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East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal

ISSN: 1875-2160 (Print) 1875-2152 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/teas20

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation

So Yeon Leem

To cite this article: So Yeon Leem (2016) The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 10:1, 51-71, DOI: 10.1215/18752160-3325203

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The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation

So Yeon Leem

Received: 1 January 2014 / Accepted: 22 June 2015

q 2016 Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan

Abstract This study investigates the widely recognizable discourse that characterizes

South Korea as a plastic surgery nation by tracing media coverage of plastic surgery as

published in two major Korean newspapers from 1960 to 2009.This study attempts to

enrich our understanding of plastic surgery in modern times within the Korean context

by delineating three distinctive periods of plastic surgery: legitimization (1960–79),

popularization (1980–99), and industrialization (2000s). I show how the discourse of

South Korea as a plastic surgery nation is both a local and a global construction. This

paper further aims to deepen our understanding of enhancement technology by showing

how the plastic surgery discourse in South Korea demonstrates the permeability of the

boundaries between therapy and enhancement, bodily and social enhancement, and the

individual and collective body.While the discourse has reinforced these complementary

and intertwined relationships, what enhancement means for whom has not been ques-

tioned. I argue that statistics have variously been used to proclaim the ubiquity of plastic

surgery, which works to “make up people” without attending to the actual experiences

and effects of plastic surgery, either for individuals or the nation. In this way, the

characterization of South Korea as a plastic surgery nation is a dubious construction.

Keywords enhancement technology�plastic surgery�SouthKorea�media discourse

�statistics

1 Introduction: Exploring a Plastic Surgery Nation

SouthKorea is a plastic surgery nation, if one listens towhat themassmedia says about

plastic surgery in South Korea. American celebrity Oprah Winfrey, for example,

Acknowledgments I thank Eunjeong Ma, Chia-Ling Wu, and three anonymous reviewers for their

extremely useful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. This work was supported by

a National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1

A3A2054849).

S. Y. Leem

College of Liberal Studies, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

e-mail: [email protected]

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2016) 10:51–71

DOI 10.1215/18752160-3325203

during an episode of her show that aired on 6 October 2004, expressed concern that

Korean womenwere the world’s most prevalent plastic surgery consumers, seeking to

change their bodies to resemble those of Western women. In 2007, BBC News gave

substantial television coverage to the fact that at least 50 percent of Korean women in

their twenties had had plastic surgery (Chung 2007). And most recently, in 2015, the

New Yorker published a lengthy article about South Korea, calling it “the world’s

plastic-surgery capital” (Marx 2015: 50). Korean people seem well aware of their

obsession with plastic surgery and physical beauty, too, as major Korean newspapers

have published numerous stories about the expansion of the plastic surgery industry.

Sample headlines include phrases such as “Plastic Surgery Trend with the Korean

Wave,”1 “Plastic Surgery Powerhouse,”2 and “Plastic Surgery Kingdom.”3 Korean

intellectuals have been self-conscious about South Korea’s image as a nation of

“false” beauty, and social scientists have severely criticized the plastic surgery indus-

try and the prevailing ideologies of gendered appearance (Lim 2002, 2004; Chung

2007; Nah et al. 2009).

But if you take another look, the obsession with plastic surgery may be less a

national and more a regional phenomenon. One district of Seoul called Gangnam,

which literally means the southern part of the Han River in Seoul, is the center of the

plastic surgery industry in South Korea. According to the National Tax Service of

South Korea, in 2014 more than half of the nation’s 671 plastic surgery clinics were

located in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, and 74.8 percent of those were located in

Gangnam. Notably, Gangnam is also symbolic of the modernization, Westernization,

and economic development of South Korea during the second half of the twentieth

century. Long before the song “Gangnam Style” by Korean pop singer Psy became a

huge hit around the world in 2012, Gangnam had a national reputation for plastic

surgery as well as Western luxury shops and modern apartment complexes. Consid-

ering this localization of the plastic surgery industry, the characterization of South

Korea as a plastic surgery nation is simply overblown. Yet given the national and

historical significance of Gangnam in modern South Korea, the idea of a plastic

surgery nation calls for further investigation.

The basic task of this article is to uncover the origin of the notion of South Korea as

a plastic surgery nation and to place that story within the larger Korean context. To do

so, the article follows plastic surgery discourses produced by the Korean media since

the emergence of modern South Korea after the Korean War. This article is, in fact,

only a partial history of Korean plastic surgery, but despite its partiality, it has value as

the first attempt to create an overview of the field of plastic surgery in South Korea

within a broader context and longer time frame.

Following the evolution of media discourse proves a good starting point for under-

standing how certain technologies are legitimated and popularized in certain societies,

1 “Plastic SurgeryTrendwith theKoreanWave amongTaiwaneseWomen,”Dong-a Ilbo, 21August 2001.

The “Korean Wave” as a translation of “Han-Ryu” refers to the increase in popularity of Korean cultural

products and celebrities worldwide, mainly through Asian countries, since the late 1990s. 2 “Plastic Surgery Powerhouse, Korea: Korean Plastic Surgery Is Popular in Asia. More Concerns Are

Needed for Reconstructive Surgery,” Chosun Ilbo, 23 June 2007. 3 “Kingdom of Fraud, Superficial Powerhouse: Concerns about Appearances Make a Plastic Surgery

Kingdom That Lacks Fundamentals,” Chosun Ilbo, 19 September 2007.

52 S. Y. Leem

or, in other words, how science and technology become culture. The role of the mass

media has beenwell documented in previous studies on science and technology,which

show how the media actively engages with knowledge claims (Collins 1987; Gieryn

1992; Hagendijk and Meeus 1993). The media provides a forum for diverse voices

about science, technology, and medicine, and reports on these topics using certain

frames, words, and metaphors (Coveney, Nerlich, and Martin 2009; Nerlich and

Clarke 2003). It has also been shown that media reports and opinions play as critical

a role in legitimating new technologies and biomedical knowledge as scientists and

medical experts do (Oudshroon 1999; Pitts 1999; Seale, Cavers, and Woods 2006).

Finally, from a Latourian perspective, there is no such thing as a plastic surgery nation

to study, because “there is no society to be explained” (Latour 2005: 239). The media

is thus important as a research site—as a theater in which a panoramic view of the

plastic surgery nation is projected.

