When people say K-culture is “global,” what elements are genuinely universal, and what remains distinctly Korean?

I describe the strength of K-culture as a hybrid culture, meaning that there is something universal yet distinctively Korean about it. K-culture is global in the sense that it knows how to craft narratives that center on human relationships. Human relationships, community-based connection, and the need for one another are things most cultures have, but that many cultures have also lost, as a result of online communication in a rapidly changing post-pandeimc world. With the rise of AI, we question what humanity really means, and the strength of K-culture is its ability to capture that human relationship before digital transformation. There is also a universality in it because we are all social beings. We cannot live alone. We need each other. But the world has come to a place where other priorities often compromise the importance of humanity.

K-dramas and Korean films know how to capture this especially well. In K-pop, the fan community has issues to improve, but it is still a very tightly networked society of different kinds of people.

What makes it distinctly Korean relates to South Korea’s rapid modernization. It developed at a supersonic speed from a premodern society with social caste. Until the early twentieth century, Joseon Dynasty had yangban and nobi, ruling elite aristocrats and even serfs and slaves, and then it went though seismic changed which led to South Korea’s fervent democratization with a vibrant civic society . Because it developed so fast, it retained much of its traditional culture, from people’s mentality to the eclectic architecture you see in Seoul urbanscape. Korea’s internal dynamism, its hypermodern developed economy, and its traditional community-based mentality, together create a great deal of synergy for storytelling. That is what makes K-culture distinctively Korean. To sum up, this condensed development made South Korea both ultramodern and, at the same time, a very distinctively Korean tradition-based culture. What makes K-culture global is its fascinating ability to capture both the past and the future.

What is doing the most work behind K-culture’s global success: storytelling, the production and training system, fandom infrastructure, or platforms?

All of those factors matter. If you think about how K-culture became this big, it is almost like a miracle. I did not see this coming. I came to the U.S. in 1996, and if somebody in 2026 had told me in 1996 that this was coming, I would not have believed one percent of it. A lot of things had to come together in coordination to make K-culture such a major global phenomenon, and all the things you listed had to be in place.

Let me briefly touch on each one. On the storytelling aspect, as I said while addressing your first question, South Korea has an incredible ability to tell stories that appeal to global audiences. Mainly, it is really about the human network. The much-discussed archetype of the hero’s journey, as described by mythologists such as Joseph Campbell and others, creates a narrative arc of a hero who is somehow unaware of their origin. They grow away from their community, and then take a journey to truly discover who they are. Star Wars is a classic example of that too.

For any culture to gain this much global success, there has to be a narrative that is intuitively understood by everyone around the world, regardless of language and cultural barriers, and South Korea has been able to do that. South Korea’s storytelling journey is often about underdogs who overcome their challenges and rising to prominence. We see this in BTS’s whole career. We also see it in many K-drama protagonists’ journeys. What makes it more distinctively Korean is the individual’s relationship with the community. South Korea is a very community-based society. The human network is much more intense than in Western societies. We are much more individualistic. This kind of human-network, human-relationship-based storytelling is so important. Because we live in such a  segregated society, people have a thirst for that kind of human-based storytelling.

Production and training systems are also very important. For K-pop, I cannot think of another music industry in the world that produces such a high-quality product at such a massive scale. The industry is mostly targeting young listeners, viewers, and fans. For the most part, we do not have a counterpart elsewhere. This has a great deal to do with the training system, which is sometimes criticized in the U.S. and the West as a factory system. Critics of K-pop often try to play it down, but the training system also guarantees high-quality performance. Without this training, these exceptionally well-coordinated K-pop performances could not exist.

Fandom infrastructure is also essential. K-pop fandom is well known for its dedication and its sense of belonging. Without fans, you cannot have idol culture. That is very important.

Platforms are enormously important as well, because South Korea was ahead of the curve in sensing the changing ways people would consume music. In the U.S., in the late 1990s, and still to some extent today, the main driver of the music industry was live touring. Musicians, big or small, had to tour big cities and small towns alike. South Korea, by contrast, sensed in the late 1990s that in order to survive in the future music industry, it had to move ahead with the digitization of music.

When MP3s were emerging, South Korea was one of the leading manufacturers of MP3 players. Nobody uses them anymore because we play music on our phones nowadays, but MP3s were a major innovation at the time. Music suddenly became freely downloadable, and it became much easier for global fans to listen to foreign-language music because everything was available online. Music became more accessible across cultures. You no longer had to go out and buy a CD. South Korea was far ahead of that shift.

Then, when the YouTube age arrived, South Korea realized that music videos were the way to reach a global audience. K-pop artists are not just musicians; they are media celebrities who appear on entertainment shows, talk shows, and many other forms of media. They could not go on extensive tours in the same way many of their foreign counterparts do, so there was heavy investment in music videos. In the early days of YouTube, there was not much high-quality content like K-pop music videos. Therefore, the rise of YouTube and the rise of K-pop music videos created a perfect match. These platforms were enormously important for globalizing Korean content.

