Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads by Olga Fedorenko (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads by Olga Fedorenko
• Keewoong Lee

Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads by Olga Fedorenko. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2022. 298 pp.

Years ago, when I started my PhD, my supervisor, who was British, handed me a scrap of an advert for my reference. It was a largish newspaper ad for Hyundai Motor Company (hereafter Hyundai) from 1991 published in The Korea Economic Weekly. The ad shows an illustration of the Korean Peninsula, in [End Page 683] which cars drive on a long road that stretches from the northern to the southern ends of the peninsula. The rather prosaic copy reads, "The Korean Peninsula should be a unified land. All 70 million Koreans share the same dream." There is no sales pitch in sight. All you can see is the promotion of a good cause, that is the reunification of Korea.

Advertising is commercial speech. Sometimes, however, we come across advertisements that deviate from this stereotype. Just like the Hyundai ad mentioned above, there are ads not made to sell something but to communicate messages of public interest or transmit certain affects. Olga Fedorenko's Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads (hereafter Flower of Capitalism) focuses on this kind of advertising. Fedorenko's argument here is that publicness is a key characteristic of South Korean (hereafter Korean) advertising. In Korea, publicness is not confined to public service announcements but permeated into a broad range of advertisements. In fact, Fedorenko was surprised to find that Korean people do not appear to distinguish non-commercial public service announcements and commercial advertisements. Both are thrown into the same category of kwanggo or advertisement together with classifieds and notices of condolence (6).

The title of the book comes from the popular metaphor of unknown origin. Although Fedorenko interprets flower as "the crucial part of a phenomenon," it is equally plausible to take it as its opposite; that is, "something beautiful and glamorous but inessential." Fedorenko adopted this metaphor to show "willful disregard for advertising's commercial dimension" (7). However, I take it to mean the extraordinariness of "unlikely advertising," or an advertisement that does not look like one (29). From a foreigner's point of view, this brand of advertising might appear different and surprising. Indeed, that was my supervisor's reaction to the aforementioned Hyundai ad. While receiving all the praise and celebration, however, this kind of advertising remains a small minority in Korea, a small island in the sea of banal hard sell. Perhaps banality is the real face of advertising.

Throughout the book, Fedorenko seeks answers to her question, "where did Korean advertising's orientation to public interest come from and how does it work?" Fedorenko's approach looks very sound and robust. Her "multi-sited ethnography of advertising-related practices" proves to be extremely effective. There is a fine balance between ethnography, text analysis, and discourse analysis. With this approach, she is able to show that the process of advertising is relational, and its publicness a complex and contingent outcome of various actors' aggregate action. It looks much more accomplished and complete compared to my similarly minded previous attempt.¹ I am also deeply impressed by her [End Page 684] ethnographic work. In particular, her detailed description of what happens in the review board is very interesting and informative. It shows how censorship works in a chaotic, haphazard fashion, a far cry from the popular image of the rigid, monolithic bureaucracy.

Flower of Capitalism is without doubt a major contribution to the study of Korean advertising. There has been a dearth of academic books on Korean advertising, and more so when it comes to English-language publications. There is little to criticize in the book, showing the long and meticulous process of its preparation and production. However, there are a few things I would still like to point out. Firstly, there are some inaccurate or dubious claims. For example, associating humanist ads with hongik ingan (devotion to the welfare of humankind, the founding idea of the ancient kingdom Gojoseon) (30) seems a stretch. Hongik ingan is a political idea different from humanist...