The Korean wave: how Seoul film and music won over the world

If you think that Boon Jong-ho’s Parasite (which won four Oscars this week, including Best Picture) is pretty black as comedies go, you should try the South Korean film The President’s Barber. Set in 1970s Seoul, a working-class hair clipper is appointed to tend the dictatorial leader Park Chung-hee, and tensions grow between his family and the upper-class presidential entourage. The barber becomes convinced that the head of state is a vicious, violent maniac, and his son ends up as the victim of an electrode punishment — played onscreen for laughs of the bleakest kind.

Parasite is the latest example of the Hallyu, or ‘Korean Wave’, or a cultural phenomenon that has been emerging over the past quarter century in South Korea’s cinema, pop music and literature. I’m a historian of modern China, yet over the past few years when I visit Beijing and Tokyo, I hear people talking more and more about the pace-setting culture of Seoul. And how South Korea, a country smaller than Bulgaria, is producing a freer and less hidebound version of Asian culture for the 21st century.

Its cinema is in the headlines this week but its music is also a global phenomenon. Korea’s ‘K-pop’ is eclipsing J-pop from Japan. Seoul’s biggest stars find themselves mobbed by teenagers in their Beijing hotels. The West caught a glimpse of that culture with the success of Psy’s hit ‘Gangnam Style’ in 2012. Then, after the split of One Direction in 2016, Korea’s BTS rose to become the highest-paid boyband in the world — last year their album Map of the Soul reached No. 1 in the UK, and their first six stadium sets in the US grossed $44 million. Globally, when people think about Asian pop music, literature or film, it’s increasingly Korea that comes to mind.

No one would have predicted this a couple of generations ago.