Korean language interview with Charlotte Fang was published by the Korean underground arts/culture publication Visla Magazine, covering Remilia's March 2024 Seoul Milady Rave with FRUiTS Magazine. Photography was taken of the event and interview was conducted by email separately and translated to Korean, original English answers from Charlotte Fang are provided here:

1. Could you introduce us a little bit about the ‘Remilia Corporation’ team for our Korean readers?
We started in 2021 as a net art collective. I describe it as Warhol’s Factory in the internet age, a kind of open ended online hangout for an emerging digital art scene. We’re exploring what we call New Net Art which we see as unappreciated by the institutional art world who have struggled to understand and integrate internet based art into a gallery context. I’m specifically interested in working within a lineage of performance art that engages the audience as participants and the use of finance and industry as an artistic medium. Internet communities make this uniquely accessible at a large scale, it wasn't possible before. As industry we have our fingers in a lot of pies. We have a Sanrio-like series of mascot characters people wear online to signal association with the Remilia sphere, our global raves which serve as meeting ground for our community and chance to platform new underground artists we appreciate, an accompanying music label, a new magazine of literary & art criticism and now expanding into a fashion line with 33reisen. Each are different teams I sponsor and direct at a high level.

2. You've been raving in London, New York, and Tokyo before landing in Seoul. What made you decide to host a party in Seoul? And please tell us about how the party was.
Seoul’s underground interests me. There’s a good energy here which we want to participate in and help accelerate while it’s still underground. The party brought out a lot of fashionable girls and it was good to see them raving, I don’t think they’re introduced that kind of music often but they were into it. Though I was surprised very few Korean alt guys showed up, I think they're more interested in rap. I heard they think those kind of Y2K egirls are scary. I think it’ll be more balanced as we do more parties.

3. I heard that you have opened an office in Seoul, is Seoul the base of Remilia Corporation's activities? If so, I'd be curious to know why.
No, only our fashion and merchandising lines. Our team is largely remote. I decided to move our production to Korean factories after being dissatisfied with the quality and reliability of manufacturers in America and Europe. The fashion industry can be quite unserious in the West. We’ll likely treat Seoul as a base for our Asian operations, it’s been more convenient than Tokyo where some of our collective’s artists are currently staying. I like Seoul, I like the food.

4. For your first party in Seoul, you themed it "Gyaru-Lolita Breakcore Night," how did you come up with the overall concept of the party?
I believe subculture demands the synthesis of fashion and music as the social-aesthetic parts of the underground, of alternative culture from the mainstream, before it can culminate into more permanent and lasting art as the conceptual groundwork for revolutionary materialsm into the production of theory, ideological thought. True subcultural beliefs. Which then flow back down to a mainstream, this is what pushes the dial of culture. We arrived on a model of raves plus pop-ups both because this subculture Remilia is nurturing combined fashion and music, but also because the rave replicates the freeform, anything goes, half-anonymous experience of the internet. It's a natural fit. We’ve been doing this loose night for a few years starting during the COVID lockdowns. "Gyaru-lolita breakcore" isn’t enforced as a dress code or anything, but it makes clear that we’re merging the new look and new sound, what’s exciting right now in alt fashion for girls and underground music for boys. When we combine gyaru and lolita, it helps make clear we don’t mean true gyaru or lolita, but the emerging trend reviving and extending the style. It Iis a modern hybridized interpretation, part of the general Y2K revival trend across fashion and egirl culture. Those actually committed to those looks as a serious subculture resent these new takes on it, but I’m not interested in that. It’s why the revival is more interesting outside of Japan rather than inside, where they’re more serious about it. It's the same for our breakcore, the more common breakcore revival happening right now in the LGBT club scene is boring and not our sound, it takes more influence from european breakcore than Japanese.

5. There were quite a few Seoul 'gyaru girls' filling the party. Was there an energy you felt in Seoul that was different from other cities?
Stylistically, there is a general movement of j-core revival fashion happening online, outside Japan. I see it primarily in London, Seoul and across China. I’m much more interested in this wave than anything happening with the contemporary designers, as it’s an organic product of outsider subculture, very much influenced by online communities. The regional differences are subtle, but I think the Koreans participating in this scene visually track more closely to Japanese than the Chinese or Londonese do. It seems Japan has become trendy in general over the last few years in Seoul, which is interesting to see as Japan has begun to fall out of fashion in favor of Korea in the west. The Chinese embrace more extreme takes on the fashion, and a more aggressive range of references from the Y2K period, such as emo and goth. One thing I noticed is Korea’s strong idol culture seems to translate even beyond major celebs, like K-pop stars, down to the internet idols who were attending our party. I was surprised to see fans line up to take photos with the attendees and come just for a chance to see them. I like it.