This study aims to enrich our understanding of plastic surgery by attending to local

context, including the specific historical, economic, and cultural factors at play, rather

than the broader categories of gender and race. In this way it is distinct from a number

of media studies concerning plastic surgery that have analyzed how female bodies are

visualized and justified through visual narratives (Tait 2007; Jerslev 2008;Weber and

Tice 2009). Other studies have focused on news reports about plastic surgery or stories

in women’s magazines (Adams 2009; Fraser 2003; Brooks 2004). For more than two

decades, plastic surgery has been a research arena occupied by feminists. Ever since

Canadian feminist Kathryn P. Morgan (1991) defined plastic surgery as a technology

that colonizes women’s bodies, many Western and Korean feminists have viewed

plastic surgery as a tool of patriarchy and racism and a means to oppress women

(Morgan 1991; Bordo 1993; Kaw 1993; Balsamo 1996; Brush 1998; Gagne and

McGaughey 2002; Lim 2002; Negrin 2002; Frost 2005; Blum 2003; Lee 2006). A

smaller group of feminists have distanced themselves from this reading, arguing that

female plastic surgery patients are active and rational actors, not mere victims or

cultural dupes, who make choices regarding plastic surgery to achieve their desired

identities (Davis 1995, 1997; Gimlin 2006). This strain of so-called agency feminism

views plastic surgery as empowering women by enabling them to rewrite their iden-

tities as they wish by altering their bodies. Although some feminist analyses of plastic

surgery have shown that women have political awareness of plastic surgery practices,

these studies are often limited to Western contexts or to nonwhite women’s experi-

ences in Western societies (Aizura 2009).4 More recently, local contexts have come

into focus, mostly in relation to the development of the modern nation and the plastic

surgery boom in non-Western societies, such as Brazil, China, and South Korea

(Edmonds 2010; Kim 2003; Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012; Brownell 2005;

Jarrin 2012). This article builds on that last set of studies by tracing how South

Korea has become a plastic surgery nation over a long period of time, and by focusing

on the changing meanings of plastic surgery within the Korean context.

Another important objective of this study is to deepen our understanding of

the “enhancement technologies” that have emerged alongside the development of

4 Like feminist studies of science and technology, feminist studies of plastic surgery oscillate between

optimism and pessimism toward science and technology;Wajcman (2004) argues that this oscillationwould

be overcome if concrete practices and contexts were taken into consideration.

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation 53

biomedicine (Clarke et al. 2003; Hogle 2005). Plastic surgery has long been associated

with certain questions, such as whether its purposes are reconstructive or aesthetic

(in other words, of necessity or vanity) and whether its transformations are physical or

mental (in other words, whether they alter how one is seen by others or how one is seen

by oneself ), as well as whether women’s choices regarding plastic surgery are moti-

vated individually or socially. In theWest, plastic surgery dates back to the FirstWorld

War, when it was used to reconstruct war-wounded bodies to help veterans adapt to

ordinary life both physically and psychologically (Gilman 2000). After the Second

World War, plastic surgeons found a new, broader market in which physical appear-

ances were changed to improve self-esteem and fulfill personal desires. For example,

in theUnited States, non-Caucasian immigrants used plastic surgery as a tool to realize

their American dreams (Haiken 1997). However, this article takes a different approach

to plastic surgery and relates it to a new set of questions about enhancement technol-

ogy. I argue that plastic surgery has implications for other, newer biomedical enhance-

ment technologies, such as prosthetics, genetics, and cognitive science, based on its

dubious biopolitics. These biopolitics are especially noticeable in three oppositions:

therapy versus enhancement, bodily versus social motivations, and individual versus

collective bodies.

I first suggest that the framework of therapy versus enhancement, instead of

necessity versus vanity, is more helpful for understanding the evolution of plastic

surgery in South Korea. Distinguished from modern medicine, which aims to cure

diseases and correct abnormalities, enhancement is an aspect of contemporary medi-

cine that focuses on upgrading and optimizing the body (Haraway 1991; Hogle 2005).

Therapy and enhancement as goals of medical technology are rooted in different

visions of the body: the former is based on pathology and deficiencies, while the latter

views the body as a lifetime project to achieve one’s true self (Hogle 2005). This

neoliberal notion of the body andmedicine is what makes enhancement different from

therapy. However, it is not necessarily grounded on the distinction between recon-

structive plastic surgery and aesthetic plastic surgery, or on the old debates about

necessity versus vanity. The term enhancement is a more inclusive and less stigma-

tized lens through which to look at plastic surgery, as it includes multiple dimen-

sions—functional, aesthetic, emotional, and social. This study intends to show how a

long-term media discourse mobilizes therapy and enhancement rhetoric as a rationale

for plastic surgery.

Second, related to the use of the inclusive term enhancement, there is a question as

to whether enhancements enabled by medical technology are pursued due to social or

bodily concerns.Whether plastic surgery is amatter of physical appearance or psycho-

logical cure becomes less meaningful, as enhancement deals with functions and forms

of the body that are inseparable from the self and the mind. This study also takes a

different approach to social justifications and biological reductionism, which are often

found in previous studies on enhancement-related medical products. Many kinds of

currently available medical enhancements, such as neurochemical products, psychi-

atric drugs, and plastic surgery, have been explained as an individual response—as

Hogle (2005: 709) writes, “bear it or medicate it”—to social suffering (Rose 2006),

such as racial discrimination in the United States (Haiken 1997), poverty in Brazil

(Edmonds 2011), and economic crisis in Argentina (Lakoff 2004). This article is not

limited by focusing on one aspect of enhancement technology as a biological fix for

54 S. Y. Leem

social problems. Instead, it considers multiple potential outcomes of socially moti-

vated enhancement, such as improvement of one’s socioeconomic status, working

conditions, or interpersonal relations. However, both social conditions and individual

desires motivate individuals to use enhancement technology. This study thus inves-

tigates the role of plastic surgery as an enhancement technology by dividing enhance-

ment into categories of motivation: bodily and social.

Finally, this study is concerned with a dual status of the body: the individual body

and the collective body—or, in other words, one’s own body and a body that is

identified by a collective identity as a particular gender, class, or nationality. This

point is particularly relevant to this study as it explores South Korea’s national identi-

fication with plastic surgery. Previous studies on plastic surgery in China and Brazil

have shown that statistics play a critical role in making plastic surgery a nation-

building tool as well as a “technology of the self ” (Foucault 1988; Edmonds 2010;

Brownell 2005). In amore general sense, statistics are used as a tool to turn qualitative,

material, individual bodies into quantitative, numeric entities, such as a population or

group, and the market-driven aspect of technological development is a main charac-

teristic of biomedical and enhancement technologies (Conrad 2005; Fishman 2004;

Thompson 2013). Due to its elective nature and lack of a measurable relationship to

productivity, plastic surgery has been less affected by state regulations and national

policies than by market forces, like most enhancement technologies. It is worth

investigating how individual consumption of enhancement technologies is attributed

to collective identities of gender, class, and nationality. In this context, this study

reveals how different but interrelated collective identities are attached to individuals

undergoing plastic surgery in South Korea by focusing on the mobilization of sta-

tistical tools.

