James Balmont looks back at the year to see how Korean film, television, art and music took the UK – and the world – by storm
If you were born in the 90s or early 00s, chances are you’d have grown up knowing next to nothing about Korea beyond, perhaps, that one school history lesson on the Korean War. But off the back of a half-decade that has seen the Korean wave grow into an international pop culture tsunami, K-culture is now impossible to ignore in the UK.
In 2022, Korean film and TV maintains a significant presence on streaming platforms and at major film awards ceremonies. K-Pop blasts on our radio stations, and fills out our biggest music venues. Kimchi is stocked in all major UK supermarkets. And on the London Underground, Korean skin therapies are advertised on station platforms. A pop-up Korean goods store now sits directly beneath the world-famous LED billboards at Piccadilly Circus, too. And while Korean fashion takes over the world, the V&A Museum showcases a major exhibition on Korean culture that runs until June 2023. It includes all of the above and more.
The Korea Times is now reporting that the country is literally planning to land on Mars by 2045, which means it’s actually an understatement to suggest that the sky’s the limit for the peninsula. President Yoon Suk-yeol, meanwhile, recently pledged 4.8 trillion won (£3 billion) in government support for K-culture content over the next five years, ensuring that the country’s moment in the sun lasts a while longer on the ground.
With the roadmap for ongoing global cultural proliferation laid out, Dazed took a look back at 2022 to see how Korean film, television, art and music cemented its place in the UK mainstream. Turns out, it was another year to remember.
MUSIC
This was not the year that K-Pop broke the mainstream. But as the V&A’s dazzling audiovisual displays of K-Pop fashion, art, choreography and composition suggest, this was definitely a year that deepened our appreciation for Korean pop music in the west.
Once again, BTS were at the fore. Though they failed to pick up a prize at the Grammys in April (despite an emphatic, James Bond-inspired performance of “Butter”), they did win three Billboard Music Awards in May, making them the most-awarded group in the show’s history. Shortly after, they announced that they’d temporarily be suspending band activities to focus on solo projects – a statement so titanic that it caused the stock of talent agency HYBE to tank by a staggering $1.7 billion.
As BTS’ Jin enlisted in the Korean army for his compulsory military service in November, fellow K-Pop superstars Blackpink cemented their place in pop history in the UK with two sold-out performances at London’s 20,000 capacity O2 Arena. The event made headlines earlier in the year, as tickets traded for up to £500 apiece – the effect of a new album so popular that it managed to top both the UK and US albums charts at the same time. This was the first time a girl group had managed the feat since Destiny’s Child released Survivor in 2001.
With members of Blackpink, aespa, BTS, and EXO now global brand ambassadors for brands like Givenchy, Gucci, Saint Laurent and Dior, Fiona Bae’s vibrant new book Make, Break, Remix: The Rise of K-Style became a bestseller upon release that same month. But other kinds of Korean music beyond K-Pop also made an impact in the UK this year.
The 2022 K-Music Festival memorably climaxed with avant-garde composer Park Ji-ha performing her critically-acclaimed album The Gleam at Stone Nest in Soho. Hybrid pansori-rock-pop band Leenalchi – stars of the Korean Tourism Organization’s viral “Feel The Rhythm” spot in 2020 – also made their international live debut via three shows at the Coronet Theatre in September.
Another progressive artist in BTS beat-maker 250, meanwhile, brought a new genre to the UK, with his effective revival of saccharine, super-high-tempo ppongjjak music in March album ‘Ppong’ finding a presence on London radio station NTS.
FILM
It’s been three years since Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning hit Parasite marked the greatest watershed moment in Korean cinema history (see an iconic piece of the set recreated at the V&A’s Hallyu exhibition). Bong commenced production of his next project – Robert Pattinson-led sci-fi feature Mickey 17 – in the UK in 2022, as Korean cinema picked up even more awards elsewhere in the west.
At Cannes 2022, two Korean productions competed for the top prize – and both went home with major awards. Parasite lead actor Song Kang-ho became the first Korean film star to win Best Actor, for his role in heartfelt road movie Broker (the film receives a wide UK release in February 2023), while Park Chan-wook’s romantic noir Decision to Leave took home Best Director. The latter sold out all 3,000 seats at London’s Royal Festival Hall for its BFI London Film Festival premiere in September and has now been submitted for Oscars consideration.
