From Kim Gu’s “My Wish” to Hallyu Today
Ahead of this year’s Academy Awards, many people have found themselves watching an unexpected contender. K-Pop Demon Hunters, and the song “Golden” within it. Whether or not it wins is, of course, part of the conversation. But the more interesting question is this. Since when did works shaped by Korean sensibilities begin to appear so naturally on the central stage of global popular culture?
That question brings me back to Kim Gu’s essay My Wish. In it, he wrote that he did not want Korea to become “the richest country” or “the strongest country.” What he wished for, endlessly, was “the power of a high culture.” Culture, he believed, can make us happy and can also bring happiness to others. Reading those words again today, the meaning of cultural power feels clearer. Culture does not force others into submission. It seeps in. And once it does, it quietly changes people’s senses and choices.
It is difficult to point to a single beginning for Hallyu. Some think first of television dramas, others of K-pop, others still of Korean athletes who rose to global fame. But what matters more than identifying which came first is recognizing that Hallyu was not born in a single explosion.
It was the product of a long accumulation. Even so, the moments when that current grew stronger shared one thing in common. It was not simply that strong content appeared, but that the way strong content could travel changed. Culture does not become power through content alone. It becomes power when it finds a route into people’s everyday lives.
Television drama was the most persuasive starting point of that change. What a series like Dae Jang Geum left behind was not merely popularity or export figures. It was the confidence that even an unfamiliar culture could be translated through familiar emotions. People follow the plot, and before they know it, they are also taking in the food, the spaces, the ways people speak, the manners, and the texture of daily life. Once emotion gets through, culture follows without needing explanation.
In the streaming era, that process traveled even farther. Viewing, once organized by broadcast schedules, became a door that opened at the same time for everyone. Korean dramas were no longer simply exports. They became part of a shared global rhythm of watching. The immediate worldwide response to Squid Game showed what can happen when the strength of a work and the structure of distribution align. Around that point, Korean dramas began to feel less like “fun foreign content” and more like “the next series people were already waiting for.”
When the mode of circulation changes, the speed of cultural transmission changes too. PSY’s “Gangnam Style” was not just a hit song abroad. It was an event that showed how the entire world could watch the same thing at once and imitate it together. Culture does not spread on excellence alone. It travels much farther when it takes a form that is easy to share. And when people begin to imitate it, it stops being mere appreciation and becomes participation. Once that participation repeats itself, culture ceases to be a fad and starts becoming a habit.
Of course, Hallyu was never smooth from the beginning. The American ventures of the Wonder Girls, BoA, and Rain were bold attempts by the standards of their time, but they did not ultimately build a sustainable structure. Yet that is precisely why those attempts matter. They served as costly fieldwork, showing where the door remained shut, what was missing, and which strategies did not work. Hallyu did not suddenly rise through luck. It kept knocking until it finally met an era in which those doors could open.
That is why comparisons with Japan require caution. This is not to say Japanese culture has become weak. Rather, Japan’s period of greatest cultural strength belonged largely to the era of regional broadcasting and distribution, when works were often consumed through heavy localization. Titles were adapted, dubbing and rewriting were added, and the fact that a work came from Japan could become faint. In such cases, interest often circulated within genres and formats rather than extending outward toward Japan itself. Hallyu, by contrast, has tended to expand in a platform environment where origin remains visible rather than disappearing. That difference affects how culture moves from a work to a country, and then from a country into everyday life. It is along that line that Hallyu began to take the shape not merely of popularity, but of habit.
What is interesting is that Japan, too, now seems to be reassembling this connection. Through anime in particular, it is reorganizing its global platform distribution, shifting from a mode in which works spread widely while losing their origin to one in which they expand while retaining a clearer identity. In the end, what matters in global cultural industries today is not only what gets made, but under what name it remains in people’s daily lives.
The way trust accumulates has changed as well. Popular appeal creates spread, but artistic recognition creates trust. Saying “this is fun” can spread quickly, but the feeling that “I want to see what comes next” lasts much longer. What BTS and BLACKPINK demonstrated was not simply the success of popular Korean musicians. It was the experience of entering the systems through which the world records, ranks, and remembers music, and of standing on those central stages. At that point, K-pop ceased to be merely well-made foreign music and became a current whose next movement people wanted to follow.
The same is true of Korean cinema. Parasite, in particular, showed that recognition can lead directly to viewing. When a prestigious award becomes not an endpoint but a beginning, and curiosity turns into actual choice, culture becomes something more than a one-time sensation. It becomes a reservoir of trust. That is why Hallyu cannot be explained through the success of a single work. What remains after such success is the expectation that people will come back again.
And some of the most interesting changes have taken place off-screen. In the end, cultural power is the power to reshape the senses. There was a time when people in the West often said that foods like tteokbokki felt strange because of their chewy texture, or that the sesame oil in gimbap smelled unfamiliar at first. But as Hallyu has grown, more and more of that unfamiliarity has turned from a barrier into curiosity. Snack bars in dramas, comfort foods eaten by idols, and endless short-form mukbang clips have accumulated. People first become visually familiar with these things, and then they begin to experience them for themselves. Culture is learned through the rhythms of life before it is understood through thought. That is how taste is formed.
And it is here, right now, that a case like K-Pop Demon Hunters shows the current shifting once again. At first glance, a work not created by Koreans but carrying the label “K” so prominently may seem ambiguous. But I would call it expansion rather than ambiguity. “K” is no longer functioning simply as a marker of nationality. It is beginning to work as an aesthetic, a genre code, a cluster of sensibilities. We are moving beyond a stage in which Korea sends its own content outward. We are entering one in which the world borrows Korean-coded language and uses it to speak to audiences.
That is why it is natural that K-Pop Demon Hunters has become part of the Academy Awards conversation this year. What matters is not only the trophy itself. What matters more is the fact that a work shaped by Korean sensibilities is no longer treated as an unusual exception on the central stage of global popular culture, but as a natural competitor. Once a culture ceases to be merely something translated and becomes a language others reference, it has already moved beyond being a national export.
That does not mean this current will continue forever without interruption. The greatest danger Hallyu now faces is not failure, but repeated success. Success invites imitation, and imitation produces fatigue. The more “K” hardens into a genre code, the more the world may begin to consume Korea not as a source of newness, but as a factory that reliably supplies a familiar flavor. As Hollywood’s recent stagnation suggests, the moment repetition and safe choices begin to erode imagination, cultural power may appear to grow even as it wears down from within.
And so we return to Kim Gu’s words. Cultural power is not the power to push others down. It is the power that makes others come closer on their own. It is the power to enter people’s daily lives so that they watch, listen, imitate, and taste again and again. What we are witnessing now, whether in works made by Koreans or in works shaped by Korean sensibilities, is precisely that process. The world absorbing them naturally into its own habits of cultural consumption.
Whether K-Pop Demon Hunters ultimately win a trophy at the Academy Awards remains to be seen. But regardless of the result, one thing is already clear. Korean culture is no longer a distant and intriguing form of foreign content. It has become something that enters people’s tastes, remains in their habits, and spreads into the language of other creators. The power Kim Gu once imagined, “the power to bring happiness to others,” may be becoming real in exactly this way, quietly, but unmistakably.