{"id":5732,"date":"2022-09-21T21:45:43","date_gmt":"2022-09-22T04:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5732"},"modified":"2022-09-21T21:45:43","modified_gmt":"2022-09-22T04:45:43","slug":"unherd-the-internationalization-of-korean-pop-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5732","title":{"rendered":"UnHerd: the internationalization of Korean pop culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><Center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"500\" height=\"290\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Squid-Game-UnHerd.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5733\"\/><\/center><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>Lee Jung-jae is in many ways the epitome of South Korean soft power. He has won international fame \u2014 and an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/entertainment-arts-62796137\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Emmy this week<\/a> \u2014 with his starring role in the hit Netflix series <em>Squid Game<\/em>, the dystopian South Korean thriller binge-watched around the world last autumn. He\u2019ll soon take that fame to new heights as a leading man in <em>The Acolyte<\/em>, the forthcoming Star Wars series from Disney+.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s no coincidence that Star Wars\u2019 first prominent east Asian performer is Korean. Americans in particular have by now come to regard South Koreans as what I call \u201cthe Westerners of Easterners\u201d, a people more culturally relatable than the Japanese and less geopolitically threatening than the Chinese. This distinction results in large part from the West\u2019s years of exposure to Korean popular culture, thanks to the likes of the Billboard-chart dominating BTS, Bong Joon-ho\u2019s Best Picture-winning <em>Parasite<\/em>, and of course <em>Squid Game<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This pop-cultural \u201cKorean wave\u201d \u2014 or <em>hallyu<\/em> \u2014 began sweeping Asia around the turn of the millennium and reached Western shores in earnest a decade ago, with the surprise global phenomenon that was Psy\u2019s <em>Gangnam Style<\/em>. A satire of the garish lifestyles led by Seoul\u2019s nouveau riche, that song \u2014 and even more so its strenuously absurd music video \u2014 showed the Korean entertainment industry that, one way or the other, the West could be won over. Ten years on, it has nearly 4.5 billion views on YouTube and features in the Victoria and Albert museum\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.vam.ac.uk\/exhibitions\/hallyu-the-korean-wave\">Hallyu! The Korean Wave\u201d\u00a0<\/a>exhibition, which opens next week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/unherd.com\/2022\/09\/south-korea-is-stealing-from-the-west\/\">Read the whole thing at UnHerd.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lee Jung-jae is in many ways the epitome of South Korean soft power. He has won international fame \u2014 and an Emmy this week \u2014 with his starring role in the hit Netflix series Squid Game, the dystopian South Korean thriller binge-watched around the world last autumn. He\u2019ll soon take that fame to new heights [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unherd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5734,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5732\/revisions\/5734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}