Anti-ageing serum, this is good… collagen face masks… take these… just push your way through… now the queue — good luck!” The Standard is being helped through K-Beauty emporium Olive Young, which despite it being nearly midnight, is heaving to such a degree that this lanky Englishman is in danger of being trampled underfoot by young Koreans. Beauty never sleeps, and neither does Seoul. With its Blade Runner ad screens and public Pop Art and hip shoppers, you might say it’s the modern equivalent of Swinging London, given its worldwide cultural impact. K-Pop, K-Drama, K-Beauty, Squid Game, Parasite, Park Chan-wook, Son Heung-min (Spurs’ loss is advertising’s gain), K-Pop Demon Hunters… South Korea is booming.
Yet in this city of the future, history is never far away, as we are discovering on a trip deep into the country with the curators of a new exhibition called Korea at the British Museum to discover the creative heart and soul of the nation. It becomes apparent that today’s K-everything is a continuation of 2,000 years of creative excellence — and a triumph over many scars. “The show covers 300BC to 2019, but even though it’s a long period, there are certain patterns you see — Korean resilience and creativity,” says Sang-ah Kim, the lead curator, “because Korea neighbours China and Japan, they always adopted new technology and culture — but they transformed it. That kind of pattern survives. [K-pop] is not the traditional form of Korean music but they found some new system of pop to show the world.”
