Under the Korean wave
It will soon be a year since the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced: Korean writer Han Kang, who also became the first from her country to receive this award. The news, perhaps unexpected in our latitude, took on the tone of a national celebration in South Korea. In a way, this award represented the recognition of the strength of Korean culture today in one of the fields where it had not yet achieved the echo that music, film, and audiovisual media have enjoyed for years. Given this landing of Korean culture in the West, it is interesting to ask what makes it so attractive and how it has achieved such an international impact.
South Korea is a unique country, with an intense history of trauma and resilience intertwined with an upward economic trajectory that has placed it among the leading economies in Asia and the world for decades. In the middle of the last century, South Korea was a devastated country after 35 years of Japanese occupation (1910-1945), which, in addition to political repression, involved severe cultural persecution, and, above all, after the traumatic partition of the country into two Koreas, a result of the tensions of the Cold War, which resulted in more than two million deaths in the country. At that time, South Korea had one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world in one of the most heated geopolitical environments. Democracy was a long time coming, because in the early 1960s, Park Chung-hee carried out a military coup that put an end to the country's democratic restoration policies, and with Western support, a dictatorial system remained in place until the late 1980s. It was during those years, however, that the so-called "miracle" took shape, developing the technological industries we know well today, with large companies like Samsung and LG at the forefront.
In the 1990s, with a fledgling democracy and having placed itself in the eyes of the world with the hosting of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games (a milestone that marked the city's history in a similar way to the Barcelona Games), the country had begun to emerge. However, the instability of global markets in that decade made the Korean government see the need to diversify its economy, and it made an unusual decision: to invest in the globalization of Korean culture. This decision was partly prompted by the fact that the American cultural industry was massively occupying the Korean market, to the detriment of its own cultural production. In a country that had struggled to survive culturally, this was a crucial issue. But the government also realized the significant revenue that culture could generate: they say that what marked the turning point was the film Jurassic Park It boosted global sales of Hyundai cars, which appear in the film. Be that as it may, in that decade the Korean audiovisual and music sector began to enjoy significant incentives and support. By 2000, the music of K-pop groups and television series made in South Korea already had a large following throughout Asia and gradually spread globally.
Today, Korean society lives in a markedly neoliberal and capitalist system, where success and personal wealth are highly regarded. The country has achieved a level of development that was unthinkable a few decades ago, and the standard of living has profoundly transformed, but the speed of this change has not been without inequalities and human costs. And, as is the case everywhere, this is only one dimension of a more complex reality. The sophisticatedly informal image projected by K-pop idols contrasts with the fact that South Korea has the second-largest military per capita in the world, just behind its neighbor, North Korea. The tensions between the two countries, separated by the most militarized border on the planet, mark a completely different dimension in Korean society: that of a country aware that it could go to war at any moment. At the same time, it's difficult to leave behind the country's traumatic history when this military tension serves as a constant reminder of a past for which reparations remain unfinished. In our country, we know well that the silences of war and dictatorship take their toll and inflict great personal and social costs.
The work of prominent Korean creators today addresses these contradictions and allows us to penetrate the complexity of this society. The Korean Wave reaches us with all this diversity, with the music of BTS, which is said to enhance the feeling of happiness, but also with the texts of Han Kang or picture book author Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, who have had the courage to address the darkest moments of the past, and with the films The Squid Game where dark humor is used to provide a stark look at the dehumanization of capitalist society. These stories captivate us because they challenge us, and this is the key to the Korean wave: in its momentum, it has managed to make us see everything universal.
At the same time, the Korean case invites us to reflect on how culture can be an engine of economic growth. Through a clear political commitment to public investment in culture, South Korea has managed to build a soft power global that generates more revenue than its tech industry (it is estimated that BTS alone accounts for 0.3% of Korean GDP) and has also shown that being small is not a problem.