Gangnam, Seoul, South Korea: 37° 31' 28" N, 127° 02' 34" E
Meet Jiseung “Lizzy” Cho: a film and TV actress. Smart, attractive, earthy, world-wise, energetic. Cho has toiled for years in South Korea’s booming but cutthroat entertainment industry. Today, she has agreed to walk with me through Gangnam, the “Beverly Hills” of Seoul.
Gangnam doesn’t sleep. Crowded against the concrete banks of the Han River, the affluent district is a buzzing hive of Pilates studios, pet cafés, unbookable Michelin restaurants, Louis Vuitton shops, and multistory buildings given over wholly to plastic surgery clinics. How expensive is it to live here? Apartment space starts at $10,000 per square meter, on par with Manhattan. Its dance clubs throb until 9 or 10 a.m. The polished faces of South Korea’s latest pop stars shine from gigantic digital billboards—glowing shrines to fame that are ferociously contested. Fittingly, I meet Cho at the entrance of her martial arts gym. She stays fit by kick-boxing.
“I’m a coward,” she says of her sparring matches. “But I’m competitive.” For our stroll she wears a pink baseball cap stenciled with “I was Born to Win.”
type="vimeo" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1024512168" thumbnail="" title="KPOP South Korea" caption="A walk through Gangnam, the "Beverly Hills" of Seoul, South Korea." credit="Out of Eden Walk" tags=""
South Korea has long punched above its weight in the arena of cultural influence.
From its origins as a niche music scene in the early 1990s, K-pop’s catchy, precision-choreographed, and highly TikTok-able performances have exploded across the world, with bands like BTS, BlackPink, and New Jeans conquering beachheads even in Antarctica. (One influencer in Peru composes K-pop tunes in Indigenous Quechua.) K-dramas produced for TV hook fans across time zones. The movie Parasite scored Best Picture at the Oscars—unprecedented for a foreign film—in 2020. And Gangnam itself romped into the collective consciousness of humankind with a music video that broke the internet: The Korean performer Psy’s pelvic thrusting in horse barns, saunas, tour buses, and elevators has been viewed five billion times on YouTube.
The rigors of working within the multibillion-dollar K-culture empire are almost as famous.
Management agencies steer aspiring pop idols into exhausting training regimens and often cosmetic surgery. Diet, makeup, and fashion decisions are policed by studios to meet corporate beauty standards.
“It’s the same as in Hollywood, but here we are too much cut from a single mold,” Cho says, striding past a popular garden brunch spot packed with Instagramming diners. “Other places, you have great actors with imperfect faces. Not here. Here, you have always to be physically perfect.”
Cho has appeared in several short films and a Korean TV series. She is beautiful. But she worries about her age—30-ish—and complains that her “strong eyes” land her supporting roles, typically villains. (“On TV most of the persons I played were bad—the woman who kills her child.”) But even that work is drying up. Last year, five projects fell through.
Cho’s struggle tracks with many South Korean artists. It is a tale of stardom as Navy SEAL training.
Actress Jiseung "Lizzy" Cho and walking partner Lee Junseok pass a building filled with plastic surgery clinics in the Gangnam district of Seoul, South Korea.
Paul Salopek
With her mother’s blessing, Cho began practicing dance in elementary school. As a teen she ground through private voice, dance, and acting classes that could last until midnight. Talent and grit earned her a coveted slot at a prestigious arts university in Seoul. At the same time, she honed her craft in Seoul’s experimental live theater scene, where she also sampled her first taste of sasaeng, or South Korean super-fandom: Some admirers bought $100 tickets to her nightly performances for weeks.
Intense emotional connection by the public is a feature of South Korean showbusiness. Fans scrape together their spare money to buy stars birthday announcements on billboards. The K-pop singer Kim Jae-joon recently posted photos, in exasperation, of the army of stalkers who shadow him daily in taxis. Adulation can turn to attack quickly.
“Even if you’re very famous, the audiences can be very cruel,” says Cho. “I have a lot of friends who killed themselves. This year, two. Last year, two.”
At the same time, Cho adds, audiences in South Korea, still a conservative Confucian society, also expect their movie and music heroes to be squeaky clean.
“In America, if you’re an actor, you can drink and drive, or have an affair, and you can still work,” says Cho. “But in Korea this kills your career. If strangers think I’m a bad person, I don’t mind. But my parents and friends? They’d be miserable. So I have to care about the opinions of others.”
Walking Gangnam’s mazey back streets, past busy coffee shops, organic wine bars, and art galleries, Cho pushes through an unmarked door and descends a stairwell to a basement beauty salon. The workspace is noisy and brightly lit. The makeup artists and stylists greet Cho warmly. It is where she comes for makeovers before auditions.
Cho admits that she has begun hedging a bit. She is attending biology courses at a Seoul university. She is learning Mandarin. She is interested in writing a novel. She waves a hand over professional quality lip glosses and eye brushes arrayed on the salon counters. “Skip art school,” she advises all hopeful young actresses. “And love humanity.”
