Interview: Meet Kim Jae-hwan, the director of the Korean Cultural Center in Brussels
Could you briefly introduce yourself to the readers of K! World?
Kim Jae-hwan: With pleasure. Dear K! World readers, hello. My name is Kim Jae-hwan and I am the director of the Korean Cultural Center in Brussels. Our center opened its doors on November 26, 2013, so it has been seven years since we have started our mission to spread Korean culture in Belgium. It is a place where we present Korea and its culture, giving our European friends the means to discover it, and in particular to experience the hallyu wave, a wave that is rich with much beautiful cultural content.
Can you tell us more about your experiences before your appointment as head of the Korean Cultural Center in Brussels?
Kim Jae-hwan: I worked as director of the Korean Cultural Center in Budapest, Hungary for four years. It has been a great pleasure for me to work on the dissemination of Korean culture in this beautiful capital of Central Europe. After completing my mandate, I returned to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to which I am attached and I worked there as director of the foreign press department, in charge of promotion and cooperation, and I was transferred to Brussels, in April this year. In fact, as you can see, my entire career has been devoted to making Korea known and promoting its culture abroad.
The Korean Cultural Center aims to present not only Korean traditional culture, but also modern culture at large. Could you tell us how you see the balance in your cultural events, between traditional culture and modern culture?
Kim Jae-hwan: It is true that nowadays Hallyu is, as its name suggests, a powerful “wave”, a fundamental movement which makes it possible to make known on a world scale the current Korean popular culture around productions. like K-Pop, movies, and dramas. It seems to me that this popular culture has in itself all the assets to ensure real competitiveness in international markets, without really needing special help from government institutions like the Korean Cultural Center. We are indeed both a diplomatic and a public institution, which should not concentrate all its efforts on the dissemination of popular mass culture, but also first of all on that of our traditional culture, such as music or Korean literature. So we strive to strike the right balance between popular manifestations of contemporary hallyu, which are somewhat of a standard in modern Korea, and another hallyu, a deeper wave of traditional culture that is its foundation.
Considering that most Belgians have generally discovered Korea through the most representative examples of contemporary hallyu, such as K-Pop and K-Dramas, how do you go about encouraging them to open their eyes and to take an interest in Korean culture in all its diversity?
Kim Jae-hwan: We offer a wide variety of programs designed to draw the attention of Belgians to Korean culture by offering them festive events. I would like to give you two examples of how we organize them. In the first case, we collaborate with cultural establishments or local festivals. One of the most representative cultural establishments in Belgium, Bozar, is in this sense one of our main partners, and we organize with them concerts of Korean classical music, as well as exhibitions. I could also mention the Comic Strip Festival, one of the most famous festivals in Belgium, with which we collaborate to offer special exhibitions dedicated to Korean comics. The second case concerns the organization by our cultural center of various participatory-type programs. I would like to mention a particularly representative example, with our Korean Film Festival in Brussels, which is celebrating its eighth edition. The health crisis caused by Covid-19 has forced us to provide our programs exclusively online, but in any case our principle is to organize cultural events that are available both off-line and on-line, in order to give Belgian fans the pleasure of participating in it in different ways, and by getting involved in it interactively.
The rest of the interview can be read here, at the site of K! World.