Four years before the end of the twentieth century, Paul Keating’s ‘tricorne’ vision of Australia as an Asia-centric republic reconciled to its violent colonial past with its First Nations peoples was inscribed in the national psyche. But it was his successor, John Howard, whose legacy stamped Australia’s identity card for the twenty-first century as America’s fifty-first state, a cultural colony floating between the Indian and Pacific oceans, comfortable and relaxed, always alert but never alarmed. This national view still dominates today, supercharged by Howard’s neoliberal fundamentalism and a new ‘new world order’ unlike any other preceding it. As the United States transitions into a post-neoliberal, authoritarian interface, our relationship requires a reimagining of our foreign policy settings. How we do this in our cultural context is a complex process of disentanglement from our current circumstances, and involves creating compelling overtures to new and occasional partners. Some instructions can be found in the experience of one of our neighbours.
Three years before the end of the twentieth century, I was living and working in Seoul during the Asian Financial Crisis, which profoundly impacted the economies of Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea and significantly impacted those of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. In South Korea, the Asian Financial Crisis was known as the IMF Crisis; this nomenclature is significant because it inverted the orientalist view of the conditions that created the event and cast the IMF—the International Monetary Fund—in the role of antagonist. The financial meltdown precipitated much soul-searching in the Republic, about not only its economic policy but its place in the world. The re-evaluation of South Korea’s currency in a global context stimulated its unpacking of the agency of culture and cultural production in engaging with the world.
I had been invited back to the Korean National University of the Arts in 1997 to direct its graduating class after a first stint in the School of Drama’s inaugural year—an opportunity that gave me a front-row seat to Korea’s journey over the following two decades. Some colleagues and students argued that Korea’s insularity had created some of the conditions for the IMF’s draconian approach. The argument went that if the West really knew Korea, then it would not have treated the country so poorly. The way forward was to take Korea’s riches to the world, which would lead to an understanding, appreciation and admiration of Korean culture, ensuring better treatment of its people in the future. An oversimplification, but the sentiment reflected many of the conversations I had in this period, and many of the experiences I had as an artist, curator and cultural operator in Asia and Europe in subsequent decades.
In truth the context for these conversations—and the beginning of this transformation—predated the IMF Crisis. I first lived and worked in Korea in 1994, the same year that President Kim Young Sam announced a bigger government role for the cultural industries, which is often cited as an origin point of the Hallyu, the Korean Wave. It wasn’t until the very late 1990s that the Hallyu began to wash up on the shores of neighbouring countries. Television soap operas, feature films, pop music, and to a lesser extent fashion, magazines and the performing arts, made a phenomenal impact, exceeding the expectations of a population of fifty million umbilically cut from their northern half and vulnerable to the volatile geopolitics of the region. Even China was smitten. On the back of this wave, Korea turned itself inside out, from a country beset by a crippling identity crisis to a nation hell-bent on internationalising itself from the ground up. This transformation led to a perception of Korea as an imaginative, creative and innovative player on the world stage, embedded in the global culture and punching way above its weight as a middle-sized regional power—a vision commensurate with Keating’s future for Australia.
The background to this cultural reset was South Korea’s fraught relationship with America. Anti-American sentiment was high amongst the civilian population throughout the 1980s and 1990s. When I arrived in 1994, there were still 37,000 American troops based on the southern half of the peninsula, many of whom rolled through Yongsan Garrison, Seoul. The only non-Korean language TV service was the Armed Forces Korean Network, whose programs were interpolated with American propaganda barely disguised as Community Service Announcements. One of my students was a student protestor who had worn nothing but the American flag on his march up the steps to Cheong Wa Dae (the Blue House—South Korea’s version of the White House). Almost every day on my way to work, I walked past buses housing riot police at the ready. When I returned in 1997, the university had been relocated to a collection of buildings that I was often reminded had been used by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, which one of my colleagues, a poet, told me had tortured him because of his dissident activities. May 18 had just been declared a National Memorial Day in honour of almost 2000 civilians who had been killed in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising against the authoritarian President Chun Doo-hwan, who had enjoyed the support of the US government, the involvement of which in the insurrection was widely perceived and later proved. The Gwangju Uprising was a pivotal point of resistance that punctuated the postwar military dictatorships of Park Chung Hee (from 1961) and Chun Doo-hwan (from 1980), both of whom operated under American oversight, and the parochial extension of Japan’s brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. South Korea’s ‘American Story’ is embedded in its twentieth-century history and persists today as a conundrum to be wrestled with, even more so now with the seismic shift in American political culture.
A sustained contradiction
As the Chilean Australian artist and writer Juan Davila, quoted by Chris McAuliffe in his essay ‘Living the Dream: the Contemporary Australian Arist Abroad’, advised forty years ago, ‘We should find a dialogue constituting ourselves as a difference, not as a peripheral “another”, but as a sustained contradiction or a “grand Autre”, the opposite of what the English attitude has been.’ Davila’s instruction is a compelling template for a middle power, identifying the need to understand and communicate the value of one’s own identifying parts to distinguish oneself from others. In twentieth-century Korea, this contradiction was exercised by a narrative of resistance to the successive occupations of Japan and America, and, as the nation emerged into the twenty-first century, the vicissitudes of the IMF Crisis. South Korea holds a place in the global cultural imaginary because of this resistance, the wave it created and how it rode its momentum. But it did not appear from nowhere; it was created in response to crisis.
