. What is the most
impressive since the 2000s is that the musicians, artists, and cultural activists are deeply involved
in or indirectly supported the practices. Aforementioned Gyeongui Railway Commons, which expli-
citly uses the language of commons, is just one recent example. Different spatial practices of different
actors in different areas have come to the fore during this research.
Although the production of exceptional space through the tactics of squatting or occupation is a
focus throughout this paper, another focus is constructing tiny underground spaces that work as the
everyday base. Among these spaces are two cases chosen for deeper observation, which are the Coop-
erative for the Production of Self-standing music, production-consumption cooperative of musi-
cians, and SDS production, production-distribution collective of musicians and artists. Based on
years of observation, the members and associates of the former were among the leading actors of
“No Limit Seoul.” By contrast, the people in the latter group were reluctant to join. Considering
these people have become close in the past 10 years and firmly constructed affective and immaterial
commons, divergence as well as convergence have emerged among the subcultural activists. This
relationship is critically assessed at the last section of the paper.
Before going into further detail about the cases, the general conditions of the Asian youth are
examined in the following section. These actors are rather uncritically labeled as “the young and
poor.”

Pushing the inter-frame of hopeless Asian youth

The most influential discourse on youth in Korea is “the KRW 880,000 Generation” (Woo and Park
2007). The monetary amount indicated the average monthly wage that a young worker could earn
during those days. The discourse of a “22k (TWD 22,000) Generation” emerged around 2009 when
the Taiwanese government implemented a policy to subsidize enterprises that employed university
graduates as interns. Considering that TWD 22,000 is approximately KRW 880,000, youth as pre-
carious low-wage workers or as new urban poor is one of the common conditions shared by
Korea and Taiwan. Critical intellectuals conceived the term as a “spell of misfortune” and that the
youth are “becoming losers” (Wu 2014; Wang 2017).
No doubt that Japan is the most “advanced” in terms of youth poverty. The language with words,
such as freeter, NEET, hikikomori, and precariat, has flourished after the collapse of the bubble econ-
omy (Amamiya 2007; Imoto and Toivonen 2012; Cassegård 2014). Similarly, mainland China, quick
at catching-up with everything, is developing its youth problem, as shown by the discourse of a
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 389

variety of social tribes since the term “ant tribe” (yizu), referring to low-income university graduates
in mainland Chinese cities, was coined by a sociologist around 2009 (Gu, Sheng, and Hu 2015).
Although different countries in Asia have taken different paths of capitalist development, the so-
called postindustrial urban economies in megacities in the region are faced with the similar problem
of youth poverty.
Thus, to talk about the hopeless condition of the Asian youth has become widespread (see Chua
2017).
In Korea, 10 years after the discourse of the KRW 880,000 Generation was born, the term has been
associated closely with a series of policies put in place by the Seoul Metropolitan Government and
other local governments in Korea. The phenomenon has brought about the institutionalization of
local governmental bodies, which defined a specific type of the youth activism in a depoliticized
way. In that sense, the definition shares the idea that is similar to “state-endorsed youth activism”
(Hong 2016). Youth activism as a form of governance does not seem to differ from the Western
counterpart that goes beyond the binary of “good citizens and bad activists” (Kennelly 2011) and
organizes the activism in a “post-political” way (Larner 2014).
However, widespread discontent arises with the policy drive in a condition when Korea is called as
“hell” (Fifield 2016) and Seoul is called “inferno” (see Figure 8). When one of the interviewees, PE, an
artist-cum-activist, shouted “the youth is a wrong frame!” the statement shows a cohort of youth is
disillusioned at youth activism as a form of governance. Self-mockingly calling themselves as “young
radicals” or of the “radical surplus,”3 they hope for radical change through non-institutionalized acti-
vism. Here, the actors of the activism are too multiple and heterogeneous to be lumped together into
a homogeneous group called “youth.”
Nonetheless, this study does not simply endorse one type of activism and discard the others.
Although sympathetic to their struggles for “self-standing” and “survival” by their vocabularies,
this study describes the difficulties, hardships, and contradictions they face from the perspective
of, hopefully, a senior friend-cum-comrade. A field work including participation observations, in-
depth interviews, and personal communications have been conducted for three years from 2014
to 2017.
A key concept, which is not conclusive but suggestive, is the aforementioned subcultural acti-
vism. Although quite a few of these people shun one or both words of “subculture” and “activism,”
subcultural activism highlights the dilemmas, chasms, and inner contradictions among personal
lifestyle, collective bonding, and political engagement (Portwood-Stacer 2013). First, subcultural
activism is different from state-endorsed and institutionalized types of youth activism. Second,
the term activism is preferred to movement, as the latter strictly supposes ideological motivation,
political goals, and specific organizations. Third, subculture, in spite of skeptical views about
its relevance about the transformation of youth culture since the 2000s, refers to the ethos
that addresses continuing inequality, in spite of fluid boundaries and floating memberships in
the formation.4
Thus, the question is more than a simple investigation of the appropriation of a concept in a
specific spatiotemporal condition. The question rather is under what circumstance is subculture con-
nected with activism, and how does it affect the political orientation, cultural sensibility, and esthetic
disposition of its members? For this purpose, this study uses another key concept urban common/
commoning based on the concepts pioneered by Autonomist Marxist (Hardt and Negri 2009) and
New School anarchists (Graeber 2002; Gordon 2008) and has already been employed in other case
studies (Han and Imamasa 2015; Kratzwald 2015; Stavrides 2015). Instead of applying the generic
concept to a specific case and confirming or challenging its relevance, the inevitable gaps when a
390 H. SHIN

