Maggie Kang’s win for Best Animated Feature at the 98th Academy Awards in March 2026, for KPop Demon Hunters (2025), was immediately framed as a historic moment—not only as an individual achievement, but as a marker of the expanding visibility of Korean-affiliated cultural production in global media. As the first Korean-Canadian director to receive the honor, her recognition appeared to signal a new phase in the trajectory of the Korean Wave, one increasingly defined by mobility, hybridity, and transnational authorship. Yet the moment was not without friction. As her acceptance remarks drew to a close—just before the transition to Michelle Wong’s speech—the orchestral cue cut in prematurely, interrupting her cadence and prompting a wave of criticism framed in terms of racial bias, institutional slight, and symbolic exclusion. What might otherwise have unfolded as a seamless celebration was briefly unsettled, exposing the uneven conditions under which such visibility is granted.
Her speech was also notable in contrast to Bong Joon-ho’s jubilant remarks upon winning Best Director for Parasite in 2020. Bong famously paid tribute to Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, positioning himself with humility within the lineage of Hollywood cinema. It was, perhaps, a strategic gesture—an outsider acknowledging the authority of the host industry.
Maggie Kang, by contrast, was direct and unflinching. She remarked that it had taken far too long to see Koreans on screen, and dedicated the award to Korea and Koreans everywhere. Yet KPop Demon Hunters is not, strictly speaking, a Korean film. At most, it is an American production that renders Korean elements with striking fluency.
Why, then, this insistence on Korea and Koreans? Is this a declaration of cultural identity, or a strategic positioning within a global market increasingly driven by Korean content? What emerges here is not simply a moment of recognition, but a shift in how the Korean Wave—once understood as a national export—reconfigures itself within transnational media industries. What follows is a small incision into this changing face of Korean content production.
The invocation of “Korea and Koreans everywhere” in Maggie Kang’s acceptance speech may also signal a confidence in the marketability of Korean-ness within the global entertainment industry. There has been a noticeable and sustained appetite for Korean cultural content in recent years. A telling example is “APT.” by ROSÉ of BLACKPINK and Bruno Mars, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 for twelve weeks. The track was named the best-selling global single of 2025 by the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry). Notably, its hook popularized the shortened Korean pronunciation of “apartment”—apateu—which began circulating as a kind of lingua franca.
Yet apateu is not merely a localized rendering of an English word. It also refers to the dominant form of residence in South Korea, where approximately 53.9% to 64% of the population lived in apartment complexes as of 2024, according to national statistics. Indeed, one of the most striking architectural features of Seoul is the seemingly endless rows of apartment blocks. What might initially appear as a playful linguistic adaptation thus carries with it a distinctly Korean mode of life. Thus the global success of “APT.” suggests that K-pop—and, by extension, Korean cultural production more broadly—has passed a critical threshold: Korean-ness is no longer an exotic accent that supplements global diversity, but an integral component of mainstream cultural consumption.
KPop Demon Hunters
The expansion and diffusion of Korean content also imply that it is increasingly detachable from ethnicity and geography, becoming an open unit for creative recombination. Korean elements are no longer bound to origin but function as modular components within a broader cultural assemblage.
Consider bibimbap, often regarded in Korea as a quintessential comfort food. In contexts such as California, however, it is frequently reinterpreted as a form of rice and vegetable salad with gochujang sauce, sometimes reframed through the lens of health-conscious consumption by figures such as Gwyneth Paltrow. In the process, bibimbap may lose certain aspects of its original cultural specificity, yet it simultaneously acquires new meanings. Authenticity, in this case, becomes less a fixed criterion than a flexible negotiation. What is significant is the capacity of Korean cultural forms to be adapted, reinterpreted, and transformed at the site of reception.
KPop Demon Hunters operates in a similar manner. The film assembles a wide range of Korean elements—from gimbap and instant cup noodles to mythological figures such as the tiger messenger of the underworld and Rumi’s sajingeom—and recomposes them into a new narrative structure. Yet its overarching framework, an apocalyptic battle between good and evil, is not distinctly Korean in any traditional sense. One would have to search extensively to locate such a fully developed mythological conflict within Korean literary or folkloric traditions.
