Rana Mitter

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

The country is becoming a cultural superpower

issue 15 February 2020

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.

Parasite’s dystopian view of class is part of the debate about what it is to be a rich yet unequal country

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

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