City, Culture and Society 19 (2019) 100295

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City, Culture and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ccs

The punk and the post-developing city: Subculture-led urban regeneration in T

Seoul?
Hyunjoon Shin
Institute for East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University, 320 Yeondong-ro, Guro-gu, Seoul, South korea

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Contrary to conventional wisdom, subculture is not completely separable from urban regeneration. Taking the
Seoul punk subculture regeneration city case of underground punk subculture in Seoul, Korea, which relocated from the gentrified neighborhood of
Hongdae to the dilapidated Mullae, I focus on the spatial practices of the key members of this subculture, rather
than taking for granted the notion of rebellion within a dichotomous structure. Before discussing the places and
the actors of the case study, the key concept of subculture is investigated. Then, the mobility, place-making,
international-cum-translocal connections and everyday negotiations of the subcultural actors are examined. The
vernacular concept of ‘youth as surplus’ is developed to explain the pure energy engendered by the subculture
and the ironic relation between subculture and urban transformation in both local and translocal scales.

1. Introduction
Can a subculture regenerate a city? Is subculture-led urban renewal
a possibility? If a subculture is assumed to be rebellious (or, at the least,
resistant) and urban regeneration/renewal understood to be conformist
(or reformist at best), it seems that the two do not intersect.
Yet, as Morgan and Ren (2012) suggested, subculture and urban
renewal can be connected with each other through the practices of the
‘creative underclass’ in the neoliberal milieu. Similarly, Katie Shaw
(2013) highlighted how ‘independent creative subcultures’ can confer
‘much broader cultural and social benefit’. These and other theorists
have convincingly demonstrated the ways in which subcultures are not
completely dissociated from urban regeneration, whether it involves
bottom-up practices or top-down policy. Rather, subcultures cut across
the different sides of urban regeneration.
Yet, the authors above ultimately offer more cautionary readings.
They not only suggest subcultures’ potential contribution to urban re-
newal but also point to the possible conditions of instability, precarity,
and vulnerability affecting the subcultural actors. As they point out, the
actors who contribute to the place-making of certain areas in the cities
are under constant threat of displacement and eviction. Although the
cases examined in the studies above concern developed Western cities,
the involuntary mobility of the subcultural actors also takes place in
developed or post-developing cities in Asia, as seen in the cases of (sub)
cultural struggle in Tokyo (Cassegård, 2014), Taipei (Tsai, 2017), and
Hong Kong (Chan, 2018).
In this research, I investigate the case of the punk subculture in
Seoul, South Korea (hereafter ‘Korea’). Punk is arguably the most ra-
dical, extreme, uncompromising, and ‘anti-social’ among all sub-
cultures. A recent strand of punk in Korea, especially, is a genuine
underground movement and warrants the term subculture even in the
conventional sense. This research, offering a comparative analysis, will
hopefully provide an intriguing case study of the complicated relation
between subculture and urban regeneration within the conditions of an
East Asian city.
Another point I make in this research is that punk subculture is
transnational, translocal, and if one prefers, transurban. In other words,
punk is a transcultural formation as well as a subcultural formation. I
explore the position of Seoul (and Korea) as a node of the translocal
connection, circuit and network. The distinctive cosmopolitan atmo-
sphere of punk subculture is expected to have implications for its cur-
rent formation and future evolution. I argue that the actors of even this

E-mail address: hyunjoon.shin@skhu.ac.kr.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2019.100295
Received 21 August 2018; Received in revised form 19 May 2019; Accepted 9 August 2019
Available online 10 October 2019
1877-9166/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
H. Shin
relatively minor subculture perform their own version of alternative
worldling (Roy and Ong, 2011).
The focus of this research is a live music venue, GBN, and two
bands, Bamseom Pirates and Find the Spot. Since opening in early 2016
in Mullae, a neighborhood in Yeongdeungpo District,1 GBN has devoted
to live music performances of extreme music based on punk, metal, and
other underground genres. Located in the basement of an industrial
building, it has become a place for subcultural gatherings, especially in
the weekend evenings as seen in Fig. 1. Based on more than two years of
intensive fieldwork including participation observation and in-depth
interviews, this research focuses on the spatial practices of the members
of the subculture, rather than adopting a dichotomous framework that
takes the notions of rebellion, resistance, and protest for granted.
