Passing Through:

Unlike traditional Chinese tourists who seem content to sightsee the city of Seoul as a site of many toured objects, there is a sizeable number of tourists from China who actively engage in the much more participatory act of finding trendy Korean clothing, wearing it, and experiencing Korea as an apparent Korean. The act of passing - no matter how superficially - as a Korean seems to add quite a bit of “existential authenticity” to the tourism experience in Korea. Ning Wang (1999) provides a lot of the theoretical undergirding for this paper in his explication of what he calls existential authenticity in tourism studies. In observing and interacting with young subjects as a street photographer in Seoul, I have increasingly come into contact with seemingly Korean subjects around popular tourist sites who turn out to be Chinese nationals merely in Korean dress. This study uses ethnographic interviews with and portraits of Chinese tourists in Korea who dress and pass as Koreans the as not mere illustration of this phenomenon, but a source of ethnographic data itself. This article is designed as a methodological screed of sorts, and will grapple with the apparent methodological conflict between photojournalistic practices and more traditional uses of photography in academic ethnography. The crux of the methodological question is how to mitigate two different kinds of photographic practice when dealing with subjects and attempting to represent etic reality. The paper also explores the idiosyncrasies and exigencies of the Korean socio-legal environment, along with the nature of street photography, towards the explication of a more flexible “situational ethics” that is specific to the nature of the documentary work being conducted while adhering to an ethos of “doing no harm.” It will also broach the idea of harnessing the “male gaze,” which, placed into the service of the street photographer armed with the camera as a recording device, becomes a crucial tool in guiding the eye towards crucial instances of gender and identity performance as a key guide towards identifying particular modes of identity representation in ways that traditional sociology does not allow.