In the midst of Bangkok’s teeming ecosystem of adverts, all over the walls of the metro and infesting the huge shopping centres, something occurred to me. Thai people can have a wide range of skin tones, but the people grinning and holding up products in the adverts were exceptionally pale. This could be attributed to depressingly-common colourism, of course, but I couldn’t shake off the impression that they looked Korean. The ultra-thin, snow-skinned women looked like they were straight out of a K-pop girlband. How have Thai people developed a taste for this aesthetic? The music, TV, and cinema of South Korea have made their mark in countries all over the world in recent years, but was Thailand, being closer to the epicentre of the Korean Wave, particularly inundated?
For a start, there was that “Koreatown” in Bangkok, but that was a designated little patch of Koreaness. If you were outside this little patch in Bangkok, looking for a more conventional way to spend an evening or a weekend afternoon by, say, going to a cinema, how much of Korea would you find? If you’d look at the listings of a branch of the SFX Cinema chain in central Bangkok in November 2024, you would find that the films would roughly break down as 36% American, 27% Japanese, 18% Thai, 12% Korean, 3% Chinese, and 3% British. So, Thai audiences do look up at Korean film stars on the big screen occasionally, but not as much as look up at their own, or at the stars of the behemoth in every sense that is the USA. Japanese cinema, too, has a stronger showing in Thailand, maybe in large part due to the popularity of anime. By comparison, if you had the middling fortune to be in Cardiff instead, the offerings at a local Cineworld would be around 73% American, 14% Indian, 7% British, 3% Irish, and 3% Australian. Both Korean and Japanese cultures have their fans in the UK, to be sure, but not enough to ensure their films being regularly shown in the average cinema.
Korean presence in the more low-key viewing habits is something similar – two of the Netflix Top Ten for Thailand are K-Dramas, and the rest are half Thai and half a mix of American, Chinese, Japanese and Kuwaiti. Both big and small screens in Thailand have a bit of South Korea’s cultural imprint on them, but not enough to explain how it became marketable in Bangkok.
The answer may lie in K-Pop.
The most distinctive and probably most powerful element of the Korean Wave, K-Pop’s grip on the Thai population appears to be strong. Bangkok is a standard stop on bands’ itineraries, performing to masses of fans who regularly share their tunes on TikTok. At the same time that, in Thailand, a cinema’s listings was 12% Korean, and Netflix’s Top Ten was 20% K-Drama, the most-streamed song on Spotify in Thailand was K-Pop. As was the second most-streamed, and the third most, and the fourth most. But, in this case, there’s a twist: Spotify’s most-streamed song in Thailand is by Lisa, a member of Blackpink. This is one of the most significant K-Pop bands in the world, but Lisa is not Korean. She is, in fact, Thai. She’s not the only one, either, as the bands NCT and Got7 also have Thai members, or “idols” as the marketable human assets of the K-Pop industry are known. Now, in the UK or the US, foreign-born members of bands would be unremarkable, but South Korea, despite being wealthy, does not have a ethnically diverse population. It is almost completely homogenous, with effectively no minorities. So, for there to be a Thai presence at all in the iconic soft-power industry of such a mono-ethnic nation is pretty surprising. It might even be evidence of a genuine two-way relationship with K-Pop that goes beyond mere fandom on the periphery.
It seems that I was right in thinking that the women in those adverts looked like K-Pop idols, because that’s what they were emulating. That is, if they weren’t actual K-Pop idols doing endorsement work. Thailand has a considerable media scene of its own, but there is still enough room to fit in South Korea’s creative output. A small country of just 52 million people inveigles itself into the hearts of yet another nation, as it has in countries across the entire world.
Sources: SFX, Cineworld, Netflix, Nation Thailand, NME, Spotify, CIA World Factbook
Wandering/Wondering 