Plastic Aesthetics: Cosmetic Surgery in Contemporary Korean Art

• In Event: Gender, Art, and Popular Culture in East Asia

Abstract

This paper examines the conspicuous cosmetic-surgery culture in Korea and how it’s being represented and critiqued by emerging Korean artists. In particular, attention is paid to the works by Mind C (Kang Min Gu), Yeoji (Yeo Ji Hyeon), and Kim Tae Yeon among others, as they address some important issues that have rarely been addressed in other kinds of discourses on cosmetic surgery, such as side effects, pain and desire involved in extreme makeovers, homogenization of facial features among Gangnam’s young women, and the changing aesthetics and ethics in contemporary Korea. But I also view these artworks as products of the culture and as partaking in the production of the growing discourse on Korea’s cosmetic surgery phenomenon, and so identify problems of gender, morality, and stereotypes in the images. Cultural studies of cosmetic surgery in general as well as journalistic and scholarly writing on the case of Korea will be used in this analysis.

Author

• Soojin Lee, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago