Mekong Review

Category: South Korea

빛 (Hope)

Taeyeon Song

While Y2K’s SM Town artists reflected a new era and hopeful future, the K-pop artists of 2025 have been positioned as soft power cultural pawns.

Star power

Mathieu Berbiguier

Dorothy Wai Sim Lau undertakes a nuanced interrogation of how fame, altruism and regional identity intersect in Asia’s transnational mediascape.

Shades of the same colour

Taeyeon Song

Kornel Chang, a diasporic Korean historian and author, paints a picture of a post-Second World War Korea searching for a singular vision of what independence looks like.

Lessons in fragility

Radhika Oberoi

Nature provides expressive backdrops for Han Kang’s fiction; while she chronicles human frailty and barbarity, she also allows the light to seep in through the foliage.

Making protests fun

Seulki Lee

How does one save the world against evil with little more than one’s own imagination? When faced with hopeless nonsense from the political leadership, what can one do with their writing?

The power of queer humour

Seulki Lee

A conversation with Korean queer author and contemporary artist Ibanjiha on their art of humour and succeeding through the heteronormative and hyper-capitalist social order of South Korea.

in-hale ex-hale

Taeyeon Song

The End of August centres voices rarely heard in English-language fiction—Koreans living in Japanese-occupied Korea and the zainichi Korean diaspora of Japan.

Different futures

Liew Kai Khiun

In Hieyoon Kim’s Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea, South Korean cinema is seen as part of a broader democratic social movement.

Transcendental fanaticism

Tamar Herman

Esther Yi’s debut novel grapples with social disconnectivity and fanaticism through an esoteric tale of a woman who falls desperately for a K-pop star and goes on a journey to integrate him into her life.

Writing about depression

Tanmoy Goswami

Baek Sehee writes: “The world tends to focus too much on the very bright or the very dark.” She steers clear of both extremes in her book. For this alone, it merits attention.

Stating the obvious

Seulki Lee

Seulki Lee talks to Raphael Rashid about identity, belonging, and the things that people don’t want to acknowledge or discuss in South Korea.

Who is Auntie?

Kirsten Han

In Ajoomma, a Singaporean-South Korean co-production directed by He Shuming, an auntie travels to South Korea to visit the shooting locations of her favourite K-dramas… but gets far more than she’d bargained for.