SEOUL | Talk about a triple whammy.
In 2019 “Parasite” became the first foreign-language film to snag a “Best Picture” Oscar. In 2020, boy band BTS dominated the music charts and drew comparisons to The Beatles. And a year later, the culture-shaking TV series “Squid Game” became the most-watched show ever on Netflix.
All three hail from South Korea, a nation that has set global benchmarks for “zero-to-hero” surges in both hard and soft power.
South Korea and its cultural output were virtually unknown in international society before the Korean War. The devastated country was subsequently seen as a basket case in the 1950s, as an unlovely bastion of metal-bashing in the 1960s and 1970s, and as a hot spot of fiery political protests in the 1980s and 1990s.
Millennial South Korea, however has become a byword for cool — with a capital “K.” Credit goes to “Hallyu” (“Korean Wave”), a term coined by a Chinese journalist in 1999 to describe an extraordinary outpouring of domestic pop-culture K-drama, K-pop, K-film, K-gaming — that was just beginning to swamp Asia.
Since then, “Hallyuwood” has swept the world, generating outsized artistic influence and attention for a country of just over 50 million people.
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“Hallyu has been instrumental in enhancing Korea’s national brand on the global stage,” said Yang Sun-mook, former government advisor who promotes South Korean “silver” fashion globally.
It provides a needed identity when your country is sandwiched between two cultural superpowers in China and Japan.
Seoul officials are “riding the coattails of Hallyu because they understand that soft power is better than hard power when you are a small country between the world’s second and third largest economies, both with much larger populations,” said CedarBough T. Saeji, who teaches Korean and East Asian studies at Pusan National University.
“A ‘Made-in-Korea’ tag once conjured up images of poverty or, in extreme cases, despotic leaders and nuclear missiles,” added David Tizzard, who teaches Korean studies at Seoul Women’s University “Now, Korea is not just winning the hearts of people though its cultural content, it’s also writing its own national identity and securing legitimacy in its struggle with the North.”
It has also been good for the national economy.
“According to the Korea Foundation, the Korean Wave has generated approximately $100 billion in revenue since its inception in the late 1990s,” Mr. Yang said. “Tourism has been positively impacted, with the number of foreign tourists visiting Korea increasing from 4.7 million in 2001 to 17.2 million in 2019.”
Stimulating creativity
Some overseas observers credit Hallyu like Korea’s industrial and technological leaps to brilliant policy-making. In reality, a complex spectrum of factors deserve credit.
The 1987 democratization wave saw censorship lifted and South Koreans freed to travel and study overseas, where they enrolled in film schools and binged on MTV. The government began pushing creative industries after seeing the success of Hollywood’s “Jurassic Park” franchise.
The 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis proved an even bigger stimulus, forcing old, established companies out of the entertainment business and allowing new talent to fill the vacuum. The crisis hammered the currency, and as cable TV came online across Southeast Asia, South Korean drama producers saw an opportunity to undercut Japanese competitors.
There was also sweat equity. Borrowing “corporate warrior” paradigms, South Korean talent agencies put prospective stars through rigorous, cross-training regimens: singing, dancing, acting, modelling, promoting.
Language training was included. In recognition of the domestic market’s modest size, South Korean cultural content was consciously aimed toward Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asia audiences.
Meanwhile, Seoul had invested massively in broadband. Fast-digitizing South Koreans embraced the internet, overturning old-school marketing and distribution mechanisms that had dominated global film and music.
The result: a kaleidoscope of unleashed creativity, savvy management, new-technology mastery and an openness to international influences.
From the late 1990s, K-pop and K-drama, populated by attractive, “nice guy/nice girl” stars, began attracting fan bases across Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
Public funding helped, but analysts say Hallyuwood’s success was bottom-up, not top-down. “Government did not become involved in supporting K-pop until after K-pop had already been making international inroads,” said Mr. Saeji.
As the talent pool expanded, South Korean offerings became more sophisticated. Western audiences tuned into edgy, gritty K-films like violent thriller “Old Boy” (2003), and Psy’s catchy rap “Gangnam Style” (2012). It was only a matter of time before “Parasite,” “Squid Game” and BTS took London, New York and Paris by storm.
“What Korea has successfully done is to create the next big stage for a modern, industrialized Asian country,” said Keiko Hagihara-Bang, who heads Bang Media Group and who notes that Hallyu is an asset for traditional K-products.
“Every second on the screen is a chance to generate interest in [Korean] fashion, design, food, cosmetics, tourism, electronics — even cars,” she said.
Hallyu’s versatility also has vaulted South Korea ahead of earlier Asian cultural powerhouses.
“While Hong Kong had its movies and Japan had its anime, … this is happening in Korea across multiple mediums – food, music, movies, beauty, fashion, computer games,” said Mr. Tizzard. “In a non-Western, non-English-speaking country, that has not really happened before. We are in uncharted territory.”
Uncharted and inclusive.
“This ability to transform creativity into an interface for a country is most extraordinary,” said Ms. Hagihara-Bang. “I don’t think there’s another country in the world that has an entire society — government, business and civic forces — build a national brand in this way, without coercion.”