Lee Sun-Kyun: Image is still everything – Institutional Control, Drugs and Stardom in South Korea

By Andrew David Jackson (Monash University Korean Studies Research Hub) February 4, 2024.

[Image source: Filmfare]

The December 27, 2023 suicide of Parasite (2019, dir: Bong Joon-ho) actor Lee Sun-kyun following investigations into his private life has caused considerable shock not just in South Korea where the actor was a household name but outside the Peninsula as well. The aftershocks are still felt with the start of a campaign against police-press collusion and media intrusion into the private lives of celebrities. The sudden death of a talented actor may seem to be a tragic anomaly in the continuing upward trajectory of an extremely successful popular culture industry. However, the media pressures and regime of control that surround stardom in South Korea have a longer tradition that dates back to the dictatorship period (1961-1987). The institutional forces that drove Lee to his untimely demise are part and parcel of the powerful media industry and represent a darker side to the global success of Hallyu (Korean Wave). Evidence of this historical continuity can be found in a 2006 article by ethnomusicologist Heather Willoughby “Image is Everything: the Marketing of Femininity in South Korean Popular Music” about the rise and fall of late 1980s popular singer NaMi (Kim Myeong-ok). NaMi was innovative, original, and gifted because of what were considered to be her wildly provocative performances. However, NaMi’s career was effectively ended because of her perceived sexual promiscuity which led her to quit Korea and relocate to Japan. Willoughby observes that Korean audiences were simultaneously envious of the “freedom she flaunted” in performances but swift to condemn when NaMi’s stage person spilled over into her private life (Willoughby 2006, 100). Willoughby identified the performative arena of the television space as a special place for freedom and one in which personal fantasies could be safely acted out (Willoughby 2006, 102). NaMi like other popular performers were permitted to act out a part on stage, but the public demanded their real life should be “untainted and virtuous.” (Willoughby 2006, 100). In the late 1980s, celebrities had particular roles to fill in a hardworking country with a rapidly expanding export-driven economy. Stars were meant to entertain and generate envy – yes – but they were also meant to promote wholesome values, as well as familial and social cohesion.

Willoughby’s message might seem dated in the context of South Korea’s global entertainment industry –an era of Hallyu 2.0 where social media helps drive the international spread of K-pop, and K-drama, and where powerful entertainment agencies dominate. This is a very different environment to the state media-dominated popular culture space of the 1980s. Yet Willoughby’s message is prescient since she identifies a simultaneous acceptance and rejection of popular culture stars at the hands of the media and general public. The same media-driven social forces that policed NaMi’s actions all those years ago and that hounded her out of the country ultimately drove Lee to take his own life. Lee’s fate was the result of what happens when the personal lives of stars, and media-policed public expectations clash. A perceived failure to abide by socially acceptable rules means that Korean celebrities become fair game for excessive media intrusion. Recent images show a visibly distressed Lee on his way to police investigations with the Korean paparazzi in hot pursuit. The same pundits who had some four years earlier championed the global success of Parasite were quick to hound the star. One major difference with NaMi’s case is that many South Korean stars enjoy far greater international status than their 1980s predecessors could ever have dreamt of. South Korean popular culture – its K-pop idols, its Netflix hit dramas, award-winning movie directors and stars, and its globally distributed webtoons are now a worldwide phenomenon. As such Hallyu stars are not just enjoyed by domestic but by overseas audiences. Despite an internationalized fandom, the actions of these stars are policed by the South Korean press, media companies, and ultimately a public that requires its stars – more than ever – to subscribe to a conservative code of behaviour that in Lee’s case proved crippling. These celebrities now represent the success of Korea’s culture for the whole world. Nails that stand up, are routinely hammered down.

NaMi was judged for her sexual proclivities but Lee was not. Despite being married, it was not Lee’s visits to a hostess bar but his alleged drug use that drew the harshest condemnation. Even the majority of stars accused of sexually assaulting female actors with the rise of the Me-too Movement were seldom pursued by the media as mercilessly as Lee. While drug taking may be considered one of the trappings of fame in Europe, North America, or elsewhere – part of the rebellious behaviour associated with stardom, this is not the case in South Korea where narcotics consumption has been a major no-no. Stars who partake in drug consumption are seen as fair game for trial by the media. Questions remain about how details of the police’s ongoing investigation into Lee’s drug taking were released to the press. Part of this public disapproval is no doubt a response to an apparent post-pandemic rise in drug consumption amongst Korean youth, and an attempt by President Yoon Suk-yeol’s conservative government to clamp down. However, there are recent historical reasons for the deeply antagonistic attitude to narcotic consumption. Cannabis grows naturally on the Peninsula and was used extensively in traditional herbal medicine, and there is strong evidence of widespread recreational consumption pre-1953. During the Japanese colonial period (1910-45), Korea was also a production hub for opium and other narcotics. A significant change came with the military dictatorship (1961-87) when General Park Chung-hee (1961-1979) introduced the 1976 Cannabis Control Act to crush drug consumption. Park who had served as an officer in the imperial Japanese forces in Manchuria was no doubt embarrassed by colonial Korea’s historical reputation as a producer of narcotics, and he was also responding to increasingly harder lines taken towards drug use by other regional governments like Singapore. Park’s government routinely turned a blind eye to nominally illegal stimulants provided to low-paid textile workers by unscrupulous factory owners to keep them productive. Many saw the new drug regulations as an attempt to clamp down on an artistic community often hostile (as they are now) to the government’s policies. While dictatorship-era policies like the draconian artistic censorship legislation have been repealed as part of a long post-1987 process of de-authoritarianisation, the drug regulations remain in place. Some might argue that this is one way to keep dissenting artistic types in their place. The 2015 blacklist scandal was another example of this control over celebrities. Many a celebrity have felt their collars felt as a result of their drug use – some saw their careers go into a rapid decline while others like Lee, tragically took their own lives. In the internationalized, big-money world of South Korean cultural products, image is still everything, powerful institutional forces permit artists to shine as long as their rebelliousness is strictly limited to their on-screen, on-stage persona.