concept travels, transmutes, and transforms itself are given attention. As seen later on, the practices
of urban commoning in Seoul are unique, extreme, and uncommon beyond any soft, gentle, and pro-
fessional language of urban policies.

From creative resistance into urban commoning: duriban struggle 2010–2011

The cultural formation that deserves the epithet of subcultural activism in Seoul cannot ignore
the “indie” scene and its cultural base in Hongdae during the 1990s and 2000s. An equivalent
term for “hipster” in English-speaking societies and wenqing (wenyiqingnian) in Chinese-
speaking societies (Chen 2014) is the vernacular term in Korean, the “Hongdae people.” For
example, the recent exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art Subculture: Angry Youth presented
the events that happened in the Hongdae area (SEMA 2015). Music-wise, diverse styles of
indie pop-rock5 were included. Theory-wise, the cultural formation based in the area would
be a vernacular equivalent of the so-called “neo-Bohemia” (Lloyd 2006), or for the critical,
“creative city” would suffice (Florida 2002).
Such “indie culture” that sprouted in Hongdae was not political in a conventional sense. To say the
event was “mere cultural” is unfair because Hongdae was, and still is, to a certain degree, the most
important place in Seoul and in Korea where one can witness the rich overlap of cultural and/or iden-
tity politics. However, old style political activism, whether left or right, was regarded as uncool during
Hongdae’s heydays. In this way, subculture and activism was disconnected with each other until the
mid-2000s. The period after can be dubbed as the post-bohemian condition in a post-creative city
in the sense that a series of policy directive of the “creative economy” by the past governments has
proven disastrous to the “bohemian types” of “creative types” clustered in the area.
A dramatic reversal occurred when members of the Hongdae scene went political and even rad-
ical. Around the late 2000s, gentrification/displacement began to be clearly sensed, perceived, and
experienced. As the transformation process is better examined elsewhere (Cho 2010; Shin 2011;
Yang 2015), this study focuses initially on the spatial practices that protested against the processes.
Among them, the Duriban Struggle, which was named after the noodle restaurant that refused to be
forcibly evicted until proper negotiations were made, deserves special attention. Numerous musi-
cians and artists based in Hongdae supported one of the local residents, who were former tenants
for many years but became squatters. The struggle took on the form of cultural event or of “creative
resistance” (Novy and Colomb 2013), including the music performances that were most preferred by
the participants of the protest.
Looking back, the Duriban Struggle marks the fading of Hongdae’s glory days because the ecology
of the scene began to be contested. What should be noted is that most actors in the struggle did not
belong to a generation that felt any strong pride at belonging to Hongdae as a cultural scene. The
activists were younger than the core Hongdae indie, on average, and sensed the serious problems
in the scene’s cultural ecology. In particular, live music venues and indie record labels began to
face criticism from younger musicians and bands when they did not pay the fees or royalties to
the musicians or bands. In short, the creative milieu of Hongdae was under serious crisis in the
late 2010s.
That is the background as to why many musicians gathered at the site of the anti-eviction
struggles. Sympathizing with local tenants, now squatters, under threat of forced eviction, younger
musicians and related artists made the sites their platforms, where each expressed disparate desire in
an open and unconventional manner. As one interviewee, HK, a musician-cum-activist said, “In
Duriban, it was possible that those who could never get together were all there.” This view is shared
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 391

