K-TRAIN KEEPS ON ROLLING

HOW SOUTH KOREA BECAME A CULTURAL POWERHOUSE, AND WHAT’S NEXT

- STORY: JIN YU YOUNG / NYT

Tony Award-winning play on Broadway. The finale of a record-breaking Netflix show. And a reunion of arguably the world’s big-gest pop band.

South Korean culture is having a moment. Again.

Maybe Happy Ending clinching the best musical Tony this month added a new art form to South Korea's growing list of international cultural successes. It followed Parasite, which in 2020 was the first foreign-language film to win an Oscar for best picture, and Han Kang, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in literature.

On the K-pop front, the last member of BTS has completed his mandatory national service, stirring the hopes of fans worldwide about a reunion. And Blackpink will start a global tour next month with a gig near Seoul.

Later this month, the third season of Squid Game will arrive on Netflix, the final instalment of a show whose first season set viewership records.

But the so-called Korean Wave shows no signs of subsiding. Global interest in seeking out all things Korean, from cosmetics to food, is surging.

HOW DID K-CULTURE BECOME SO POPULAR?

Experts say the nation’s cultural wave, known as Hallyu in Korean, began in the late 1990s, when South Korean soaps started gaining popularity in China and Japan. The rise of the internet spread these exports further.

In 2012, Psy’s horseback dance moves and rap melody made Gangnam Style the first video on YouTube to surpass 1 billion views. The breakout hit brought global attention to K-pop. But it was BTS — a group of seven handsome young men who rap, dance and sing (all at the same time) — that took K-pop into the global mainstream. During the pandemic, BTS broke several Guinness World Records for streams and views of their tracks Dynamite and Butter.