From Squid Game to K-pop to kimchi, South Korea has taken the planet by storm. Josh Glancy travels to Seoul to discover how a once-impoverished country turned its fortunes around.
I can think of few less appealing activities for a steamy evening in Seoul than putting on a mask and joining 50 teenagers for an intermediate class in Korean pop dancing. In fact, although I've signed up to take part, I'm so petrified by the gyrating adolescents and stench of body odour emanating from 1Million Dance Studio that I opt to watch from the sidelines instead.
The kids noodle about pre-class, swiping phones, admiring each other's Nirvana T-shirts. These aspiring teenyboppers are here to appear in a promotional video to help the launch of the dance studio's franchise in Tokyo, expected by the end of the year. Finally they enter and start dropping hip thrusts and neck snaps, confirming the wisdom of my abstention.
If you want a sense of just how vast and successful K-pop has become, try this: 1Million Dance Studio was given its name because the founders hoped it might reach one million subscribers on YouTube. It is now approaching 26 million; more than Beyoncé, more than Lady Gaga. The studio, however, is just one small swell in the vast wave of South Korean culture that has swept the world in the past decade. It's a wave so pronounced it has a name: hallyu.
Even Britain's most venerable institutions are paying attention to this mega-trend: last year the Oxford English Dictionary added hallyu and 24 other Korean words including bulgogi (strips of marinated beef or pork) and mukbang (a live streamed video of someone eating large amounts of food while talking to the audience). In London the august V&A has devoted an exhibition to hallyu, which opened this weekend and features a dazzling array of modern Korean cultural artefacts, from early MiniDisc players through to K-pop-branded Covid masks.
You'll have noticed the Korean wave by now, even if you didn't know its name. You might have seen Parasite, the comitragic thriller about an impoverished family leeching off a rich one, which won the best picture gong at the 2020 Oscars; or the pandemic phenomenon Squid Game, still the most watched show in Netflix history. You may have come across the K-pop bands BTS (105 million album sales), who met President Biden at the White House in May, or Blackpink, crowned the world's biggest pop band in 2020 by Bloomberg's Pop Star Power Rankings. Both are so ferociously popular among teenagers they've been compared to the Beatles and the Spice Girls. Perhaps you've put Korean snail mucin on your face in search of a healthy glow, or sniffed curiously at a bowl of spicy kimchi. In Britain, Korean condiments such as gojuchang and ssamjang have popped up in world food aisles and K-pop dance classes can be found in every main city.
How did a small country that was an impoverished dictatorship until the 1980s come to play such an outsized role in global culture? I've come to Seoul to find out. It's a city I've always wanted to visit because as a vision of the Asian 21st century, I find South Korea instinctively attractive: democratic, modern, prosperous, an open east Asian society that doesn't loathe the West.
Yet there's also a dark side to hallyu, and indeed to modern South Korea. This is a country with the highest suicide rate and lowest fertility rate in the developed world. A place where lonely men drink their sorrows away in gloomy bars and the violence and misery of the 20th century still weighs heavily. Korea's success reflects a work ethic and collective intensity that is hard to come by in modern Britain, as the latter slides towards cultural decadence and economic decline. But one has only to watch a couple of Korean movies — often dark, vengeful, violent — to see that success has not necessarily brought contentment.
The success, however, is undeniable. At the 1Million Dance Studio HQ, a four-storey dance emporium in the trendy Seongsu-dong neighbourhood of Seoul, I'm greeted by its impossibly lithe and sparky founder, Lia Kim, and her business partner Timon Youn. They have worked with some of the biggest Korean girl bands, including Wonder Girls and Girls' Generation. Kim launched the studio in 2014 but says interest has spiked "exponentially" in recent years and, until Covid, some 70 per cent of their students were coming from abroad.
The choreography taught by the likes of Kim lies at the heart of the K-pop phenomenon and the South Koreans are so good at it they make Jennifer Lopez look like Ed Balls doing Gangnam Style. Earlier this year the Seoul fire department was called to investigate reports of severe tremors at the Acro Seoul Forest high-rise complex in Seongsu-dong. Concerned fire chiefs called for an architectural review, which traced the tremors to Tower D, the home of SM Entertainment, one of the big K-pop management companies. The report concluded that the "increased amplitude was caused by concentrated, rhythmic group movement". Their commitment to the cause is quite literally earth-shaking.
