The National Museum of History in Seoul is currently hosting an exhibition that aims to gain insight into how the Hallyu wave is shaped today.
The exhibition, titled “Pop Culture We Love and the Rise of the Hallyu Wave,” debuted at the National Museum of Korean Modern History in Seoul, South Korea, on Wednesday.
Koreans love pop culture—music, movies, TV shows, and more.
The number of people enjoying Korean pop culture continues to increase around the world. That’s why it is also called “Hallyu”. Korean singers are rising up the charts, and Korean movies and dramas have won prestigious international awards, making Koreans proud.
The Korean wave is popular all over the world, and Koreans also accept, appreciate and love various cultural forms from all over the world. Since liberation in 1945, Korean people have always loved Hollywood movies, while Hong Kong movies and Japanese manga and cartoons have also exploded from time to time. As a result, avid fans of popular culture both at home and abroad continued to create new music, movies, and TV shows, which eventually led to the rise of the Hallyu wave. It is the result of tolerance and empathy developed through openness to different cultures under different social conditions.
What role will Hallyu play in the future global cultural space? Hallyu was formed in a diverse pop culture landscape. As such, we can expect a wider variety of pop culture offerings to flourish around the world.
The “Korean wave” is known as the global prosperity of Korean pop culture.
The show, which will run until September 3, tells the story of how current Korean culture has been inspired by foreign pop culture from around the world, including American, Japanese and Hong Kong pop culture, and has emerged globally.
“This is basically not an exhibition to promote the Hallyu wave or show its history,” Kwon Gi-jun, the exhibition’s curator, said at a news conference at the museum on Thursday.
“As a museum of Korean history, we hope to provide a new perspective on how the Hallyu was created and why it is so successful.”
He believes the current phenomenon is the result of Korean society’s open acceptance of different pop cultures from around the world.
Divided into three sections, the exhibition features approximately 1,000 works, showcasing the influence of the United States, Hong Kong and Japan on Korean pop music, movies and comic books.
When visitors enter the exhibition hall, the first thing they notice are the two gorgeous stage costumes worn by Hyun Mee and Lee Geum-hee, two of Korea’s most popular pop singers in the 1960s. The former died in April at the age of 85.
Like many other Korean singers and entertainers at the time, the two began their musical careers on stage with the Eighth Army of the US Army in Korea.
The first section is dedicated to American culture and also includes the first LP released in the US in 1956 by Ok Doo-ok, America’s first Korean singer.
There is also an autographed record by Kim Sisters, the first Asian girl group to debut in the US.
Ok’s English stage name Moon Kim’s vinyl record “East of Make Believe” contains two tracks: the title track and “Kanda Kanda.” The discovery of the album a decade ago changed the history of Korean music abroad, and K-pop trio Kim Sisters, who debuted in the North American market in 1959, are considered the first Korean artists to do so.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Hong Kong films and Japanese manga and animation films were very popular in Korea.
The second part of the exhibition displays more than 400 classic Hong Kong film videos of different genres, which visitors can watch with VHS players.
They could see stores filled with unauthorized J-pop manga and J-pop songs, as well as promotional posters for Japanese animated films. Due to the ban on the import of Japanese pop culture, these works were not released under Korean names in South Korea until the embargo was finally lifted in 1998.
The third part of the exhibition focuses on the development of the Hallyu wave in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The exhibit showcases the K-pop records, TV series and movies that contributed to the K-pop phenomenon as a global phenomenon, as well as a variety of merchandise purchased by K-pop fans.
The museum showcases newspapers and publications from the US, Japan and Taiwan, showing the popularity of K-pop or K-Pop, such as BTS, BLACKPINK, Super Junior, G-Dragon and Psy, for those who still don’t understand the global cultural fame .
Juergen Thomas Steinmetz has been working in the travel and tourism industry since his teenage years (1977) in Germany.
He founded eTurboNews in 1999 as the first online newsletter for the global travel and tourism industry.
