From music to movies, technology to food, the world has fallen in love with everything South Korean. Ahead of a big London exhibition, Tim Adams visits Seoul in search of the origins of hallyu – the Korean wave
Last week, I was standing in a huge dance studio – one of 12 – near the top of a funky new office tower just north of the Han River in the South Korean capital, Seoul. The building is home to a company called SM Entertainment, which has strong claims to have invented one of the most potent cultural movements of the 21st century, the phenomenon of Korean pop music – K-pop.
Each generation creates hit factories in its own image. The “SM Culture Universe” was originally the vision of a Korean pop entrepreneur called Lee Soo-man who, after a brief career as a singer and DJ, studied computer engineering in the States in the 1980s. He returned to Seoul “with the dream of globalising Korean music”.