These studios are perfectly calibrated profit factories: K-pop albums, calendars and Christmas specials are released like clockwork. At SM the carpets are pink and fluffy, the lighting soft and inviting, and the iconography of the pop idols appears everywhere from giant screens to coffee mugs. Massage rooms and physio treatment tables tend to the stars' physical wear and tear. Racks of ripped jeans and artfully faded leather jackets provide style on demand.
At another studio, KQ Entertainment, I meet Ateez, an eight-strong boy band who hope to become the "new BTS". The boys have just got back from a European tour that included sell-out shows at Wembley Arena. They are polite, accommodating and friendly, handing over gifts and telling me of their London pilgrimage to the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, home of Son Heung-min, South Korea's finest footballer.
The Ateez boys exhibit none of the standoffishness you might expect from western pop stars. Cool in Korea doesn't mean aloof and there's no tradition of effortless superiority: BTS have been known to rehearse for 15 hours a day. "No one in Korean culture respects someone who doesn't give a shit about anything," says Euny Hong, author of The Birth of Korean Cool, the unofficial bible of hallyu. "What's considered cool are people who are energetic, who push forward to reach their goal without distraction. If you weren't good at something at school, you'd be made fun of."
Intense focus, a Stakhanovite work ethic and unapologetic ambition are all driving hallyu. But the wave has also been propelled by a Korean government determined to achieve cultural success to match its economic flourishing. By the 1990s South Korea had gone from being one of the world's poorest countries, ravaged by war and reliant on subsistence rice farming, to a forward-looking democracy and economic powerhouse. It now has the tenth largest economy in the world, a GDP per capita slightly below the UK's and six universities in the world's top 100. This electric expansion became known as the "miracle on the Han", a reference to the Han River that flows through Seoul.
"The Koreans had absolutely nothing," says Michael Breen, a Seoul-dwelling Englishman and author of The New Koreans. "They had no natural resources to boast of, no tradition of business. Within a generation they brought a country that was on a par with Haiti and built it up to be a European-level advanced nation. It's astonishing really."
Culture followed. According to what is referred to as the Jurassic Park theory of hallyu, it was in 1993 that the cultural wave began. This was the year the Korean government observed that the Steven Spielberg dinosaur blockbuster had made more money than Hyundai, the car behemoth that is a wellspring of national pride. So it began to pour investment into cinema, music and theatre, building giant auditoriums and even regulating Seoul's famous noeraebangs (karaoke bars) to protect K-pop's intellectual property.
It took until 2012 for hallyu to go properly viral, though. This was the year of Psy's Gangnam Style, a parodic K-pop dance that became the most watched YouTube video and the first to reach one billion views. Psy, a chubby rich kid from Seoul's fanciest neighbourhood, wasn't who Koreans had envisaged as their breakout star; but Gangnam Style became the earthquake that triggered a Korean tsunami. The government quickly assembled a task force to support hallyu and recently dedicated a division of its ministry of culture to the promotion of Korean culture overseas.
Psy has since become an elder statesman in K-pop, a kind of Psy-mon Cowell running his own agency to bring new talent to the fore. His clasped Gangnam Style hands live on as a giant bronze statue in the Gangnam neighbourhood. His recent single That That blasts from the coffee shops of Ikseon-dong, one of Seoul's hippest areas.
The financial rewards of this soft power explosion have been considerable: according to one analysis, BTS alone bring in as much as US$5 billion a year to the South Korean economy (although they recently announced a hiatus and will soon have to complete their compulsory military service). Blackpink have become a national ATM as well: the four members have struck lucrative deals with luxury designers. Jennie, perhaps the band's best-known member, has been nicknamed "the human Chanel" for her devotion to the French fashion house.