by an academic observer who wrote, “Those who gathered at Duriban have nothing in common
which ties them as ‘us’” (Yang 2015, 318).
Rather than constructing a community of “us,” the events provided numbers of unexpected
and unpredictable encounters among artists and activists, and the convergence of their ideas,
projects, and agenda. No shortage of resources or concepts showed that an example of “liminal
space” (Huang and Rowen 2015) or “liminoid space” (Turner’s term, as quoted in Hui 2017) or
threshold space (Stavrides 2015) or “emancipatory space” (Kratzwald 2015) was created during
the Duriban Struggle. All those conceptualizations of exceptional spaces designated that the
social relations inside the space beyond the threshold becomes completely different from people
outside the space.
It was not only musicians and artists but also activists in a usual sense that gathered at Duriban.
Their ideological orientations were as diverse as the music genres performed at the site. At Duriban,
the radical and leftist ideologies, such as socialism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, environmental-
ism, and others, intermingled, contested, and eventually cooperated. Regardless of the ideological
affiliations of different actors, their practices and activities are closer to “liberal, intuitive anarchist,”
or the concept invented by George McKay (1998) when he described the “party and protest in
Nineties Britain.” Even in the harsh conditions of the protest, the event did not lose the “pleasure
principle,” which is a norm of subcultural activism in Asia and beyond (Cassegård 2013).
Most important is that the subcultural activism at the Duriban Struggle created and shared a
specific form of protest ethics and esthetic. This space showed a new cultural sensibility among
younger artists, activists, and others was nurtured, fostered, and cultivated. This sensibility had a pol-
itical dimension. In particular, the old-style organized social movements, such as labor movements,
student movements, and NGOs, were criticized as authoritarian, ageist, and masculinist. The spon-
taneous process of struggles evolved into a practice of urban commoning that produced different
ways of life and forms of cooperation, where material and immaterial resources, such as idea, knowl-
edge, and affect, are shared and become common goods in spite of or because of disorientation and
ambiguity.6
Nonetheless, the “victory” of the Duriban Struggle, a peaceful agreement on displacement, meant
the physical disappearance of the liminal/liminoid/threshold/emancipatory space. If the power
relations of urban regime of the so-called “redevelopmental state” in Asia (Doshi 2018) are con-
sidered, then any kind of squatting could not last forever. If it is agreed upon that “common
goods don’t simply exist, they are created” and that “there is no commons without commoning”
(Kratzwald 2015, 28), then spatial practices of commoning by the squatters need to be traced further
after a common space physically disappeared. In other words, the spatial practices for commoning
are constantly pursued while the efforts of creating commons in a specific place are temporarily lost.

From self-standing to community activism: case of Jarip co-op

One of the instant outcomes of Duriban Struggle was the formation of the Cooperative for the Pro-
duction-Consumption of Self-standing Music. This group Jarip7 which literally means “self-stand-
ing,” was invented to differentiate the term from “indie,” which was perceived to become too
contaminated. Drafted by aforementioned HV, the Declaration of Self-standing for the cooperative
(hereafter Jarip co-op) was promulgated in April 2011:
The result of efforts by musicians who claimed independence from capitalism over the past 15 years in Hon-
gdae is the rise in real estate prices and rents. This is not the intention of the musicians. The living conditions
392 H. SHIN

of the musicians haven’t gotten any better; rather, they’ve gotten worse. As musician’s life is miserable, what
with the flood of indie ghosts? At this moment, we need to ask, “Hey, you musicians! Are you still surviv-
ing?” Today, we declare our self-standing. We will not be subordinated to your indie ghosts.8

The language of the statement is explicitly leftist, as the point puts special importance on the rights of
the musicians, such as “the right to musicking,” “the right to work,” and “the right to a living.” The
fact that the “Newtown Culture Party 51+” music festival was held on 1 May was the expression of
their desire to identify their activism as a branch of labor movement (Figure 3). The new identity of
musicians as militants was formed as standing up against and beyond the concept of musicians as
losers. By their words, the aim is “the constructing [of] the common material bases for the pro-
duction of music for the musicians and listeners alike.”
Then, where did they make places for the production and consumption of self-standing music?
Criticizing the “indie ghost” meant they would leave Hongdae and make a new scene somewhere
else. After unsuccessfully relocating to a live venue, DGBS in Seokgwan, a neighborhood of north-
eastern of Seoul, the headquarters of the co-op was finally set up in Chungmuro, a neighborhood of
central Seoul, in 2014. Although the Jarip co-op has constructed a loose network of self-standing
musicians by affective bonding and practical collaboration, making a scene and finding audiences
out of nothing in relocated places was far from smooth and easy. Several interesting bands that
have built small but loyal followings still signed with established record labels and played in the
venues based in Hongdae. Aforementioned HK, who has been in charge of Jarip co-op talked that
its aim has been changed, saying “if we cannot make money from producing music, let’s not
spend money for it.”

