Park Jin-hai primarily focuses on K-dramas, entertainment shows and actor interviews. Beyond that, she also pens articles covering the broader arts scene, with a particular emphasis on classical music, dance and various aspects of lifestyle. Since joining The Korea Times in 2013, she has made significant contributions in the realms of hallyu (Korean wave), industry news and international affairs.
Detailed, fluent content key to Hallyu
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The manga section in a French book store is shown in this file photo. Japanese manga are popular among youngsters and many manga fans have transformed into K-pop fans, after they stumbled onto K-dramas that portray the same values as the original manga.
By Park Jin-hai
Professor calls for incubation effort in book
Professor Hong Seok-kyeong of Seoul National University
The cover of Hong’s book “Hallyu in Globalization and Digital Culture Era.” The image features such names of K-pop stars as SHINee on a school bench at Magendie High school in Bordeaux, France. / Courtesy of Hong Seok-kyeong
By Park Jin-hai
The “unexpected” has the power to lure and that is the interesting part of the success of “hallyu” or the Korean wave.
That’s how Hong Seok-kyeong, 50, a professor at the Department of Communication of Seoul National University (SNU), starts her book on the popularity of the genre. She says that nobody really expected it to be popular as its content was produced for the local market, unlike the Hong Kong popular culture that had a vast Chinese-speaking audience.
The Korean market was also far smaller than Asia’ top cultural market of Japan.
But Hong, a long-time resident of France and first-hand witness to the rise of hallyu, says that there are more factors to its rise than digital advances such as YouTube.
She says its popularity comes from Korean dramas’ detailed and well-written plots, where a typically rich-and-handsome-but-cold male character gradually falls in love with an ordinary-looking female character.
“French fandom is far from abstract. If you look at the comments on hallyu content sharing websites, they describe in detail the repeated pattern of plots often seen in Korean dramas as well as items and places that appeared in the dramas,” said Hong in an interview with The Korea Times.
“It was at first a surprise to me, because there I spotted a significant number of hallyu fans in France, where unlike eastern European countries Korean dramas were not aired through national broadcasters.”
That surprise made her look at the hallyu phenomenon in France. Since 2009 she has researched the subject including a series of interviews with students in hallyu forums and fan clubs.
As for the process of expanding the fan base, she claims that Japanese “manga” helped a lot. Manga fans in France stumbles onto a drama with the same name as the manga on the web, without knowing that it was Korean. By watching the Korean dramas, they are gradually intrigued by the alien language and culture of Korea.
That was the case for the drama “Full House (2004),” in which Rain and Song hae-kyo starred. The drama opened the gate for other romantic comedies and melodramas. .
Hong said the French are not immune to "tear-jerking" Korean melodramas, since such dramas were practically extinct in the French drama landscape.
"After watching Korean melodramas, some fans said that they couldn't lead their daily lives because the aftereffect was so huge," she said.
When asked if the current hallyu phenomenon will die out eventually, she said that the idea of waning comes from the market-oriented thinking.
“The hallyu phenomenon shows a new method of enjoying culture in the digital era. Thus it is not something that wanes or vanishes. Indeed, the phenomenon itself is meaningful, because it shows by example how a globalized culture is born and distributed,” Hong said.
She stressed that culture and economy are two different things. However, in Korea, where both of them have developed in leaps and bounds, she thinks that people often apply the same rule of measure to both of them.
Thus instead of minding the economic gains arising from content exports and providing short-time support for cultural products, she added that long-term incubating measures were needed.
Only that way, cultural diversity that the majority of European fans consuming Korean culture need can be achieved.
“Those fans tend to have an omnivorious cultural appetite and if the quality of the culture lags behind, they will not stay loyal to Korean culture,” Hong said.
Before joining SNU, Hong spent 13 years as an associate professor at the Department of Communication of the University Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 in France.
She published a book titled “Hallyu in Globalization and the Digital Culture Era” in June, 2013. The book looked at how Hollywood looks at Asians and cultural issues raised by the hallyu phenomenon by observing hallyu fans in France.