Plastic surgery is a good research site to examine how medical technology makes

and ismade by theworld beyond the clinic, how it creates meanings and networks, and

finally how it becomes deeply embedded in society. After describing mymethods and

the data gathered for this study, I give a brief overview of three historical periods to

sketch out the development of the field of plastic surgery in SouthKorea. I then present

the results of a media discourse analysis, focusing on how plastic surgery and bodies

(as both subjects and objects of plastic surgery) are represented. In the last section, I

discuss how this analysis contributes to our understanding of enhancement technol-

ogy, especially concerning the ambivalent and dubious dynamics between therapy and

enhancement, bodily enhancement and social enhancement, and individual bodies and

collective bodies.

2 Methods and Data

To take a close look at the evolution of media discourse on plastic surgery since the

1960s, the primary materials for this paper were 2,724 articles from two Korean daily

newspapers, theChosun Ilbo and theDong-a Ilbo.5 Daily newspapers were chosen for

5 These two newspapers are known for their high rates of circulation in Korean society. According to a

survey by theKoreanAdvertisersAssociation in 2006, theChosun Ilbo and theDong-a Ilbo are the first (13.5

percent) and third (8.0 percent) largest newspapers, respectively, in terms of their subscription rates in Seoul.

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation 55

this study because of the range of topics they cover aswell as their wide readership. For

this analysis, I preferred general newspapers to women’s magazines because I am

interested in plastic surgery as a sociotechnical network in South Korea, not as a

technology for or against women. These articles were sourced via the search engines

of the official websites of the two newspapers. Articleswere included if they contained

the word plastic (seong-hyeong 成形), the word most commonly used to express

“plastic surgery” in Korean,6 in either their headline or body, regardless of the article

type (newspaper story, editorial, column, opinion piece by an outside writer, letter to

the editor, or advertisement) and regardless of the section of the paper in which the

article was located (politics, economy, society, science, health, women, entertain-

ment, etc.). After performing an iterative analysis, a total of 342 articles were select-

ed—244 from the Chosun-Ilbo, and 98 from the Dong-a Ilbo—for the final in-depth

examination. All quotations from these texts in this article are my translation.

Before continuing to the next section, one noteworthy quantitative detail in Fig. 1

must be explained. There has been a marked increase in the number of articles on

plastic surgery since the late 1990s. The annual number of articles on plastic surgery in

either newspaper has not dropped below50 since 1999, and it recently reached a height

of 145 in theDong-a Ilbo. Considering that the total number of articles was nevermore

than 50 prior to 1996, the quantity of media coverage related to plastic surgery since

the late twentieth century appears to be increasing rapidly. The growth of media

attention to plastic surgery at the turn of the twenty-first century is, in part, related

to the growth of newspapers. According to the Korean Press Institute (1998), the

Korean newspaper industry was unprecedentedly prosperous in the 1990s, and papers

competed with each other by increasing the number of pages they published. In par-

ticular, more pages were allotted to issues regarding family, consumption, and health

than to political, economic, and social matters. It is also related to the fact that the

plastic surgery industry in South Korea began thriving in the 2000s; scholars have

argued that this is because themedicalization of beauty has accelerated since the 1990s

(Lim 2010; Tae 2011). The number of plastic surgery advertisements in one women’s

magazine reached 105 in 2001, which was four times higher than that reached in 1999

and almost ten times higher than in 1997 (Choi 2004). In the late 1990s, advertise-

ments for plastic surgery clinics increased exponentially because Korean womenwere

6 In Korean, the word plastic is used as a noun tomean “plastic surgery” and further implies plastic surgery

for “aesthetic” or “cosmetic” purposes unless otherwise specified, such as in the case of plastic surgery for

reconstructive or therapeutic purposes. I chose to use theword plastic (成形)—seong-hyeong in Korean—to

sort articles for two reasons. First, I aimed to review a broad scope of media discourse on plastic surgery, so

my search had to be as inclusive as possible. In Korean, the word plastic is used as a noun to mean “plastic

surgery,” which can mean plastic surgery for both aesthetic or cosmetic and reconstructive or therapeutic

purposes. While, to clarify further, the word plastic is also used as combined forms such as “reconstructive

plastic surgery” or “plastic surgery for therapeutic purposes,” the term cosmetic surgery or aesthetic surgery

without the word plastic is used much less often than cosmetic for aesthetic plastic surgery in South Korea.

The keyword plastic, therefore, encompasses similar terms such as plastic surgery, aesthetic plastic surgery,

cosmetic plastic surgery, and reconstructive plastic surgery. The term cosmetic surgery without the word

plastic is used much less often than cosmetic plastic surgery in South Korea. Second, the preference for the

inclusive word plastic among the Korean public is perhaps a strategic choice made to avoid immediate

political and ethical criticism or debates. It is alsomy strategic choice, as one of the objectives of this study is

to examine the ambivalent interplay between aesthetic enhancement and therapeutic medicine in media

discourse of plastic surgery. I want to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out this termino-

logical and methodological issue.

56 S. Y. Leem

able to spend money on themselves, which meant that plastic surgeons were

competing not only with each other but also with other beauty professionals (Lim

2002: 196–97). Figure 1 echoes existing research showing that plastic surgery has

been highly visible in Korean society since the late 1990s.

3 Historical Overview: Plastic Surgery and South Korea

The media discourse on plastic surgery in South Korea can be roughly divided into

three periods, 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, and the 2000s, which are defined

by the changing medical, cultural, and social status of plastic surgery and run in

parallel to South Korea’s national development.7 The national economic situation is

amajor local context in which the preference for plastic surgery amongKorean people

can be understood. This section explains how the discipline, culture, and business of

plastic surgery in South Korea have been legitimatized, popularized, and industrial-

ized alongside national development. It intends to provide a brief historical back-

ground to the section that follows, which presents how the media has represented and

continues to represent plastic surgery and patients, consumers, and the greater

population.

The first period (1960–79) was characterized by the legal and social legitimization

of plastic surgery in Korea. During this period, Korean plastic surgeons strived to

domesticate plastic surgery as a new Western medicine and attempted to make it a

necessary field ofmedicine. Concurrently, the Korean government struggled to recon-

struct its national economy and modernize its society as quickly as possible. During

the Korean War and the American military occupation in the early 1950s, American

Fig. 1 This graph shows the increase in newspaper articles related to plastic surgery published in theChosun

Ilbo and the Dong-a Ilbo from 1960 to 2009.

7 A similar historical overview of plastic surgery has been given as part of amodern history of biomedicine

in South Korea. For details, please see chapter 6 in John DiMoia’s (2013) book.

