"How to understand the Hallyu : issues, questions, and problematics"

As a global phenomenon outside of East Asia, the Korean Wave is a thoroughly grassroots phenomenon. Institutional mediators did not bring Korean cultural products to their home countries and introduce them to the world, but rather the global audience spontaneously subtitled and mediated by taste communities in the global digital cultural environment created by the Internet. Unlike Japanese manga and anime, the Korean Wave offers a more inclusive discourse in terms of race and gender because it has a human face and embodies new relationships that Western popular culture does not. The hybrid nature of Korean popular culture also gives the Korean creative industries the freedom to actively and inclusively embrace and express different cultural trends from around the world. Therefore, the attitude of foreign media and scholars that there is a hidden recipe for the success of Korean popular culture, or understanding it as a soft power theory of the government, is problematic. This lecture is an explanation and challenge to these questions.

Lecturer

Prof. Dr. Seok-Kyeong Hong 

Seok-Kyeong Hong is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Seoul National University and director of Center for Hallyu Studies, SNU Asia Center. Her research interest is the digital cultural forms and practices and transnational cultural flows in this era. She published Hallyu in the Globalization and the Digital Era (2013) and BTS On the Road (2020) as well as codirected Transnational Convergence of Esat Asian Pop Culture (2021). Her recent interest includes the intersectionality of gender and race in Hallyu Studies and the use of data analysis as an auxiliary method for studies on digital cultural practices.