What happened to all those videotapes?

A VHS film plays on an analogue television set which sits among stacks of videotape covers at the Asia Culture Center's special exhibition "To REWIND is Divine!" Feb. 10. Korea Times photo by Saul Latham

Korea's fading videotape legacy not forgotten

By Saul Latham

Nothing lasts forever. The faded cases of old videotapes are a testament to that. Those of us old enough will remember fondly the sound of a videotape popping into a VCR and the distorted lines caused by fast-forwarding through the video. For decades the videotape touched us. But its legacy has faded. The remnants of its cultural boom are scattered. What happened to all those videotapes?

For a rare few weeks, visitors to the Asia Culture Center's (ACC) special exhibition "To REWIND is Divine!" experienced a historic collection of videotapes and film memorabilia. They were able to touch and feel decades of videotapes as material and as memory. The exhibit featured some 27,000 Video Home System (VHS) tapes ― a combined volume equivalent to 10 video rental shops ― taken mostly from the remarkable collection of about 50,000 tapes kept by Gwangju-based film buff Jo Dae-young.

On display was Korea's relationship with video. Entangled with nostalgia, the collection revealed our own liminality in a changing world. An artistic statement near the entrance explained that using video as an exhibit material reveals "the 'materiality' that is difficult to feel in modern times."

Perhaps that is why Jo and others have held on to the fading legacy of videotapes in Korea.

Jo began collecting tapes as a way to make ends meet at a time when video stores were closing one after the other. "I felt sorry for the disappearance of the videotape," he told The Korea Times. "I cleaned up the shops and loaded them in a van to sell."

From 2001 to 2006 he collected tapes in earnest, opening his own store called Video Treasure Island in Gwangju. Since then, the 50,000 tapes were kept in a 12-square-meter basement underneath an apartment complex for 15 years.

During the height of the video boom in Korea, between 1982 and the mid-2000s, Jo said there was a video store in every alleyway. Video stores provided cultural and "spiritual nourishment." They were "cultural love rooms," he said.

"Where did these tapes disappear?" he remarked.

According to Jo, VHS was a "foundation" for Korea's internationally esteemed modern cinema, and video stores were a "cash cow" for cinema and directors chased the medium. Bong Joon-ho famously searched a flea market in Hwanghak-dong for the films of Kim Ki-young, a legendary auteur. Video was not only a mass cultural commodity but an early and unheralded link in the country's highly developed export economy.

A visitor rewinds a video in one of the many viewing booths at the Asia Culture Center's special exhibition "To REWIND is Divine!" Feb. 10. Korea Times photo by Saul Latham

According to internet consensus, director Kim Ki-duk's film "The Young Teacher," produced in 1972, was the first to ever be released on VHS, four years later in 1976. However, Mathieu St-Pierre, a Canadian artist from Gyeonggi Province who collects VHS and runs the YouTube channel K-Tapes, says this claim is a "hoax."

"The first pre-recorded movies in Korea came out around 1981-82," he told The Korea Times. "To my knowledge, 'Cheongchun Gyosa' (The Young Teacher) doesn't have a video release in South Korea but can be viewed via video on demand (VOD) at the Korean Film Archive digital library. Also, the first VHS ever released should by default be in Japan around late 1976."

St-Pierre started collecting Korean VHS tapes in 2007 after becoming intrigued by the abundance of national cinema accessible only on the medium. "I do it for the love of cinema and to discover films that were never exposed to a Western audience before," he said.

According to St-Pierre, Korea was slow to look back into its film history through VHS. "But we can slowly see a resurgence of the medium, especially anything related to nostalgia such as old kids' movies and animations," he said.

At the ACC exhibition, children browsed the colorful spines of cartoon video covers examining a complete set of the animation series "Hong Gil-dong," which centers on Korean literature's most famous heroic bandit. To such a post-video generation, Jo said the video becomes a material that "they can feel."

"I consider the 'materiality' of the videotape, the plastic videotape, the video case that protects the tape and the cover and design surrounding the video," he said.

He admits VHS has poorer image and sound quality compared to other mediums.

A video documenting scenes from the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 is played at the Asia Culture Center's special exhibition "To REWIND is Divine!" on Feb. 10. Korea Times photo by Saul Latham

When cable TV and VOD arrived on the scene, thousands upon thousands of video stores faded into the scenes of history. Many of the tapes ended up in landfill or were shipped to Africa or China, according to Jo.

Korean-made erotic films "saw their heydays under the VHS format and have now almost completely vanished from history," St-Pierre said. But behind a curtain of the exhibition's Red Zone were thousands of adult videos, some playing on small screens.

These days, digital storytelling in its myriad forms is not merely cheap and accessible or free; it is ubiquitous. As Korean content continues to intrigue the world, the remnants of and nostalgia for its magnetic heritage are not lost on Jo and others.

"I think it is important that videotapes that have been with the public for an era are kept in a tidy state, in a specific place," Jo said. "This is because the generation who borrowed videos is nostalgic, and the generation of 'post-video' can see the legacy of the past with their own eyes. A space with videotapes could play a role in connecting the past and the present."

While the claim to the first VHS film release remains unproven, Korea does likely have another historic tie to the medium. "The last VHS in the world could very well be from Korea as they stopped manufacturing them in early 2011, half a decade after the U.S. market," St-Pierre said.

The Canadian artist continues to collect and search for the last VHS releases. "Some of the last VHS ever released like 'Inception' and anything from 2011 were most likely printed in very low numbers," he said. "I have yet to find any VHS from 2011 but I know that maybe three or four titles, all Korean films, were released from January to February 2011."

To some, the increasing rarity of videotapes is appealing. But Jo is not so concerned with rarities. "Every single videotape is precious," he told The Korea Times. "I think each videotape has its own meaning."

What will happen to the 50,000 videos in Jo's collection? He prefers that they be used and watched, instead of sitting in a basement.

The exhibition is now closed. With its passing, there is "no definite direction" for Jo's 25,000 tapes stationed at the exhibit. What will happen to his collection remains to be seen.

Saul Latham (slatham@ktimes.com) is a copyeditor of The Korea Times.