Before I discuss the places and the actors of my case study, the key
concept subculture is investigated. Then, I proceed to examine the
mobility, place-making, international connections, and everyday ne-
gotiations of the subcultural actors. These discussions, descriptions, and
investigations point to the ironic relation between subculture and city.
1.1. Youth, subculture, and surplus
Let me begin with a discussion of the vernacular production, com-
munication and signification of the term subculture in the Korean/East
Asian context, rather than rehearsing a general, chronological in-
vestigation of this concept. In my view, it is more useful to attempt a
general reconceptualization of subcultures from the point of view of
contemporary Asia rather than examining the ‘Asian variants’ through
the frame associated with the ‘original’ youth subcultures - i.e. forma-
tions that emerged in the West in the past decades. For this purpose, it is
necessary to examine the discourse of ‘youth as surplus,’ which was
pervasive in 2010s Korea.
In November 2014, an exhibition titled ‘Youth and Surplus’ was
held in an art space in Yeongdeungpo, a neighborhood next to Mullae.
The term ‘surplus,’ which designates ‘the redundant population’ (Choi,
2013), was itself born as a subcultural term, i.e. produced, circulated
and consumed through the internet.2 Quickly replacing previous labels
such as ‘loser,’ ‘geek,’ and ‘nobody,’ the term ‘surplus’ began to capture
the hearts and the minds of the ‘creative but poor’ population in Korea
since the late 2000s. It can even be said that the youth subculture in
Korea became almost synonymous with the cultures associated with
youth as surplus (Choi et al., 2016).
The widespread use of the term ‘surplus’ within Korean con-
temporary youth culture demonstrates how the actors themselves
continue to use terms denoting subcultural status despite the skeptical
view on the concept and term of subculture held by some theorists. In
general scholarly discourse, ‘subculture’ has sometimes been used in-
discriminately to designate any culture which is claimed as non-main-
stream, and incongruities in usage become more problematic when we
1
Yeongdeungpo is a district that lies in the southwestern part of Seoul. Some
basic facts about the districts and the neighborhoods of Seoul need explanation.
Seoul, designated Korea's ‘special city’ (특별시/特別市), has developed into a
metropolitan city covering an area of 605.21 km2 since its massive expansion in
1963. While it had only 9 districts until the 1970s, it has developed into a city of
25 districts (구/區) since the mid-1990s. The district is called ‘city’ at the level
of administrative unit. Each district consists of neighborhoods (동/洞). More
broadly, the Seoul Capital Area or the National Capital Region covers about
11,704 km2 and spans Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi province (도/道). It is one
of the biggest megacities in the world, with a population of about 25 million. It
goes without saying that it is the economic, political, cultural center of Korea.
Seoul, let alone the Seoul Capital Area, has become too heterogeneous, uneven,
rough, and multi-layered to be a ‘city as place’, as is true of other megacities in
Asia and beyond.
2
The internet and other digital media platforms have had such an important
resonance in subcultures in China that some scholars created the term ‘sub-
culture 2.0’, which is connected with web 2.0 (Jiang & Hua, 2014).
2
City, Culture and Society 19 (2019) 100295
Fig. 1. Urban tribe in a deindustrialized area in Seoul. During the break of a
punk show in the summer of 2017. Photo taken by the author.
trace the use of the term across different areas of the world. In parts of
East Asia, there are some studies that apply the concept even to near-
mainstream or non-rebellious cultural configurations. For example,
‘subculture’ is applied to any ‘postmodern’ culture such as kogyaru and
otaku in Japan (Keliyan, 2011; Imoto and Toivoinen, 2012; Mori,
2006), and feminized ‘indie’ cultures such as the ones dubbed ‘little
fresh (xiaoqingxin)’ in Taiwan and China (Yang, 2013; Zhang, 2013,
2016). The unsteady use of the term ‘subculture’ shows how it can
sometimes function as an all-encompassing rubric.
A well-established critique holds that the classical theory of sub-
culture (Hall & Jefferson, 1976/1993; Hebdige, 1979) romanticizes
white working-class male youth in postwar Western societies. This as-
pect of the classical theory has become the target of a series of criticisms
since the 1990s, when the configurations of youth culture began to
change profoundly. But the critics' alternative frameworks such as ‘post-
subcultural turn’ (Thornton, 1996; Muggleton & Weinzierl, 2003) and
‘neo-tribe’ (Maffesoli, 1996) have been perceived, though retro-
spectively, as the celebration of youth hedonism and consumerism
(Bennett, 2011; Williams, 2011). Even if we accept the notions of fluid
boundaries and floating memberships proposed in such critics' readings
of subcultural formation, it is crucial to note that the value, validity,
and vitality of the concept lies in its orientation towards addressing
sociocultural inequality. In the city, this inequality encompasses spatial
inequality as well.
