Entering the Space-out competition: I tried to be the best at doing nothing – but my opponent had a secret weapon
The Space-out competition, held in Melbourne on Monday, was the ultimate test of whether I could fight my own nature and embrace nothingness. Created by South Korean artist Woopsyang as a response to her own experience of burnout, the competition has been running for more than a decade around the world with a simple proposition: a mini-city of competitors, all dressed as their jobs, sit in a public space doing absolutely nothing for 90 minutes.
Related: 'A diagnosis can sweep away guilt': the delicate art of treating ADHD
Laughing, chatting, using technology or falling asleep results in disqualification – 'lifeguards' patrol around monitoring everyone's activity, or lack thereof. A large yellow card is a warning, and a red one is a disqualification. Participants can raise smaller coloured cards to ask for warmth, water, a massage or to exit the competition. Every 15 minutes 'doctors' measure participants' heart rates. The watching crowds vote on their favourite competitor, which, when combined with the heart rate measurement, determines the overall winner.Because I am a self-respecting journalist, my outfit is a fedora adorned with a card reading PRESS. My competitors include an actual dog, an elderly man (who turns out to be the oldest-ever participant in the competition), a woman sitting in a tub with a functioning fountain on her head, a Teletubby, a chef (with a Ratatouille toy on their head) and a bunch of young kids.
We're all invited to write our reasons for participating on a board the public can read and vote on. The answers range from earnest to silly. 'To calm my nervous system,' one reads. 'I'm extremely unemployed,' reads another.
Woopsyang comes to the stage, wearing the traditional male Korean ceremonial garb, including the wide-brimmed gat, and makes a speech via an unfurling ribbon. 'Sometimes doing nothing can be the most powerful and valuable act,' it reads. We participate in stretching and aerobic exercises before sitting on our mats. The timer begins.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see my partner taking photos of me, but I try to ignore him and focus on a fixed point in front of me. I try not to move. I'm desperate to get up, to shake my limbs, but I keep sitting. My mind is not blank, but I try to engage the meditation techniques my Buddhist mother taught me.
I can hear comedian commentators Harry Jun and Oliver Coleman telling the crowd that the young boys left the competition 20 minutes in, that warnings have already begun to be handed out, that someone's ice-cream has melted. I want to look around, but I can't. I can hear the public around me. I feel like an animal in a zoo.
The only marker of time is when a doctor approaches to measure my heart rate; I'm surprised to find the 15-minute increments feel shorter every time. Each time a doctor comes over, I know I'm closer to my goal – and my heart rate is steadily decreasing. I'm in the zone, baby.
I raise my blue card once to ask for water, and my yellow one once for warmth, which turns out to be a small sock with a heat bag in it (not useful!). But after a while, doing nothing becomes quite pleasant. My mind is still not quite blank but I enter a liminal state. The sound of the crowd has become white noise. When the final whistle is blown, I'm shocked that it has been an hour and a half. I could happily have sat and done nothing for much longer.
Alas, I do not place – the fountain lady, who admits that the trickling water in her costume was designed to make her fellow contestants need to pee, is declared the winner. I find out later via Instagram that she has been working on the costume for months, unlike mine, which I made in about two minutes. She deserves the win.
But winning is kind of beside the point of the Space-out competition. I proudly tell my family that I managed to sit still and be quiet for 90 minutes straight in public. I won't get $100 from my mum for this but I finally won the bet, after all.
