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Indonesia’s embrace of foreign popular music began during the colonial era, with recordings of jazz and similar forms imported from Europe and the U.S. In recent decades, as Indonesians developed an indigenous popular music industry, other foreign influences have entered the popular music scene in Indonesia. Most prominent among these recently is Korean pop (“K-pop”)—which swept into Korea suddenly in the early 2000s along with a flood of Korean TV dramas. Few Indonesians could have named a Korean pop star in the 1990s, but by 2005 Korean dramas occupied primetime slots on several major TV networks and legal and pirated CDs of Rain, Se7en, and earlier stars (S.E.S., H.O.T., Shinhwa) were sold widely. BoA, born in Korea but producing CDs in Japan, was more closely associated with J-Pop, but came to be known as another KPop star. How and why did these stars from Korea gain the attention and the fandom of Indonesians? The sudden surge in awareness of Korea due to TV dramas is part of the picture, but fanrelated print media and, above all, social media have contributed in a spectacular fashion. Based on field work in Indonesia in 2005, 2008, 2010, 2013, and 2016, and extensive exploration of internet sources, I trace the contours of K-pop fandom in Indonesia, assessing the methods of distribution, the factors articulated by Kpop fans as contributing to their involvement with and enjoyment of K-pop music and its key figures. I consider the ways in which Indonesians are constructing notions of “Koreanness” in their interaction with Korean popular culture and the reasons underlying its appeal in relation to other popular musics transmitted transnationally. I conclude by considering whether the “Korean Wave” in Indonesia represents a new Asian cosmopolitanism more than an interest in “Korea” per se, as is claimed by the Korean media, and comment on the recent decline in K-pop fandom in Indonesia.

Korean Wave (Hallyu; ‘韓流’) referred first to the meaning of “the fashion of Korea surges” written and published by Beijing Youth Daily, China as early as November 1999. Development of the latest smart media makes the Korean Wave contents disseminating rapidly. The existing Korean Wave was a limited flow relating to the middle aged female class in Eastern Asia, while the Korean Wave centred on K-pop since the late 2000s is different in the method of dissemination. The latter is renamed as the ‘New Korean Wave (新 韓流)’ which has been spread by social media and exported to the USA, Europe, South America, and so on. The primary distribution base of the New Korean Wave includes SNS (Social Network Service) media – i.e. YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, etc., which suit the characteristics of K-pop genre. The Korean Wave 3.0 can be the period of ‘diversification of the Korean Wave’. Periodically it starts with the huge success of Gangnam Style performed by Psy in 2012. As an important genre, it became spread to music, drama, game, film, cartoon, character, Korean cuisine, Korean language. Geographically it has been diffused further Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, the USA, etc., beyond China, Japan, Taiwan. The main contents include K-pop, Idols and on-line gaming. In particular, the enormous success of Gangnam Style brought to the event that broadened boundaries across the world. The Korean Wave that has been in great demand is now, however, receiving a great shock with the anti-Korean Wave in Japan and the China’s retaliation against Thaad. Luckily the Hallyu marketing is beyond the confine of China and Japan. As heavy reliance on China and Japan can be variable according to the political situations, it is necessary for us to make more efforts for Hallyu marketing.

The recent popularity of contemporary gugak (Korean traditional music) and performing arts in Britain is on the rise, and this is attributed to a combination of young Korean artists’ creativity and the aid of cultural agencies of both Korea and the U.K. with perfect timing. Along with the K-pop’s popularity, this resulted from the success of a series of the K-Music concerts (the fourth time in the 2017 season) performed by the young creative Korean performers who pursues global communications. These regular concerts initiated at the suggestion of strategic partnerships and cultural exchange between Korean and Britain by the UK government official in 2012. The year was momentous both for Korean music and Korean culture collectively called ‘Hallyu (Korean Wave)’ when Gangnam Style by Psy reached the top U.K. single chart through YouTube and the large scale of Korean festival took place in London during the London Olympic Games. These two crucial events fueled not only the spread of Hallyu, but the catalyst for major attraction of contemporary gugak in Britain. Shown in its recent concert series performed for the committed British audience, it will be a turning point in the history of Korean music. At present contemporary gugak is seen as great potential for the promotion of Korean cultural exports. This article examines the processes and background of contemporary gugak gaining the global status within the context of Britain.

This paper is aimed at discussing the current status of Korean wave or Hallyu in the African continent by discussing major developments and strategies. It begins with the description of the historical roots and the progress in the relationship between Korea and African countries in the past several decades. The paper continues exploring into the emerging cultural force of Hallyu in action in the African continent and discusses further on the essence of the Korean Wave along with its manifestations and effects as a new engine for economic growth and cultural diplomacy or soft power. Cultural diplomatic strategy of China is briefly presented as a comparison to that of Korea’s after discussing the major developments related to cultural exchanges between South Korea and African countries at an official level. Special discussions on major Hallyu related activities and trends in some sub-Saharan countries such as South Africa, Ethiopia, and Nigeria will follow in the last section.

As our musical and artistic tastes become increasingly formed and cemented by closed circuits of media networks, most of us acknowledge that the tributaries of traditional arts need to join an established waterway to survive. Hallyu is often this river into which all other genres flow. But hallyu (韓流) is not actually “the current out of Korea” but rather seoryu (西流), a tidal incursion from the west that, on its ebb tide, carries a redefined Koreanness back to where it started. With the erosion of its “cultural integrity” by the tidal force of globalization, South Korea has drifted into an intertidal mixing zone, with officials increasingly supporting a “fusion” of the old local traditions with non-Korean and popular modern forms. The hybrid results of such melding exemplify the “ironic compromise” Homi Bhabha found in Jacques Lacan’s writings on mimicry, wherein Lacan asserts the result of mimicry is never of the local culture becoming the same as that under whose influence it has fallen, but rather an accumulator of certain affects of that influence. Since its coining by the Jangakweon (掌樂院 institute in charge of music) in the late Joseon dynasty, as a musical sensibility separate from western “music” (音樂), gugak, the music of Korea, has thrived as a living, breathing category of sound by perpetually transforming itself. Now more than ever, one of the biggest challenges for Korean traditional music—how we define it and otherwise think about it, how we perform it, and how we work to develop its audience in Korea and abroad—is to determine how best to nurture its musical aesthetic. How do we sustain Korean music’s unique identity as it fuses with outside and more popular genres to become the new face of the nation? This is not a new question, but finding answers to it in fusion’s murky estuary has never been trickier. This paper travels back upstream in search of historical evidence of gugak’s expansion and redefinition over the past 100 years.