If you don’t recognise the guards’ costumes from Squid Game that loom at the V&A with their cerise suits and geometrical masks– where have you been? This dystopian TV series was watched by well over 100 million viewers in more than 80 countries on its release last year. It’s part of the surge of global pop culture from South Korea that Hallyu! – Korean for “wave” – celebrates.
The reason this blockbuster show from the V&A translates so well is that it portrays its own desires and concerns as universal: it doesn’t recognise frontiers. In a century when many have become suspicious of globalisation, fleeing an economically and technologically unified world into renewed nationalism, South Korea has gone the other way. There’s no Krexit. This society embraces everything and everyone.