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Los Angeles Times
6 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
South Koreans are obsessed with Netflix's ‘K-pop Demon Hunters.' Here's why
SEOUL — When South Koreans start to obsess over a movie or TV series, they abbreviate its name, a distinction given to Netflix's latest hit 'K-pop Demon Hunters.' In media headlines and in every corner of the internet, the American-made film is now universally referred to as 'Keh-deh-hun' — the first three syllables of the title when read aloud in Korean. And audiences are already clamoring for a sequel. The animated film follows a fictional South Korean girl group named 'HUNTR/X' as its three members — Rumi, Mira and Zoey — try to deliver the world from evil through the power of song and K-pop fandom. Since its release in June, it has become the most watched original animated film in Netflix history, with millions of views worldwide, including the U.S. and South Korea, where its soundtrack has topped the charts on local music streaming platform Melon. Fans have also cleaned out the gift shop at the National Museum of Korea, which has run out of a traditional tiger pin that resembles one of the movie's characters. Much of the film's popularity in South Korea is rooted in its keenly observed details and references to Korean folklore, pop culture and even national habits — the result of having a production team filled with K-pop fans, as well as a group research trip to South Korea that co-director Maggie Kang led in order to document details as minute as the appearance of local pavement. There are nods to traditional Korean folk painting, a Korean guide to the afterlife, the progenitors of K-pop and everyday mannerisms. In one scene, at a table in a restaurant where the three girls are eating, viewers might notice how the utensils are laid atop a napkin, an essential ritual for dining out in South Korea — alongside pouring cups of water for everyone at the table. 'The more that I watch 'Keh-deh-hun,' the more that I notice the details,' South Korean music critic Kim Yoon-ha told local media last month. 'It managed to achieve a verisimilitude that would leave any Korean in awe.' :: Despite its subject matter and association with the 'K-wave,' that catch-all term for any and all Korean cultural export, 'K-pop Demon Hunters,' at least in the narrowest sense, doesn't quite fit the bill. Produced by Sony Pictures and directed by Korean Canadian Kang and Chris Appelhans — who has held creative roles on other animated films such as 'Coraline' and 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' — the movie is primarily in English and geared toward non-Korean audiences. But its popularity in South Korea is another sign that the boundaries of the K-wave are increasingly fluid — and that, with more and more diaspora Korean artists entering the mix, it flows in the opposite direction, too. Those barriers have already long since broken down in music: many K-pop artists and songwriters are non-Korean or part of the Korean diaspora, reflecting the genre's history of foreign influences such as Japanese pop or American hip-hop. 'Once a cultural creation acquires a universality, you can't just confine it to the borders of the country of origin, which is where K-pop is today,' said Kim Il-joong, director of the content business division at the Korea Creative Content Agency, a government body whose mission is to promote South Korean content worldwide. 'Despite what the name 'K-pop' suggests, it is really a global product.' In 'K-pop Demon Hunters,' Zoey is a rapper from Burbank. In addition, the soundtrack was written and performed by a team that includes producers, artists and choreographers associated with some of the biggest real-life K-pop groups of the past decade. Streaming productions are increasingly flying multiple flags, too: Apple TV's 'Pachinko' or Netflix's 'XO, Kitty' are both American productions that were filmed in South Korea. But few productions have been able to inspire quite the same level of enthusiasm as 'K-pop Demon Hunters,' whose charm for many South Koreans is how accurately it captures local idiosyncrasies and contemporary life. While flying in their private jet, the three girls are shown sitting on the floor even though there is a sofa right beside them. This tendency to use sofas as little more than backrests is an endless source of humor and self-fascination among South Koreans, most of whom would agree that the centuries-old custom of sitting on the floor dies hard. South Korean fans and media have noted that the characters correctly pronounce 'ramyeon,' or Korean instant noodles. The fact that ramyeon is often conflated with Japanese ramen — which inspired the invention of the former decades ago — has long been a point of exasperation for many South Koreans and local ramyeon companies, which point to the fact that the Korean adaption has since evolved into something distinct. It's a small difference — the Korean version is pronounced 'rah myun' — but one that it pays to get right in South Korea. The girls' cravings for ramyeon during their flight also caught the eye of Ireh, a member of the real-life South Korean girl group Purple Kiss who praised the film's portrayals of life as a K-pop artist. 'I don't normally eat ramyeon but whenever I go on tour, I end up eating it,' she said in a recent interview with local media. 'The scene reminded me of myself.' South Korean fans have also been delighted by a pair of animals, Derpy and Sussy, which borrow from jakhodo, a genre of traditional Korean folk painting in which tigers and magpies are depicted side by side, popularized during the Joseon Dynasty in the 19th century. In the film, Derpy is the fluorescent tiger with goggle eyes that always appears with its sidekick, a three-eyed bird named Sussy. Though they have long since been extinct, tigers were once a feared presence on the Korean peninsula, at times coming down from the mountains to terrorize the populace. They were also revered as talismans that warded off evil spirits. But much like Derpy itself, jakhodo reimagined tigers as friendlier, oftentimes comical beings. Historians have interpreted this as the era's political satire: the magpie, audacious in the presence of a great predator, represented the common man standing up to the nobility. The movie is peppered with homages to Korean artists throughout history who are seen today as the progenitors of contemporary K-pop. There are apparent nods to the 'Jeogori Sisters,' a three-piece outfit that was active from 1939 to 1945 and is often described as Korea's first girl group, followed by the Kim Sisters, another three-piece that found success in the U.S., performing in Las Vegas and appearing on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' Longtime K-pop fans might recognize the demon hunters from the 1990s as S.E.S., a pioneering girl group formed by S.M. Entertainment, the label behind present-day superstars Aespa and Red Velvet. (Bada, S.E.S.'s main vocalist, recently covered 'Golden,' the film's headline track, on YouTube.) For a long time, South Korean audiences have often complained about outside depictions of the country as inauthentic and out of touch. Not anymore. 'Korea wasn't just shown as an extra add-on as it has been for so long,' Kim said. ''K-pop Demon Hunters' did such a great job depicting Korea in a way that made it instantly recognizable to audiences here.'