The case of punk suits the term ‘subculture’ arguably better than
other scenes variously associated with it. As Ian P. Moran puts it, punks
‘goes much further than rebellion and fashion as punks generally seek
an alternative lifestyle divergent from the norms of society’ (2011:58).
However, as the author admits, it is likely that punk ended up becoming
a fashion and lifestyle choice in spite of its rebellious ethos – indeed, a
characteristic observable across subcultures. Other studies indicate that
dilemmas, chasms, and contradictions exist among personal lifestyles,
collective bonding and political engagement (Portwood-Stacer, 2013;
Shin, 2018). Subculture as a formation of collective bonding oscillates
between personal stylistic choice and conscious engagement in acti-
vism, fitting neither a category of frivolous fashion nor a romantic
model of serious rebellion. Approaches to subculture should carefully
consider its production, circulation, and reproduction in specific con-
ditions, rather than reinforcing a dichotomous view.
1.2. The displacement and emplacement of Korean punk
Stephen Epstein, who has investigated punk as a subculture in
Korea, analyzed the evolution of punk in Korea since its inception in the
early 1990s to the mid-2000s (Epstein, 2000, 2006; Epstein & Dunbar,
2007). In using the term subculture, he paid close attention to the
differences between its meaning in the West - especially in the US and
the UK - and in South Korea. As a supporter of the local punk scene, an
H. Shin
ex-pat scholar, and an active participant in the scene, Epstein legit-
imized Korean punk and punks (or punx) in Korea, describing the
agenda of this scene as ‘solidarity in ROK’, contrasting it with that of
‘anarchy’ in the case of the UK. In his view, Korean punk struck a
balance between subcultural rebellion and fashionable trend, between
cosmopolitan desire and patriotic sentiment. This analysis informs Ep-
stein's interpretation of the vernacular version of punk, a.k.a. Joseon
punk (Korean punk).
Despite its pioneering role in making the indie scene in the 1990s,
punk was crowded out by other styles of indie rock, mislabeled as
‘modern rock.’ Punk became a sub-subculture if we choose to call the
entire culture of indie rock a subculture. In other words, punk became
an agent of urban regeneration from below, while it had to find a dif-
ferent place for subcultural production and reproduction. The period
when fashion and rebellion struck a balance was gone for good around
the late 2000s and the early 2010s. The boys and girls who dressed in
punk fashion – especially, those donning Mohawk hairstyles, black
leather jackets and combat boots - in the public spaces of Hongdae
disappeared as well.
The displacement of punk from Hongdae also coincided with a sharp
division within the punk scene. Unfortunately, a significant number of
the punks based in the venue Skunk Hell evolved into skinheads tinged
with nationalistic, masculinist, rightist, and even neo-Nazi ideas and
ideologies. Regardless of the question of whether non-white skinheads
make sense or not, there is significant evidence that the Korean skin-
heads were, and still are, opposed to left-wing and progressive politics
within the indie community and in the Korean society at large. One of
my interviewees KM, the leader of the now-defunct crust punk band
Explode, confessed that he was violently beaten by a skinhead when he
confessed that he was involved in an anti-war movement.
The other - and younger - strand of punks got into minor genres and
styles such as crust punk (Roby, 2013), grindcore (Matsue, 2011), an-
archo-punk (Gosling, 2004), and D-beat,3 and leans a bit to the left. The
relatively small community of punk in Korea was not characterized by a
rift into subscenes along the lines of genre and style, but beginning in
the early 2010s, the division of the punk scene became highly visible,
especially in terms of ideological orientation. Thus, it was not a surprise
to hear AA, a musician-cum-activist whom I interviewed, say ‘Punks
didn't like political engagement such as anti-eviction struggles.’
Among the leftist bands, I will trace the Bamseom Pirates. This two-
piece grindcore band supplied a fresh breath to the punk scene, which
seemed to lay in ashes from the 1990s to the 2000s.
