Yin Yuan
Hallyu is multi-dimensional and transnational. There’s the government-state level, then there are the individual companies and content producers who are riding this wave, and then there’s also the fandom side.
An Assistant Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of California, who’s currently editing an academic project on Hallyu.
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Many Koreans maintain that Hallyu is merely the result of a remarkable culture built on communal arts and emotional intelligence, but it’s also a commercial strategy disguised as a cultural flex. Kim Dae-jung, the President of South Korea from 1998 to 2003 and self-anointed “President of Culture,“ set in motion an effort to export the country’s popular culture to boost its economic standing.
GLOBAL CACHE BY DESiGN
Hallyu what?
Understanding
the Korean Wave.
Hallyu, or “The Korean Wave,” is the ongoing phenomenon of Korean culture—music, film, cuisine, comics, video games, technology, and language—achieving a global embrace. The colloquial term was adopted domestically in the 1990s, and it’s come to represent Korea’s modern cultural takeover.
After World War II, America’s cultural exports (think Levi’s, Coke, muscle cars, and all things Hollywood) established the country as a 20th century trendsetter. Similarly, South Korean culture is experiencing global adoption today. Everywhere you look, there’s something cool and Korean.
8 Ways the Korean Wave Washes Over the Globe
Korea’s most successful exports marry the traditional and the modern, absorbing a variety of global references in minimalist (even humble) packages. But simple doesn’t mean unsophisticated or lacking in R&D. Perpetually on the cutting edge, Korean cultural products have now made their way into the lifestyles of Americans and beyond. These are the eight main forces of Korean influence.
술
spirits
패션
Streets of Seoul
텔레비전
Television
영화
FIlms
자동차
Automobiles
케이팝
Kpop
음식
cuisine
아름다움
k-beauty
President of Culture
Kim dae-jung
The government-aided push has only exploded throughout the pandemic, as the world’s increasingly bored and isolated citizens sought out new forms of distraction. In 2020, the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced that it would be formally establishing a Hallyu Department to further support “cultural exchange.”
케이팝
K-Pop
It’s impossible to talk about K-pop’s hallyu effect without mentioning BTS. The seven-member group has six chart-topping singles and a global fanbase known as the devoted ARMY. The global superstars have spoken at the UN twice and went to the White House for a statement against anti-Asian hate crimes. For the past nine years, BTS has created genre-expansive music that honors Korean culture while pulling from many unexpected references—Jungian philosophy, Greek mythology, and the novelist Haruki Murakami, just to name a few—all while emphasizing a message of community.
BTS
Blackpink
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BTS
Blackpink
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Of course, BTS is not the only K-pop act that’s taken the world by storm; Blackpink became the first Korean girl group to play Coachella in 2019 or appear on the cover of Rolling Stone and has collaborated with everyone from Lady Gaga to Dua Lipa.
The K-Pop wave is still cresting, with the 13-member Seventeen, fourth-gen groups such as Tomorrow x Together (which landed three Billboard No. 1 albums), and Aespa (which played Coachella in 2022).
K-pop is a blend of traditional Korean and East Asian music styles with American hip-hop, R&B, and other genres. This remixing and integration of different forms extends to the genre’s visuals—videos, choreography, styling, makeup, and the graphic design around each release. Its secret is in the blend. “They’re part of an industrial process that takes the best of what works and incorporates it into something new,” Hurt writes. The results are highly-curated worlds that encourage fans to immerse and connect with the song’s messages of hope and love.
blackpink performing at coachella in 2019
BTS on the set of their music video Dynamyte
BTS meeting president biden at the white house
blood, sweat & tears by bts
영화
FILMS
Films
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The Korean movies most beloved abroad are the thrillers and horror films that capture the darkest elements of interpersonal relationships, class, and sexuality. Leading director Kim Ki-young, one of the first Korean filmmakers to gain international recognition for works like the psychosexual The Housemaid (1960), inspired most of the country’s modern directors—like Bong Joon-ho, who took the Best Picture Oscar and the Palme D’or for 2019’s Parasite (both firsts for a South Korean), and Park Chan-wook, who won Best Director at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival for Decision to Leave.
parasite (2019) trailer
bong joon-ho and the cast of parasite
Films
Why do these films resonate with non-Koreans in ways Korean films never have before? “It's the universalist themes of Korean society,” said actress Jung Bo-ram, who stars in rising director Kim Se-in’s The Apartment with Two Women, which debuted at Berlinale this year. The growing success of directors in Korea have also carved out space for Korean storytellers abroad, like the American Lee Isaac Chung. His 2020 film Minari was nominated for Best Picture, and actress Youn Yuh-jung won Best Actress for her role as Soon-ja. She shouted out Kim Ki-young in her acceptance speech.