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation 57

military surgeons, notably Dr. David Ralph Millard, performed reconstructive plastic

surgery for war-wounded soldiers and patients with deformities such as cleft lip.8 In

1961, under a military dictatorship, the state began to implement strong policies to

drive economic development. Coincidently, in the same year, Dr. Jae-Duck Yu, a

Korean plastic surgeon who had been trained and certified in the United States, began

to practice and teach the specialty at theMedical College of Yonsei University, which

had the first department of plastic surgery in SouthKorea. In 1969, theKoreanMedical

Association admitted the Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons

(KSPRS), which Dr. Yu established in 1966, as a subsociety; however, the larger soci-

ety still did not recognize plastic surgery as a legitimate medical field. Such terms

as cosmetic orthopedic surgery (美容整形手術)9 or cosmetic surgery (美容手術)10

were often used to mean “plastic surgery” (成形手術). In 1974, the Supreme Court in

South Korea finally approved plastic surgery for aesthetic purposes as a medical

practice, which followed the same judgment by the Daegu district court one year

earlier. A system of board certification for plastic surgeons was established in 1975.11

The second period (1980–99) was a period of growth, not only for the plastic

surgery industry, but also for South Korea’s economy, culture, and politics, as if all

the efforts in the previous period were being rewarded. This was the period in which

plastic surgery was popularized, emerging as a new commodity and “a form of ordi-

nary shopping” (DiMoia 2013: 1). From the 1960s to 1981, the Korean government’s

five-year economic development plans were successful, with average yearly eco-

nomic growth rates as high as 8 percent. After a democratic uprising in 1987 and

the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988, the first half of the 1990s was a heyday for South

Korea. In 1992, the military regime ended after thirty long years of domination, and a

new civilian government assumed power. Given the economic development and polit-

ical stability of this period, plastic surgery and other beauty treatments became part

of middle-class culture, along with other new commodities (Nelson 2002). Plastic

surgery was also part of the newmedical culture that had emerged since themid-1980s

and could be described as highly specialized, with sophisticated practices, fewer state

regulations, and private interests, because of the underdevelopment of the Korean

health system (DiMoia 2013). Additionally, with the economic and political difficul-

ties of the past behind them, South Korean citizens started to appreciate cultural

products such as professional athletics and popular songs. However, economic hard-

ship soon returned. South Korea experienced a currency crisis in 1997 and had to

receive financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) until 2000.

8 There was another type of plastic surgery operation in South Korea besides reconstructions by American

military surgeons. After the war, pseudo–plastic surgery, such as paraffin injections, originally practiced in

Japan, were popular amongKoreanwomen for cosmetic purposes. A brief history of plastic surgery in South

Korea is available at the Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons’ (KSPRS) official website:

http://www.plasticsurgery.or.kr/. 9 “Increasing Cosmetic Orthopedic Surgeries for Men,” Chosun Ilbo, 18 June 1967. The word orthopedic

implies Japanese influence on the early practice of plastic surgery for aesthetic purposes in South Korea. 10 “Commonsense on Cosmetic Surgery,” Dong-a Ilbo, 9 June 1960. 11 These early events in the history of plastic surgery in SouthKorea explainwhy the numbers of newspaper

articles in both 1974 and 1975were unusually high comparedwith those in the 1960s and 1970s generally, as

shown in figure 1. During this period, a handful of plastic surgeons wrote manymedical columns and essays

in newspapers to educate the general public and achieve social legitimacy for a new medical field that had

just emerged from illegality.

58 S. Y. Leem

The third period (the 2000s) is characterized by the industrialization of plastic

surgery. In this period, plastic surgery became a national characteristic of South

Korea. The national economy officially recovered in 2001, after which Korean society

changed drastically from that of the 1990s. Because the nation’s economic structures

were vulnerable to global forces and South Korea still did not provide sufficient social

welfare to its people, citizens were suddenly pitted against one another. Employment

became unstable, and companies and markets were deregulated. Plastic surgery

became a form of competition among both individuals and plastic surgeons, which

fueled the rapid expansion of the industry in SouthKorea.While the industry has taken

advantage of the increased demand for plastic surgery, plastic surgeons also have

suffered from competition with other surgeons, especially in Gangnam, which has

the highest density of private clinics in South Korea.12 During this period, Korean

plastic surgery businesses discovered a market beyond the national border thanks to

the KoreanWave, or Han-Ryu (韓流), a term signifying the import and popularization

of South Korean cultural products such as TV dramas, popular songs, and films in

other Asian countries, including China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Thai-

land, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008). The plastic

surgery industry was quickly recognized by the Korean government as a replacement

formanufacturing industries, the earlier major source of national income that had been

lost due to inexpensive Chinese labor.

4 Media Discourse: The Birth of a Plastic Surgery Nation

4.1 The Legitimization of Plastic Surgery (1960–79): Medicine and Pathological

Bodies

In this period, the legal and social legitimization of plastic surgery as medicine was

based on the pathological model of bodies. Plastic surgery patients were portrayed as

suffering from psychological problems and abnormal concerns about their physical

appearance. In 1969, when a group of plastic surgeons urged the government to

approve plastic surgery as an official medical discipline, they wrote that plastic sur-

gery would help “ill women,” as the following statement indicates: “How longwill the

government hide quacks in the field of orthopedics who take full charge of plastic

surgery and avoid women’s illness to want to look beautiful?”13 Although plastic

surgery patients were usually intelligent and elegant women, they were portrayed as

desperate and excessive as well. Plastic surgeons such as Sung-Chun Choi, Jae-Duk

Yu, and Sea-il Lee often mentioned that their patients were educated women, specifi-

cally female college students, who had “surging desires to be beautiful.”14 The exces-

sive desire for beauty that most of their plastic surgery patients shared was the raison

12 It can be argued that the high number of articles related to plastic surgery during the 2000s, as shown in

figure 1, resulted from not only competition among newspapers but also the high level of domestic com-

petition among plastic surgery providers in South Korea. 13 “Cosmetic Surgery Guided by the Field of Plastic Surgery,” Dong-a Ilbo, 3 April 1969. 14 “Seoul, Manufacturing Beautiful Women,” Chosun Ilbo, 18 November 1962; “Risks of Artificial Beau-

ty,” Dong-a Ilbo, 16 March 1967.

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation 59

d’être for the field of plastic surgery. Plastic surgeons at first described their patients

positively: as “a beautiful lady in her thirties” with “a sophisticated manner and

clothes,” who looked “more intelligent than anyone else”;15 a young woman in her

twenties with “a pretty face in every respect and a slim figure”;16 or “a shy lady in

Western style.”17 However, they often also found these women to be “whining”18 and

“greedy.”19 Plastic surgery patients were seen as women with high levels of intellec-

tual, cultural, and social status who were suffering from irrational desires for their

bodies and had unreasonable expectations for medical interventions.

The purposes of plastic surgery were identified with physical reconstruction and

therapy. Surgeons attempted to combat the severe criticisms of plastic surgery as a

shallow aesthetic practice by advancing claims about the true identity of plastic sur-

gery as therapeutic medicine. For instance, Jin-Hwan Kim, MD, a plastic surgeon at

Seoul National University, explicitly wrote about the reconstructive purposes of plas-

tic surgery: “Although there are certain procedures done for aesthetic purposes among

plastic surgery practices, those procedures are just part of the overall field, which does

not exist for only aesthetic purposes. Rather, as most cases of plastic surgery are for

reconstruction, it may be more proper to call it ‘reconstructive surgery.’”20 The

emphasis on the reconstructive purposes of plastic surgery was paired with doctors’

concerns about the public perception of plastic surgery as a magical solution. Plastic

surgeons lamented laypeople’s belief that plastic surgery could change a face without

leaving any scars. Turning women’s desires to be beautiful into serious problems to be

cured and ascribing the superficial image of plastic surgery to lay misunderstanding

were both effective in strengthening the medical status of plastic surgery. In this way,

plastic surgery gained social legitimacy as medicine while still retaining its unique

disciplinary identity based on the pathologization of beauty seekers.

