(gentle music)
- I was born in Nuremberg, Germany,
although that doesn't really matter.
I mean, I was raised in Ohio since I was two.
My mother is Korean, father African American,
and yeah, I'm a Midwesterner, I think by birth
and I think by temperament.
And I ended up in Korea actually
after being interested in race,
mixed race identity and stuff like that.
Mostly in college.
Somewhere at the end of college realized that,
me being half Korean, I didn't really know what that meant.
I know things about Korean culture, food, you know,
ephemera of Korea.
But I felt like as much as I talked about
that I don't really know anything about Korean,
I don't know what I'm half of.
Ended up getting a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship,
teaching English and Korean middle schools
from '94 to '96 after college and with a host family.
Kind of got a sense of what Korea was about.
So after two years of being in Korea
went to grad school at Berkeley Ethnic Studies,
ended up trying to do my dissertation
on Korean national identity and textbooks
and how that's constructed.
So was in Korea since 2002.
Ended up doing street photography, then street fashion,
then more into fashion from like 2002 to 2000...
Well, continuously.
And didn't finish my dissertation until 2014.
Kind of came back to academia from 2014
and have mixed everything together.
The photography, ethnographic,
view of fashion into being a visual sociologist.
So that's what I do now.
I ended up in Korea in 1994 after college,
there was this program and I said,
"Oh, I'll go and teach English and live in a host family."
And kind of live a Korean life.
Korea in the '90s, what I like to call the last years
of real Korea, like 생 like hardcore, unadulterated,
unfiltered Korea where people would just be like,
"You're a foreigner, you're fat.
What's your problem?"
People you don't know are like,
"Why don't you lose weight?"
I'm like, "Who are you?
Why are you talking to me?"
Yeah, I mean racial difference,
any difference was not acknowledged.
And it was seen as a pretty big negative to talk about.
When I came to Korea, back in the '90s originally,
I had pretty low expectations.
I did not expect to learn Korean,
conversationally, comfortably.
That happened after about a year
and a few months in.
It really just (finger snaps) flipped into place
after great effort.
But I've expected to find out something about Korea
'cause I realized everything,
you know, I would talk about,
"Oh, I'm half Korean, I'm Korean descent."
I'm like, "What is that?
What is Korean culture?"
Unless I, you know, how can I talk about that
as if I know something about it?
I founded a group, co-founded a group called BOMBS,
the Brown Organization of Multiracial, Biracial Students
when I was at Brown.
I remember talking about multiracial identity
in these fractional sense of quarter this.
People, some people quarter this half this, half that.
I'm like, "Half of what really?
Like what do I know that's concrete about Korea
such that I know half of or am half of something."
So I kinda wanted to come to Korea
to kinda figure that out.
Figured out that I was asking the all the wrong questions.
It was a very identity politics kind of "Me, me, me, me.
What is it?
What does this mean for me?"
And I realized Korea doesn't really mean much to me
in this kind of like foundational sense.
It's just a place with a culture, a society
that has its own norms
and all these things that I'm not a part of.
What I realized what Koreanness is,
I realized that I don't really have a lot of it,
you know, I'm American.
That's what I realized.
And that's a common thing you hear from people
who go over to Korea, who are of the diaspora,
who are like, "I wanna find the Holy Grail
and figure out what it means to me."
And then it's like this revelation will happen.
And then the revelation is usually,
You're American much more than you think defined by
at one time Saturday morning cartoons, pop-tarts,
you know, bad food, bad culture, you know, commercialism.
And at that time Korea didn't have a lot of that.
That's why I kind of call it a pure,
like 생 original Korea.
Yeah, that was a very different time,(laughs)
very different Korea.
I came back to the states
after the Korea experience 'cause I realized,
I thought, I got in my head that
I have to go to graduate school,
I have to go to the Berkeley Ethnic Studies
and was very interested in issues
of not so much social justice.
I think that's kind of a cop out for me.
But I mean I'm more interested in like the theory,
the history than being an actual social justice warrior.
So went to the lefty liberal program
at the most lefty liberal university that you can find
and did all my coursework, took my quals,
came out to write my dissertation in 2002.
I had other questions, other things,
other ways I wanted to attack the question
of national identity or identity,
and ended up more interested in actually gender identity
and you know, kind of feminist theory to apply.
'Cause if you think about Korean society these days,
everything to the extent that Americans are obsessed
with thinking about race, race, race, race.
Koreans are thinking about gender, gender, gender,
sex, sexual identities.
You know, how does gender, how do you define,
where do certain things begin and end?
How do we like socially control women in this society?
And how has kind of like a social disciplining
of women been a constant through Korean media,
governmental policy, all this kind of stuff.
So to me that's pretty interesting to try
and kind of make sense of photographically
and in getting involved in the fashion industry,
it's become a little bit easier to make sense of.
One of the first things I got interested in
as a sociologist, visual sociologist photographer
was looking at prostitution.
In the Korean news, it was popping up in the, in 2002, 2003
like crazy, the size of the prostitution sex work industry.
Think it was something like, 4% of the GDP, agriculture,
fishing, mining agriculture made up like 3.9 or so.
Prostitution sex work made up a larger percent of the GDP
than traditional industries
that are considered important parts of the economy.
So I was like,
"Hey, your own newspapers,
your own government bodies say this is size this up
at as a huge part of the economy.
So why aren't we talking about it?"
And I would, you know, talk about this
in classes I was lecturing in and things like that.
