- Publisher
- V&A Publishing
- Published
- 2022
- Shelf
- culture: Korea
- ISBN
- Out of print
Korea
Hallyu! The Korean Wave
Rosalie Kim (ed.)
The V&A's account of how Korean film, music, drama and fashion became the most exported culture of the last twenty years, and what was designed to make that happen.
Why read it
Most writing about the Korean wave treats it as something that occurred. This treats it as something that was built, and shows the machinery: state funding decisions from the late nineties, the studio system behind an idol group, the styling and the graphics. If you want to understand how a country deliberately made its own culture travel, the working is here.
Why own it
It is the only serious catalogue of a subject everyone now references and few can source. The costume and album-design plates in particular are hard to find anywhere else in print.
Who it is for
Anyone who has been asked to make something feel Korean, and anyone interested in culture as industrial policy.
Opens a search on AbeBooks, a network of independent and antiquarian sellers, which is where a good part of this shelf has to be found, because it is out of print.
Read next
Chosen because they argue with this one, not because a machine noticed they share a category.