4.2 The Popularization of Plastic Surgery (1980–99): Commodities and Affluent

Bodies

During the economic development of Korean society in the 1980s, plastic surgery

practices became a part of middle-class women’s culture and a sign of a high quality of

life in South Korea. Plastic surgery transitioned from a new Western medicine to

become a commodity for affluent bodies, that is, a sign of material wealth. Young

and middle-aged women still constituted the majority of plastic surgery patients;

however, plastic surgeons no longer portrayed their patients as sick women who

desperately needed “regenerative psychiatric therapies.”21 During the 1980s, the

association between the popularization of plastic surgery and national economic

developmentwas reinforced byChinese plastic surgeonswhen plastic surgery became

15 “Medical Essay: Corrective Surgery in the Field of Plastic Surgery,” Dong-a Ilbo, 23 December 1974. 16 “Doctor’s Corner: Plastic Surgery Ignorant of Facial Balance, Over-Packaged Beauty,” Chosun Ilbo,

12 June 1974. 17 Ibid. 18 “Medical Essay: High Rate of Side Effects in Breast Augmentation by Injection,” Dong-a Ilbo,

11 November 1974. 19 “Medical Essay: Rhinoplasty for Facial Balance,” Dong-a Ilbo, 20 November 1974. 20 “Plastic Surgery Is Not Just to Make Faces Beautiful,” Chosun Ilbo, 31 August 1975. 21 “Cosmetic Surgery Even Changes Personality,” Chosun Ilbo, 11 October 1981.

60 S. Y. Leem

popular among affluent Chinese women.22 Middle-class women were the likeliest

potential candidates for plastic surgery in relation to their material well-being. Certain

times of year such as holiday seasons, summer and winter vacations, and high school

graduations were busy times for plastic surgeons.23 Around graduation, female high

school graduates and college-goers visited clinics; so many people were seeking

plastic surgery that some had towait up to a year for an appointment.24 The association

between plastic surgery and middle-class Korean women was confirmed by plastic

surgeons’ testimonies and the statistical technology of this period. For instance, in

1987, the Pusan branch of the Korean Federation of Housewives’ Clubs, an active

middle-class women’s organization in the then-second-biggest city in South Korea,

conducted a survey titled “Real Conditions of Women’s Cosmetic Treatment and

Management for Beauty” that included more than nine hundred women between ten

and sixty years old. It was revealed that only 6 percent of women actually received

plastic surgery. However, the questions are as significant as the answers in this case, as

they imply a connection between plastic surgery and women’s daily lives. This survey

asked women about their everyday beauty practices, ranging from applying makeup,

washing one’s hair, and taking a bath to visiting a beauty shop; plastic surgery was

explicitly categorized as a cosmetic treatment and beauty management.25

In the 1990s, plastic surgery further became one of the common commodities for a

young generation of consumers called the “New Generation” or “X Generation.” The

New Generation was defined as those “who pursue enjoyable lives, stand firm in their

views, and value physical appearances andwho have changed consumption patterns as

well as popular culture . . . in the 1990s.”26 The New Generation greatly contrasted

with the older generation, who could not afford such luxuries and valued humility over

pretension. This new form of consumption was seen as rational and practical, as the

young generation prioritized their own values and sensible satisfaction over patriotic

or traditional values, which assumedly belonged to the old generation. Themain actors

in this period were marketing companies and their statistical tools. For instance, in

1995, Cheil Worldwide, one of South Korea’s major advertising companies affiliated

with the conglomerate Samsung, conducted a survey targeting twelve hundred people

aged nineteen to twenty-nine from all over South Korea. This survey asked respon-

dents whether plastic surgery was acceptable to them: 33.8 percent of men and 54.1

percent of women responded positively.27 In 1996, LG Ad Inc., a major advertising

company belonging to the LG Group, reported that 49.4 percent of New Generation

women in their teens and 48.6 percent in their twenties were optimistic about plastic

surgery. The same survey indicated that 32.5 percent of male respondents accepted

plastic surgery.28 During the mid-1990s, young female celebrities such as Nam-Ju

Kim (a South Korean actress) and Seong-Hee Lee (a Korean American nude model)

22 “Plastic Surgery Trends amongChineseWomen,”Chosun Ilbo, 11 August 1983; “China, Plastic Surgery

Boom after Economic Reform,” Dong-a Ilbo, 23 August 1985. 23 “Plastic Surgery Is Spreading,” Dong-a Ilbo, 18 March 1985. 24 “Graduation Season Plastic Surgery,” Chosun Ilbo, 13 February 1985. 25 “Real Conditions of Women’s Cosmetic Treatment and Management for Beauty,” Dong-a Ilbo, 30

November 1987. 26 “Survey on Mindsets of New Generation: Work Hard to Enjoy 83%,” Chosun Ilbo, 4 January 1995. 27 Ibid. 28 “Survey on Office Workers: Fashion and Beauty,” Chosun Ilbo, 16 December 1996.

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation 61

were open about their plastic surgery and talked freely about their jobs and

relationships.29 These kinds of confessions reaffirmed the desires of the younger

generation to be true to their own desires and use plastic surgery to express themselves.

However, as young women underwent plastic surgery much more frequently than

young men, the commodification of plastic surgery and women’s bodies caught fem-

inists’ attention. For instance, Su-Ja Lee, an academic feminist, strongly criticized

plastic surgery, arguing that it turns women’s bodies into sexual objects.30 Thus, the

popularization of plastic surgery was viewed negatively, too.

4.3 The Industrialization of Plastic Surgery (2000s): National/Global Business and

Flexible Bodies

In the third period, plastic surgery was industrialized, merging with other medical

practices such as dermatology and dentistry for aesthetic or cosmetic purposes. While

during the first period, most surgeons practiced at university hospitals and warned

against the abuse of plastic surgery, surgeons now began to run private clinics and act

as disinterested experts, providing medical necessities and aesthetic advice to any

prospective patient. Plastic surgery became distinguished as a national industry due to

its widespread popularity. The plastic surgery industry now considered nearly every

Korean citizen a prospective patient. Plastic surgeons arrived on the main stage with

a different role—to make every group of Koreans plastic surgery candidates—and

newspaper coverage facilitated this. For instance, one newspaper reported that men in

their forties and fifties were seeking plastic surgery to look younger because they

believed that a youthful appearance would signify their ability to work as hard as

young people do.31 In this report, many kinds of dermatological treatments and plastic

surgeries available to middle-aged men were explained, and the names of surgeons

and their private clinics were listed.

