K-culture's 'moment in Europe' is really a summerlong takeover

K-culture is abundant in Europe this summer, with major festivals across the continent all vying for Korean content in their lineups. Not the K-culture that is easy to describe — not another Netflix drama, not another boy band breaking a streaming record — but something stranger and slower to achieve.

An 80-year-old French theatre festival is handing the stage over to the Korean language itself, a piano prodigy from Gyeonggi is opening the world’s most storied classical festival and a Korean pop star is headlining a Danish festival that has never before booked a K-pop act. Korean artists are no longer supporting acts at European programs. Increasingly, they are the reason the programs are booked.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Avignon, France. The Festival d’Avignon, founded in 1947 and still run out of the Palais des Papes, has made Korean its official guest language for this year — the position previously held by Spanish and Arabic, and never before by an Asian language or a single national tongue. The festival began Saturday and runs until July 25.

Nine Korean productions made it into the Festival d’Avignon’s “In” program, the curated main stage of the event. Those nine productions were introduced at a Seoul news conference by the Korea Arts Management Service in May, which called it the first time an Asian language, and a single national language, had been given guest-language status.

The marquee lecture, “Oiseau,” at the Festival d’Avignon, is a staged reading of Han Kang's “We Do Not Part” (2021) performed by French actor Isabelle Huppert alongside Korean actor Lee Hye-young — a union of a Nobel laureate, a French national treasure and a Korean actress few in Avignon will have ever seen before, all built around a novel that returns to the buried violence of Jeju in 1948.

Theater director Koo Ja-ha brings “Haribo Kimchi,” a piece that stages cultural assimilation as a late-night Seoul food stall, where the ache of living as a Korean expatriate in Europe gets folded, unglamorously, into the taste of seaweed soup. Koo’s staging mixes language, music, video and robotics, using the textures of Korean food to get at questions of cultural paradox.

Pansori, Korean traditional narrative singing, also gets its own slot at the Festival d’Avignon, away from the theatre crowd. Lee Ja-ram brings “Snow, Snow, Snow” to the Opera Grand Avignon from July 17 to 23 — a solo pansori adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's “Master and Man" (1895), sung in the centuries-old Korean narrative style that pairs one voice against one drummer on the janggu, the traditional Korean drum.

Cinema Utopia, the festival’s longtime film partner, will run its own Korean sidebar during the same three weeks. Ten films, including July Jung's "Next Sohee" (2022) and her new feature “Dora,” auteur Bong Joon-ho's representative works, Lee Isaac Chung's "Minari" (2020) and Yeon Sang-ho's "Train to Busan" (2016) will be shown through daily screenings through July 25.

If Avignon is the loudest signal of K-culture gaining a foothold in central Europe, the classical circuit is a more persistent one. Yunchan Lim — 21 years old, Van Cliburn gold medalist at 18, the kind of pianist orchestras build opening nights around — will perform Ravel’s “Piano Concerto in G” to open the BBC Proms Festival on July 17 at the Royal Albert Hall, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Dalia Stasevska.

Lim doesn’t disappear from the season after that. From the Royal Albert Hall, he moves to the Swiss Alps for the Verbier Festival, where his July calendar reads like a small residency: a Mozart concerto for two pianos alongside his mentor Sohn Min-soo, a Medtner Piano Quintet built around violinist Daniel Lozakovich, violist Timothy Ridout, and cellist Kian Soltani, and finally a solo recital at the Eglise de Verbier in Switzerland. Verbier lists Lim among a younger generation of pianists this year, alongside Lucas Debargue, Alexandre Kantorow, and Bruce Liu.

Cho Seong-jin, the pianist who put Korea on the map at the Chopin Competition a decade ago, runs a parallel summer. He opens with a recital at France’s La Roque d’Antheron piano festival on Aug. 8, then travels to Lucerne on Aug. 24 for a first-time pairing with violinist Augustin Hadelich for a program featuring Brahms, Janacek, Amy Beach, Prokofiev and described by the Lucerne Festival as “world-class meeting world-class.”

Two of the most closely watched summer classical festivals in the world, in other words, have each built an entire evening around a Korean soloist without needing to explain why. Nobody has to walk the audience through Cho’s biography anymore. He is simply on the bill, the way Argerich or Kissin are on the bill.

Theatre picks the story back up in August. “Haribo Kimchi” resurfaces at the Edinburgh International Festival, running Aug. 20 through 24 — the same piece, the same late-night snack bar, a different audience working through the same questions of assimilation and appetite in a different accent.

Reviewers who saw Koo’s work in London call it intimate and conversational, and tickets for the Edinburgh dates are reportedly hard to get. Down the hill at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the register drops considerably: “Kimchi Comedy: A Spicy Korean Stand-Up Show,” a Korean stand-up show billed, more or less, as the end of the K-pop era and the start of something spikier, is up on the schedule. It’s a small entry next to Avignon, but it says something that K-comedy is a category worth naming at all.

Then there’s the part of the European summer that has nothing to do with prestige programming. K-pop artist Jennie became, on Friday, the first K-pop artist to headline the Danish Roskilde Festival. This puts Jennie alongside a bill that also includes Addison Rae, Zara Larsson and The Cure. A week later, Jennie has another headline spot in Madrid at Mad Cool.

Korea has been “having a moment” in Europe for a while now, in the way that phrase usually means K-pop or a Netflix show. This summer looks different mostly because of where the bookings landed — a piano recital, a stage reading of a Nobel-winning novel, a slot at a metal-and-indie festival in Denmark — places that had no obligation to care about any of it.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]