With a rush of sweeping cultural transformations, the South Korean capital is becoming the fashionable intrigue of the Far East.
It is the new can't-miss building in the heart of Seoul. Like the bandages on a plastic-surgery patient, the last of the protective fencing has been peeled away to reveal the capital's latest architectural creation. City Hall, a vintage vestige of South Korea's ruthless onetime colonial overlord Japan, has been restored. Over a cold stone shoulder, as formidable as the all-powerful mayor who works within, now rises a tsunami of glass and steel, the future poised to obliterate the past in the next 60 seconds. It took five months to build. This is the new face of Seoul.
"Pali! Pali!" everybody likes to say. Faster! Faster! South Korea has been sprinting down the road to recovery since the end of the Korean War. As fast as PSY's "Gangnam Style" anthem, mocking Seoul's Ferrari-and-furs nouveaux riches, galloped to the top of the Western music charts this year, the city has emerged as one of the most hip (and most underrated) cultural capitals in the world. Cruise-line-proportioned flagships, architecturally bombastic headquarters, museums celebrating traditional houses to handbags, haute and hot restaurants are all competing for the attention of its 10 million increasingly affluent residents.
Koreans have the reputation for being nose-to-the-grindstone, study-smarties. But looking around Seoul today, one can only conclude they're ready to enjoy themselves. It's no longer the city voted least favorite layover in the Far East. Let everyone rabbit on about how places like Shanghai are The Future: Seoul residents are smarter dressers; its restaurants feel more fussed over, more daring; and after an early force-feed of education, everyone's creative, individualist side is emerging.
South Korea never just apes the West but puts its own topspin on music, fashion, food, technology. Apple may have won its patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung, but Samsung's Galaxy S III is neck and neck with the iPhone 5 in stores, early to the notion that people wanted smartphones with bigger screens. Samsung has overtaken Sony as the world's biggest maker of TVs." Apple takes forever to develop a jewel of a phone, but Samsung, they just throw it out there. Bam-bam-bam!," says the architect Euhlo Suh. "People don't like this feature? Let's make another one. Bam-bam-bam!"
That's just the hardware. Content has arrived, too. The cultural wave rolling from these shores already has a name — hallyu — literally, the Korean Wave, coined by awestruck Chinese who were the first to acknowledge Korea's revised profile in Asia. Its "K-pop" music and television shows have been embraced with such a Pacific Basin bear hug that money from these sectors alone buoys South Korea's economy by $4.5 billion a year. This year, Korean directors transitioned from Hallyuwood to Hollywood, and will open their first English-language films, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Nicole Kidman.
The Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, which opened two years ago, is Seoul's bigger, badder Whitney Museum, and a hard-won $256 billion National Museum of Contemporary Art will make its debut later this year. (Like many of Seoul's prestige projects, the Leeum was designed by Western architects and was hardly issue-free: Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel and Mario Botta were each commissioned for a site that shrunk after the economic crisis in the late 1990s — witness this trio of buildings now existing in near collision with each other.)
The worldliness announces itself on every street corner: a constellation of starchitect-designed headquarters is aligning in the night sky. Here a Rem Koolhaas. There a Daniel Libeskind. Perhaps not so impressive a feat as a city like Shanghai, but Seoul is well on its way, even if the candelabra of new buildings are in many instances snuffed every night by 10 p.m., as the economy-minded socialist government has encouraged.
Until now, South Korea has never really registered as a culture — or as a country — save in news reports about threats from the North, forever lumped together with places like Taiwan as an emerging industrial powerhouse. Seoul is run by a tight group of family-owned conglomerates (Samsung, Doosan, LG, et al.) called the chaebol, with every line of business in their tentacle grip. Now these families' third-generation sons and daughters, in their 30s and 40s, are leading Seoul through the most radical upgrade of its 2,000-year history. They've come of age during South Korea's growth with all the attached benefits: virtually every one of them educated abroad (America, mainly), fluent in foreign languages, buzzing with international connections.
The most graphic sign of the city's transformation is perhaps the string of fashion flagships docked on the main drag of Gangnam's Cheongdam-dong: Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Tory Burch, Prada, Gucci. It all reads very Rodeo Drive — that is, if there weren't already a street named Rodeo Drive in Gangnam's Apgujeong. The endgame for these companies has been to plant a flag early, establish the brand as quickly as possible. This explains what Dean & DeLuca is doing in the basement of Gangnam's Shinsegae department store flogging French chocolates and muesli, why Jamie Oliver is taking meetings with the "global lifestyle company" CJ Foodville and why Tory Burch entered a partnership with Samsung Chiel. "If Samsung hadn't approached us, we probably would have approached them," says Burch, whose orange-lacquer flagship and 23 shop-in-shops enjoy double-digit sales growth yearly.
Forty years ago, Gangnam ("south of the river") was farmland. Today, after hyper-development and redevelopment that made numerous property owners mega-millionaires overnight, rabid consumerism runs free.
The wives of Gangnam crowd into the months-old Gourmet 494 in the basement of the Galleria mall. To call this a food court would be an act of libel. The hottest restaurants in Seoul have branches here, like Pizzeria D'Buzza and Vatos Urban Tacos, the latter of which began with funds its California-born founding partner, Kenneth Park, raised on Kickstarter. The menu is an East-West border-mix with kimchi carnitas fries, galbi short-rib tacos, peach makgeolitas made with Korea's fermented rice wine makgeolli, and funny pictograms display the source of each meat, required by law ever since a 2008 controversy when beef from the United States was allowed back into Korea.
