[May 16, 2023] As South Korea's soft culture power expands through K-pop, K-drama, and K-film, it's serving as a global advertisement for the country's exacting beauty culture and ever-improving innovations to "fix" our physical bodies. Seoul now exports more cosmetic products than smartphones — many of them the techy lasers, wands and light therapy for which the country is known. Meanwhile, patriarchal attitudes domestic Korean women face are unusually backward for such an advanced nation, dropping its fertility rate to the lowest in the world and fanning an ongoing gender war.
In her debut non-fiction book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, Elise Hu takes the business of appearances seriously — exploring the way performing beauty is built into our political system, our economic system, our labor system, our media (especially social media), and ourselves. It asks, where do we draw the line on physical improvement, when a technological gaze makes it so promising, and possible?
About the Speaker
Elise Hu is a Los-Angeles based journalist, podcast host and entrepreneur who spent nearly a decade at NPR, as a regular voice on flagship shows All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Before NPR, Elise helped found the nonprofit digital startup, The Texas Tribune, in 2009 and spent more than a decade as a television news reporter. She’s an alum of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Journalism school, and the co-founder of the podcast production company Reasonable Volume.
Elise Hu founded NPR's Seoul bureau in 2015, covering geopolitics, business and culture in both Koreas and Japan. Her experiences as an Asian-American woman there led her to questions about the enduring power of standardized beauty, how they intersect with capitalist imperatives, and where we go from here, when technology is making our exteriors so vital.
You can find her online at elisehu.com, on Twitter and Instagram @elisewho, and on TikTok @whoelise.
In her debut non-fiction book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, Elise Hu takes the business of appearances seriously — exploring the way performing beauty is built into our political system, our economic system, our labor system, our media (especially social media), and ourselves. It asks, where do we draw the line on physical improvement, when a technological gaze makes it so promising, and possible?
About the Speaker
Elise Hu is a Los-Angeles based journalist, podcast host and entrepreneur who spent nearly a decade at NPR, as a regular voice on flagship shows All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Before NPR, Elise helped found the nonprofit digital startup, The Texas Tribune, in 2009 and spent more than a decade as a television news reporter. She’s an alum of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Journalism school, and the co-founder of the podcast production company Reasonable Volume.
Elise Hu founded NPR's Seoul bureau in 2015, covering geopolitics, business and culture in both Koreas and Japan. Her experiences as an Asian-American woman there led her to questions about the enduring power of standardized beauty, how they intersect with capitalist imperatives, and where we go from here, when technology is making our exteriors so vital.
You can find her online at elisehu.com, on Twitter and Instagram @elisewho, and on TikTok @whoelise.