The same is true for dramas. If you think about the global dominance of Netflix, the highest all-time viewing records in both the drama and film categories are held by Korean content. In the drama category, it is Squid Game. In the film category, it is K-pop Demon Hunters. South Korea’s ability to dominate beyond K-pop, in both film and drama, has a great deal to do with how successfully it forged partnerships with leading platforms like Netflix.

Has the global success of K-content expanded what Korea can export, or narrowed it into a handful of high-performing templates?

The success of K-pop and Korean content has opened up venues for many other export areas, especially products tied to daily consumption. K-pop is not just music; it is a total performance. Just as K-pop idols are media celebrities rather than simply musicians or dancers, K-pop is really about lifestyle.

When people consume K-pop music, they are also consuming beauty products, food, the products idols use during mukbang, the places they go, and the language they use. In that sense, what is being promoted through the success of K-pop is a Korean lifestyle, and Korea as a brand, rather than simply a particular country or destination. Although tourism is certainly part of this phenomenon, what K-pop brings with its success is the transformation of Korea into a hip brand, which is why we now see “K-” attached to so many things.

Where do you see “idol logic” showing up outside K-pop today, such as in reality TV, branding, politics, or public diplomacy?

The idea of perfection is often understood through South Korea’s obsession with looks. You have probably heard that it is a country where putting your photo on a job application is standard practice. I would say that South Koreans pay much more attention to body grooming, beauty, and skincare than an average American. That is part of why South Korea has become so dominant in the beauty industry.

The way I see it, idol logic is everywhere in the country, and I do not want to attribute it simply to an obsession with looks. I would rather explain it through the hyper-intensive competition that most South Koreans have to experience at their formative years and beyond. South Korea is a small country that started out as one of the poorest countries after the Korean War, and it did not have natural resources to export. Human resources were the main resource South Korea could rely on. That explains the education fever that so many South Koreans are subject to. The pursuit of a perfect look is an extension of that fierce competition. If all other things are equal, employers are more likely to choose the more perfectly groomed job candidate. I would contextualize the pursuit of perfect looks in those terms.

If I extend the idea of idol logic to include group work and team coordination, it is also tremendously prevalent in all aspects of South Korean life. As I said already, community-based human relationships carry much more weight in South Korea. Idols are usually part of a larger team, and each person has a specialized role. One person may be a dance expert, another may be the vocal specialist, and another may be known for appearance. People with distinct talents coordinate their individual strengths to produce teamwork.

That is also what defines South Korean corporate culture. You cannot simply be an individual genius and expect to do well in mainstream corporate culture in South Korea. That may also be true in the United States, but in my view it is even more true in Korea. This sense of belonging to a community, finding your area of expertise, your unique edge, and coordinating it with other people who have different abilities are extensions of idol logic in South Korea.

Looking ahead, what are the biggest constraints or risks to the Korean Wave, and what would help it stay innovative?

South Korea has succeeded in telling its own unique story, based on the cultural hybridity that I mentioned earlier, with both deeply traditional aspects and qualities that appeal globally. In that sense, it has succeeded so far by being a distinctively Korean culture.

What will be necessary and useful to keep in mind is that the cultural flow may need to become more mutual. As an example, you might first be drawn to a very attractive person, but if that person keeps delivering a monologue just about who they are without taking interest in their conversationalist, you will eventually get bored. Ultimately, people are drawn to Korean culture because they want to see themselves reflected in what they watch and listen to. Developing content that is much more reflective of multidirectional dialogue would be valuable, and finding deeper forms of engagement with local audiences would also be important.

Many K-pop musicians have explored Latin beats, or sometimes appropriated Blackness for a certain cool effect without necessarily understanding the history behind it. K-pop is now so globally influential that it has to move beyond that. Rather than relying only on stylistic rendition or appropriation, it needs to engage more deeply in mutual respect and dialogue. That is a different and much deeper level of localization.

In terms of dramas, this is something Korean content has already done very successfully for more than a decade. There was a time, maybe more than ten years ago, when K-dramas were heavily criticized for clichés such as chaebol romance often based on mistaken identity and amnesia. Once Korean drama was able to work with global platforms, it became possible to move beyond those genre constraints and diversify. More edgy, risky, and experimental content now defines the new frontier of K-dramas. Squid Game is one strong example. Something like that could never have been shown during family-friendly broadcasting hours.

With global streaming platforms now available to K-drama creators, it is even more necessary to pursue diversification in genre and subject matter. If you think about how K-drama came to conquer Netflix, one of its early breakthroughs was Kingdom, which came out in 2019 as Netflix’s first Korean original series. It was a strange and edgy genre usually known as folk horror that combined traditional historical drama with zombies. Korean content needs to keep diversifying by incorporating new genre formats and new subject matter. I think that is where it needs to go.