Bodies had become flexible entities in three ways. First, the body was considered

one of the few resources available for individuals to manipulate, and it became a

project to manage, develop, and invest in to improve individuals’ competitiveness,

both in the job market and in their private lives (Shilling 1993; Martin 1994). Second,

members of all groups in the Korean population—of any age, gender, class, and

occupation—were ready to become plastic surgery consumers. All of the following

“generations,” including men,32 were reported as participating in plastic surgery:

teenagers,33 the “2030 Generation” (people in their 20s and 30s),34 the “3050 Gen-

eration” (people who are aged from 30s to 50s),35 the “4060 Generation” (people who

29 “WhyDo I Have to HideMy First Kiss and Plastic Surgery?”Chosun Ilbo, 29 April 1997; “NudeModel:

‘I Love My Job,’” Chosun Ilbo, 12 May 1997. 30 “Pornographic Gaze,” Chosun Ilbo, 14 July 1997. 31 “I Might Not Be Fired If I Look Younger . . . ” Chosun Ilbo, 10 December 2003. 32 “Men Who Want to Be Beautiful,” Chosun Ilbo, 22 October 2003. 33 “Big Eyes, Sharp Nose: Teenagers’ Dream,” Dong-a Ilbo, 19 August 2002. 34 “Challenge of the 2030 Generation: Spend Money Freely on Luxuries to Find Personalities,” Chosun

Ilbo, 20 March 2000. 35 “3050 Silver-Design: Make My 60s Beautiful,” Dong-a Ilbo, 4 April 2006.

62 S. Y. Leem

are aged from 40s to 60s),36 and the elderly.37 Together these generations encompass

nearly the entire population. These categories were also subdivided into specific

groups: middle and high school girls,38 job hunters,39 housewives,40 brides-to-be,41

singlemen,42middle-aged people of high social rank,43 and the upper class.44Men are

considered to be legitimate candidates for plastic surgery, as it is seen not as merely an

act of pursuing beauty but as necessary for the tough competition of South Korea.

Third, bodies were flexible in a geographical sense due to their mobility beyond

national borders. Based on its success domestically, the plastic surgery industry in

South Korea expanded into global markets and recruited foreign customers.

The globalization of Korean plastic surgery was closely related to transgressing

national borders and fortifying national identities (Park, Jang, and Lee 2007). Korean

plastic surgery became a global spectacle. When the popularity of plastic surgery

turned into one of the country’s national characteristics, three new global actors

were introduced: Western visitors and residents, psychiatrists, and sociologists. For

example, in 2002, it was reported that while discussing women’s rights, a group of

female Western South Korean residents from the United States, Canada, New Zea-

land, and France argued that Korean women’s enthusiasm for plastic surgery was a

serious social problem.45 It was also reported that the world-renowned French phi-

losopher Jean Baudrillard found South Korea “bizarre” because of its high rate of

plastic surgery (which was quite misleading, because it was a Korean professor who

specializes in French literature, June Suk, who actually used that expression, not

Baudrillard himself).46 Psychiatrists also contributed to the popularity of plastic sur-

gery by providingmedical explanations for people’s desire for beauty. In 2004, a team

of psychiatrists at Seoul National University concluded from one survey that Koreans

collectively suffer from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and thus tend to be addicted

to plastic surgery.47 Korean feminists and sociologists further contributed to defining

South Korea as a uniquely “appearance-oriented” society by offering sociological

explanations (Lee 2006; Lim 2002, 2004). Korean sociologist In-Sook Lim argued

that physical beauty had become very important in modern Korean society because

in the modern age, which is characterized by speed, people use their bodies as an

instant means of identification.48 In particular, psychiatric and sociological accounts

of Korean people’s social pressures and beauty ideologies served to justify the choice

36 “4060 Plastic Surgery Fever: From Remodeling to Restoring,” Chosun Ilbo, 30 March 2005. 37 “Age of 5 Million Old People: Plastic Surgery to Be Part of Society, Not to Look Young,” Chosun Ilbo,

31 October 2008. 38 “88% of High School Girls Not Happy with Their Bodies,” Dong-a Ilbo, 24 June 2004. 39 “Appearance Influences Job Interviews,” Dong-a Ilbo, 6 October 2004. 40 “Lifestyle Addictions for Housewives: Shopping, Gambling, Sex, Exercises, Plastic Surgery, and Inter-

net,” Chosun Ilbo, 30 August 2006. 41 “Plastic Surgery before Wedding Day,” Chosun Ilbo, 27 September 2006. 42 “Late 30s Single Men with High Incomes: Regular Laser Treatments, Habitual Blind Date Syndrome,”

Chosun Ilbo, 21 May 2008. 43 “Middle-Aged Men of High Rank: Plastic Surgery for Promotion and Employment,” Chosun Ilbo,

30 November 2009. 44 “Wealthy Class Has ‘Noble Plastic Surgery’ Fever,” Dong-a Ilbo, 7 March 2005. 45 “Informal Discussion by Female Foreign Residents in Korea,” Chosun Ilbo, 4 June 2002. 46 “Bizarre Views of Country by Baudrillard,” Chosun Ilbo, 17 October 2002. 47 “Society That Recommends Plastic Surgery,” Dong-a Ilbo, 30 April 2004. 48 “Why Body?” Chosun Ilbo, 10 March 2004.

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation 63

to pursue plastic surgery and provided a basis for plastic surgery marketing (Fraser

2003; Pitts-Taylor 2007; Tae 2011; Lakoff 2004).49

In this period, Korean plastic surgery became a global commodity. The recognition

of theKorean plastic surgery industry as a new source of national income resulted in its

emergence as a transnational brand. As part of the “KoreanWave” in Asia, the plastic

surgery market expanded under the name “Han-Ryu plastic surgery” (韓流成形) or

“Korean-style plastic surgery.”50 China became a major target for medical tourism.51

Noticeably, beginning in this period, journalists began urging the Korean government

to promote Korean plastic surgery to the world. For instance, a newspaper editorial

writer, Seong-Ho Huh, strongly urged the Korean government to more actively and

directly advertise Korean plastic surgery.52 Another chief journalist, Min-Cheol Kim,

argued that individual practitioners in the biomedical industry would bring money to

Korea only if they were allowed to practice freely in the global market.53 Plastic

surgery was certainly at the core of the neoliberal transformation of the Korean medi-

cal industry, which aimed to improve the national economy.54

5 Discussion: The Dubious Enhancement of Bodies and Nation

The media discourse surrounding plastic surgery in South Korea complicates our

understanding of enhancement by revealing the interplay of therapy and enhancement,

bodily and social enhancement, and individual and collective bodies. Although en-

hancement is differentiated from therapy—with the former based on the idea that the

body is a project requiring self-care,management, and improvements, and the latter on

pathology, abnormality, and deficiencies—therapy and enhancement are mutually

beneficial to and necessary for each other. In the case of South Korea, enhancement,

at first glance, seems to have replaced therapy. In the beginning, plastic surgery

patients were seen as pathological bodies, while later, plastic surgery was turned

into a form of self-expression and self-improvement. This change in the purpose of

plastic surgery appears to echo the transformation of medicine from curing diseases

and saving lives to enhancing quality of life (Elliott 2004; Conrad and Potter 2004).