Time Magazine
a day ago
- Time Magazine
The Best K-Dramas That Are Not on Netflix
For better or worse, Netflix is the king of the global K-drama phenomenon. The streamer has invested billions of dollars in South Korean TV—even if the people really driving K-drama's success appear to see little of it—and in return, 80% of subscribers watch Korean content as the streamer garners a bevy of awards for its trouble. Yet, as Netflix rushes productions an focuses on sequels, sometimes prioritizing celebrity over quality, other streamers have swooped in to fight for their piece of the pie. Which might come as a surprise to some fans, with Disney and Prime Video consistently going minimal when it comes to marketing their K-dramas in the West. But if they won't tell you about the surprisingly great K-dramas that aren't on Netflix, by gum, we will. Given the rate at which Disney spews out content, it's no surprise that Hulu and Disney+ dominate this list, though there's a surprising amount of platform diversity as Prime Video and even Tubi capitalize on our continuing enthusiasm for South Korean media. That said, one streamer that doesn't appear is Viki—a platform devoted entirely to Asian content. An argument could be made that it deserves its own list. However, a clutch of issues, including limited versatility regarding devices and a hard-to-justify cost for general viewers in a sea of streamers offering a broader array of content, makes it increasingly hard to recommend. We also excluded shows that, while not Netflix originals, are consistently available to watch on Netflix (most notably, My Mister and Reply 1988, both justifiably regarded as two of the finest K-dramas). Those limitations don't even remotely dent our options though. The titles listed below evoke the K-drama at its best—exploring the depths of human emotion, the power of community, and the importance of truth—and, in many ways, a level of quality that's become harder to find. Moving (Hulu; Disney+ outside the U.S.) You can't discuss the best K-dramas without including Moving. At the height of superhero fatigue in 2023, Kang Full—adapting his 2015 webtoon—fashioned a fresh take by asking: What if super powers sucked? Gone is the tired exceptionalism of American superheroes as Kang places them on the fringes of society. A desperate, frightened group pursued by a government that perceives a threat in their otherness. On a personal level, Moving's allegory of superpowers as disability—cemented by disabled superhero Lee Jae-man (Kim Sung-kyun)—is an overdue approach to the genre. From a broader K-drama perspective, its focus on bringing people together, on empathy, and on dispelling the perceived barriers of our differences—led by literal power couple Bong-seok (Lee Jung-ha) and Jang Hui-soo (Go Young-jang)—elevates it above the stumbling output of the MCU and Netflix's cynical attempt to capitalize on its success with the mostly horrid The Atypical Family. As I wrote in 2023, it's almost unfair to call Moving a superhero show. It's a category of television unto itself. Revenant (Hulu; Disney+ outside the U.S.) 2023 was a big year for Disney and K-drama—and this list, it turns out. Before Moving became a word-of-mouth sensation, Revenant offered a tour through the greatest hits of South Korean folk horror to remind us what we're missing as western horror increasingly shifts to hastily-assembled franchises like the Conjuring universe and relying on jump scares alone. You know you're in good hands when Kim Tae-ri's on-screen. Revenant doubles that surety by casting her in dual roles, as the troubled yet sensitive Gu San-yeong and the demon possessing her. Together with folklore professor Yeom Hae-sang (Oh Jung-se), San-yeong comes to understand both her own grief and the trauma death leaves behind as Revenant embraces the quiet, brooding dread that makes Korean horror genuinely unnerving. Masterly performances and production make Revenant an unnerving gem. The sympathetic eye it casts over lost souls, however, is what truly makes it an unusual joy. Light Shop (Hulu; Disney+ outside the U.S.) Speaking of sympathetic horror, Kang Full continues his reimagining of well-trodden genres as explorations of marginalization in 2024's Light Shop. Ju Ji-hoon and Park Bo-young lead an ensemble cast as Kang proposes that the fear with