Hallyu | Martin Petersen

Hallyu deals with Danish fans of Korean popular culture. As consumers of Korean popular culture, not least K-pop (Korean pop music), these fans aspire to integrate into the Korean social fabric through career choice; they produce ‘K-pop realities’ by performing Korean dance, conforming to Korean aesthetics or beauty ideals, thinking through Korean story-worlds and finding viable alternatives to Danish youth sociality. This constitutes an example of how East Asian popular culture is present in the formation of Danish youth culture in the 2010s.
Hallyu is the second publication in the four volume series East Asian popular culture in a transnational perspective: A National Museum of Denmark Collection.
What happens when Korean pop music & comics and anime, manga, video games & photo booths from Japan flow into Denmark? This series explores issues pertaining to East Asian popular culture in a Danish context and asks what it can contribute to our understanding of cultural flows in an East/West perspective.
Martin Petersen is a senior researcher and curator of the East Asian collections at the National Museum of Denmark. His research focuses on East Asian popular culture and ethnographic museums. Recently, he has published on North Korean comics, Danish ethnographic expeditions and the Korean collection in the National Museum of Denmark. As a museum curator he works on exhibitions, events, podcasts, collection catalogues and more. He is also a comic book writer.