However, enhancement does not exclude therapy. Indeed, enhancement must be

seen as a form of therapy to justify it legally, socially, and morally. Therefore, suf-

fering bodies that cry for therapy must be created. For instance, the sexual enhance-

49 “Let’s Be a Leading Country of Medical Industries,” Dong-a Ilbo, 21 May 2008; “Foreign Doctors:

‘I Came to Learn from Korean Surgeons,’” Chosun Ilbo, 9 April 2007. 50 Han-Ryu (Korean-style) plastic surgery is, in fact, a very ambiguous term, as it does not indicate any

specific kinds of surgery or products that are distinct from surgical practices elsewhere. Rather, it has strong

connotations of naturalness of postoperative appearance, delicacy of surgical skills, and the achievement of

resemblance to Korean celebrities, which is distant from simply mimicking a Caucasian ideal of beauty. 51 “Han-Ryu in China, Plastic Surgery,” Chosun Ilbo, 17 September 2005. 52 “Come to Korea.WeWill Make Your Nose a ‘Dae-Jang-GumNose,’”Dong-a Ilbo, 10 December 2007. 53 “Medical Tourism for the Best Brains of Medical Schools,” Chosun Ilbo, 2 December 2009. 54 “Medical Laws, Barriers ofMedical Tourism,”Chosun Ilbo, 2 June 2008. The exclusion ofmedicine and

education from the free trade agreement (FTA) between South Korea and the United States in 2007 was

considered a lost opportunity to increase the competitiveness of the Korean medical industry in the world

market. See “The Age of Korean-American FTA Has Begun: Lost Opportunities to Strengthen Competi-

tiveness of Medicine and Education,” Chosun Ilbo, 6 April 2007.

64 S. Y. Leem

ment medical market is justified by the invention of new diseases such as “female

sexual dysfunction” (Fishman 2004). In the 2000s, plastic surgery for aesthetic

purposes served as therapy for people suffering from the burden of living in an

appearance-oriented society and its endless competitions, as well as for those with

physical malformations (Lim 2004). At a broader industrial level, however, therapy

also requires enhancement, especially enhancement technologies that can be easily

made into commodities and thus serve as a financial support for therapeutic plastic

surgery. The development of new biomedicines for incurable diseases, such as patient-

specific stem cell therapy, is sometimes accompanied by new cosmetic products, such

as stem cell anti-aging facial cream, because the money required to invest in research

and the development of new biomedicines can be raised in part by selling aesthetic

enhancements to the general public (Thompson 2013). In twenty-first-century South

Korea, the plastic surgery industry is considered a partial but powerful driving force in

the development of the biomedical industry.

What is enhanced throughmedical technology is not only biological but also social;

moreover, these two aspects of enhancement inform and affect each other. As the

history of plastic surgery in South Korea shows, in its early days, medical intervention

to change the form of the body was a symbol of economic and cultural enhancement;

later, aesthetic enhancement came to be ameans to improve one’s social and economic

status. A shift in plastic surgery trends and beauty ideals in Korean society illustrates

this suspicious, circular relationship between bodily and social enhancement. Since

the 1970s, plastic surgery has been associated with celebrity culture, affluence, and a

modern lifestyle, and especially associated with American culture, the object of emu-

lation formany ordinaryKorean people. In this context, there has been little discussion

about whether bodymodification to resemble white Americans is good or bad in terms

of aesthetic values. When Helen Gurley Brown, editor of the women’s magazine

Cosmopolitan, made her face-lift surgery public in 1983, saying, “I’m afraid of losing

my femininity more than dying,”55 her actions—both having surgery and talking

about it proudly—were seen by the Korean public as a sign of self-confidence and

modern femininity. In fact, whether double-eyelid surgery enhances the aesthetic

value of a face has not been supported by evidence, nor has it been a matter for debate;

rather, it is assumed to be self-evident that double eyelids constitute aesthetic

enhancement.

In the 2000s, when globalization replaced Westernization as the aim of Korean

society, a new ideal of beauty emerged that was focused on the whole face rather than

on fragmented parts such as the eyes or the nose. Popular Korean stars were presented

as icons of beauty, and their faces were numerically and geometrically analyzed to

create a beauty standard: as a result, a slim face shape and jawline, such as the “V-Line

jaw”56 and “proportional balance,”57 became targets of plastic surgery as much as the

shape or size of eyes, noses, or lips. Moreover, the youthful, vibrant, and elegant

impressions given by a face were deemed as important as the physical form of the

face. With the globalization of Korean plastic surgery and cultural products, aesthetic

enhancement became even more a matter of images and visual representation, able to

55 “I’m Afraid of Losing My Femininity More Than Dying,” Dong-a Ilbo, 2 July 1983. 56 “Research on Jaw Shape: Korean Women Prefer V-Line,” Chosun Ilbo, 16 May 2007. 57 “1:1:0.8þ Volumous Face, She Looked Young and She Was Pretty,” Dong-a Ilbo, 17 March 2008.

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation 65

travel beyond national borders. The Korean plastic surgeon Sang-Hoon Park, MD,

even named this “the age of image plastic surgery.”58 In any case, what “enhance-

ment” actually means has hardly been discussed, as the correlated desires for a

good-looking body (aesthetic enhancement) and a successful social life (social

enhancement) have been unquestioningly and mutually reinforced.

Finally, individual Koreans’ consumption of plastic surgery, obtained from sta-

tistics, have been categorized according to gender, class, and nationality. Whereas

plastic surgery makes individual bodies flexible, statistics make collective bodies

flexible: groups of bodies have been made into plastic surgery patients through the

selection, categorization, and enumeration of those bodies. Individual bodies can be

transformed into a national body through statistics, making them critical entities in the

legitimization, commercialization, and globalization of any medical technology;

therefore, the technology of “data collection” and “making up people” is an essential

tool of biopolitics (Lock and Nguyen 2010; see also Anderson 1992). The power of

statistics is based on how numbers function as pure descriptions or facts (Urla 1993).

Statistics can be considered a modern technology used to understand self and society:

they have the effect of constructing social reality and a social self, derived from

dividing and categorizing societies into groups and elaborating and objectifying the

behaviors and traits of those groups (Hacking 1982; Anderson 1992; Urla 1993;

Sangaramoorthy and Benton 2012). Counting has the power to produce “subject

effects,” key to understanding how biopower works (Foucault 1991; Curtis 2002).