6. You have been releasing psychedelic electronic music on SoundCloud, and in February, you released a K-pop-inspired cassette tape. We'd love to hear more about the music that Remilia Corporation is pursuing.
The COVID lockdowns were something of a powderkeg for underground music which is blowing up now, it’s very interesting to follow, and we curate our opinionated take on it, platforming those artists and sounds we find most exciting. With our raves I’m interested in the side of breakcore that trades in breaks for high BPM techno elements: gabber, schranz, freetekno, hardstyle. Or on the inverse, hard techno that introduces mashup energy. I think a lot of this has been driven by a renewal of interest in the otaku speedcore scene around DJ Sharpnel, for example, Project Gabbangelion. I think this became popular among western otakus through rhythm games like “osu”. Techno has gotten too self-absorbed, whereas breakcore doesn’t take itself seriously as a rule, so it’s both fun and hardcore, which is an ideal combination.

The #BASEDRETARDGANG tape we published was the debut mixtape from BRG, a hyperpop collective that formed out of our community. Conceptually, they share our same values, embracing a heavy remix culture and whitepilled aesthetic. Musically, they’ve built a hybrid mix of hardstyle and kpop to hyperpop which pairs well with breakcore sets. It’s very Remilia. We booked them at our Tokyo party last year alongside the breakcore DJs, it was Luvbug's live debut, it was very fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsEcA151hFk

7. The party was filled with breakbeat music representing the chaotic digital world. How was the breakcore music from Korean local DJs?
Korea’s breakcore scene is small. I noticed it has a taste towards heavier noise elements and BPM pushing above 180, which I like, but I actually asked them to tone it down a little for the sake of our party, since we were introducing the Y2K gals to it. Some of the revival breakcore collectives in the west, I think they came out of the digicore scene, engage too much in softer dance sounds like footwork and juke. I think that’s a dead end, I don’t like it when they lean soft. Artists should be extremists. I can feel this energy from some of the artists in Korea, like they’ll bloody their fists trying to punch through the screen to grab their audience by the neck. That’s what I like.

8. The Remilia Corporation seems to be based on the Kawaii digital world, as is the character Milady. You must have spent quite a bit of your childhood exploring the digital world, what was your childhood like?
I was around Orange County’s indie punk scene as a kid but most of the influence I took was from what I was accessing online, which everyone was doing at the time to find new music. American highschool is much easier than in Korea, and there’s not much to do growing up in suburbia before you’re old enough to drive, you have a lot of free time. I was very into reading theory back then. I gave myself a very quick cultural education that way. We make extensive use of references and citation so we’re very self-conscious about curating what we include. When you say "kawaii digital world", we’re not solely interested in “kawaii” aesthetics, but the overall appeal of Otaku aesthetics is probably derived seeing the hikkikimori as an early instance of an increasingly common archetype, the network addict, something the whole world embodied during the COVID lockdown period. We take a lot of inspiration from appraising this character, and it forms a lot of our own audience. I think they’re like monks who reject the world to stay in the mountains. Also, the art-industrial nature of anime as a commercial medium lends itself to a rhizomatic design highly appropriate for the internet age, Hiroki Azuma described it as “database culture”, basically forming new work out of an assortment of constituent tropes. It is a mode of industrial art production that I think defines the current era, and anime is a very refined example. We’ve taken an interest in K-Pop and idol culture, and China’s taobao boutique fashion scene, for similar reasons.

9. At the party, there was also a pop-up corner for Remilia Atelier, a new fashion project of Remilia Corporation. Can we expect a full-fledged fashion brand in the future?
Yes, this was a debut for our capsule collection, especially for our cotton candy tartan pattern which is a Remilia Atelier signifier. We’ll go live with a complete debut and a showroom this summer. The goal is to have the line intimately embedded with the subculture of our raves, and the sound and scene we’re cultivating. It’s a reversal of what Vivienne Westwood did to punk, we’re concretizing signifiers of the subculture simultaneously as we create it, looking to architect the emerging identity rather than just taking inspiration from it. This is only possible today because the underground and luxury is unifying. The post-financial crisis period of branding austerity in designer brands has given way as modern manufacturing flattened access to luxury materials and construction for RTW boutiques. I'm making a bet on this as a trend driver basically. Essentially, we’re taking cues from Miu Miu’s ever-present cheeky-cute branding, which we’re designing distinct patterns to achieve. We're also sticking to a size zero standard as a bet against the body positivity which dominated fashion in the last decade. For menswear, I want to do a ready to wear suit line in the future, I want to create a new uniform for men, a new suiting silhouette inspired by tailoring in Korea. I believe men should stick to a life uniform, not focused on constantly changing style. Maybe we can get to this next year.