When I first encountered the band in the early 2010s, they played at
several sites of anti-eviction struggle. Most of these sites were located in
the Hongdae area in western Seoul, where gentrification emerged as a
popular social issue. In many senses, the Bamseom Pirates was the most
outstanding cultural icon of the struggle against the gentrification. The
band's sound is ‘shitty,’ in the words of KY, who wrote most of the
lyrics. The radical ideology of his lyrics are laced with irony and
paradox. It is in this ethos that the vocalist-bassist JS often wore a
helmet with the slogan ‘Raid communism’, but the band performed
songs such as ‘Hurrah Kim Jong Il.’ Still more paradoxically, lyrics had
nothing to do with the late North Korean leader. The group endorsed
nobody and criticized everybody, including themselves, as shown in the
song title ‘I am f***king too young’. To speak colloquially, they didn't
give a damn about being young. The “anti-everything” ethos compel-
lingly captured the ethos of the anti-gentrification struggle as well as
the anarchic atmosphere of the struggle site. Fig. 2 shows the perfor-
mance of the band which perfectly matches with the aesthetics of
parody, visualized in the sign of ‘Eradiate Communism’ in the helmet of
3
These studies examine different genres and places. Among studies of punk-
derived extreme music, Matsue's is notable as an examination of Japanese
hardcore including its subgenres. About punk in mainland China, see Xiao
(2015).
3
City, Culture and Society 19 (2019) 100295
Fig. 2. Bamseon Pirates in an anti-eviction struggle site in 2011.
one member.
During the struggle, KY was invited to a forum titled ‘Furious Young
Radicals’ on May 22, 2010. He looked marginal and ‘too subcultural’
even in a crowd full of young radicals when he said, ‘I'm just a keyboard
warrior and one of the powerless who knows nothing, but people like
me have discontent, too.’ A newspaper coverage (Redian, May 23, 2010)
took its title from one of his remarks: ‘Let's make a revolution with
mothers money’. Though his statement sounds self-cynical, our inter-
pretation is that he expressed the Korean youth's ever-declining pro-
spect of achieving independence and survival in the second decade of
the 21st century.
The very fact that protest sites were Bamseon Pirates' natural venues
points to ‘subcultural activism’ (Shin, 2018), pursued and shared by the
bands and artists that emerged in the late 2000s and the early 2010s.
Their resistance is fun, playful and creative, although it did not exclude
delivering radical political messages. The shift toward protest sites and
away from regular live venue is, at the same time, an eloquent testa-
ment to the transformation of Hongdae, the birth place of punk, into a
place of rampant gentrification since the late 2010s (Shin, 2011). The
displacement of punks is but one important outcome of gentrification.
The social discussion of whether (and how) the place-making actors
should be compensated for conferring social and cultural benefit
through their material and immaterial labors is still ongoing. The ab-
sence of a social consensus, however, made the relocation of the actors
inevitable. Looking back, it can even be said that the protest struggles
made the area attractive, captivating, and alluring. For a short period in
the early 2010s, Hongdae was not only a place for independent, bo-
hemian, and alternative cultural practices, but also one of progressive,
democratic, and socially-conscious political activism. But even this
activism ended up becoming the ‘latest event’ in the urban regeneration
from below.
I will skip the description of the painstaking but unsuccessful
struggle of the band and its like-minded colleagues in finding live music
venues. In short, none of the newly set venues could draw enough au-
dience members, and all of them were short-lived. This challenge sug-
gests that the emplacement of a certain music genre and the associated
(sub)culture is difficult to occur without proper conditions. This is most
likely why KY confessed that he was ‘exhausted and disempowered’
during Bamseom Pirates's farewell show, which took place in GBN on
20 January 2017. Can a subculture get emplaced to a different physical
location and cultural environment?
1.3. Lifestyle anarchists in the metal city
Mullae is one of Seoul's relatively old neighborhoods where it is easy
to find signs of an industrial past. Yeongdeungpo District, which the
neighborhood belongs to, began to be developed as an industrial area in
the 1930s, a decade at the height of Korea's colonial period. Though it
began to be deindustrialized since the 1990s, it is still home to small
forges and metalwork factories. The buildings that were spared
H. Shin
demolition and redevelopment look dilapidated, deserted and even
abandoned. The newly built commercial and residential high-rises
nearby throw into relief these older buildings' run-down appearances.
