Flashed flesh, 'pay models' and entrepreneurial femininity in the creative economy of Korean Instagram

This photograph has many uses in both the model and photographer's Instagram feeds. It is not only a provocative picture of a Korean Instagram "pay model" (@so_lexy), but a calling card for the brands of both the model and a photographer looking for more gigs. It complies with Instagram's flesh exposure policies even as it pushes the edge of what is socially acceptable according to still-extant conservative social norms for young, Korean women. It is not a mere statement of narcissism or lasciviousness on the part of the model, but is an act of business, even if "art" is perhaps only a delivery vehicle, a kind of aesthetic cover. Photo by Andika Ahn (Instagram @andika_hendro_wibowo)

By Michael Hurt

The more I do work as a visual sociologist and ethnographer in Korea, the more I am fascinated by the many rabbit holes I am pulled down. The hypermodern Korea I live in ― and Korea's hypermodernity has permeated through society to differing extents and in different ways ― is most apparent when entering virtual spaces and interacting with people's many avatars and layers of artifice.

Whether it be the street fashion culture of the paepi, the growing, glowing influence of the drag culture in bigger pockets around major cities like Seoul and Busan, or a growing economy of models, photographer, makeup artists, and stylists ― and all the people who access this network of people, these "hypercultures" (not subcultures of people with values against/different from the "system," but subgroups of people possessed of the overculture's values who are engaged in specialized work for collective gain) are defining innovative and surprising ways to get famous, make money to pay bills and generally get ahead.

And in a time of a stagnating economy, massive under-employment and the general social malaise that comes with such instability and worry, the rise of Korea's Instagram makes a lot of social sense, especially the closer one chooses to look. In a time when the separation between producer and consumer, professional and amateur, and even paid and unpaid has become confusingly blurred to the point of near meaninglessness, a closer look at one of the cultures that sits on all these fault lines is certainly warranted ― and is endlessly fascinating.

The shadow economy of Korean Instagram

You may have Instagram, but do you really get it? There are the majority of us who use Instagram as a living, visual/pictorial diary and languish in the personal use/amateur zone of followers in the double or triple digits, and then there are those with 25-50,000-plus followers who make a substantial part of their living off their online activities. We've heard about the Jenner sisters' sponsorships, the money that can be made off advertising and the sheer power of pride in being an "influencer" of many sorts as stories in the news, on social media and around the proverbial water cooler.

But South Korea is a different story and does Instagram on a whole other level. Korean Instagram has evolved from pre-existing general and media-specific cultural patterns into a particular ecosystem of commodified creative skills and skilled workers that have actually come to play a large role in the social and economic lives of a group of creatives who, before the advent of Instagram, used to engage in those activities as hobbyists or avid amateurs.

What has evolved is a fiscal and political economy of image creators that has grown as the direct result of and response to shifts in the larger economy of a South Korea in which many younger people are un- or underemployed. At the same time, society has been witness to a compression of the skills required to create artistic expressions that would have been far more difficult and expensive to produce even two or three decades prior to now.

This skills compression is superficially similar to the process described by biologist Ernst Haeckels in his infamous (and erroneous) pronouncement that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," meaning that within the developmental growth cycle of an individual, the evolutionary stages of the entire species is recapitulated. Or something like that. The main takeaway here is that what has evolved on Korean Instagram is not only at least the sum of all image production skills that has existed before it, but also a higher level of skills and the economics to properly compensate them that is quite unlike anything anywhere else in the world.

In these heavily hypermediated and commodified days, exposure is an important part of gaining concrete and countable markers of cultural capital. On the social media service Instagram, the number of one's followers weighed against the numbers of one's posted pictures results in a cultural capital quotient as a "social influencer" that can result in money in the bank.