July Jung’s dark call centre drama Next Sohee, starring Bae Doona (of Park’s Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Bong’s The Host, and Broker) closed the Cannes 2022 International Critics’ Week, receiving rave reviews ahead of its own UK debut at the BFI London Film Festival. Arthouse juggernaut Hong Sang-soo, meanwhile, won a fourth Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear for The Novelist’s Film in February, before another film of his, In Front of Your Face, was distributed in UK cinemas in September.
In October and November, meanwhile, London East Asia Film Festival and London Korean Film Festival fostered buzzy UK premieres for five of the country’s top ten box office hits of 2022 (including aviation disaster spectacle Emergency Declaration and sci-fi fantasy Alienoid). Fans flocked to Leicester Square in great numbers for the former’s Opening Gala, as Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae arrived on the red carpet for the premiere of his espionage thriller Hunt.
TV
Squid Game, of course, was the story of the year in television in 2021 – and it kept on giving this year. The Netflix production won six Emmys in 2022 to make actor Lee Jung-jae, actress Lee Yoo-mi, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk the first Asians to win in their respective categories (Jung Ho-yeon, meanwhile, became the first Korean actress to be included in Time Magazine’s annual ‘TIME100 Next’ list in September).
The Emmy Awards’ sidelining of Pachinko, on the other hand, was one of the year’s biggest snubs. Apple TV+’s sweeping adaption of Min Jin-lee’s New York Times bestseller attracted huge audience numbers in the UK and the US upon its release in March. A historical epic exploring the lives of three generations of the same family between the years 1910 and 1989, it was widely praised for its acting, cinematography and writing in a story that confronts racial prejudice in Korea’s convoluted history. It’s the fifth most acclaimed new drama series of the year according to reviews aggregator Metacritic – just behind The Bear.
Netflix serial All Of Us Are Dead, meanwhile, was the most-searched new Korean drama of 2022 according to a study by VPN Overview. The high school zombie apocalypse show, released in January, is one of countless new productions adapted from a Korean webtoon (digital comic), with the medium itself becoming something of a cultural phenomenon thanks in part to partnerships with BTS, Marvel and DC Comics.
Like previous Netflix webtoon adaptions Hellbound and Itaewon Class, All Of Us Are Dead was a hit in January, clocking up over 474 million hours of viewing time within its first 30 days, and topping global viewership charts. A few months later, Extraordinary Attorney Woo – a legal drama concerning a rookie lawyer with autism spectrum disorder – became the most-viewed non-English production in the world for most of the summer. An unnamed US production company reportedly bid for the remake rights soon after.
Unsurprisingly, Netflix’s Korean-language slate for 2023 is already looking stacked as the likes of Disney+ and Amazon Prime also eye the market with their own Korean-language productions. Lee Jung-jae will be back on our screens soon enough, as well – he was cast as the lead in the new Star Wars series The Acolyte, which began filming in the UK this autumn.
ART
Korean contemporary art also had a major impact in 2022. At the Venice Biennale, the Korean Pavilion had a total of over 400,000 visitors between April and November – the highest number they’ve ever received. One of the key displays there was Gyre, which included six installations by Kim Yun-chul that married physics, experimental materials and sci-fi-like imagery – such as the 50-metre-long, pulsating and serpentine kinetic art piece Chroma V.
Kim’s work travelled to the UK off the back of its Venice success; it’s now on show at an exhibition in London, presented by Barakat Contemporary at No. 9 Cork Street. The display, which also includes impressive works from fellow creators Chung Seo-young and Jun So-jung, calls attention to the diversity of contemporary Korean art.
In the Korean capital, meanwhile, September 2022 marked the debut of Frieze Seoul – the first Asian art fair from the team behind Frieze London and Frieze New York. In an event that spanned over 110 galleries, Korea’s thriving creative communities underlined why the country is increasingly becoming a go-to destination for contemporary art lovers. It’s the continent’s next major art market, according to CNN.
Offerings like Ryu Sung-sil’s provocative and kaleidoscopic YouTube-inspired works were among the contemporary highlights at Frieze Seoul. Park Hyun-ki’s recreated 1988 piece Untitled, meanwhile, juxtaposed flickering television screens with raw materials like rocks and stones – the pioneering video artist’s work offers a great counterpart to the iconic Nam June Paik Mirage Stage installation, another highlight at the V&A’s Hallyu exhibition in London.