126 igafencu.com
K-ENTERTAINMENT
It’s no coincidence that Psy, the internationally-feted South
Korean rapper, chose Hong Kong as one of the stops on his
2012 tour as he looked to capitalise on the unlikely global
success of Gangnam Style, the first K-pop single to truly
transcend every boundary. Nor was he the only Korean
performer that prioritised a stop-off in the city that year,
with Yoona, a member of the all-girl Girl’s Generation group,
mobbed by keen K-pop fans the moment she arrived at Hong
Kong airport. Since then, several generations of South Korean
musical exports – the likes of SHINee, T-ara, 2AM, Exo,
Monsta X and Wanna One – have ensured that Hong Kong’s
K-pop connoisseurs remain wholly enamoured.
The popularity of South Korean pop has, if anything, been
matched by the city’s growing demand for K-drama – a body
of operatic works that spans everything from heavy historical
dramas to contemporary romcoms.I
t’s fair to say that the debt K-culture owes
to animated dinosaurs has seldom been
acknowledged. The origins of this seemingly
omnipresent manifestation of South Korea’s
soft power, however, can indeed be traced back to the
multiplexes of 1993...
While cinemagoers around the world gaped
in slack-jawed amazement at the computer
trickery employed by director Steven Spielberg
to convincingly send a 65-million-year extinct
tyrannosaurus rex chasing after Jeff Goldblum
in Jurassic Park, the summer’s big blockbuster, a
very different sentiment gripped a canny group of
South Koreans. That sentiment was shock – more
specifically, shock that the amount of money made
by this faux-historical Hollywood fare exceeded the
total sales value of 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The fact
that the company was the country’s leading motoring
marque and a source of considerable national pride
only added to their discomfort.
As this realisation reverberated upwards, Kim
Young-sam, the country’s then-president, sensed
an opportunity and the idea of Korean culture as a
highly-lucrative, eminently-exportable commodity
began to take root. As a result, the South Korean
Ministry of Culture was soon mandated to prioritise
the development of the country’s wider media sector,
while investors were incentivised to back a raft of film,
TV and music projects. It was an astute call and, within
a decade, Korean culture was sweeping across Asia
and making inroads into Europe and North America.
Hong Kong, just 2,000km away, was one of
the first places the Korean Wave made landfall.
Embracing what came to be termed as hallyu – the
Chinese word for the sudden popularity of all things
Korean – the city got its initial taste of Seoul-sourced
drama in the late 1990s, courtesy of the soap operas
screened on ATV and Christmas in August, t h e
South Korean romance that was the country’s first
cinematic success in Hong Kong.
After that, the floodgates were well and truly open,
with post-Handover Hong Kong keen to be culturally
experimental after 99 years as a British chattel and
South Korea intent on using the Fragrant Harbour as a
platform for the yet wider dissemination of its artistic
endeavours. Since then, Korean culture has permeated
deep into Hong Kong society, manifesting itself in four
particular sectors...