About

My name is Riley Kim. Cultjunk is my little experiment to share notes, writings and images about cultural critique. Broadly speaking I am interested in squaring popular and visual culture against the disciplines of technology & society, post-modernity, literary criticism, media/film studies, and psychoanalytic theory. I once aced a term paper by analyzing Fight Club, perhaps the best guy flick ever made, with Freudian, Lacanian and Žižekian theories and it made me very happy. The fact that I mention it here makes it pretty clear that I am partial to the use of psychoanalysis in destabilizing and re-conceptualizing “identity” in relation to cultural theory blah blah blah.

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The truth is I’m totally pretending to be an intellectual when I really just want to eat, sleep, and snowboard. Except I’m terrified of breaking my arm or something. So I replaced snowboarding with shopping.

And my liking for visual art? I started my career in art criticism when I convinced my secondary school principal to permit me to drop Fine Art as an examinable subject “because, Sir, I will definitely pull down the school point average – and that’s not right.” Did I mention I was in my school’s ‘Arts’ curriculum?

I legitimize the need for my blogging with my reading habits – having still not excelled in snowboarding. My spread include important periodicals such as DETAILS and GQ (I read them for the culture!), print news NY Times and The Guardian (cough *east coast Marxist feminist liberal *cough), and literature from the likes of Augusten Burroughs (Dry is sooooo underrated!).

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Currently I work for a government agency which manages national museums in Singapore. Because my job description includes evangelizing museums through social networking media, I have officially blurred the last frontier between work and personal life. Fortunately – or unfortunately – I like museums enough to do my job and in any case I know shopping, sleeping, and Gossip Girl will always get me through the darkest times.

If you have a comment about the stuff I write, or simply want to get in touch about anything museum, popular culture, or theory-ish, email me at rileykim[A/T]gmail[D/O/T]com. You can also find me on social networking sites: I am rileykim on Twitter and Facebook, and cultjunk on Youtube.