Korean Cultural Heritage Festival marries contemporary cool with traditional arts

This year’s Korean Cultural Heritage Festival will have a modern feel.

According to festival spokesperson Mike M. Suk, it’s going to be vibrant and cutting-edge, reflecting South Korea’s status as a major global tastemaker, from cars to smart phones to pop culture. The festival’s theme is Dynamics of a Modern Korea.

“We want to show people the new Korea,” Suk told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.

According to Suk, Hyundai will roll out its latest cars at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby’s Central Park, the venue for the 13th annual festival organized by the Korean Cultural Heritage Society.

He added that for the first time, huge TV screens will be set up to play Korean pop-music (K-pop) videos and commercials throughout Saturday (August 16). On-stage, local performers will sing and dance to K-pop songs.

“The energy is going to feel different,” Suk said. “It is important to note, this festival is not exclusive to the Korean community but rather a true celebration of a multicultural Canada”

Historically, the festival has been about traditional elements, and Suk said those will be present as well. A drum dance will open the festivities, followed by a reenactment of a traditional Korean royal wedding.

There will be a demonstration of the Korean martial art tae kwon do, and there will be tightrope-walking, or jultagi. A food pavilion will offer Korean food, beer, and wine, and traditional Korean souvenirs and gifts will be sold.

B.C.’s Korean community has grown to about 80,000. According to Suk’s organization, it is second in size in Canada to Ontario’s.

Suk noted that in the past, Canadians with Korean roots kept mostly to their community, but now with the help of politicians like NDP MLA Jane Shin and Burnaby council, they are increasingly reaching out to others.

“This festival is very much about how do you make this festival exciting, modern, so that a lot of people from all different walks of life come out to enjoy and have a good time, so that you can build these cultural bridges between, you know, the Korean that feels that he’s very isolated and the Canadian that feels that this Korean Canadian, ‘He seems like he’s very standoffish.’ This is the whole point of the festival…to break down those barriers.”

There are many Korean elements in the daily life of Metro Vancouver.

Hyung Gu Lynn, an associate professor at UBC’s Institute of Asian Research, cited as an example the Canada Line trains that were built by Hyundai Rotem. Lynn, who is of Korean heri­tage, previously taught in Korea.

According to Lynn, many of the cargo vessels in Vancouver-area harbours are made by Korean shipbuilders. Many of the containers on those ships are moved by Hanjin, which is Korea’s largest shipping company and one of the world’s top container carriers.

In addition to the growing immigrant community, Lynn noted that there are also significant numbers of Korean students staying temporarily in the Lower Mainland to learn English. On the other side of the Pacific, he mentioned the Canadians working as English teachers in Korea. “There are many tangible and important everyday exchanges,” Lynn told the Straight in a phone interview.

Ties between Korea and Canada go far and deep.

According to the Canadian government’s official account, international relations started in 1888, when Canadian missionary James Scarth Gale set sail for Korea from Vancouver. Canadian doctor Francis Schofield is a national hero in Korea because of his participation in the 1919 independence movement against Japanese colonial rule.

During the Korean War in the 1950s, Canada contributed the third-largest military contingent to the United Nations Command, and 516 of its soldiers didn’t make it back.

Korea’s postwar development can be divided into three phases, according to UBC’s Lynn. The first and most important phase was industrial, starting with light industry in the 1960s, then moving on to heavy industries like steel, chemicals, shipbuilding, and automobile production. The high-tech stage came next, with semiconductors and mobile phones featuring prominently. Pop culture followed.

“There’s not necessarily a causal link, but in terms of time sequence, you could think of Korea’s development as having been primarily industrial first and then high-tech second, and as [pop-culture] contents-driven, currently,” Lynn said. “In fact, all three are still very important.” Industry, high-tech, and K-pop are integral to the brand that Korea has been building, one that is hip and chic.

Korean-American author Euny Hong describes this linkage as an “ecosystem”.