In this respect, Korean elements function less as markers of cultural authenticity than as a kind of open-source repertoire—available for recombination, reinterpretation, and even appropriation across different cultural and industrial contexts.
When Maggie Kang invoked “Korea and Koreans everywhere,” the referent may therefore extend beyond a geographically bounded nation or an ethnically defined population. It may also include those who engage with Korean cultural elements, rework them, and produce new meanings in the process. Her statement, then, points not only to the global popularity of Korean content, but to its increasing value as an adaptable cultural commodity.
This shift is further reflected in the emergence of artists such as MICO, a 23-year-old Filipino-Canadian singer-songwriter based in Toronto, whose work can be described as contemporary alternative pop. His recent collaborations with K-pop musicians signal a notable development: what was once understood primarily as a nationally produced export now operates as a transferable cultural resource. K-pop, in this sense, becomes less a fixed genre tied to Korea and more a set of stylistic and affective possibilities available for global adoption.
KoKuho
If Maggie Kang’s declaration and the modular circulation of Korean cultural elements suggest an increasingly confident and mobile configuration of identity, the work of Lee Sang-il introduces a more ambiguous formation. A Zainichi Korean filmmaker operating within the Japanese film industry, Lee occupies a position in which Koreanness is neither fully foregrounded nor entirely absent. In films such as Kokuho (2025), identity does not present itself as an exportable marker or a cultural resource to be mobilized. Rather, it persists as a structural condition—diffuse, unspoken, and resistant to easy incorporation into the logics of the Korean Wave.
Kokuho follows two Kabuki actors, both friends and rivals, as they are trained in onnagata (female roles). Kikuo and Shunsuke grow together within the discipline of performance, and the film stages a series of visually striking reenactments of canonical Kabuki pieces such as The Heron Maiden and The Love Suicides. Yet what is most notable is not only what the film presents, but what it withholds. Despite spanning the period from 1964 to 2014, the narrative offers little explicit engagement with broader social or political contexts. Historical markers such as the Tokyo Olympics or the fluctuations of the Japanese economy remain largely absent, leaving Kabuki suspended from its material surroundings. What emerges is not Kabuki as a cultural institution embedded in history, but Kabuki as an aesthetic and existential condition.
This distancing is reinforced at the level of form. Rather than sustaining an adoring, immersive gaze on performance—a mode often associated with cinematic renderings of traditional arts—the film frequently interrupts moments of theatrical intensity with intrusions from memory and lived experience. The climactic sequence of The Heron Maiden, for instance, is fractured by recollections that displace the performance from the stage. In doing so, the film redirects attention away from Kabuki as spectacle and toward the interior struggles of the performers who inhabit it. The result is a work less concerned with preserving cultural form than with tracing the cost of embodying it.
In this sense, Kokuho resonates with earlier works such as Blood and Bones (2004) by Choi Yang-il, where Korean identity does not operate as an overt cultural marker but as a lived, often fraught condition. In Lee Sang-il’s case, Koreanness remains tied to experience—personal, historical, and biographical—slowly seeping through the film to construct the interior conditions of the performers.
This raises a broader question: is the modularization of Korean cultural elements a phenomenon specific to the contemporary media environment, where digital platforms facilitate the rapid adoption and recombination of cultural forms? Maggie Kang’s speech may well signal a future in which such experimentation becomes increasingly normalized. Yet this does not render obsolete the more embedded, less visible forms of identity found in Lee’s work. Rather, it suggests that these modes coexist unevenly.
What emerges, then, is not a single trajectory of the Korean Wave, but a field of divergent configurations—where identity may be asserted, circulated, recombined, or remain structurally present without being fully articulated. In this uneven terrain, Koreanness persists not only as a global cultural resource, but also as a lived condition that resists complete translation into the language of the market.