People, yeah, got angry.
When I had a small exhibition,
I had a picture of a prostitute in a sex worker
in the red-light district at Cheongnyangni
in the midst of bringing people into
her glass booth,
people at the exhibition got visibly shakingly angry
and were like,
"You're not a monk, you're embarrassing the country.
You can't take pictures like this."
And then I would, 'cause I was younger and just didn't care.
I would get into arguments and I would say,
"Hey, 조선일보 said, 'It's 4% of the GDP.'
Don't blame me, I'm just taking pictures of it."
And they would get more angry and you know,
almost like fist fight level.
But yeah, I got a lot of pushback
when talking about issues of national identity,
race, discrimination, gay people, stuff like that.
You know, the line, there are no gay people in Korea.
And I would just say, "No, I met some, I've talked to 'em."
In fact, my first 여관 in the Fulbright ETA program
in the summer before we went to Kondo,
we were there in Seoul for a few weeks.
All the people coming into his little love motel.
I didn't know it was a love motel.
This little cheap dive motel where like dudes,
like guys in suits after work coming in,
going into the rooms.
And I was like, "Oh,
I guess they're salary men and they're tired."
But that's what Korean people would tell me,
you're not seeing things right.
At night though, the basement would turn into,
like a nightclub kind of a cabaret.
Clearly men would be coming up in like cabaret dresses
and you know, talking to people at the door
and saying, "Oh, do you wanna come in?"
You know, "I'm like, I don't know what's going on."
But I do know one thing, this is gay people in Korea.
I've seen this stuff going on with my own eyes.
You can't tell me that these people don't exist.
People didn't like when I say stuff like that.
So I just as a social scientist
as a very interested person, as a photographer,
I would say, "I see things with my own two eyes
and I'm not just gonna act like they don't exist."
That gave me ample things to take pictures of.
Eventually, once I got more, I guess focused on things,
I started using my street fashion
as a way of tryna draw a picture
of what gender and gender boundaries look like in Korea.
I think, the photography is really powerful
and I think that's, you know,
I've always been in that,
going in that direction the photography.
When coming to Korea,
I had something to apply it to
because I suddenly had a lot of people telling me,
the things that I said I saw, I didn't see.
So I'm like, "Hmm, I saw it."
And people thought I was either lying or crazy.
Yeah, I see things.
If I could take a picture of it
and you know, privacy or whatever, you can't.
If I have a picture, I can say,
"You can't tell me I didn't see these people
or I didn't talk to these people.
How are you gonna tell me, there's no prostitution
when there's a red-light district with glass
and people walking by."
And even with the pictures, people would tell me,
"Oh, what you think you saw?
You didn't see because you misunderstood it
because you're a foreigner."
So I think that kind of focused,
not only the photographic practice,
but also the context I have to give to it
to talk about what's really going on.
One story I can tell of several people,
'cause I published a story on the...
After effects of the 2004 prostitution,
special anti-prostitution law in the Korea Herald.
And I published a big Cheongnyangni picture,
and actually interviewed sex workers
who at the time were being interviewed
a lot by the Korean media.
And I was the first one to be like,
"Okay, I'll just take them at, take them at their word."
'Cause they really didn't want to talk to the media anymore
because the media would come in,
Korean media would come in and set up these narratives,
like she's a poor beleaguered, you know, prostitute.
And she's gotten training by an NGO
to like sew her own clothing.
Now, she has a clothing shop that never happened.
I mean, it maybe happened a couple times,
but you know, they're really sick of being made
to be these kind of like patsies to make Korea feel better.
And I'm like, "Tell me about why you got into it.
What are the economics?"
So I interviewed a Cheongnyangni sex worker
and she was like,
"Yeah, I have like I'm pretty popular,
I have like 10, 12 customers a day,
which is a lot even for that."
And she's like, "Yeah, I'm tryna open up."
Sorry Yongsan, not Cheongnyangni.
"I'm tryna open a kalbi restaurant
and get the money to put that down myself."
And it wasn't really like a typical sob story.
I'm a medical student putting myself, you know
the American stripper story.
But it was more like I'm tryna gather the capital
to put myself, get myself a business
that I can take with me and use
and benefit from well after my shelf life as a prostitute
as a sex worker is finished.
So I was like, "Okay."
And I heard that from several other people
and it matched up with statistics and stuff like that.
So I just said, "Let me just publish what you said
and take you at your word."
And I got attacked for that as defending prostitution.
Yeah, as an outsider and an insider.
I think there are advantages,
I think as and disadvantages
that particular story, I could publish
because I was an outsider,
but I think because I was an insider
in that I kinda understood I'd photographed to that area.
I talked to people, could speak the language,
could approach people without them putting up their shields.
I was able to tell a real story.
In the final summation,
I guess after all these experiences and stuff,
I now view myself pretty,
literally as an American 'cause I'm very,
I've realized my thinking is very American,
even though it's tempered with Korean things.
I'm very Black American,
I realized those are the,
so many things define myself as such in Korea.
'Cause you can't be American in Korea
without being Black American in Korea.
I think if you are here in a certain way.
Everything I do photography, writing about Korea
what have you is, in a way studying Korea as an outsider
'cause I'm a perpetual outsider.
I'm just a Black American in Korea doing academic stuff.
So my identity has kind of become very literal
and concrete that way.
My name is Michael Hurt
and this is my Korean-American story.
(gentle music)