The irresistible cultural wave that started in Seoul
It's a global phenomenon. From music to food, cinema to video games, South Korean culture is winning hearts and minds around the world. The British newspaper The Guardian visited the South Korean capital, where it all began.
[This article was first published on our site on October 27, 2022 and republished on July 18, 2025]
Last week [at the end of August], I was standing in a sprawling dance studio, one of twelve on the upper floors of a trendy new office tower on the right bank of the Han River in Seoul, South Korea. It's home to SM Entertainment, a company that could be credited with inventing one of the most powerful cultural movements of the 21st century: K-pop, or Korean pop.
Every generation has its own dream factory. The parallel world now known as SM Culture Universe was originally born from the vision of a South Korean entrepreneur, Lee Soo-man, who, after a brief career as a singer-DJ, went to study computer science in the United States in the 1980s. He returned to Seoul with “the dream of globalizing Korean music.”
In the dance studio, his nephew Chris Lee, executive director of SM Entertainment, explains to me how this dream became a reality. K-pop idols first went on to conquer music charts throughout Asia. Since the extraordinary success of BTS (the group, managed by
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