which we regard the creatures that populate our horror stories is really a manifestation of our own unchallenged biases. It's not as original an approach as Moving, but if that series is a bombastic allegory for the treatment of those who exist outside of perceived norms, then Light Shop is a quieter rejection of the othering of those we don't immediately understand. In a murky, haunted alley through which both the living and dead must travel, Jung Won-young (Ju) and his titular light shop serve as a beacon that literally shines a light on how unremoved we are from the spirits. The only difference between us and these creatures we fear, Kang suggests, is that we get to leave the alley once we exit Jung's sanctuary. Marry My Husband (Prime Video) Amazon has been quietly outstanding with its infrequent Korean originals. No Gain No Love and the recent Good Boy are a measure of that. But it's Prime Video's time-travel revenge-romance that, despite its crummy title, is most notable. In a hackneyed genre in K-drama, Marry My Husband blends a welcome self-awareness of its own goofiness with a rare modern deployment of a She's All That makeover to overcome the usual K-drama cliches where it counts. When Kang Ji-won (Park Min-young) discovers her layabout husband Park Min-hwan (Lee Yu-kyun) in bed with her best friend Jeong Su-min (Song Ha-yoon), plotting what to do when Ji-won finally succumbs to the terminal cancer she's been battling, Min-hwan murders her. At the same moment, she transports into her past self—complete with thick-rimmed glasses and a ponytail so you know she's not secretly a smokeshow—from where she plans to visit her cancer upon Su-min and carve a better life after ruining her and Min-hwan by inciting the stress that made her sick in them. That might sound like a typically sadistic revenge thriller a la The Glory. Marry My Husband, however, is surprisingly subtle in exploring and ultimately challenging Ji-won's twisting morals, making her a far more sympathetic protagonist, and is relatively sensitive around the subject of health. It also has a great cat. The surest sign of Marry My Husband's quality is that it already has a Japanese remake, released on Prime Video in June. Blood Free (Hulu; Disney+ outside the U.S.) Ju Ji-hoon turns up again in Lee Soo-yeon's near-future Korea dominated by AI chatbots and synthetic meat. CEO Yun Ja-yu (Han Hyo-joo) navigates the political and corporate pitfalls of her synthesized flesh empire, protected (and kind of turned on) by superman bodyguard Woo Chae-woon (Ju), a former naval officer with his own mysteries to solve—including the mystery of his cold heart. As the controversy around her cheap, 'blood free' meat threatens corporate and political interests across South Korea and puts Yun's life in constant danger, both are forced closer together with both romantic and tragic consequences. Lee is the mind behind the criminally underrated Stranger (which you can find, yes, on Netflix). Her output since, including Stranger's second season, has been tepid. But in Blood Free, she rediscovers some of the chemistry and fun that made her crime caper so watchable. Whether all that fun is deliberate on Lee's part isn't always clear, but Blood Free is a goofy and surprisingly watchable sci-fi bodyguard thriller. Live (Tubi, CJ ENM Selects—accessible via Prime Video, including a 7-day free trial) K-dramas have a habit of lionizing the police without nuance, but Live presents a more complex picture as it follows young people exiting a punitive job market to train as police officers—led by Bae Sung-woo as their troubled instructor Oh Yang-chon. The first half-hour of Live is genuinely awful, so be warned there is, not unusually for K-dramas, a rough patch to endure before the series hits its stride. Once it does, through a relatively honest look at both the fallibility of authority and the moral ramifications of power, somehow paired with all the usual trappings of K-drama as the show interrupts its procedural with a not always believable romance subplot with the patented K-drama melodrama that goes with it, Live becomes the ne plus ultra of Korean police dramas (that aren't on Netflix) and one of the most underrated K-dramas of the past decade. Rookie Cops (Hulu; Disney+ outside the U.S.) If that all sounds a bit too high-brow, Disney's