As the previous section explains, globalized gazes—whether by foreign people or

Korean people with a global worldview—affect and are affected by statistical group-

ings. This is howglobalizationworkswith nationalism, and how statistics function as a

technology of nation (Brownell 2005; Edmonds 2010).

In fact, the statement that South Korea is a plastic surgery nation has never been

statistically proved true or false; the Korean government has not generated official

statistical data, encompassing the entire Korean population, on how many Korean

people have actually received plastic surgery. The previous section shows that sta-

tistics on plastic surgery have been produced by diverse actors, including advertising

companies, economists, dating agencies, psychiatrists, cosmetic product companies,

and newspapers, each of which have obtained different results. However, news reports

reveal that counting the number of actual plastic surgery recipients among the Korean

population is considered less critical than determining how many young Korean

women are candidates for plastic surgery.59 In the 1990s, large-scale surveys on the

younger generation’s consumerism were often conducted by advertising companies

for their ownmarketing use: in those surveys, questions about the acceptance of plastic

surgery were always accompanied by questions about other consumer behaviors, such

as how often respondents changed their clothes.60 In 2000, according to one dating

agency’s survey, almost 80 percent of singlemen said that they were comfortable with

58 “The Age of Image Plastic Surgery,” Dong-a Ilbo, 20 September 2006. 59 “Challenge 2029 Generation: Frequent Visits to Plastic Surgery Clinics,” Chosun Ilbo, 29 May 2000;

“A Society That Recommends Plastic Surgery,” Dong-a Ilbo, 30 April 2004. 60 “30% of Koreans Are Self-Conscious about Weight and Body Shape,” Chosun Ilbo, 26 June 1995;

“Survey on theMindsets of the NewGeneration:Work Hard to Enjoy 83%,”Chosun Ilbo, 14 January 1995.

66 S. Y. Leem

women who had “plastic beauty.”61 In 2004, a team of psychiatrists at Seoul National

University concluded not only that Koreans were collectively suffering fromBDD but

that half of female Korean college students had already had plastic surgery, and 95.7

percent of thosewho had already had surgerywantedmore in the future.62 In 2005, one

of the biggest Korean cosmetic companies, Tae-Pyeong-Yang, reported that 55 per-

cent of Koreans intended to have plastic surgery.63

These statistical surveys show clear disparities in their results, and in most of the

surveys, respondents were asked to share their acceptance, comfort, and intentions

regarding plastic surgery, not their actual surgical experiences. The role of statistics,

therefore, is to create, maintain, and reinforce the speculative connections between

plastic surgery and certain groups of Korean people. Thus, the claim that plastic

surgery is highly popular in South Korea is made through the use of statistical tools

that categorize individual plastic surgery recipients into collective bodies, such as

women, the young generation, andKorean citizens, a process that seems very dubious.

6 Concluding Remarks: Behind a Plastic Surgery Nation

By following the media discourse of plastic surgery over the past half century, this

study has shown howSouthKorea has beenmade into a plastic surgery nation. It offers

an enriched historical understanding of plastic surgery in the local Korean context and

discusses the complexities related to biomedical enhancement. Before plastic surgery

was “Koreanized”—before plastic surgery became part of Korean culture and had

commercial value in the global beauty market—it was seen as a new Western medi-

cine for desperate women and a commodity for middle-class consumers. The history

of the legitimization, population, and industrialization of plastic surgery in South

Korea reveals the conflicting coexistence of therapy and enhancement, bodily and

social enhancement, and individual and collective bodies. While the individual

elements in these pairs may be ambiguous and constantly changing, they are depend-

ent upon and indispensable to each other. First, plastic surgery is both therapy and

enhancement: it not only improves the aesthetic value of a body but also cures social

suffering and physical deficiencies. In broader social contexts, enhancement requires

therapeutic justification, and therapy requires a market for enhancements. Second,

bodily and social enhancements motivate each other: plastic surgery associates social

enhancement with economic affluence and is a means by which people can invest in

the body for social enhancement. Third, individual bodies are mobilized as collectiv-

ities in order to advance certain interests. While plastic surgery might be chosen to

fulfill an individual’s interest in looking beautiful, expressing him- or herself, or

winning competitions, we should ask: Whose interests are fulfilled by making

South Korea a nation of plastic surgery (Kohrman 2003)? Statistical tools play a

critical role in collecting and categorizing the individual bodies of Korean people

and representing them as candidate groups for plastic surgery; this then feeds the

61 “Challenge 2029 Generation: Frequent Visits to Plastic Surgery Clinics,” Chosun Ilbo, 29 May 2000. 62 “Society That Recommends Plastic Surgery,” Dong-a Ilbo, 30 April 2004. 63 “First Nationwide Survey on Beauty Index: 86% Think Appearance Is Competitiveness, 55% Intend

Plastic Surgery,” Chosun Ilbo, 6 September 2005.

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation 67

plastic surgery industry and enables it to market itself in multiple ways and to reach

individual consumers beyond national borders.

Missing from all these mutually referential and reciprocal interplays among

enhancement, body, and nation are the individual bodies that do not and cannot

“make up” other people, particularly patients, who have only their own multiple

(biological, representational, and social) bodies (Mol 2002; Taylor 2005). Even for

those who have criticized the “bizarre” popularity of plastic surgery in South Korea,

such as intellectuals and scholars in South Korea and abroad, actual patients’ lives—

whether their lives are enhanced through plastic surgery or they suffer from health

risks and side effects—have been less of a concern than quantifying who chooses

enhancement technology and why. Individual patients’ experiences with enhance-

ment technology, and especially how their multiple bodies live with it and its actual

effects, may call into question the meaning of enhancement and the promises of

medical technology. These personal stories can be used as bricks for the construction

of a new discourse. South Korea as a plastic surgery nation is a dubious discursive

construction, as it tells very little about the multiplicities, messiness, and contingen-

cies of living bodies actually engaged with enhancement technologies as medical,

cultural, and social practices. While the goal of this study is to show that South Korea

as a plastic surgery nation is, locally and globally, a “leaky” (Ormrod 1995) construc-

tion, that is only the beginning of the story. Future studies should look behind the

notion of the plastic surgery nation—beyond themedia discourse and the numbers and

the graphs—at the actual bodies, which may tell a different story.

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So Yeon Leem is a lecturer in the College of Liberal Studies, Seoul National University, South Korea. She

was awarded the Fernand Braudel International Fellowship fromMaison des Sciences de l’Homme, France,

in 2014–15. She has published a number of articles about female workers in a plastic surgery clinic,

visualization technologies and plastic surgery, feminist critiques of Korean stem cell research, feminist

science and technology studies (STS) theories, and new research methodologies, both solely and jointly, in

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal andKorean journals of STS,medical

ethics, and cultural anthropology. Her academic interests include globalization and the body, enhancement

technology, and science, technology, and affection.

The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation 71