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the housemaid (1960)
decision to leave (2022)
Next level by Aespa
Good Boy Gone Bad by TXT
Clap by seventeen
How you like that by Blackpink
Blackpink + Selena gomez
blackpink + Dua lipa
Blackpink + Lady Gaga
영화
Television
Squid Game
K-Drama
In 2021, Squid Game was beamed into more than 142 million member households, becoming Netflix’s most-watched series ever. (Netflix recently renewed it for a second season and announced a spin-off competition series, Squid Game: The Challenge.) Like Parasite, the show’s allegory of the horrors of modern neoliberal society has resonated with audiences across the globe. “They’re both about the spectacle of being alienated by capitalism and how it creates a sort of violence in you,” says Yin Yuan, an Assistant Professor at St. Mary’s College of California, who’s currently editing an academic project on Hallyu. She adds that while both of these works critique capitalism, they’re “less interested in diagnosing the solution,” which makes it easier to commodify them as cultural products for international audiences. “Generally speaking, Hollywood and the American cultural industry is invested in these high-octane narratives,” she explains. “Parasite and Squid Game both fit into that mold.”
Squid Game
Global attention around K-dramas have also exploded in recent years for their relatable depictions of romantic relationships and family dynamics. “I have students who say that they like K-dramas because they can watch it with their families and it resonates with everybody,” Yuan says. “The way that family is represented in these shows is so different from the typical American offering; it’s similar to Hispanic family structures, Indian family structures.” While these serial dramas have been globally popular since the 1990s, they hit a milestone year in 2020, when everyone was looking for easy-to-binge content during the pandemic. Yuan offers the hit series Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha as an example of a show that brought comfort to viewers, both domestic and abroad. “The writer felt like community was the only way we humans could save each other, and I think that resonated with a lot of people in the U.S. as well.”
K-Drama
자동차
Automobiles
Korea has been stealing the world’s attention with its cutting-edge (mostly affordable) automobiles— especially as Hyundai, its primary car-maker, has become a forerunner in the EV market. In 2022, the Hyundai-owned Kia EV6 won the international Car of the Year award, while Hyundai’s IONIQ 5 won the World Car of the Year Award in June.
Hyundai’s takeover of the American market (including a chunk of Tesla’s share) was inevitable, if slow to arrive. Consider that there wasn’t a single Korean-made car sold in the US before 1986, when Hyundai introduced the economical (but otherwise forgettable) Excel. Now, Hyundai is making aesthetic waves with retro-futuristic pixelated tail lights, design talent lured from Volkswagen Group, and brand-defining models. It’s a rapid departure from the country’s very first automobile called the Shibal, a colorful taxi developed in 1955, which was built from parts of U.S. Army jeeps and sheet metal from oil drums. “Piecing together the best parts of finished technologies and practices perfected overseas and creating more efficient domestic versions is as old as modern, industrial Korea itself,” writes Michael Hurt, a Professor of Cultural Theory at Seoul National University of the Arts. Much like in music, beauty, and fashion, Korean automakers—once seen as pastiche—are now setting trends globally.
hyundai's commerical for ioniq 5
Words by Michelle Hyun Kim
The country’s outsized global influence has a name—hallyu—and a mission: to drive Korea’s economy by exporting everything cool.
상세보기
Korea is Having a Moment
아름다움
아름다움
술
술
자동차
자동차
한류
한류
영화
영화
패션
패션
고추장
고추장
텔레비전
텔레비전
IONIQ 5 is 2022 world car of the year
음식
Cuisine
In Korean cuisine, blandness is simply not an option. The country’s foods have a reputation for incorporating a variety of flavors at once, usually in the form of side dishes called banchan (the most famous of which is kimchi). “Your five flavors—sweet, salty, sour, acidic, and spicy—are all encompassed in a single dish,” said Hooni Kim, the chef behind New York’s Danji and Hanjan. “Korean food delivers all these different flavors right off the bat, without [you] having to look for them."
In Korea, meals are usually shared, with the spread at the center of a communal table for anyone to grab and enjoy. In 2020, the U.S. became the top importer of Korean food, as global palettes have grown to love the country’s snacks, like rice cakes and the addictively salty seaweed snacks, as well as its punchy pantry goods, like the chili paste gochujang.
banchan 101 by Aaron and Claire
Bulgogi filet mignon sliders from danji
korean bbq style skirt steak from danji
Budae Jjigae aka Army Stew from hanjan
패션
streets of seoul
Streetwear
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In recent years, Korean streetwear brands have emerged as global trendsetters, with K-pop stars and Western celebrities alike spotted in Ader Error, Thisisneverthat, D-Antidote, and 87MM. Korean street fashion is a mélange of global trends, subcultural aesthetics, and Western brands, all taken out of context and styled together.