second Korean original 2022's Rookie Cops eschews all sense of realism for a more typical K-drama approach (including an out-of-nowhere confirmation of the afterlife). In the bright and breezy romance, Ko Eun-kang (Chae Soo-bin) joins Police University—which does not sound like a real thing—to follow her first love, only to discover once she arrives that there is, in fact, more than one boy in the world. If Live's romantic subplot felt tacked on, presumably under the duress of K-drama expectations, here the police plot is simply a vehicle to smush K-drama characters' faces together. That might sound like a knock, but Rookie Cops is a surprisingly spry police procedural even if that aspect is not the main attraction (so to speak). It might not have much to actually say about the police, but it sure is fun. Argon (Tubi, CJ ENM Selects—accessible via Prime Video, including a 7-day free trial) It's a rare K-drama that remains timely beyond its initial run—if at all. But in a post-truth world, and as journalism faces unprecedented challenges under corporate interference and political malfeasance across the globe, Kim Ju-hyeok's final drama before his untimely death in 2017 isn't just a reminder of how transformative good K-drama can feel, but also a peek into what now feels like an idealized rendition of the profession. HBC intern Lee Yeon-hwa (Chun Woo-hee) is re-assigned to Kim Baek-jin (Kim) and his struggling investigative program, Argon. Kim's dedication to the truth has left his career stalled, as he butts heads with his network's corrupt higher-ups and their big-city friends. But when a coveted lead anchor role opens in the network, and as he slowly trains up the idealistic Yeon-hwa as a moral successor, he starts to understand how profoundly sick his city, and his network, has become. If you're getting whiffs of 2015's Spotlight, that's not an accident. In another drama, Yeon-hwa and Baek-jin's relationship would flourish into a problematic workplace romance. Argon, a mostly romance-free series, isn't interested in that, letting Chun and Kim anchor a rare Korean glimpse of journalists as anything other than unscrupulous, which both tragically caps Kim's career and speaks of Chun's to come. Soundtrack #2 (Disney+) We started with the bombastic in Moving; let's end with something quieter. 'Hidden gem' is an overused term when media is more accessible than ever—though streamers' unwillingness to market non-English media in the U.S. does lend a bit more credence to the term. Buried deep in Disney+'s catalogue, and unluckily releasing in the wake of Moving, Soundtrack #2 (2023) is a stand-alone sequel series that improves on its predecessor, 2022's Soundtrack #1, in every way. A sweet, tender story about the rocky road to rekindling romance sees struggling music-lover Do Hyun-seo (Keum Sae-rok) finding her way to doing what she loves—in more ways than one—when she's hired as a piano tutor for a YouTube mogul who happens to be her ex-boyfriend, Ji Su-ho (Noh Sang-hyun). That is, if their history doesn't get in the way. This is a K-drama, so of course their history is going to get in the way. Soundtrack #2 squeezes a lot of heart into its six-episode run and, though it may not be the most original K-drama, it serves as a perfect primer for those discovering more of what K-dramas have to offer.
UPI
a day ago
- UPI
Watch: Korean teen finds first love in 'Love Untangled'
Netflix is teasing "Love Untangled," which arrives on the streamer Aug. 29. Photo courtesy of Netflix Aug. 1 (UPI) -- Netflix is teasing Love Untangled, a new Korean teen romance film that arrives on the streamer Aug. 29. Shin Eun-Soo portrays Park Se-ri, a 19-year-old with "perpetually frizzy hair" and a crush. "It all started then. My hair started curling and my life got tangled right along with it," she says in the trailer, released Thursday. "Experienced in unrequited love confessions, Se-ri collaborates with her friends to team up with Han Yun-seok (Gong Myoung), a new transfer student from Seoul. Their goal? To carry out 'Operation Love' so she can confess her feelings to the school's most popular boy, Kim Hyun (Cha Woo-Min)," an official synopsis reads. The journey produces comedy and a love triangle, the description continues. Love Untangled also stars Youn Sang-Hyun, and is directed by Namkoong Sun.
