Sounding Korean: The politics of Korean popular music exhibitions

In the past few years, Korean popular music is emerging as a new trendy subject for museum exhibitions. While the first popular music museum in Korea was established in 2014 in Gyeongju, southeast Korea, it was the Korean Wave (Hallyu) exhibition in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, UK, which initiated this new development.

Following the success of the V&A’s Hallyu exhibition in 2022-23, the National Museum of Korean Contemporary Museum (MUCH) curated an exhibition of the Korean Wave in 2023.

These two Hallyu exhibitions in the UK and South Korea, take contemporary Korean popular music as their key topic. Moreover, both the UK and South Korean Hallyu exhibitions are on global and national tour respectively. Most recently the Busan Modern and Contemporary Museum in Busan, the second largest city in South Korea, opened a special exhibition to mark the 60th anniversary of a Korean popular song called ‘Miss Camelia’ sung by Yi Mija in1964.

This presentation will explore how curating and exhibiting Korean popular music contributes to its nation branding, which is often supported by the South Korean government. The presentation will then explore how, on the other hand, these curatorial and exhibiting processes give shape to the ways Korean popular culture, from the 20th and 21st centuries, are canonised to represent national, transnational, and regional heritages and identities. Finally, I will discuss what the associated political implications are for the museums, curators and visitors, and for the perception of Korea and the Korean creative industries.

Bio:

Dr Haekyung Um is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music and the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool. She specialises in contemporary Asian performing arts and music industries, focusing on the politics of performance, cultural identity and transnationalism. She has undertaken ethnographic research in South Korea, China, Russia, Central Asia and the UK. She has published on the Korean musical drama pansori, Korean diasporas in China and the former USSR, Indian classical music in the UK, Korean hip-hop and various aspects of Korean traditional and popular genres. She directed a collaborative research project on K-pop fandom in Europe funded by the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange. She was a PI for an ESRC-funded network project, entitled ‘Globalizing South Korean Creativity: Exhibiting and Archiving Hallyu, the Korean Wave’.

Host or Publisher The Centre for Korean Studies