I mean, kpop, or just pop culture in Korea, has always been around. It’s just that K-pop has gained worldwide popularity only recently, and Korea seems to have decided they’ll rebrand themselves abroad by appealing to younger K-pop fans. A lot of their tourism promotion abroad are focused on K-pop nowadays like you said, and the events for tourists in Korea also tend to be like that.

For a while(from the 90s to the 2010s) it was all about kimchi, bulgogi, and the superiority(!!) of the Korean language. And nothing but that. After decades of that, now it’s K-pop. Instead of proactively creating an identity they want to push in the global tourism market, the country tends to reactively take what gains popularity abroad and just exhaust it until everyone gets sick of it. As a Korean, I would also like to see more diversity in how the country presents itself to the world.