But South Korea's desire for cultural recognition also has its roots in the misery and oppression that dominated large stretches of Korean history. Buffeted and regularly invaded by its more powerful neighbours, Japan and China, Korea became known as the "shrimp between two whales". In 1910 imperial Japan annexed Korea and ruled it as a colony until the end of the Second World War. Occupation was a miserable experience and was followed quickly by civil war, a vicious conflict fought in 1950-53 that claimed the lives of an estimated five million Koreans, or some 20 per cent of the population. The war ended with partition and a country sliced in half between north and south.
One way of looking at hallyu, then, is as a kind of extended revenge fantasy: against the enemy in the north, the dreaded Japanese, overbearing Chinese, culturally arrogant Americans, against history itself. Seen through this prism, it's no surprise that so many Korean movies are violent revenge dramas, most notably the cult classic Oldboy (2003), but also The Man from Nowhere (2010), which inspired the John Wick trilogy starring Keanu Reeves. Similarly, K-pop tunes are sometimes blasted across the demilitarised zone between South and North Korea, flaunting the South's freedom and cultural success.
Hong attributes this darkness to han, a kind of ancestral sadness that is said to haunt Koreans. "Han is a real thing," she says. "Watching Korean films, there is this relentless pain. There is no redemption and the bad guy does not get caught. I can't think of too many other cultures that love to see misery."
Still processing its difficult past, Korea is even more obsessed with historical dramas than Britain. Two hours outside Seoul I visit Yongin Daejanggeum Park, a vast and gorgeous historical film set owned by the broadcaster MBC. It features a full-scale reconstruction of a Korean royal palace — the backdrop to a swathe of K-dramas.
Filming is taking place for The Forbidden Marriage, a drama set in the 14th-century kingdom of Joseon, in which a bereaved king bans all single women from marrying until he stops grieving for his wife. Medieval guardsmen lounge about under the fake battlements checking Instagram between action shots. Shows like this are now broadcast globally. Jean Hur, MBC's publicist, tells me that Iranian housewives and Indian grandmas structure their days around K-dramas. In recent years Korean broadcasters have cut deals with all the main US streaming platforms. "We used to be popular in Vietnam, Singapore, mostly southeast Asia," Hur says. "Now, because we sell shows to Disney and Netflix, we are all over the world."
Perhaps the success of hallyu points to just how predictable western culture has become. As Hollywood exhumes Batman for the umpteenth remake, the freshness and zest of Korean cinema has begun to resonate. "This couldn't have happened if there wasn't a vacuum," Hong says. "Hollywood got sloppy. People got tired of western mainstream media. They got tired of the deviation from storytelling."
Rosalie Kim and Yoojin Choi, the curators of the V&A exhibition, attribute much of hallyu's advance to globalisation and the dawning of the age of diversity. "Globalisation exposes us all to a wider range of culture," Kim says. "But Gen Z and millennials are also in a social context where diversity has come to the fore. They are more inclined to embrace other cultures."
South Korea also has a knack for tweaking and perfecting foreign innovations. For years Samsung's nickname was "Samsuck", because of its poor imitations of leading Japanese and American electrical products. Now it is a market leader. "We are good at absorbing other cultures, understanding them, deconstructing them and making them our own," says the dance maestro Youn. "K-pop has become Korean but is not entirely foreign to westerners. It has lots of influences from the US and Europe."
This replication can be a little synthetic. The K-pop wave has been compared with the British musical wave of the 1960s and 1970s that gave the world the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. For me, K-pop doesn't belong in the same sentence as those 20th-century giants: much of it feels samey and forgettable. Nonetheless, like all Korean content it comes with sharp production values and the kind of tightly wound energy that flows through the streets of bustling Seoul. "Korean people want to take things to the extremes," Choi says. "They use a model that already exists and take it to the next level. There is this desire to add more, to go beyond what already exists."
On the streets of Hongdae, Seoul's university neighbourhood, students display a distinctly Korean mixture of street style, grunge and bright poppy colours. Every few blocks, outside a fried chicken shop or a barbecue joint, crowds gather to hear an aspiring K-pop idol sing or watch a would-be dance star perform. Everyone seems to want to see their name on the K-Star Road, a copy of Hollywood's Walk of Fame that runs through Gangnam. "My daughter spends two hours in a dance class after school every day," Breen says. "She has singing lessons every week. There's a real formula for this."