10. Shoichi Aoki of Fruits Magazine joined you for the event. We know that 'Milady', the symbol of 'Remilia Corporation', was inspired by FRUiTS magazine, but how did the collaboration with FRUiTS and Aoki's participation in the event come about?
Last April, we were invited to a group show at Momentary Gallery in Shibuya, where we debuted the Bonkler generative art project. We also organized a weekend of events for our fans and called it Remilia-Con Tokyo, including a rave. This was our first showing in Japan, and our work reached Aoki-san through a mutual friend who helped organize the show who proposed a collaboration. This resulted in the FRUiTS x Remilia show at PARCO Shibuya this January which adapted our Milady character into a 3D model with designs pulled from the FRUiTS magazine archives. It was inspired by a comment Aoki-san made when he paused FRUiTS Magazine in 2017, citing “there are no more cool kids to shoot”. For Harajuku I agree but countered that the kids are still cool. They’re just online. That’s why we throw raves. Subculture needs a “third place” as a destination and if the scene is now online and global, a party across major cities serves the same function in the same way conventions in the anime or gaming industry do. The model is being rigged to work on VRchat where we want to start throwing virtual raves also.

11. There will also be a special Seoul photo book by Shoichi Aoki, can you give us a little hint about that?
So actually I invited Aoki-san to our party in Seoul specifically to show him the cool kids. He hadn’t been to Seoul in 20 years and was surprised to hear me describe what they were up to in Korea. Actually, I hadn’t seen them much in Seoul yet too, those kind of fashionable girls are only out on the street long enough for an instagram photoshoot. But I did see them online. So I wasn’t sure how things would turn out but they did good, they passed my test. This was our secret mission, I think we were successful. They were swagged out. Besides shooting the 33reisen party attendees, Aoki-san also took shots around Seoul over the weekend. We’ll work to put together to put a special edition from everyone he took. We’ll probably do another party in Seoul for the launch party for this issue.

FRUiTS Magazine served as an archive of Japanese alt fashion, so his photobook will capture and document that same fashion’s downstream influence decades later. It's a scene that’s similar but different. This documentation is just as important in 2024 as it was any other year. Fashion is constantly changing and decades from now the teenagers will be looking back to see what our cool kids are wearing today. It’s important.

We also held a lengthy interview between myself and Aoki-san. Hana from Balmung was gracious enough to act as translator, which we’ll provide in English, Japanese, and Korean in the issue. I’m really glad we had the chance to do this because not many detailed interviews exist with Aoki-san, especially in English. It was a great opportunity to pick Aoki-san’s brain about contemporary trends. We talked about a lot. I think he’s overdue for a revival in coverage but for now there isn’t many direct interviews you can find. So we’re translating it into multiple languages, also it helps encourage the world to see Seoul’s scene.

12. I think it was a party that allowed me to experience a new culture in Seoul. Remilia Corporation is branching out into various genres such as NFTs, fashion, and music, so what new projects would you like to take on in the future?
We’re launching a concept talent agency I’m excited about, with influencer models, artists and DJs part of the same loose subculture that are part of our parties. We actually scouted a couple at the 33reisen party. The theme is Remilia Academy. We are decorating our talent board like a highschool yearbook of alt kid troublemakers and planning to give them DJ lessons and encourage them to start bands. It evolved out of some ideas originally conceptualized for a highschool troublemaker themed fashion collection. I’m thinking about hiring someone from the K-Pop industry to manage their social media and treat them like a high member count K-Pop idol group, with a collective social media and fan community. What I’m most excited to explore the social and commercial mechanisms of the K-Pop idol industry. I’m interested in the merhandise. They're like art artifacts being produced like the light sticks and fan cards and photobooks. I think the merchandise is fascinating, I want to make them for the agency. Remilia always likes to play-pretend real industry and produce a large trail of these commercial artifacts that exist like collector’s items, like an artificial reality where Remilia is a trillion dollar pan industrial conglomerate. My goal is for the project to be financially successful enough to sustain a steady production of these frivolities.