Hanam has a mayor who loves visitors and tourism, and it shows. Hanam’x Mayor Lee Hyun-jae’s vision to have Hanam become the capital of the most popular music culture in the world by 2025, K-Pop, is becoming a reality.
Mr. Lee-Hyun-jae has been working hard to make this vision a reality, and the fruits and transformation of his city are showing.
What is K-Culture?
K-Culture refers to South Korean popular culture, which emerged in the late 1990s. It includes music, film, dramas, fashion, food, comics, and novels. Started by a young generation of Koreans, it spread to neighboring countries and took over the world.
The feverish fondness that Korean pop culture attracted in overseas media soon gave rise to a host of terms such terms as Korean Wave, K-Culture, and so on. The term K-Culture was quickly reimported back into South Korea, where it has been used to describe South Korean pop culture.
What is the secret to the ongoing popularity of Culture?
Part of the reason for its success may be found in the institutional, financial, and policy support the South Korean government has provided for the movement, continuously and relentlessly working to keep the Korean Wave going and stopping it from becoming a transient phenomenon, all in the hope of enhancing the nation’s soft power.
Hanam is a city where you want to live; in other words, Hanam is on the Rise. Under Mayor Lee Hyun-jae, the city is leveraging its administrative successes to bring this vision to life.
Although the country’s political leadership has changed several times since the 1990s, from Liberal to Conservative and back to Liberal again, support for Pop Culture has remained constant.
The government has also expanded and diversified its support into digital domains as the country’s cutting-edge.
IT companies have grown, seeking to foster stronger industrial digital content clusters, thereby propelling the production and consumption of cultural content online beyond South Korea’s national boundaries.
Despite these efforts, it took several decades for K-Culture to become truly widespread, reaching beyond East and Southeast Asia. These regions share a similar cultural background, with cultural exchanges and Asian pop culture media, including Japanese songs and Hong Kong cinema.
Overall, South Korea is still a relatively small country. With a population of 51 million, it occupies only half of the Korean peninsula.
Digital technologies may have made cultural consumption and global sharing more straightforward, but cultural competition against other non-English countries remains fierce.
So what is the historical and cultural context in which K-Culture became more widely consumed?
Psy’s “Gangnam Style”, a worldwide hit in 2012, is widely regarded as a tipping point for K-Culture in the global marketplace.
While it may be true that this song had a huge influence, despite the language barriers, several Korean TV dramas, films, and pop songs had already been gaining a strong reputation in Asia before this time, thanks in part to the extensive efforts of diverse Korean talent.
Meanwhile, today, a large fraction of contemporary K-Culture is indebted to rising public participation in new digital culture genres, such as Mukbang and Webtoons.
These genres are unique to Korean Web culture and have become successful or even viable not just thanks to the creative ideas or initiatives of pioneering individuals but also because the public as a whole was interested in participating in such digitally driven production formats.
A significant proportion of K-Culture content today is free of charge, which facilitates its dissemination across the Internet.