Figure 3. “Newtown Culture Party 51+” 2011 held at the site of Duriban Struggle on 30 April and 1 May 2011. A
documentary film Party 51 was released in 2013.
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 393

Figure 4. Three compilation albums produced during or after the struggles against the forced eviction in 2016,
2017, and 2018 respectively. The first, Gentrification, is based on the anti-eviction struggles of Takeout Drawing,
the gallery-cum-café against the global K-pop star Psy who became a new landlord. The second, Soseongriui
Norae (The Songs of Soseong Village), was about the struggles of the peasants in Soseongri who were evicted
by the installation of THAAD. The third was on the restaurant Gungjungjokbal in central Seoul, which was on
the threat of eviction. The latter two are the products of the series Sae Minjung Eumak (New People’s Music).

Yet, that situation was never the case that Jarip co-op has not produced any tangible outcome. The
musicians associated with Jarip co-op spontaneously joined numerous anti-eviction protest struggles
that became widespread across urban (and even) rural spaces during the years after Duriban. Listing
all the struggles is difficult because the events were too many and were held in many places. During
the intensive field work in 2014 and 2017, five sites of protest struggles in the form of squatting simi-
lar to Duriban were visited.9 Closely making alliance with the anti-eviction protest association People
Who Want to Run a Commercial Business with Peace of Mind, also known as Mamsmangmo, Jarip
musicians provided the protest struggles with creative expression. The products based on the
struggles in 2016 are two compilation albums, Takeout Drawing and Gentrification, where Jarip
co-op assumed the role of record producer (Figure 4).

Figure 5. BTT, an anarchist/alterglobalist folk-punk band in an anti-eviction protest struggle, 14 August 2016.
394 H. SHIN

Ironically, the never-ending forced evictions in Seoul and beyond have provided the musicians
with the opportunities of commoning through squatting. Although Jarip co-op almost stopped func-
tioning as a record label or live venue, HK, its leader and his new associates have become devoted,
proficient, and radical as activists in political ideology and artistic creativity. Beyond making solidar-
ity by playing musicians’ own songs that do not necessarily have specific messages, many topical
songs based on the struggles have been created, performed, and recorded. The places of squatting
were transformed into spaces of cultural production and artistic creativities, functioning as rehearsal
room, recording studio, exhibition hall, and live venue. Not surprisingly, the recent compilation
series produced and curated by HK is titled, Sae Minjung Eumak (New People Music), which
reminds minjung gayo (people’s songs) in the 1970–80s, though very different in style but similar
in attitude.
Among the musicians-cum-activists, two “veteran” acts are considered for examining the evol-
ution of self-standing music for longer time span. The first is a solo singer HV and the other is a
trio BTT, who have actively joined the protest struggles for about a decade.
HV is still one of the leading musicians who is relentlessly participating in any kind of meetings
that have the cause of subcultural activism. While he has experimented diverse styles during younger
days, his recent music style, based on “cheap” electronic sound and outdated song formats, sounds
“kitchish cool.” Colorfully dressed like a clown, he identifies himself as a “people’s entertainer,”
“neighborhood musician,” and “urban guerrilla musician.” The handcart, which has the installed
basic sound system he uses for his mobile performance, is called “Gurubu Guruma” (Groove Hand-
cart). His weird but interesting esthetics and politics would be the Asian counterpart of Clandestine
Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA).
Recently, he opened a small and independent books and records store, Universal Gravity, in a
crummy neighborhood in central Seoul. This venture connects his subcultural activism with a com-
munity activism based on the cooperative of artists’ co-housing. The practices of urban commoning
have gone beyond exceptional and emancipatory spaces and have begun to be embedded in everyday
life’s survival. Despite the difficulties of earn a living by selling books and records, he keeps trying to
construct a way of life that provides an alternative to the dominant notion of the social by stepping
over the boundaries of any established community. Searching for alternative places to survive on a
small local scale is another ethos of radical musicians like him.
Another case is BTT, a trio that plays self-penned songs, which sound seemingly amateurish but
definitely creative. The leader, MJ, explained their genre of music as being “folk-punk” and all the
instruments, such as acoustic guitar, kazoo, and djembe, are portable. Hence, the band is optimized
for the unpredictable conditions of music performance, such as having no electric supply. Strangely,
the band has not yet released any regular album except a few recordings in a compilation album pro-
duced by Jarip co-op. Considering that even HV released four full-length albums in the 2010s, BTT is
not interested in any career-making as recording artists. BTT members firmly saw themselves as pol-
itical activists rather than serious artists, although their music is creative and original (Figure 5).
Actually, the members belong to the case that explicitly admits they are anarchists. Each member
is involved in political activism (such as anti-war and legalization of marijuana) or community acti-
vism at the neighborhood level. They belong to a wider network of alterglobalists, which can be
dubbed as “politicized subculture” (Piotrowsky 2013).10 However, two interviewees, MJ and GR,
were critical of the concept of “subculture” in the sense that artists who claim to be members of a
subculture are “apolitical hangers-on.” They even criticized a number of musicians who joined Dur-
iban Struggles as being “hipsters,” although several used to be members of an online anarchist net-
work. Then, where have all the hipsters and their subculture gone and survived?
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 395

