Creative Dilemmas and New Global Aesthetics

The Korean Wave on Digital Platforms

Abstract

This special issue aims to illuminate the sustained Hallyu phenomenon within the structural context of a new global cultural landscape driven by digital platforms (platform capitalism) and the ways in which cultural difference is consumed as aesthetic value (aesthetic capitalism). The proliferation of K-content is intimately linked to the twenty-first-century digital media environment. Whereas past influxes of East Asian culture into the West reached European audiences through aristocratic intermediaries or intellectual elites, today’s K-content differs significantly in that it reaches mass audiences directly through digital platforms. This unmediated access, combined with the explosive speed of digital dissemination, is fundamentally transforming the character and terrain of contemporary global popular culture. While existing scholarship has largely focused on audience reception and consumption, this issue addresses a critical gap by foregrounding production dynamics, translation practices, platform governance, and fandom formations. Through interdisciplinary contributions, the issue examines how global platforms reconfigure creative labor and industry structures, how aesthetic and translational strategies mediate global sensibilities, and how transnational fandoms construct emotional attachments and forms of “global Koreanness.” Together, these perspectives offer new insights into the power relations, cultural meanings, and industrial logics shaping K-content in the twenty-first century.