And it is not just how flesh is shown or how much, but how it is professionally made up, lit and shot with knowledge and gear that was highly specialized only a decade ago. Indeed, the digitalization of media is only the most patently obvious shift in the hypermodern content of today. Marshall McLuhan may have shown the world that the "medium is the message" in that it is not just the content of a new medium that changes society and the way we live, but the medium itself that has a huge social impact. For McLuhan, this was television. For us today, this is certainly social media and Instagram is its prophet/profit. But it is also true that the modes of media-making is the message, especially as evidenced by the huge changes in the social relations that have to happen for the media we see to even exist in the first place.

Korean Instagram has developed its own fiscal and creative economy in which those involved in the image-making process can be compensated for the services they perform in the process, all according to the key commodity that is most useful and relevant to the particular skill set they possess. And each agent in the exchange is using a particular form of cultural capital that is quite useful within the peculiar creative economy of Korean Instagram but only partially (if at all) useful in the larger field of society.

As for me, I presently have around 2000 followers on my main Instagram account (@kuraeji), which serves as my personal account, as well as my portfolio as a photographer. However, as far as marketers would be concerned, this isn't an impressive number when combined with the number of people I follow, which is about 2300, as well as the approximately 6300 pictures I have posted since 2012, none of which I have deleted. So when divided into my number of followers, I am not very "influential" at all compared to a Korean high school-age fashionista with an equal amount (about 2000) followers, following very few other people, with perhaps only 20 or so picture posts. Having 2000-plus followers with only 20 posts is quite impressive. So would having around 25,000 followers with fewer than 50 or so posts.

Regardless of whether the followers are real people or fake bots made for show, having a profile like that will attract small beauty/makeup/fashion brands to request the Instagrammer to display their product in pictures, often usually including a payout of perhaps around 80―150,000 won per product display picture post. If one is lucky enough to breathe the rarefied air of Instagrammers with follower counts in the hundreds of thousands or more, product placement posts can command payouts of thousands of dollars each, which can add up to a sizable income.

And it's not just models baring more skin that are the anchor around which this creative economy evolves. There are makeup artists who participate as servitors of model-photographer production, as well as makeup artists and beauty product promoters who participate as well.

Claudia (@funskincare), an Indonesian Instagrammer with 27,000 followers, poses at a beauty/skin care expo (@kbeautycollective) in Seoul. Photo by Michael Hurt

What is interesting is how the photograph is the central currency around which this particular political economy revolves, which actually privileges photographers in the equation, who are able to leverage good photographs to the models who need them to bolster/grow their feeds, who also employ and retain makeup artists and stylists, who typically charge anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 won per look, respectively, if they are paid professionally.

Aspiring Instagram model Dasl (Instagram @das925) poses for the author's camera at a coffee shop in Seoul. Photo by Michael Hurt

'Entrepreneurial femininity'

What is interesting to note is how similar the process is between how women's bodies are used to make money in K-pop and in the Instagram-based beauty/fashion/model economy. Scholars Brooke Erin Duffy and Emily Hund put forth an extremely facile concept of "entrepreneurial femininity" in their article "'Having it All' on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding Among Fashion Bloggers", published in 2015 and before the Instagram economy coalesced into what it is today.

The authors talk about an "entrepreneurial femininity" that centralizes fashion bloggers' (own) female bodies as a means of production through a system of self-care and curation of the body and all its accoutrements, all while actively (and necessarily) masking the work and productive processes that went into producing the glittering images on the screens, i.e. "I just woke up like this" or "#nofilter."

One of the fascinating things about looking at the seemingly unremarkable world of Korean Instagram through the lens of "entrepreneurial femininity" is just how much an academic term created to describe circa-2014-era big fashion bloggers (this is an eon ago in internet years) seems to fit a social phenomenon in Korea in 2019 to a much more complete "T."

Embodied work

There is a legion of young Korean women marketing themselves under the Korean term "pay models" who charge (mostly) 20―50-something Korean men anywhere from 30,000 to 80,000 won to pose for (mostly) groups of such photographers through rental studios. (Which was one of the major formative moments for the Korean "Me Too" movement, through the incident involving model Yang Hye-won and allegations of being forced to pose nude against her will and unwanted sexual touching by the photographers.)

