Drawing: Cultivating freedom in South Korea’s highly standardised creative industries
This is an online event. Register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_R0eAIhcxSSimZfEUVGHyoA
Speaker: Chloé Paberz, INALCO, Institut Français de Recherche sur l’Asie de l’Est
Discussant: Jenn Law, social anthropologist & artist
Abstract
With the growing global success of manga, anime and video games, East Asia has become a key player in the production of global collective imaginaries. This production requires a massive and highly skilled workforce, including thousands of workers with excellent drawing skills that are used mainly to copy a style imposed by companies for commercial purposes. In South Korea, these “artists” do not generally see their work as creative, but as temporary positions within highly standardised industries. They tend to find value in the process itself, rather than in the result: firstly, in its learning potential; secondly, in their sense of belonging, and thirdly, in the pleasure of the movement. While the content is highly standardised, the workers’ movements seem to remain free of any standardisation. My seminar presentation will question the relationship between this freedom and the pleasure of their work experience and put it into perspective with the new training programmes designed to meet the needs of the creative industries.
Biographical note
Chloe Paberz is a social anthropologist and associate professor at INALCO Paris. Her research focuses on work culture in South Korea, particularly in the “creative industries” of video games, anime and manga. By describing local practices and their entanglements with international networks, she studies the changes brought about by information technologies and the culture of innovation in East Asia, and explores the ideal and material relationship between people and their work. Through ethnographies of game companies, manga classes, contemporary art studios and carpentry workshops, her research aims to understand the collective imaginaries and bodily techniques associated with non-human beings.
Jenn Law is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and editor based in Toronto. Working across print-based media, Law’s practice explores cultural ecologies and processes of material storytelling. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and publishes on contemporary art and print culture, working as a lecturer, curator, and editor in Canada, the UK, and South Africa. Law is the co-founder of the publishing platform Arts + Letters Press and is currently working on a book and digital archive project with Jillian Ross Print focusing on collaborative print culture in Canada.
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Artistry@Work is an online Seminar Series in the Anthropology of Artists & Artisans, running 2024–2025
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme–Université Clermont Auvergne, in collaboration with the Royal Anthropological Institute
Organisers: Dr Raphaël Blanchier & Professor Trevor Marchand
This seminar series in anthropology explores the situated practices of ‘artistry at work’ and, more broadly, the working lives and career trajectories of artists and artisans plying their trades in regions around the globe. The scope of the series also encompasses studies of occupations not conventionally categorised as “artistic” but that nevertheless foster creativity among (some) practitioners and even accommodate the development of “artist” identities.