Figure 6. The small gathering at SDS, located in central, old town Seoul, 26 May 2017.

Hidden up in the inner city: artists that sell what they do not want to sell
In 2017, during the final phases of fieldwork, quite a few musicians and artists in the Duriban
Struggle were not to be found at recent protests and that other musicians just joined passively.
Quite a few of these musicians were disinclined to spend too much time and energy on the struggle.
This situation illustrates the chasm between personal lifestyle and political engagement. In response,
interviewee DP, a musician, had the most impressive answer.

Q: When the musicians are engaged at the sites of protest struggles, what do you have in mind? Do you
think that, “I have to contribute to the cause of the activism,” or that, “I use my artistic expression for
the activism?”
A: You divide arts and activism. If so … those of the former case stay longer on site, while those of the
latter case go home pretty soon.
Q: Why is that? Does it have something to do with having clear goals concerning the struggle?
A: Yeah. The latter goes home when the hipness disappears. I don’t say that that’s necessarily bad. It’s just
a matter of what people tend to do, and which direction they go to.

In his words, a gap emerged between “cultural hipness” and “political correctness,” which shows
that subculture and activism are not always smoothly articulated. A chasm divides the two, when the
former is perceived as personal esthetic lifestyle and the latter as collective political action. Colloqui-
ally, “hipster” is the label artists who are culturally hip but politically inactive, while “anarchist” is the
label to artists who are politically active but culturally unhip. If placed in another way, being creative
as artists and being militant as activists are not always smoothly articulated. For artist who are into
artistic authenticity, sensitivity to the gap is common. One tactic for such artists is to retreat from
direct forms of political engagement.
The art space-cum-pub SDS, hidden up in a rundown office building in the heart of old town
Seoul since 2015, is a new haven for musicians and artists who were exhausted by the political
engagement and who needed a space for retreat, or even withdrawal. The owners and their associates
396 H. SHIN

had bitter experiences being displaced from the Itaewon neighborhood – the space called Kkottang –
and the Mullae neighborhood – the space called Lowrise. By the words of one of these artists in Octo-
ber 2016, SDS was made for them after “firmly making up their minds for economic self-standing”
according to one informant (Figure 6).
Calling a person “hipster” would not be necessarily fair as well as labeling a style of music as hip-
ster music just because the person looks like and the music sounds hip. As the connotation of the
word hipster is getting negative, the actors associated with SDS are unhappy with being labeled as
hipsters. Nonetheless, the affective atmosphere at SDS is definitely hip beyond being conventionally
cool. All the items at the venue look like works by installation artists. Weekend music-related events
are alluring, enticing, and seductive. The actors at SDS are adept at modulating affective fields, rather
than subverting them. Although the place is rented on a normal contract, the atmosphere looks that
of “entrepreneurial squatting” (Pruijt 2013, 32–37). Ironically or not, the venue has become one of
the underground hotspots in Seoul as of 2017.
Music-wise, SDS is no longer devoted to indie rock, which is still the norm in Hongdae. Instead,
the musicians who play at SDS are devoted to electronic dance music performed by local and some-
times, international, DJs. One of those DJs, PD, has been digging up old vinyl records of obscure
Asian pop from the past decades and complied the recordings into albums. SDS looks like a Korean
branch of the “empire of retro and of the hipster international” (Reynolds 2011) in Asia, whose capi-
tal is located somewhere in Tokyo. However, such circumstance does not mean that SDS and its
associated venues follow the trends in and from Japan. Rather, a network of, though sounds para-
doxical, “post-hipster hipsterdom” across East Asia has taken firm roots in Seoul.
In early 2017, SDS launched the artist production company, SDS Productions, in a different floor
in the same building. This venture was followed by opening a vintage “gift shop,” Cosmos Wholesale,
in another floor. The products displayed in the shop are closer to subcultural goods than to artist

