Taejabo: Remediations and Materiality of South Korean Wall Posters

Abstract:An iconic medium of underground antiauthoritarian student activism in the 1980s, taejabo, or large "big-character" paper posters, has experienced a revival in postmillennial South Korea. Despite democratization and the availability of numerous online platforms, taejabo remains an important low-tech medium for students' expression on matters of local, national, and international significance. This article explores taejabo's transformations—from flourishing as an analogue counter-establishment medium in the 1980s, to experimental digital adaptations and the medium's decline in the 1990s, to taejabo's comeback in the 2010s as a postdigital medium. Drawing on scholarship on remediation, media materiality, and postdigitality, this article argues that taejabo's abiding relevance and coherent identity have been anchored in its ontology as publicly displayed large sheets of inscribed paper, and in its material performativity. In particular, taejabo's spatiality enables it to not simply represent different ideas but emplace them, literally confronting onlookers and materially transforming campuses into places of contestation. Contemporary taejabo's intermediality between paper and digital illustrates how online media, rather than being disruptive, are incorporated into established media practices.