Rita Rongyi Lin is a PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. Her research explores the intersection of gender, spectatorship, and urban space in cinema through the figure of the flâneuse as a mode of female spectatorship and methodology for doing transnational film historiography. She also writes about spatial production and new media more broadly and has published in Tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture. In her spare time, she likes to watch K-pop and think about affective economies in the age of digital globalization. Rita received her BA in English from Bryn Mawr College and MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University.
In March 2020, K-pop boy group NCT 127 released “Kick It,” a Bruce Lee-themed music video showcasing a pastiche of Oriental/ist aesthetics from gold-embroidered suits and dragon tapestries to Japanese-garden round window interiors and cyberpunk Hong Kong neon street façade exteriors. Spectacularly fusing its heavy-metal bass line and fast rap with a hip-hop choreography punctuated with kung-fu high kicks, the music video seems to profess, as Bruce Lee’s films once did, an empowered cosmopolitan image of “cool” Asian culture that throws off its Sick-Man-of-Asia past, echoed in the lyrics’ repetition of “no more trauma”. As the song marked a new peak in K-pop’s global (read: American) popularity, however, Chinese netizens have been quick to call out its gratuitous instrumentalization of Chinese cultural influences, a deliberate blurring of (what they consider) specifically Chinese origins into an ambiguously pan-East-Asian appeal that is strategically present in K-pop’s quest for world popularity. This paper situates “Kick It” and the debates it raises over heritage and authenticity in the ongoing culture wars between China and South Korea in the recent decades, those about Chinese New Year and Lunar New Year, hanfu and hanbok, Dragon Boat Festival and Gangneung Danoje, etc. Not only do accusations of Korean cultural appropriation in popular Chinese online discourses reveal larger anxieties about nationalist identity and the role “soft power” plays in the global economy, they also speak to China’s precarious positionality in the supposedly collective struggle of minor Asian culture(s) against the hegemonic structures imposed by the first world. Taking into account NCT (Neo Culture Technology)’s marketing concept of “infinite expansion” across the world, I push for an understanding of culture as technology through a textual analysis of the music video’s remediation of Bruce Lee’s cinematic legacies into flat and inhuman hyperreal CGI simulations. Like the digital technologies it employs, “Kick It”’s postmodern self-fashioning of intra-East-Asian elements into a cosmopolitan blend of Orientalism, I argue, presents culture as a plastic sign available for imitation, competition, and ultimately sale in the neoliberal capitalist circuit, dispelling myths about an original or authentic cultural “locale” available for representation to begin with. By engaging with Tina Campt’s definition of adjacency as “the reparative work of transforming proximity into accountability” and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of “speaking nearby,” I hope to bring a more nuanced discussion into popular and academic critiques of cultural appropriation that take into account the shifting dynamics of power from and to its sites of production and reception.