It was during the 2000s that some artists attracted to Mullae's
cheaper rent and unique atmosphere spontaneously moved into the
area. The area came to be designated Mullae Art Village, following the
policy intervention that materialized in the form of the installment of
Seoul Art Space Mullae in 2010. With artists' studios dispersed across
the urban fabric, the atmosphere is still dark and gritty and gives im-
pressions of unlawful occupation. Despite the gradual changes in the
landscape, the emerging community of the artists is not highly visible.
On that account, gentrification may not be an applicable term yet.
GBN had been in existence for two and a half years by 2018, and the
punks are newcomers in the neighborhood. Yet, this relocation was
neither simple nor straightforward: actors associated with the punk
scene did not take a simple Hongdae-to-Mullae spatial trajectory. As for
GBN, before the punks came in, it was run by an artist as a live music
venue under a different name. Before considering the role of the venue
and the punk subculture in the place-making of Mullae, I examine who
the actors are and what meanings they make in and through their
practice.
Those who gather at GBN belong to a new, arguably third genera-
tion of punk in Korea. They wage a fierce struggle against the right-
wing punksters: the slogan on the wall in the venue says ‘Nazi punk f**k
off,’ referring to the title of a song by the US hardcore band the Dead
Kennedys. Their political orientation can be sensed in the song lyrics of
Find the Spot, a veteran among the bands that frequently perform there.
The songs of this self-proclaimed ‘old school hardcore’ band are short,
fast, angry and straightforward. During live performance, it is hard to
decipher the lyrics, all of which are written by the leader SC, but upon
scrutiny, they strike one as poetic, if one does not mind a fair number of
dirty, rude and impolite words. The target of SC's anger is diverse,
ranging from ‘party people’ and ‘hipsters’ to the ‘386 generation’, the
generation of South Koreans who were born in the 1960s and were
politically active in the democratization movement of the 1980s. SC
often smashes his forehead with the microphone until he bleeds. The
music may sound generic to some connoisseurs, but his performances
are undoubtedly raw and wild. Their outdoor performances have cre-
ated anti-spectacles as seen in Fig. 3.
In contrast to such outward signs of intensity, songs such as ‘The
Society of Spectacle’ show subtle signs of SC's inner awareness.
Society of Spectacle.
Written and performed by Find the Spot.
Die y'all.
The society is opium to me.
It is full of the dead.
Fig. 3. An outdoor show by Find the Spot (source: the Facebook page of the
band).
4
City, Culture and Society 19 (2019) 100295
And the intoxicated.
The society of spectacle.
The construction of the fake.
The magic lantern of opium.
Change the life occupied by the spectacles.
Like the poems of Rimbaud
The subcultural economy of the new generation of punk is rather
simple. Like many others, SC works menial jobs. SC says that he is a
‘nogada freeter,’ which means a daily worker who is employed in the so-
called ‘3-D’ sector, characterized by ‘dirty, dangerous and difficult’
labor. Punks like SC run the space with money made from hard labor.
However challenging, unskilled labor has a liberating effect, too, be-
cause they do not need to encounter regular, run-of-the-mill people in
such work settings. The reward of this hardship is a lifestyle that is
conceptualized as an ‘urban tribe,’ in the words of SC.
There was a period when I thought punk was a weapon for social
revolution, but there was another period when I thought punk was
‘what you do, what you want to do.’ Now, I think punk is an urban
tribe, after thinking about it for a long time.
SC's invocation of ‘urban tribe’ reminds me not only of Maffesoli's
concept but also Murray Bookchin's comparison of ‘lifestyle anarchist’
with ‘social anarchism’ (Bookchin, 1995). Rather than critically ad-
dressing lifestyle anarchism as a depoliticized branch of radical
thought, I would like to highlight the sociocultural conditions under
which ‘lifestyle’ becomes significant in everyday politics. I venture to
argue that such conditions arise when (it is believed) political change is
blocked. Although it is true that SC's case deploys tactics of retreat
rather than direct engagement in confrontational politics, it is not be-
cause he does not want to be engaged in ‘real’ and ‘organized’ social
movements, but because his lifestyle is not acceptable in these move-
ments, which are centrally organized and hierarchically structured.
Within the punk subculture, there are diverging views on the issues
of lifestyle and politics. SJ, who introduced himself as an ‘anarcho-
communist,’ used to be deeply involved in organized and ‘orthodox’
labor movement organizations. His criticism of the left's transformation
into ‘enlightened citizenry’ was also a criticism of the recent consign-
ment of social movements to representational democracy. However, he
also said that he had grappled with the dilemma of choosing between
politics (movement) and culture (lifestyle).