Figure 7. The mixtape curated by PD, which signals the return of cassettes and obscure sound of Asian pasts.
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 397

works. The radical esthetic is in the contents and in the forms. One of the examples is a cassette-only
albums with MP3 download coupons. It is tempting to call them as the commodification of the com-
mon. Yet, what is more important is that these artists refuse to sell their products through regular
distribution channels. Even digital music is distributed through the online music store run by one
of the associates whose office is located in the same building (Figure 7).
One of the owners of the pub, LB, soberly says, “we just do what we want to do with the money
earned by selling drinks,” denying that he was an activist in any way. He mentioned that he kept his
distance from the “community.” In that sense, SDS is a part of spatial practices of young artists since
the 2010s, which deploys the tactic of “dislocation” (go to places which are unlikely to be gentrified)
or “image damage” (decrease the attractiveness of a neighborhood) (Novy and Colomb 2013, 1831).
However, the subcultural formation of the artists is not the main focus of this study. What is certain
is the struggle to build a model for artistic autonomy and for economic survival without totally rely-
ing on the public subsidies to the artists. They are seriously waging “a struggle that never subverts,”
according to an art critic.11
Let this study finish with two notes about the artists associated with SDS. When the venue was
visited on a Saturday, 11 March 2017, a parade was happening in the street to celebrate the impeach-
ment of the president. The event at the pub was a screening of a “Modern Action Movie,” with the
subtitle “Cinema Hell, Impeachment Heaven.” During a short personal meeting with KY, who used
to be a drummer in a “grindcore” band with radical leftist messages, he was preparing his permanent
relocation to Jeju Island. The route of the retreat by one who was once called a young radical was
taking him beyond the metropolitan sprawl of Seoul. For minimizing packing, he sold quite a few
CDs and vinyl records by unheard artists including Asian ones at affordable prices. Seemingly, he
gave them to the author for a common use. This unexpected gist was an instant reminder of the
exact meaning of what was written on the website of Cosmos Wholesale, “we sell what we don’t
want to sell.”
A couple of months before KY left Seoul, Musanja Seojeom (Proletariat Bookstore) sharing a sec-
tion of the office room of SDS production, was opened. The one who runs the bookstore is PE, who is
one of the most radical artists-cum-activists, arguably anarcha-feminist. She had led the artist col-
lective LTTC that argues, “Cities are common assets that lots of people create together.”12 In an

Figure 8. A grindcore band BP in a concert against the construction of the navy base in Gangjeong, Jeju. Footage
from a documentary film Bamseom Pirates, Seoul Inferno (2016). At the right is one of its publicities.
398 H. SHIN

interview with her, she fiercely denied the existence of any chasm between artists and activists, and
the questioning about it is “stupid.” Rather than regarding that she is an exceptional case, her per-
sonal lifestyle and political engagement are still conjunctured by the subcultural collective bonding
that functions as affective commons. The subcultural activists are fragmented but are still networked.