Director of the Centre for Critical Korean Studies at the University of California Professor Joseph Jonghyun Jeon apprises the effects of the Hallyu through the prism of one of its most successful products, the Netflix television series Squid Game (Ojingŏ Keim, 2021). Jeon asserts that it would be a mistake to see the Hallyu as a wonderful accident of business and creativity when it was in facta highly funded, state-coordinated strategy that reproduced and transposed the logics of industrial developmentalism of the earlier postwar years, during which South Korea rapidly grew from one of the poorest economies in the world to one of the richest. So successful was this policy that within a decade South Korea had resumed its role as the world’s fastest-growing economy, and by the early-2010s, the Hallyu was peaking. Over the last decade progress has slowed, due in part to the interference of right-wing governments using strategies like the Korean Blacklist to directly control artistic and cultural production. Notwithstanding this, the country became a sustained contradiction for two decades, and an indicator for Australia that recalibrating a nation’s cultural settings requires a whole-of-government approach.
Australia in crisis
South Korea’s cultural transformation was a direct response to the Asian Financial Crisis. If a crisis is the necessary condition for change, then Australia is ripe. The democracy crisis that faces Western countries in the wake of the 2024 US election is a compelling case for the kind of soul-searching that transformed South Korea.
Like South Korea, we share a longstanding relationship with the United States, although our histories and circumstances are divergent. Like South Korea, we are not alone in facing our crisis; we have fellow-travellers in the Anglosphere, including Canada and the countries of the United Kingdom. But limiting our identity to this colonial reference point is our greatest weakness. For all our cultural diversity and claims to independence, Australian cultural production, policy and governance are largely determined by the Anglosphere, led by our cultural and colonial masters, America and England. Their enormous influence shapes our default settings.
In the Indo-Pacific region we are like children in a playground designed by helicopter-parents; we are immature, we struggle to make new friends, learn new languages and come up with new ideas, and we lack the confidence to implement them. Always looking to America and England for guidance, mentorship, instruction, we are lost in global culture without their supervision. In times of relative peace and security this complacency—inherited from Howard’s vision—solicits irritation and frustration from those who view the world in a more complex way; when, as now, that complexity manifests in social, cultural, economic and military forms all at once, our complacency is a manifestation of our immaturity, our failure to grow with and in the world pointedly illustrated by our inability to engage in truth telling about this country’s foundation.
This framing tends to the garden view of Australia as a white, patriarchal, colonialist and capitalist society. But no country is a singular iteration, it exists as a multiplicity of histories, cultures, desires and ambitions; only its geography is fixed. The reality of our daily lives is closer to Davila’s description. Our defining characteristics are contested, conflicted, multi-faceted. Our struggle as a nation is to offer this complexity to the world in a way that draws others to us. For decades we have preferred the colonial (and racist) default setting, and this has inscribed an image of Australia in the international community which has damaged our ‘brand’.
From 2009 to 2011 I was based in Brussels curating the IETM-Australia Council Collaboration Project, an international program of which a key ambition was to increase contact and collaboration between the European and Australian contemporary performing arts scenes. The resistance from the European side was significant. Australia was not as attractive a partner as to other players such as South Korea and Brazil, in part because our politics around migration, climate change and refugees were seen as objectionable—a politics that had fallen in lockstep with our Anglophone parents. We were better known for exporting a model of militarised border politics than for any unique cultural contribution. Trying to communicate this negative sentiment to Australian ears was very difficult, largely because Australians feel the perception of their country to be untouched by their governments’ draconian policies. ‘Everyone loves Australia!’ Only they don’t.
How does Australia grow up in a hostile world?
Our default settings in international policy need recalibrating. It will require a deft hand to extricate ourselves from the future misadventures of America’s oligarchy whilst at the same time reaching out to occasional partners —nations with whom we can develop trust and a shared worldview— to bed down constructive friendships. How we grow up in an increasingly hostile world is a question for all Australians, but a critical one for our artists and cultural operators.
To confront the crisis in Western democracy, our cultural frameworks need to transcend America and England. We can learn much from how our neighbours in the region have addressed their own crises with cultural responses. That could mean Korea, as exemplified here, but Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan also provide instruction on different responses to different crises, such as how to navigate the rise of China. We desperately need to overcome our reliance on English as our sole language in international communications. Our policy needs to move away from transactional modes of engagement and adapt the relational ways of arts and cultural practices. The challenge of Artificial Intelligence forces us to confront our very existence and ask what aspects distinguish us from other species, and properly valorise them. The creation, practice and expression of art is one such aspect. Not all cultures are interested in this inquiry, especially those subject to the Western version of neoliberalism that seeks the eradication of the arts as a corollary of its success. But there are cultures for whom the arts are central to the ongoing production of identity, and we must seek them out.
Whichever templates, languages and processes we choose to use, commitment to a culture-led strategy is paramount, because it is in the expression of culture that a nation’s identity is forged, recognised and appreciated. To make that strategy sustainable, it must be underwritten by the valorisation of the arts as a public good, and by support for the cultural ecology and industries within which the arts are held.
In the international arena, a clear sense of national identity is crucial. If we are interested in the value of our own identifying parts—those that distinguish us from and align us with others—then will we begin to create a clear sense of our own identity, not one borrowed or imposed by our colonial and cultural masters. We can become a nation that sustains itself as a contradiction made of a multiplicity of contested histories and experiences rather than a singular untruth: a nation attractive to others for its independence, self-determination and self-confidence, complex but globally relatable. Without an honest, deep national self-reflection on our new circumstances, we will, at this critical tipping point, be caught on the hook of our past, our futures eaten by the failures in this, our present.