There is, however, a thin line between a successful formula and stifling control freakery. The K-pop industry in particular is controlling to the point of claustrophobia. Potential idols are picked young, trained intensively and then often spat out by the system if they don't make it into a band. Even those who do make it don't always reap the benefits at first: locals told me of well-known K-pop stars working extra shifts as baristas because the management companies take so much of the profit.
The punishing hours, the fan obsession and the media glare all take their toll. K-pop and indeed K-drama is regularly rocked by high-profile suicides. Two female K-pop idols, Sulli and Goo Hara, took their own lives within six weeks of one another in 2019.
In K-pop even the biggest stars are often forced to suppress their romantic lives so as not to offend jealous fans. Any hint of debauchery or excess can be a career killer. The same can apply in K-drama. In 2009 Ju Ji-hoon, a star of the Netflix Korean zombie hit Kingdom, admitted to using Ecstasy and ketamine. He received a suspended prison sentence and a fine, but it was ten years before he was allowed back on to two of Korea's biggest broadcasters.
"They're treated like slaves," Hong says. "But this doesn't just come from their managers. If they went to Korean school [as Hong did], then they were brought up to do that. A country doesn't go from being the third poorest in the world to being very rich if people are not working their asses off."
Hallyu has worked. It has brought fame, riches and attention to South Korea, twinning its economic progress with cultural prestige. Koreans I spoke to told me they have more confidence in the world now, a sense of being known. Korean schoolkids in Britain or America are no longer likely to be mocked or bullied for the kimchi in their lunch boxes — quite the opposite in fact. But for all its rapid success, South Korea is not a particularly happy country. The kind of inequality that drives the horror in Parasite is rife in Seoul. The cut-throat competitiveness dramatised in Squid Game dominates daily life. "Koreans have a serious happiness issue," Breen says. "None of this has made them happy. If anything they're more miserable than they were when they were poor. Competition has made people sad."
Yet they continue to forge an impressive path into the 21st century. While waiting for my flight home at a spotless Seoul airport, I watch a live panpipe performance of Frank Sinatra's My Way, one of Korea's favourite pop songs. Meanwhile, a Dalek-shaped robot glides past giving people travel advice. Blending ancient and modern, homegrown and foreign replicas, and pursuing success with a relentless zeal: this seems to be the Korean way.
From colony to cultural phenomenon
• 1945 At the end of the Second World War, Korea ceases to be a Japanese colony and is partitioned along the 38th parallel by the Soviet and American victors. Plans to reunify Korea are mothballed as the Cold War develops.
• 1950 Troops from the communist north invade South Korea and occupy Seoul. After three years of conflict involving US, British and Chinese forces, the war ends in stalemate and the peninsula remains divided along the 38th parallel.
• 1988 After long periods of martial law, a string of ruling generals and several uprisings, South Korean leaders agree to hold democratic elections. In the same year Seoul hosts the Olympic Games.
• 1990s The fates of the two Koreas continue to diverge. In the north, a dynasty of Kims rules with an iron fist and famines kill hundreds of thousands. In the south, deregulated industry and a new enthusiasm for international trade rapidly transform the nation into one of the world's leading economies.
• 2012 Psy releases Gangnam Style and the video becomes the first to hit one billion views on YouTube. The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki Moon, hails the song as a force for world peace.
• 2013 Park Geun-hye becomes the first female president of South Korea. Four years later she is impeached and then sentenced to 25 years for coercion and abuse of power.
• 2020 Parasite becomes the first non-English language film to win an Oscar for best picture.
• 2022 Byron Burger launches its Korean GochuBang Burger across its UK restaurants
Where to get help:
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 (available 24/7)
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO (available 24/7)
• Youth services: (06) 3555 906
• Youthline: 0800 376 633
• What's Up: 0800 942 8787 (11am to11pm)
• Depression helpline: 0800 111 757 (available 24/7)
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155
• Helpline: 1737
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111
Written by: Josh Glancy
© The Times of London