Conclusion
During the Candlelight Protest of 2016 and 2017, many bands and artists, including the “indie,” per-
formed on the stages set up at Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul. If rock and related genres of
music suffered from social criticism in the past, seeing the legitimization of rock and its cultural sen-
sibilities in front of a huge audience participating in political rallies for the restoration of democracy
was heartening. However, the musicians who claim they are younger and more radical were not
invited to these rallies. Demonstrations were normally held on Saturdays. As those days of the
week are particularly important for the survival of small bars and musical venues like SDS, they orga-
nized their events mostly on Saturdays. Driven by curiosity, the author asked what was on their
minds concerning these “scheduled clashes” and even thought of “by launching these small-scale
subcultural events, do you imagine that you live outside of the capitalism, authoritarianism and
patriarchy in Korean society?”
However, such question did not materialize, as the young radicals have difficulties constructing an
“us” within Korean society and trying to find common grounds for encounters with others. This
reason explains why few members of the subculture currently reside abroad, with different qualifica-
tions and periods of sojourn. The ones who remained in Korea have close connections with their
overseas friends, regardless of their physical place of living. Hence, this situation exemplifies a trans-
cultural formation as well as a subcultural formation. Perhaps, because of their social position as
“creative underclass” (Morgan and Ren 2012), they show a higher degree of translocal mobility, sym-
bolically and physically.
Although transcultural formation is still understudied and undertheorized at this moment, the
subcultural activism by young radical musicians in Seoul is becoming more interconnected and
transnational networks in spite of, or because of, their status as underclass. In particular, the
inter-Asia connections make these young artists think about the possibilities and limitations of living
as radicals in today’s Korea. Korea is arguably a “liberal democratic” country, where even a change in
president is performed in a “revolutionary” manner. However, radical practices against all forms of
authoritarianism and discrimination are never far below the surface. In spite of all these constraints,
the actors of subcultural activism, though still regarded as marginal and powerless by many, struggle
to produce their spaces, foster a new protest esthetic, and envision a political prospect within broader
contexts of anti-authoritarian, anti-discrimination, and anti-violence activisms in East Asia and
beyond. They create, cultivate, and instigate the chasms among the young generation rather con-
structing ideal citizen youth by suturing them. In that sense, they are “trapped citizens”13 in post-
developmental South Korea and East Asia (Figure 9).
The radical section of the young generation that had been (mis)regarded as super-individualistic
began to learn to live together (gòng) beyond being public (gōng) citizens. To them, the common is in
sharp contrast with the public in the society where the former and the latter are uncritically equated
and merged together in the official discourse of “gōng gòng.” In other words, they construct the com-
mon in everyday life among intermittent anti-eviction struggles and go beyond merely pursuing
alternative lifestyle in personal levels. The constructing of the common by subcultural activism,
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 399

Figure 9. HV (in the left) was leading the “demonstration for the permanent peace in Asia” on 11 September 2016
at the first day of “No Limit Tokyo.” Photo was taken by the author.

described in this study thus far, is nothing but a temporary name of one case of collective processes
and practices to overcome the social exclusion brought about by a new configuration of global or
planetary capitalism. As somebody once said, “it’s easy to imagine the end of the world … but
you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.”14

Notes
1. The English word occupation does not differentiate sino-Korean words jeomryeong (점령) and jeom-
geo (점거). By an activist-cum-artist, the latter is preferred, while the former is criticized as “a pro-
duct of imperialism” (Park 2014, 45). She suggests that jemgeo has to be translated into “sit in” or
“squatting.” However, a documentary movie about the Duriban Struggle, which is discussed below,
is translated into “The Occupation” in English, while its Korean title is “Eoddeon Jeomgeo” (어떤
점거). The terminology is far from settled, and the word “squatting” is used only by certain activist groups.
Hans Pruijt suggested five types (or configurations) of squatting in Europe, which are deprivation-based, an
alternative housing strategy; entrepreneurial, conservational, and political (Pruijt 2013, 21, 52–53). Although
the first three types of squatting seldom happen in modern-day Korea, “conservation squatting” or “political
squatting,” which occupies or sits-in spaces under threat of demolition and eviction, has a long history in
Seoul and other cities in Korea. It is also true that informal settlements, the so-called slums, through squat-
ting on public land had been widespread between the 1950s and 1970s.
2. See website: http://nolimitseoul.com/about/no-limit-seoul-declaration/.
3. About the local discourse of “youth as superfluous being,” see Choi (2013) and Jang (2016). What should
be noted is that the age cohort of youth is extended to cover “in their twenties and thirties” in the mid-
2010s, while it was “in their twenties” in the mid-2000s.
4. Subculture is a highly contested concept. Although years are needed to introduce, define, and evalu-
ate the concept and its evolution, the concept has a full cycle, from the classical conceptualization
(Hall and Jefferson [1976] 1993; Hebdige 1979) via the “post-subcultural turn” in the 1990s–2000s
(Thornton 1996; Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003), to critical reflection on the turn and controversies
among the authors (Bennett 2011; Williams 2011). Thus, the time-space today would be that of
“post-post-subculture.” If the classic concept of subculture is tied to the relations among youth,
style, and cultural taste, that of post-subculture or “neo-tribe” (Maffesoli 1996) emphasizes the
400 H. SHIN

