When I meet Patrick Lee, director of art behemoth Frieze Seoul, the first café he proposes we try has vanished, its façade demolished. “This café was just here,” he says, disoriented but not at all surprised. “It was here the last time I was on this street. You see, this is what happens in Seoul.” In the city’s vibrant historical center, hanoks—the traditional curved-roof wood houses that give Seoul its distinctive heart-stopping skyline—are jammed next to sleek art galleries, fashionable glasses shops, and pop-up boutiques. And my God, the cafés. How to convey the love for coffee in this high-octane, thrilling city of late-night barbershops and 4 a.m. Tuesday karaoke? Seoul bursts with, at some estimates, more than 15,000 cafés, many of them freshly opened, and the number keeps escalating.
Lee and I grab coffee from a different café, then queue outside Art Sonje Center, which has been one of the city’s most influential private art museums since it was founded in 1998. An astonishing postapocalyptic installation by Argentinian Peruvian artist Adrián Villar Rojas has visitors entering at timed intervals. While Lee and I talk, locals and tourists bustle past. People from both categories are dressed in hanboks, the sumptuous, intensely colorful traditional clothing of Korea, full skirts shaped like upside-down blown-glass flowers, pants billowing. Some of the locals are having engagement photos taken. The tourists, Lee says, dress up, in part, because shops in the neighborhood often give discounts to anyone clad in a rented hanbok.
“We are blessed with a society that values its culture,” Lee says. Increasingly, the rest of the world values South Korean culture too. You’ve probably encountered a significant aspect of it in the past week, if not today. Your children could be dancing and singing along to KPop Demon Hunters, the most-viewed Netflix film of all time. Four years after it first aired, nothing has topped Squid Game as the most-watched Netflix TV show in the world. Your aunt might be learning Hangul, the Korean alphabet, so that she can follow her K-dramas more closely, and half of your brother’s prized skin-care products could be Korean. Restaurants across the world are slathering their food with gochujang, a thick red chili paste foundational to Korean cuisine. Frieze, the important contemporary art fair that takes place annually in New York, Los Angeles, and London, launched in Seoul in 2022; Frieze House, a permanent art space, debuted here last year. The profile of Korean literature keeps rising higher, including but not limited to the fiction of 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang. This rapid ascent of Korean culture throughout the world, known as hallyu, or the Korean Wave, draws ever more travelers to the country and particularly Seoul.
It wasn’t long ago, though, that South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. In 1953, after the ravages of the Korean War and 35 years of colonization, it had a per capita gross national income of $67. Even recently it could be hard for someone like me, a Korean American writer, to find much anglophone literature written by other Koreans. What has driven the sweeping change?
