The Semiotics of Soft Power
South Korea was never meant to be a cultural superpower — the smallest country in East Asia, scarred by Japanese colonisation, civil war, and the 1997 financial crisis. With few natural resources and an economy on the brink, Korea made a strategic bet: export culture instead of goods. Decades later, Hallyu (less wave, more tsunami) washed over global pop culture: the flavours at your restaurant, the songs on your radio, the background of your tween's iPhone. I wanted to know why, and more importantly how — so I spent a year in Seoul trying to find out.
My master's thesis uses three semiotic lenses — cognitive aesthetics, music semiology, and linguistic analysis — to dissect two of Korea's most successful exports: Squid Game and BTS's “Butter.” I trace how visual metaphors borrowed from Munch, Escher, and Magritte encode the show's contemporary anxieties; how a saxophone solo engineered between funk nostalgia and futurism lands in the body before the brain; and how lyrics quietly cast the listener as a passive recipient to a dominant speaker.
Across every medium, the goal is the same: conjure a positive feeling, and attach that feeling to Korea. This is nation branding as industrialised mining for emotions. The most radical rewrite of soft power happens not in a war room, but a recording studio.
The Semiotics of Soft Power
South Korea was never meant to be a cultural superpower — the smallest country in East Asia, scarred by Japanese colonisation, civil war, and the 1997 financial crisis. With few natural resources and an economy on the brink, Korea made a strategic bet: export culture instead of goods. Decades later, Hallyu (less wave, more tsunami) washed over global pop culture: the flavours at your restaurant, the songs on your radio, the background of your tween's iPhone. I wanted to know why, and more importantly how — so I spent a year in Seoul trying to find out.
My master's thesis uses three semiotic lenses — cognitive aesthetics, music semiology, and linguistic analysis — to dissect two of Korea's most successful exports: Squid Game and BTS's “Butter.” I trace how visual metaphors borrowed from Munch, Escher, and Magritte encode the show's contemporary anxieties; how a saxophone solo engineered between funk nostalgia and futurism lands in the body before the brain; and how lyrics quietly cast the listener as a passive recipient to a dominant speaker.
Across every medium, the goal is the same: conjure a positive feeling, and attach that feeling to Korea. This is nation branding as industrialised mining for emotions. The most radical rewrite of soft power happens not in a war room, but a recording studio.