fluidity of stylistic preferences and cultural tastes. Yet, the continuous usage of the term with diverse
meaning-making cannot be controlled. The dissonance gets louder upon tracing the use of the word
around the world. In East Asia, studies apply the term to the mainstream or to non-rebellious cul-
tural configurations, such as to all postmodern aspects in Japan (Yoda 2000; Nanba 2006; Mouri
2006), historical formations of youth cultures in mainland China (Clark 2012), recent pop culture
related to Korean pop music (Choi and Maliangkay 2014), and anti-consumerist consumerim of
“Little Fresh” (xiaoqingxin) in Taiwan and mainland China (Yang 2013; Zhang 2013). Quite a
few studies focus on the role played by the Internet and other new media platforms to the extent
that several coined the term “subculture 2.0” closely associated with the concept of “web 2.0” (Jiang
and Hua 2014).
5. In this paper, punk and hardcore music, which also joined the Duriban Struggle and other ones, is not
deeply dealt with. Interestingly, the punk and hardcore musician relocated to a southwestern area of
Seoul. This subgroup will become another object of study.
6. The difference between commons and the common is based on the conceptualization of Autonomist
Marxists; see Han and Imamasa (2015).
7. Unfortunately, “self-standing” does not look very different from the term “indie.” However, the differ-
ences are clear when the two terms are transliterated into Korean. While “indie” (인디) is transliterated
directly from the English, the term “self-standing” (자립) comes from the Chinese characters “自立.”
Confusingly, several keep using “independence” when they translate jarip into English.
8. See website: https://sites.google.com/site/jaripcoop/about-jarip/balgiseon-eonmun.
9. Below are the five sites of anti-eviction protest struggles where the author has established “solidarities”
with the activists: Takeout Drawing (an artists’ residence at Hannam neighborhood in Yongsan District)
in 2015–2016, Ujangchangchang (a restaurant at Sinsa neighborhood in Gangnam District) in 2016,
Okbaraji Alley (a town in Muak neighborhood in Seodaemun District) in 2016, and Gungjungjokbal
(a restaurant at Chebu neighborhood in Jongno District) in 2017–2018.
10. The idea of “politicized subculture” was coined from a study on the “alterglobalists” of Central and East-
ern Europe, which argues, “The alterglobalist social movement is closer to a subculture and a counter-
culture there than in other parts of the world” (Piotrowsky 2013, 417).
11. The word is borrowed from a Korean art critic An So-hyun (as quoted in Shin 2017, 31). The concept
raises the question about the “autonomous art” and “public art” in a neoliberal milieu, which negates the
possibility of artistic creativity that does not depend on the market. The context about the place-making
and/or production of art spaces by young artists in Seoul, see Shin (2017).
12. See website: http://www.listentothecity.org/.
13. Trapped Citizen (愁城) is a subcultural music and arts collective based in Taipei, Taiwan. Its members
join No Limit. Its website is at https://trappedcitizen2017.wixsite.com/trappedcitizen.
14. Slavoj Zizek in his speech at Zucotti Park, 9 October 2011.

Acknowledgements
The author appreciates all the members of a reading group “Asian City” (2014–2016). Special thanks go to Kim
Tae-yoon and Ryu Haemin for their painstaking work on the transcription of interviews and Lin Shang-ting for
her help in making sense of Chinese texts.

List of interviews
GR (activist and musician), 10 February 2017.
HK (musician and activist), 15 October 2016.
HV (musician and activist), 24 February 2017.
KY (musician), 22 January 2017.
LB (musician and activist), 21 October 2016.
MJ (activist and musician), 18 January 2017.
PE (artist and activist), 19 December 2014.
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 401

Special terms
Jarip 자립/自立 Gōng 공/公
Yizu 蚁族 Gòng 공/共
Xiaoqingxin 小清新 Gōng gòng 공공/公共
Wenqing 文青 Jeomryeong 점령/占領
Wenyiqingnian 文藝青年 Jeomgeo 점거/占據
Mamsmangmo 맘상모

Notes on contributor
Hyunjoon Shin is an associate professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. His research focuses on popular
culture, international migration and urban space, from the perspective of inter-Asia cultural studies. He was a
research fellow at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore in 2006–2007, a
visiting professor at Leiden University in 2008–2009, and a visiting lecturer at Duke University in 2015. He
is currently a member of the International Advisory Board of Popular Music and a member of the Editorial
Collective of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

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