On August 22–23, 2025, the Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University hosted an international conference titled “Korea as Symptom.” On the first day, the K-Future Team organized a panel session entitled “Reading Cultural Symptoms of Korea” at the Asia Center (Room 230). Chaired by Professor Dongshin Yi (Department of English Language and Literature, Seoul National University), the session brought together three scholars who examined diverse cultural “symptoms” of contemporary Korean society through distinct theoretical and disciplinary lenses.
In the first presentation, Professor Steve Choe (San Francisco State University) delivered a paper titled “Sympathy as Symptom.” He addressed one of the most frequently invoked yet theoretically underexplored aspects of the K-drama phenomenon: the problem of feeling. Focusing on sequences situated between dialogue and action in television narratives, Choe conceptualized these moments as affective interludes. These interludes, he argued, stage genuine emotions as spectacles that invite viewers to respond—whether through sympathy, anger, tears, or embarrassment. Such affective responses, far from being merely sentimental, often operate as forms of moral reflection and critique within the specific ethical landscape of Korean culture.
In the second talk, Professor Tzung-wen Chen (National Chengchi University, Taiwan) presented “Behind and Beyond the Logic of Imitation,” a critical reassessment of conventional explanations for South Korea’s technological development. Challenging the long-standing “imitation-to-innovation” narrative, Chen proposed instead to understand Korean technological modernity through the notions of assemblage and instauration. Using the history of semiconductor production as a case study, he demonstrated that technological innovation in Korea has unfolded as a continuous process in which heterogeneous elements—forms, concepts, and values—coalesce across multiple layers. This assemblage-like dynamic, he suggested, extends beyond the semiconductor industry, resonating with the trajectories of K-pop and the food industry as well.
The final presentation, “The Rise of Neoliberalism in South Korea: Success or Failure, Dream or Nightmare?” was given by Professor Nathalie Luca (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, EHESS). Luca examined how major religious movements such as the Yoido Full Gospel Church and the Unification Church in the 1980s came to fuse religious attitudes with neoliberal values. Particularly striking was her analysis of neoliberalism’s capacity to infiltrate religion. She argued that within the neoliberal order, the economy increasingly dominates religion, compelling religious institutions and spiritual leaders to recalibrate their doctrines and practices in accordance with market imperatives. The religious communities discussed by Luca no longer exist outside the market; rather, they actively reconstruct their teachings and align their spiritual practices with neoliberal demands. This observation echoes the concerns raised in Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism—specifically, capitalism’s ability to absorb critique and thereby renew itself—and invites reflection on how religion, capitalism, affect, and doctrine are mutually reconfigured in the present conjuncture.
Together, the three papers—addressing popular culture, technology, and religion—offered a multidimensional reading of Korea’s cultural symptoms. Through the conceptual prisms of affect, assemblage, and neoliberal adaptation, the panel illuminated how contemporary Korean society manifests and negotiates the cultural signs of its time.