K-pop is changing, too

IN A SMALL restaurant in a quiet backstreet in Seoul’s Gangnam district, the walls and part of the ceiling are covered in posters, postcards and key rings. On one shelf sits an enormous pyramid of coffee-cup sleeves. All the decorations show members of BTS, South Korea’s most successful K-pop act and the highest-grossing boy band in the world. They are gifts from fans around the world for whom the restaurant, where the band used to eat before they were famous, has become a site of pilgrimage.