Cultural & Creative Sectors Research
Explore key trends and issues shaping the cultural and creative industries in Korea and ASEAN, and discover new insights.
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Reading Shenzhen's Culture Fair: What the ICIF Signals for ASEAN's Creative Economy
This report tracks the trajectory of China's largest state-backed cultural-industry fair, the China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair (Wénbóhuì, hereafter ICIF), examines what a contemporary industry fair actually does beyond matchmaking, and situates the IP business it incubates within an Asian context that is distinct from Western models.
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Regional perception poll on the ASEAN creative economy
In October 2025, the British Council released the first-ever Regional Perception Poll on the ASEAN Creative Economy — a survey of 4,117 respondents across all ten ASEAN member states and Timor-Leste, covering both the general public and active creative economy participants ("Creative Players").
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When the Dividend Ends: ASEAN's Demographic Turn and the Creative Economy Bet
The creative economy is the region's chosen answer — and notably, an agenda ASEAN set rather than received. Indonesia was the main sponsor of the 2019 UN resolution declaring 2021 the International Year of Creative Economy, having convened the first World Conference on Creative Economy in Bali in 2018, and ASEAN culture ministers enshrined their own definition of the "ASEAN Creative Economy" in the 2022 Siem Reap Declaration.
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THACCA: Thailand's Creative Super-Agency in the Making — and What It Signals for ASEAN
When Thailand's Pheu Thai-led government took office in September 2023, its very first cabinet meeting created the National Soft Power Strategy Committee — a signal of how central the creative economy had become to Thai economic thinking. The reasoning was openly demographic and structural: with the country's fertility rate at roughly 1.0 and conventional industries no longer generating sufficient growth, policymakers framed soft power as the engine for transforming Thailand's economic structure
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The ASEAN-Korea Olle Trail in Jeju: Cultural Diplomacy You Can Walk
There is a particular kind of cultural diplomacy that does not happen in conference rooms. It happens when you stop walking, sit down on a bench, and find yourself reading about a country you have never visited—while looking out at the sea. That is exactly what the ASEAN-Korea Olle Trail is designed to do.
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HORI7ON and the P-Pop Moment: When the K-Pop System Goes Southeast Asian
HORI7ON (호라이즌) is a seven-member Filipino boy group under MLD Entertainment, formed through the ABS-CBN/MLD co-production Dream Maker (2022–23). They debuted in Seoul in July 2023 and performed at the 2026 ROUND ASEAN-Korea Music Festival in Manila in April 2026.
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AI, copyright and the creative industries(2026)
The UK faces a choice between two futures. In the first, the UK becomes a world-leading home for responsible, licensing-based artificial intelligence (AI) development, where commercial model developers using UK content obtain permission, pay fair remuneration to rights holders and can deploy their models without questions of legal liability.
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Special Eurobarometer 562: Europeans' Attitudes Towards Culture
Special Eurobarometer 562: Europeans' Attitudes Towards Culture is publicly available via the European Commission's Eurobarometer portal. Fieldwork was conducted February–March 2025 across all 27 EU member states.
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Indonesia's Batik Economy: From UNESCO Heritage to Global IP Asset (2)
The digitization of batik commerce is simultaneously accelerating the industry's reach and introducing new categories of IP risk that existing governance frameworks are not equipped to handle.