At Gourmet 494, customers are learning to care more and pay more for groceries. Elderly ladies wearing stewardess-y pillbox hats sell gift sets of grapefruit-size apples and pears. Tins of Spam packed with Andalucian olive oil run counter to such other dainty offerings as the "brioches haricots rouges." After the Korean War, the American base in town offloaded Spam onto the hapless starving natives who developed a taste for it. Now it is a tradition to give Spam as a thank-you to parents.
Blocks away, at a satellite outpost of the cult Italian fashion emporium 10 Corso Como, Faye Lee gives her order to the waiter. Lee, who introduced Milan's exotic-skins brand Colombo to South Korea, is outfitted in the local uniform: fur vest, leggings and wedge heels. Bought out by Samsung in 2011, she drives a yellow Ferrari 458 Italia. Upstairs at the store, where Thom Browne shirts hang next to Mercury-winged Azzedine Alaia boots, an employee tails shoppers closely — too closely. The same occurs at the Rick Owens store in Dosan Park, where a Facsimile Rick in the window resembles a Dothraki horse lord from "Game of Thrones," a wind machine buffeting his hair. In Seoul, the designer clothes may have arrived but the service — the manners — have yet to follow.
Koreans are as obsessed with image and aging as Westerners, and plastic surgery borders on national pastime. Having a "small face" is the ultimate, and the procedure of the moment is a very painful double-jaw overhaul. Also: hair implants for women to fortify a moderately thinning hairline. Koreans are decidedly more adventurous on the road to perfection. At Gangnam's Enzyme Health Spa, women soak in fermenting rice bran up to their necks to lose weight. Then there's the Dr. Fish pedicure, where for $2, carp will nibble dry skin from feet, like a thousand points of electroshock. Opening the wallet wider, for $170,000, locals can join Chaum, a Kubrickian anti-aging center in the Pie'n Polus building that will bank your endlessly renewable stem cells for the day stem-cell therapies become viable in Seoul.
Restaurant bills can feel similarly ludicrous too, as if price alone can elevate the mediocre. At Elbon the Table, this translates to gold leaf on foie gras, steak served with five colored salts, wasabi ice-cream powder steaming from a liquid-nitrogen application. Innovation feels fresher at Okitchen, where the servers are all chefs in their 20s rotating nights in the kitchen and sending out Jeju horse carpaccio and Gorgonzola ice cream.
At Goo STK, customers can call ahead to reserve their dry-aged steaks, and the kitchen stays open until 1 a.m., an exception in a city where most restaurants take their last reservation at 8 p.m. Why? To make way for the drinking that will go on afterward: in Asia, it is Korea that hits the bottle hardest, another reason you always hear people comparing the Koreans with the Irish. Jinro's branded soju, a drink much like vodka, is the world's best-selling alcohol you've never heard of.
Speakeasy Mortar looks like it might be a sauna from the outside. Instead in this swank whiskey bar, the anomalous American vice-chairman of the Doosan corporation has four men out on a hoesik, a traditional roundelay of after-work drinks. Today, one of them won an award. After a last belt of Guatemalan sipping rum, the boss is off. His team bows deeply at the waist as he vanishes into his chauffeured car.
Lee Bul, Seoul's biggest contemporary artist in residence, wears an apron as she bustles around her embassy-area studio. On the wall is a wearable Sigmund the Sea Monster sculpture reconstructed for her recent Mori Art Museum retrospective in Tokyo.
Only three Korean artists have a truly international profile and an international market commensurate with that reputation: Bul, Doh-ho Suh (who mainly resides in London) and the longtime Japan resident Lee Ufan. Though the chaebol are major collectors — particularly the wives, sisters and daughters-in-law who collectively run six Korean art museums — they mainly indulge a taste for secondary-market Western art. "Go to MoMA in New York. Three of the biggest corporate sponsors are Samsung, Hanji and Hyundai Card," says Bul's husband, James B. Lee, who represents his wife and is a consulting partner at Seoul's leading PKM gallery.
Every major museum swings through Seoul with its trustees and directors with the goal of forging future institutional partnerships. Still, international collectors are not coming, which means fewer galleries, which hurts younger local artists. "I still think Korea is very isolated," Lee admits.
It's difficult to tell who's stockpiling what because of increased secrecy: South Korea doesn't impose any taxes on transactions of art property, and artwork is exempt from transfer and inheritance taxes, too. Which makes it an ideal form of currency for some chaebol, and a way to launder money and make bribes. A number of prominent executives have found themselves accused and convicted of tax evasion, most famously Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of Samsung. Last year, the chairman and an executive at Orion Group were convicted of using embezzled funds to buy art and were sent to jail.
Architecture is more the vehicle for flaunting a company's success publicly. But too often, local business owners are consumed with creating spectacular shapes beribboned with LEDs and little else. A client can cheap out. The guts of a building are often forgotten as the zany facade takes precedence. The residents like to hate a lot of what's going up. Seoul remains the destination for "the Cloud" in Daniel Libeskind's Yongsan International Business District, which has drawn criticism for its remarkable similarity to the smoke-wreathed ruins of the Twin Towers. Some of the other starchitects are perceived to be phoning it in. The local architect Eulho Suh compares it to American movie stars quietly shooting dopey commercials in Asia for astronomical sums.
Politics can also interfere. Zaha Hadid's mercury-lobed Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park was supposed to be a cultural complex. When the mayor who championed so many of these projects felt obliged to resign in a force play over a school-lunch referendum, his socialist replacement made a point of denouncing a number of building projects, wrenching funds. The building boom became a touchstone issue for the have-nots demonstrating in front of City Hall and citing North Korea as a model society, untainted by all this Americanism, all this mindless showing off.
It is now the year of the snake, and anything born the year of the snake is strong, sheds its skin and is reborn. Rumor has it when the bandages come off, Hadid's building will be a shopping mall.