“One thing that Korea is trying to do with its Korean pop-culture exports, for example, is they try really, really hard to market the songs and the Korean dramas,” Hong told the Straight in a phone interview. “And one reason is that the audience that’s watching them, you know, suddenly find themselves wanting a Samsung Galaxy phone because that’s what everyone is using in the dramas.”

Hong, who grew up in the U.S. and Korea, explores the rise of Korea as an economic and cultural powerhouse in this year’s The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture (Picador).

In her book, Hong relates that in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Korea embarked on “quite possibly the biggest national rebranding campaign in world history”. Business conglomerates, known as chaebols, had to shift strategies. “Samsung stopped making cars (good idea!) and focused on electronics,” the author notes. “Hyundai did the reverse, scaling back its electronics division to focus on cars.”

Other important decisions were made during the Asian financial crisis. “Its information technology, pop, drama, film, and video game industries as we know them today all arose out of a last-chance, long-shot gamble to get out of this hole,” Hong wrote.

The crisis offered unexpected opportunities. Internet cafés bursting with the unemployed provided the impetus for the growth of Korea’s video-game industry, which is now the second-largest in the world, after China’s, according to Hong’s book.

“In fact, online games account for 58 percent of Korea’s pop culture export revenue (official term: the content industry): about $2.38 billion in revenue in 2012, out of a total of just over $4.8 billion,” the author writes.

Years before Korean performer Psy made a breakthrough in 2012 with his outrageously popular song “Gangnam Style”, the country embarked on a methodical exporting of its cultural products. It began building up its “soft power”, Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye’s term paraphrased in Hong’s book as the “intangible power a country wields through its image rather than through force”.

Korean television dramas are a good example of promoting images and tastes to international viewers. One beneficiary has been the Korean cosmetics industry. In her book, Hong notes that “one beauty chain alone, Face Shop, has a thousand stores in Asia.”

Hong, talking to the Straight by phone during a trip to L.A., noted that the Internet has also been crucial in the projection of Korea’s cultural cachet.

Told that Burnaby’s August 16 Korean Cultural Heritage Festival will feature performances of K-pop music, she said that is “extraordinary”. “Previous generations of immigrants…were not really that engaged with…contemporary Korean pop culture,” Hong said. “We’ve just kind of ignored it. Or we didn’t really just know about it. Even if you’re really interested, it was not that easy to have access to the music. And…because of the Internet, everything is instantaneous.”

According to Hong, Korea is the first country in the world to try to knock the U.S. off its throne as the number one exporter of pop culture.

“They’re probably going to succeed because it’s a number one national priority, and no other country has made a national campaign out of trying to [be] making their country cool,” Hong said. “And Korea somehow has done that. So I think the 21st century is going to be Korea’s century.”

This year’s Korean Cultural Heritage Festival marks its return to its original home in Burnaby’s Central Park, a move helped by a city grant. For the past 11 years, the festival has been held in Coquitlam. Burnaby and Coquitlam are home to most Korean Canadians in the Lower Mainland.

It’s not just traditional Korea that will be represented in the daylong event. According to festival spokesperson Suk, there will be “more modern Koreans” there as well, the offspring of immigrants who came to Canada in the past few decades.

“We have something to say; we have something to contribute to our society,” Suk said.

Suk said he was only six months old when his family arrived in the early 1980s. “I’ve been very successful in business,” he said. “I would think, you know, a good 80 percent of my success comes from living in Canada and being acceptable to other cultures.”

As a country whose history has been largely shaped by waves of immigration since early times, Canada is strong because of its diversity.

“It’s just an asset for our country, the fact we can still be Korean or you can still be Colombian or whatever it is, but you are all Canadians,” Suk said. "To recognize one's culture while also mixing old customs with new ones is perhaps the single greatest gift of this nation. This is at the very heart of the Korean Cultural Heritage Festival. In essence, it’s a celebration of Canada” 

The Korean Cultural Heritage Festival will be at Burnaby’s Swangard Stadium on Saturday (August 16) from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The opening ceremony is at 11 a.m.