Since then, many chul-sa groups of hobbyist model-photographer posing (which have been around since the early 2000s on Korean internet cafes) have adjusted their practices through strict rule enforcement and vetting systems (e.g. no touching of the model under any circumstances, especially to "adjust her hair," and requiring all members to attend at least three group sessions before doing any one-on-one work. Korean photographers contacted for this article report that this incident has actually forced a welcome shaking/shaping up of practices among more serious photographers in Korea.

This also quite likely created a more conscientious environment for the growth of the "pay model" on Korean Instagram. According to several pay models I interviewed, there are two main ways to get paid work as a model on Korean Instagram. One is to be an in-demand (read: pretty and willing to pose in a risque fashion) pay model who commands a decent hourly rate of say 60,000 won, usually booked at a minimum of two hours per session.

Although 60,000 won seems to be an average of the several models I've spoken with who have fewer than 100,000 followers, one with 100,000 followers reported the highest hourly rate of 500,000 won. This leads to the other major way to earn money through Insta-influence, that of paid endorsements, or all those images of young female Instagrammers posing with specific products in their feeds, which garners anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 won per image or set, depending on the size of the marketer's budget and the size of the feed.

Additionally, there are higher-order groups ― marketers who gather together either influencer with high follower counts or who have the potential to gain high follower numbers ― who gather groups of models to leverage into the ability to charge brands flat rates to plug their products into their network of models, paying the individual models either by commission or a flat rate for being in the network.

Art as cover

But what is even more interesting is how leveraging the female body on screens for commercial gain in South Korea mirrors the path taken by K-pop to do the same. Since South Korean society tends to hold putative works of art (especially "fine art") in high esteem and in a special social category above the fray of the usual social criticism that comes in Korea's oft-mentioned "conservative culture," one of the best ways to carry out "entrepreneurial femininity" in a society that infamously used to bully young women out of their jobs for daring to post bikini shots on the now-defunct Cyworld social media platform in the early 2000s is to couch one's productive work within known categories of artistic production.

This seems to have been a pressure that pushed the model-photographer chul-sa formation into the direction of the "arty" look of the hwabo (roughly: "photo editorial") and the utilization of professional makeup artists, rental studios and stylists.

Given that aspects of this underground social institution have been in place a decade (e.g. the chul-sa system) before Instagram was even Kevin Systrom's very good idea, the Korean Instagram economy has evolved in a particular way that it has not in other places in the world. In short, Korean Instagrammers and their legions of photographers, stylists, makeup artists, and even graphic designers and retouchers, have created a nearly unparalleled level of quality that rivals the level of professional fashion and photography producers found in the pages of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar.

In the end, this is a job, and the truly professional professionals are doing work to provide and accomplish goals, just like the rest of us. Korean Instagram model @so_lexy with her newborn baby. Photo from Instagram (@so_lexy)

What makes the Korean Instagram economy inherently interesting is how different social actors have come together to make money and art in a symbiotic/mutually beneficial way that utilizes a unique combination of domestic tendencies such as the chul-sa system and foreign technologies such as Instagram. It just goes to show that anything is possible in a Korean society in which people need to come up with creative solutions in a time of endemic underemployment, gender trouble and a general social malaise related to the definition of work and leisure, as well as the social pressure to be creative while remaining constantly, relentlessly productive.

Dr. Michael W. Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies and started Korea's first street fashion blog in 2006. He researches youth, subcultures and street fashion as a research professor at the University of Seoul and also writes on visual sociology and cultural studies at his blog and book development site Deconstructing Korea. His PR/image curation company Iconology Korea also engages in an effort to positively shape images of social others in Korea, construct a positive face for Korea-based or Korea-interested clients, and positive images of Korea in the world. (Instagram @IconologyKorea)

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