These conditions led them to ‘small movements,’ such as those
committed to animal rights (see Fig. 4) or anti-domestic violence. Punks
like SC imagine that these small movements fill in the gaps and bridge
the chasm between an individual's lifestyle choice and collective poli-
tical engagement. Participation in small movements aligns more prop-
erly with the kind of function played by the subculture in the classical
sense. What is certain is that such dilemma and chasm are sensed not
only by lifestyle anarchists but also by those who think they are radi-
cals.4
Generally, punk scenes are not known for community engagement,
and this is also the case of the punk scene in Mullae. Neither the artists
nor the residents associate the punks with the neighborhood or with
any kind of place-specific community. Although there emerged a strong
organization for artists based in Mullae, punks are not active partici-
pants in it. There is minimal encounter with the residents: as the punk
gatherings take place late in weekend evenings when the factories and
workshops are closed for the weekend, there is no possibility of conflict
4
What distresses these bands and bar-owners in their everyday lives is
something else. As most of the members of the punk subculture are men, it is
difficult to go beyond male chauvinism. LR, a female independent singer-
songwriter, frowned after attending a punk show, comparing the subculture to a
‘well,’ meaning a very narrow and deep subcultural enclave. The gender di-
lemma gets as serious as the generation dilemma in the process of subcultural
transformation.
H. Shin
Fig. 4. A benefit concert for abandoned dogs at GBN on 23 June 2018.
with the neighbors who are active in the neighborhood during weekday
daytimes. When the punks and the residents happen to come across
each other, the attitude is close to benign neglect.
My recent visits to Mullae revealed some shifts in the neighbor-
hood's atmosphere. Commercial hotspots such as cafes, restaurants,
bars and pubs had sprung up conspicuously in the area, point to the
forces of urban regeneration policy. If urban regeneration as a top-down
state policy means ‘governing the surplus life and land’ (Doshi, 2019),
the spatial change in Mullae shows a shift in the way of surplus gov-
ernance. Ironically, none other than Skunk Hell had become the hall-
mark of lifestyle anarchism. Having moved into a space across from
GBN in 2017, it became more interested in selling ‘subcultural goods,’
including tatoos, than in holding punk shows. Nazi punk was not f**ked
off yet.
1.4. Translocal and/or inter-Asia connections and wording Asia
When there is a show at GBN, it is common to see members of
Seoul's Western ex-pat community enjoying the show as active con-
stituents of the audience. Some of them have even formed their own
bands and play at the venue now and then, creating a cosmopolitan
atmosphere. What is more important, however, is translocal and inter-
Asia connections.
HT, the drummer of Find the Spot, is from Japan. From an interview
with him, I learned that HT ended up moving to Seoul after studying
Korean wood carving. It was not surprising to learn that he was in-
volved with an anarchist group in Japan. What was more unexpected,
however, was the profile of the owner-manager of GBN, who goes by
LY. An ethnic Chinese,5 LY is perfectly trilingual: he speaks perfect
Korean, fluent Mandarin and flawless English. It became clear to me
why so many bands from across Asia have come to GBN to perform. The
‘international’ shows that LY organizes are not well known beyond the
small network, but he does not mind the narrow range of publicity.
The network of GBN cannot be reduced to the physical presence of
5
About ethnic Chinese in Korea called hwagyo, and their complicated relation
with the recent discourse and practice of ‘multiculturalism’ in South Korea, see
Shin (2016).
5
City, Culture and Society 19 (2019) 100295
the two non-locals. Rather, this network emerged from the so-called
‘flaneur activists’, who travel in transnational spatialities. Among them,
Matsumoto Hajime is worth mentioning. He is an overarching activist
who invented extraordinary forms of protest such as ‘sound demo’,
‘smell terror’, ‘hotpot rally’, etc. Unlike the conventional and serious
forms of protest in Japanese social movement, his protest is firmly
based on the pleasure principle (Cassegård, 2013). Though con-
troversial a figure, Matsumoto opened the possibility of unserious, to
put exactly, anti-serious forms of community activism and social
movement. He has run a recycling shop Amateur Riot, a socializing bar
Nantoka Bar, and an accommodation facility Manuke Guesthouse in
Kōenji, a western part of Tokyo. These spaces are not run for profit but
are meant to be shared with local residents, hangers-on, and passers-by.
