The publishing world is eager to get in on the action too. Last year a magazine called Cabinet was launched in Seoul; written in both Korean and English, its debut issue contained articles about Belgian couturier Dries Van Noten and Tom Dixon, the British industrial designer. Following international hits such as The Host and The Chaser, Korean movie directors like Na Hong-jin are inking deals in Hollywood. And restaurants like the Kitchen Salvatore Cuomo, which just may serve the best wood-fired pizza in Asia, are poaching chefs from Europe and Japan.
Creativity, in short, is boiling over. While the global recession has becalmed the world’s great economies, the ancient yet breathtakingly modern city of Seoul is holding its coming-out party: Welcome to Asia’s latest It city.
If this comes as news, join the club—it’s also news to Koreans, who seem curiously oblivious to the transformation sweeping their capital. But here are the facts: South Korea now boasts the world’s 15th-largest economy. As unemployment spiked all over the developed world last year, the country piled on 200,000 new jobs. And as the nation’s former colonial overlord across the Sea of Japan (which Koreans would prefer you called the East Sea) seems destined to enter its third “lost decade” of microscopic economic growth, Korea’s economy is expected to expand by nearly 6 percent this year.
Nowhere are signs of the South Korean Miracle more apparent than in Seoul. The city is in the midst of installing parks and grand boulevards. There are cafés springing up next to the Han River, which bisects the capital and which, only decades ago, was something akin to an open sewer. Big-name architects, too, are remaking the city: Rem Koolhaas—who codesigned the world-class Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, which opened in 2004—also designed the Prada Transformer, a building that has four radically different appearances. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has broken ground on the Digital Media City Landmark Tower, which will be the tallest building in East Asia when it is topped off in 2014. And Zaha Hadid is in the process of turning a derelict section of downtown into a 900,000-square-foot megastructure comprising a shopping mall, a design museum, a library, and a seven-acre park with reflecting pools, lotus ponds, and bamboo groves.
Urban renewal started in 2003, when Lee Myung-bak, then Seoul’s mayor and now South Korea’s president, embarked on a plan to prettify one of the world’s ugliest cities. But the roots of the city’s renewal go back through more than 50 years of Korean history, when Seoul was shelled to rubble during the Korean War. It needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, and a generation of survivors dedicated themselves to doing just that. During the mid-Seventies, South Korea was actually poorer than the communist North and run by a military dictatorship that didn’t take kindly to free thought. It became known for producing cheap textiles and knockoff electronics.
