The Observer, a Sunday publication of the British daily Guardian, on Sept. 4 ran an in-depth feature titled "K-everything: the rise and rise of Korean culture" on Hallyu's global popularity. The image is of the Observer feature. (Korean Cultural Centre in London)

By Yoon Sojung 

The Observer, a Sunday publication of the British daily Guardian, has released an in-depth analysis on Korean cultural content that has earned global popularity ranging from music, film and video games to TV shows, fashion and food.

In the article titled "K-everything: the rise and rise of Korean culture," the Observer devoted five pages including the front page and pages eight to 11 to the Hallyu boom. 

Calling SM Entertainment a "K-pop factory," the piece described a visit to the management agency's office, quoting SM founder Lee Soo-man as saying, "The Korean entertainment industry has created a new paradigm for cultural export."

"The collective results of that Korean coolness, which has flourished across the world over the past decade or more – not only in music but also in film and video games and TV and fashion and food – will be celebrated in a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London at the end of this month called Hallyu! The Korean Wave."

The exhibition will open late this month.

In the story, the influential Korean cultural critic Lee Moon-won is quoted in Korean American journalist Euny Hong's book "The Birth of Korean Cool" as saying, "Very few countries have ever attempted to sell their pop culture to the United States. For about a decade, when K-pop and K-dramas were ascendant across Asia, that ambition was stubbornly resisted."

The Observer said, "The unlikely detonator of the Korean wave in the English-speaking world was Gangnam Style, the 2012 track by the Seoul-based rapper Psy that became the first YouTube video to be viewed a billion times."

Such popularity was also thanks to a decision by the Kim Dae-jung administration, which saw the need for a large-scale project to revive the national brand after Korea endured the 1997 Asian foreign exchange crisis, it added. 

The development of the Korean digital industry such as high broadband penetration, the Observer mentioned, was also part of such efforts. "One outcome of that early adoption of technology is that the Korean wave tends to blur distinctions between real and virtual worlds. Just as K-pop stars exist both on concert stages and in an imagined metaverse, so esports merge real-world competition and online gaming," it added.

On Korean food, the article said, "Kimchi is at the heart of that revolution. The spiced cabbage dish holds a unique place in Korean hearts partly because of the collective memory of kimjang, the communal autumn ritual of massaging vats full of cabbage leaves with red pepper, salt, garlic, ginger and anchovy paste." 

It also mentioned the nutritional benefits of kimchi, saying, "Those viral beliefs in kimchi's health-giving properties went properly global, along with K-pop, during Covid."

On Korean cinema, the Observer said, "While Hollywood repeats ever-more bloated Marvel franchises, Korean film-makers have learned that 1970s Hollywood trick of making thoughtful, auteur-led films go mainstream."

Turning to director Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite," it said, "(Parasite) was a groundbreaking Oscar success – the first foreign language winner of best picture - not for any kind of worthiness but for its brilliant contemporary storytelling, the sharp and resonant things it had to say about inequality and class and poverty and excess – subjects about which mainstream American film is mostly silent."

"(Squid Game) was the first non-English Netflix show to top global viewing charts, breaking all previous records for the platform."

Finally, the article introduced the annual "good country index," which attempts to quantify how effective countries are in selling positive images of themselves. Korea last year was sixth in global cultural influence while the U.K. was 23rd.  

The Observer has the highest circulation among British current affairs and analysis publications with 140,000 copies per issue and is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper. Its reporter Tim Adams visited Korea for a week last month.