Already full of live music venues, Kōenji has established itself as the
haven for the subcultures associated with extreme music.
The words invented by Matsumoto such as shiroto (amateur)
(Matumoto & Futatsugi, 2008), binbōnin (the poor) (Matsumoto, 2011),
and manuke (idiot) (Matsumoto, 2016) helped to redefine the types,
characters, and directions of social movement in terms of agencies,
agenda, and activisms. All of the coined words have derogatory or
negative connotations in daily use. However, they articulate different
and subversive meanings of disobedience to the requirement of the
social system. For example, manuke, which literally means idiot, is
conceptualized by a close collaborator of Matsumoto, Kenichiro Egami,
as ‘uselessness’ that ‘triggers an unexpected event or exchange, re-
vealing a truth that would otherwise be silenced or suppressed’ (Egami,
2018).
Since the late 2000s, the views of Matsumoto and his colleagues,
friends, and associates began to be shared by like-minded actors in Asia,
mediated by the translation of these views from Japanese into Korean,
Chinese, and other Asian languages.6 Matsumoto and his allies also
travelled to Asian cities outside Japan in order to spread their ideas,
making connections with subcultural activists. They joined the protest
struggles as well. What should be noted is that these encounters, con-
nections, and communications were rarely mediated by English, except
the ‘broken’ Asian English. Basic-level Japanese, Korean, and Chinese
were chaotically used in the conversation. The encounters were, and
still are, bodily, sensorial, and for lack of a better word, affective. It is in
this sense that Egami writes that the spirit of manuke ‘possesses a uni-
versal or common property that defies national borders and the barriers
of language and culture, akin to the concepts behind anarchism’
(Egami, 2018).
It was through Matsumoto's initiative that Bamseom Pirates and
Find the Spot could have ‘Japan tour’ in 2012 and 2015, respectively.
The tours constituted some of numerous encounters in the complex web
of connections of translocal affiliations among subcultures. This web
underwent a profound transformation over the course of 2016 and
2017. In September 2016, a translocal gathering titled ‘No Limit Tokyo
Autonomous Zone’ was held in several areas in Tokyo, and in
September 2017, a gathering of the same title included GBN as one of
its important venues. The gritty and black-and-white images of poster
in Fig. 5 eloquently show the DIY ethos. These two events drew sub-
cultural actors or activists across the cities and regions in and beyond
Asia without a specific goal and a tight organization. It is debatable
whether the event can be perceived as social movement or political
activism. Yet, ‘doing nothing special and being there with others’ may
be considered the ‘art of being global’ (Roy and Ong, 2011) and that of
making their own a meaningful world by those who are mistreated as
idiot or surplus.
6
The aforementioned three books by Matsumoto were translated into Korean
in 2009, 2010, and 2017. In Taiwan, the first book was translated into Chinese
in 2012, the third one in 2018. In China and Taiwan, manuke has been trans-
lated to dabendan (大笨蛋), and the discourse is the most influential in Taipei
and Guangzhou.
H. Shin
Fig. 5. Two shows at GBN for ‘No Limit Seoul 2017’, an Asian subcultural
gathering.
One thing that I found out during the research is that there exists a
significant number of Korean punks who currently reside outside Korea.
Neither as short-term sojourners nor as long-term ex-patriates, they
selected the places that suited their lifestyles. They may be dubbed
cultural migrants (Fujita, 2009),7 more precisely, subcultural migrants
whose practices cannot be explained by any rational factors. Not sur-
prisingly, they maintained close connections with those who ‘remained’
in Korea, regardless of their physical place of living. These connections
are some of the evidence that punk is a transcultural formation, as well
as a subcultural formation. In spite of their social position as surplus in
any place, or perhaps because of this, they show a higher degree of
translocal mobility, both symbolically and physically. Their heavy use
of social media and online communication goes without saying. This
transcultural formation is still under-studied at this moment. What I can
say at this moment is that punks in Seoul have a more realistic view and
experience of ‘foreign countries’, rather holding fantastical notions,
thanks to translocal networks.