“There’s a feedback loop where people wearing Korean street fashion are more cognizant of how they’re going to be received outside of Korea,” says Hurt, who has been doing ethnographic street fashion photography in Seoul for two decades. “It’s a really successful form of hypermodern fashion. There are no fashion trend borders anymore, it’s all as fast as Instagram can spread it.” Hurt explains that Korean street fashionistas have recently gravitated towards edgy accessories like harnesses, chains, and straps usually associated with BDSM subcultures in the West, even if the bondage association is lost when it gets to Korea.
Streetwear
In 2014, Seoul Fashion Week moved locations from a Gangnam convention center to the futuristic Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), whose sloping structure led to more media coverage. “People were using the building for official event runways, press rolls, and other traditional things,” Hurt explains. “But at the same time, the structure of the DDP flipped this active [street] fashion fandom, this outsider group, onto the main ramp runway that leads people from the top floor to the bottom, from the outside to the inside. So while the official raised runways of Fashion Week were going on inside, all the attention was going to the ramp outside.”
BTS on the set of their music video Dynamyte
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thisneverthat's 2022 collection
ader error on machine-a
87MM
술
spirits
What do you drink over a Korean dinner? Korean booze, of course. As the country’s cuisine got popular internationally, there was opportunity on the beverage front, says Carol Pak. She’s the founder of Sool, a Korean American alcohol brand launched in 2017. “There are more types of Korean restaurants arising, with some doing innovative, fusion menus and others doing premium menus,” Pak says. “At the time [I founded Sool], the beverage directors were saying that it’s a shame Korean cuisine has gotten this far, but there’s not really many options when it comes to beverages.”
Pak’s brand spotlights Korea’s oldest liquor, makgeolli, a coarsely filtered rice alcohol, by raising the quality standard. The result is Makku, a craft makgeolli drink that has a thoroughly traditional brewing process, but appeals to an American palate with flavors like blueberry and mango. And of course, there’s now a seltzer. In 2021, Sool launched Soku, America’s first hard seltzer made with soju, a low-ABV grain alcohol that’s the beverage most commonly associated with Korea.
soku by sool
makku by sool
아름다움
k-beauty
Dr. Jart+
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Innovative, yet homespun. It’s what Korean beauty is all about. Korea’s beauty industry incorporates natural ingredients like rice water or mugwort, formulating them into scientific, easy-to-use products. Dr. Jart+, the first Korean skincare brand to land on shelves at Sephora, introduced the United States to that philosophy in 2011. Emphasizing a balance between dermatological science and art, the brand represented Korean beauty’s greater philosophy of using the most potent ingredients and distilling them into elegant treatments. And today, the country’s wide variety of products are now commonplace. You’ll find Korean sheet masks, ingredient-specific ampules, and beauty balm (BB) and complexion corrector (CC) creams at every CVS in America.
dr jart+ products on sephora's website
Dr. Jart+
Shortly after Dr. Jart+, the U.S. got its first two major Korean beauty-retailers: Peach & Lily and Soko Glam, whose founder Charlotte Cho said it was a challenge to introduce Americans to the “concepts and philosophies K-Beauty is built on. There’s the Korean ‘skin first’ philosophy, double cleansing, and categories like pimple patches, snail mucin, and essences,” she elaborated. Now with the proliferation of hugely popular Korean beauty influencers like Pony Park (nearly 6 million YouTube subscribers) and K-pop idols with beauty collabs, international consumers have endless access to K-beauty’s best.
peach & lily
soko glam
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pony park on youtube
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Korea’s reality-based content, known as variety shows, have also gained international influence. The Korean singing competition King of Masked Singer got an American remake, The Masked Singer, in 2019. Last year, Netflix’s 2021 dating show Single’s Inferno, which nods to their other popular formats like Too Hot to Handle and The Circle, became the first-ever Korean reality show to enter the top 10 of Netflix's most popular shows. The streamer seems to be looking to ride that momentum by renewing Single’s Inferno for a second season and bringing the domestically popular dating show Change Days to the platform this June.
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The country’s outsized global influence has a name—hallyu—and a mission: to drive Korea’s economy by exporting everything cool.
blackpink's rosé in king of masked singer
trailer for single's inferno
trailer for hometown cha-cha-cha
seoul fashion week 2014
trailer for It’s Okay Not to Be Okay
trailer for sweet home
a scene from Squid game
The Apartment with Two Women (2022) trailer
Youn Yuh-jung's oscar speech
banchan 101 by Aaron and Claire
thisneverthat's 2022 collection
ader error on machine-a
87MM
dongdaemun design plaza
soku by sool
makku by sool
자동차
Automobiles
아름다움
K-Beauty Revolution
음식
K-cuisine
패션
Streets of seoul
영화
films
술
spirits
케이팝
k-pop
텔레비전
television