For those of you wondering about the painful cheeriness of my picture, please don't think me a complete freak. It started as a joke, with me parodying the women taking self-portraits with their cellphone cameras on subways, waiting for the bus - well, just about everywhere. This particular picture was the result of a slaphappy, but inspired moment when was able to successfully (or so I think) reproduce the affected cuteness of the "eoljjang" face pictures for which Korean women have come to be known as specialists. As both photographer and subject - a conceptual overlap that is quite rare, for habitual objectifiers tend to dislike objectfication - I realized that this was actually a specific and learnable skill. With the proper angle and lens length, almost anyone can make their mug look like the "best face" on the block. It just took my peeking out past my usual ascerbic cynicism about mass consumer culture for a moment; as an old friend of mine always puts it, I just needed to "get over myself."
Actually, I am loathe to admit, it was quite fun, and I mug for many a friend's cellphone now. I have gotten quite a bit better at the euljjang shot. I wouldn't say that my face is particularly cute, nor does my body match the lie I can perpetrate with a cellphone camera. By way of defending my dignity, must say that I don't do it with the intent of pursuing the pure aesthetic that defines true eoljjang photography: making myself appear handsome, or fooling others into thinking I am. But there is fun in the endeavor, in attempting to make the most stoopid faces and expressions possible, to try to make 
my face look absolutely unrecognizable, or even to use the insane roundness of my mug to make like a strange animation character. You'd really be surprised at how alien you can make yourself appear with the distortion of a high angle and a ridiculous expression. I realized that there is technique involved with taking this kind of picture - I watched in awe as an otherwise quite unextraordinary-in-appearance female friend of mine contorted her face into the most unnatural of expressions as she quite skillfully twisted and contorted her camera-wielding arm and herself into just the right position to take the shot - just one snap would often require a full minute or more to pose. When I got the "proofs" back in the form of the image on the cellphone screen, I was surprised to see a complete and beautiful stranger beckoning back at me. My quite unspectacular friend shot me a smug smirk as I looked back at her in complete surprise at this digital fib floating in my cellphone screen. "Save it," she ordered, beaming proudly. Wow, I said to myself - and communicated to her - I was impressed. She really knew what she was doing.
Korean women have figured something out here - the pursuit of euoljjang as veritable pop art, an evolution in knowing kitschiness that started with Japanese-style "sticker pictures," inflamed by the collective corporate decision to place cameras on cellphones, but really pushed to the level of pandemic portfolio proportions with the convergence of the "dica" (di-gital ca-mera) craze and the all-pervasive Cyworld personal homepage obsession. In combination with the fact that Korea has the highest level of broadband protection in the world, making possible many venues for proudly circulating prime moments of mugging for the camera, the high level of eoljjang evolution is...inevitable. And it has infected me too, but just a bit. I can quit anytime I want. Really.