It has been common for punks in Korea to have fantasies about
Western Europe, North America and Japan, where the punk scene is
known to have been much bigger and to have had a longer history. This
Western-centric attitude never sat well with me. However, it seems that
the punks in Korea have come to know that there is something more
important than the physical size of the ‘scene’. Reflecting on his ex-
perience of the Japan tour, a guitar player of Find the Spot said, ‘we
were the youngest among the people in the venue … Japanese punks
are middle-aged!’ More recently, GBN-associated punks made connec-
tions with a punk collective ‘Trapped Citizen’ based in Taipei and an
indie label ‘Qii Snack Record’ based in Guangzhou. Is new solidarity
one of the effects of their painstaking work of ‘worlding Asia’ or
‘Asianing the world’? Whatever the answers are, the subculture is
widely dispersed but closely encountered.
2. Conclusion
Some years ago, an article titled “Youth subcultures: what are they
now? (The Guardian, 20 Mar 2014) reflected that “there was a time
when young people made it clear what tribe and music they were into
by the way they dressed”. The implication is that the relation between
music genre and fashion style does not exist anymore. Not surprisingly,
7
Fujita's case is concerned with the Japanese artists (or artists-wannabe) who
have the hopes of ‘making it’ in cultural production. But the case of this re-
search is different from hers because the actors do not have any desire to be
‘successful’.
6
City, Culture and Society 19 (2019) 100295
the examples of past subcultures cited in the article were historical ones
such as Mods, punks, soulboys, metallers, goths, and hippies.
Commenting on the contemporary formations, the article argued that
the haul girls, who are obsessed with the consumption of luxurious
clothes, suit the term subculture best, in the sense they attend to every
detail of the fashion.
However, critical observers aside, what does the term subculture
mean to those who have not experienced all the historical cases? Rather
than turning to the saying ‘it is not subculture anymore’ and thus pri-
vileging a pre-determined definition of subculture, it would be neces-
sary to pay close attention to when, where, and by whom the term
subculture is used, overused, and even misused. Otherwise, it would be
too easy to assert, unfairly, that a certain subculture is original, au-
thentic, and creative while another is derivative, artificial and generic.
In this context, the words of the musician DP were impressively
relevant. For him, subculture is ‘something ambiguous, something in
one's heart and mind’. The music he creates and performs is not generic
punk in terms of music style, but he said, with a sense of resolve, that
‘he loves punk’ and that he has a good connection with ‘real’ punks.
DP's words bring me back to the vernacular concept of surplus. It
cannot be denied that the word has a cynical, defeatist, and miserablist
nuance. However, the derivative term ‘surplus power (잉여력/剩餘力)’,
which finds no easy equivalence in English, denotes potentiality or
creativity (Choi, 2013; Choi et al., 2016). Investing energy without
specific intention is the power of surplus, a power that cannot be ob-
tained in non-surplus life and place. It would be the vital energy. Sur-
plus power, I venture to suggest, is akin to pure vital energy.
Then, it is understandable why subcultures are ironically associated
with urban revitalization, regeneration and renewal. The surplus, punk
in the case of this paper, is the name of the pure vital energy. It is easy
to imagine how this surplus would be exploited for urban governing or
governance. The city, the capitalist city to be exact, produces the sur-
plus, and the surplus produces the city. And while the state tries to
capture the surplus power through the policy design of urban re-
generation, the surplus creates its own space in the niches of the urban
space. As we have seen, the space sometimes becomes transurban.
Can punk regenerate the city? What culture other than punk can
animate such a pure energy?
3. 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 has some drawbacks (for
example, a very limited use of the hyphen), it is intended to enable non-
Korean readers to trace phonetics back to the Korean script. Exceptions
to the RR system are applied to names that have already been estab-
lished internationally or those that have been chosen by the authors or
the artists themselves. In terms of the order of the names, the surname
is followed by the first name, observing the conventional Korean and
East Asian order. When used in citation and bibliography, however,
authors’ names follow the English order, i.e., first name first and sur-
name last.
4. List of interviews
KY (musician), 22 January 2017.
LY (musician and club manager), 26 October 2016.
HT (musician), 13 July 2016.
AA (musician and activist), 18 January 2017.
SJ (musician), 10 February 2017.
SC (musician and activist), 19 February 2017.
KM (musician), 9 February 2017.
LR (musician and illustrator), 28 February 2017.
DP (musician), 20 February 2017.
H. Shin
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Korean government's National
Research Foundation Grant Fund (NRF-2018S1A6A3A01080743). The
author appreciates all the members of the reading group ‘Asian City’
(2014–2017). Special thanks go to Kim Tae-yoon and Ryu Haemin for
their painstaking work on the transcription of interviews.
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