The Public and Private
In this post, I want to go back to something I promised not to mention again: face masks. I apologize for breaking my promise but hope you will find what I have to say adds something interesting to my on-going exploration of cultural differences between the West and Korea. These reflections come after having spent the past month and a half in Europe.
After my stay in my house in France I was in London for ten days. The main purpose of my visit was to install an exhibition I helped curate and in which I exhibited. It’s called TRANSFER and is at the Korean Cultural Centre UK until April 15th. The picture at the head of this post is of me at the Opening. If you’d like more information, here is a link: https://kccuk.org.uk/en/programmes/partnership-programme/transfer/
But in this post, I want to go back to something I promised not to mention again: face masks. I apologize for breaking my promise but hope you will find what I have to say adds something interesting to my on-going exploration of cultural differences between the West and Korea.
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It’s always a massive culture shock to be back in Europe after months in Korea, especially since the pandemic. Now that Covid-19 is far less threatening, life in Europe looks like it’s trying to go back to the familiar old pre-pandemic ways. In Korea, however, we are not permitted to forget so easily the virus’ continued presence in our midst.
The most obvious contrast is, as I already noted (more than once), in the attitude to face masks. Almost no one wears them anymore in Europe, not even on the crowded Metro or Tube, whereas in Korea they are still everywhere. The persistence in masking-up outside was bizarre to me because the Korean government decreed in May 2022 that it was no longer mandatory to wear them outside, and yet the Koreans went on doing so. The only Koreans you saw not wearing masks on the city street were foreigners on visits, and some younger Koreans who, I assumed, were sufficiently ‘Westernized’ to consider breaking ranks with their compatriots. This put me in an interesting cultural dilemma: did I do what my fellow Westerners were doing, or my fellow Koreans? I tended to side with the Koreans out of the belief that one should try to respect the norms of the place one is in. But evidently, the Westerners who went mask-free were not troubled by this obligation, and only wore their masks when they knew it was legally required.
It’s still necessary to wear a mask on public transport. But on my return in early March, I find that many more Koreans are now walking mask-free. In late January, the indoor mask mandate was also finally lifted. But far from jumping at the chance to throw off their masks, Koreans still seem reluctant to comply with this freedom.
Whenever I mentioned the fact that Koreans were voluntarily wearing masks to people during my visit to France and Britain, they said the exact same thing: “Oh, the Koreans are used to wearing mask.” That is, they wore them pre-Covid because of pollution or because they were sensitive to the risk of contagion when they were sick with a cold or flu. This is certainly true. But I can’t help thinking that much deeper factors are involved.
I now see the face mask issue in term of the relationship between the public and private realm – of the relationship between the self as a public and private entity. There seems to be a fundamental difference in the way these two realms relate to each other between Korea and the West.
By ‘private’ self I mean the one that loves and hates, fears and desires. This is a self that is essentially invisible to the world. It is the subject’s consciousness. By ‘public’, I mean the self that one presents to the world, that performs duties within society, the one that is visible to others, and is characterized by specific social signifiers. The level where private and public intersect is what we call ‘identity.’ Here is a typical diagram of how this works:
Historically, a society’s stability rested on the strict policing of the boundary between these two realms, so that people’s identity remained stable, and so did society’s. But with the advent of modernity, the boundary began to become much more flexible or permeable. The ideal of the free private individual seeking their ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ identity supplanted that of subordination to the collective, with the result that the private realm took on more and more public importance. This was especially the case once capitalism moved from its productivist to consumerist phase. When one is a producer, one is primarily a social self, but once one becomes a consumer the private self is increasingly implicated. This is because consumerism is based on desire.
In the West today the public and private are all mixed up – and are becoming ever more so. Here in Korea, by contrast, the division between public and private selves is still much more strictly demarcated, but also under threat.
We are already familiar with the tendency of Westerners to dress in ways that visually mark them out their identity from others – sometimes in extreme ways, especially amongst the young, who are experiencing the tensions between their public and private selves especially strongly. The fashion for tattoos is in this light an attempt to wear your private self on your skin – to share it with the outside (which is maybe one subliminal reason why tattoos are always pixelled out on Korean television). The whole gender fluidity issue in the West can also be discussed in these terms: it’s about people struggling to fit their private selves comfortably within their public selves in a society where the public/private binary is no longer firmly established, where no one is quite sure where on begins and the other ends, or what constitutes one’s identity.
Another dimension relates to multiculturalism. When people began living together who look very different from each other, it was obvious that this visible sign of difference correlated to differences in the hidden private realm. Korea has no such diversity. More or less everyone in Korea is ethnically Korea. They have the same colour hair, the same colour eyes, the same colour skin. Of course, there are differences. Koreans are not clones. But compared to London, Seoul definitely looks mono-ethnic. This makes policing the private/public realms much easier. There are no visceral triggers signalling the ‘irruption’ of identity via the private into the public. Instead, one can go through one’s day without any strong awareness of one’s distinctly divergent status as part of a poly-ethnic society, and instead can comfortably assume one’s unity with others. This also means that it is much easier to consider oneself in terms of a public self – which is ‘public’ precisely because it is like all the other public selves – rather than, as in the West, constantly being reminded that the public realm is made up of private individuals.
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While I was lying awake unable to sleep because of jet lag back here in Korea, and also suffering from a cold that I caught somewhere in London, it struck me that the willingness of Koreans to wear face masks is subliminally a collective re-instating of the public/private binary in the face of the threat to this boundary due to Westernization. By donning a mask one effaces to a considerable extent the external signs of one’s individuality – the private self visible to the outside world – and makes oneself part of an anonymous homogeneous group. As a Westerner, I find this tendency very unsettling, even ‘inhuman’.
It’s interesting that on Korean current affairs television programmes one often sees members of the public with their faces obfuscated, fogged, or pixelled out, to conform with privacy laws, or ‘portrait rights’, which mean you're not allowed to post or film other people's faces on media without explicit permission. The result can be really rather surreal or comical. Sometimes, it seems that every living thing on the screen is a mass of pulsing pixels. Or the tv cameraman is obliged to shoot at a weird angle so they don’t inadvertently get people in the frame and infringe their privacy.
I think in this context the face mask can be described as functioning as analogue fogging or pixelating. Of course, it is ostensibly intended to safeguard private and public health, but unintentionally, what happens is a radical delimiting within the public sphere of the visual attributes of the private. The mask has become a way of suppressing the expression of individual identity by serving as a wall between the private and the public realm.
The result is social conformity and stability. But I find it hard to believe this can be altogether healthy.
Image source: