The K-pop industry is one of the fastest-expanding industries in the world. Unlike the global music markets that have faced consistent decreases in album sales, the South Korean market has had a gradual increase since 2014 – its album sales exceeded 10 million in 2016; 16.9 million in 2017; 22.8 million in 2018; and 25 million in 2019 – thanks to K-pop fans, who have strategically and competitively consumed their idols’ music.¹ K-pop groups are dominating international music charts – EXO Baekhyun’s Delight (2020) ranked No. 1 on iTunes charts in sixty-nine countries, and EXO’s OBSESSION (2019) and BLACKPINK’s “How You like That” (2020) in sixty. In 2020, BTS released four number-one albums faster than any other group since the Beatles, and their song “Black Swan” reached number one on iTunes in 103 countries – more than any song in history.² By the end of the 2010s, K-pop had become even more saturated, with millions of aspiring performers hoping to become the next BoA and BTS.

If aspiring idols were inspired by the rags-to-riches stories of BoA and BTS, numerous investors saw K-pop idols as a one-time jackpot. The flow of reckless investments has resulted in small companies producing the same style of idol groups, going into financial peril, and disbanding the groups within a few years. These companies are often denigrated as “idol factories” that force teenagers to look and act in certain ways, sacrificing their privacy, education, family life, friendships, and romances to maintain a loyal fan base.³

Western media have continued to describe K-pop stars’ limited agency as “the dark side of K-pop.”⁴ However, the Western counterparts also suffer from chronic structural problems of unfair contracts, sexual abuse, and exploitation behind the commercial myth of musical authenticity. Among the examples are Brian Epstein’s molding of the Beatles’s image, Michael Jackson’s childhood history of abuse, Ke$ha’s sexual assault lawsuit against her producer Dr. Luke, Lauren Jauregui’s leaked audio that described her group Fifth Harmony as “literal slaves,” and Scooter Braun’s legal ownership of Taylor Swift’s music catalogue. Attempts to control artists’ agency are endemic in the global music industry.⁵

The goal of this chapter is not to perpetuate the myth of K-pop as magical and/or abusive but rather to reveal the complexity and fluidity of human relations in the popular music industry. Keith Negus’s study of genre cultures in the British music business of the 1970s and early 1980s is critical of defining culture industries in Fordist terms, because that ignores the historical specificities that contextualize the development of the music business.⁶ He also points out the impossibility of theorizing cultural production in general terms, due to differences in “aesthetic form, content, working practices, means of financing and modes of reception and consumption” in each industry, because “all industries are cultural.”⁷ It will be productive, then, to discuss the K-pop industry not as a standardized culture built on a Fordist business model but as a critical site in which diverse social relations are created, subverted, and negotiated.

This is why field research is important in examining an industry as culture. On the one hand, trained experts sustain the industrial system; on the other hand, there are always thinkers who question capitalist principles that alienate laborers and reject human-essential capacities, discuss the laborers’ calling and raison d’être in economic activities, and take actions within and beyond the given social structure of the industry. While the former is readily noticeable through top-down, media-based cultural studies, listening to the latter requires participant observation, interviews, and personal networks in the field. From 2015 to 2018, I interviewed more than seventy people, including K-pop idols and trainees; entertainment company CEOs; workers in A&R, marketing, and casting divisions; TV show producers; music video directors; reporters and journalists in Korean and American media; academics; and fans from Korea and around the world. All the interviewees are active in the K-pop industry and wished to remain anonymous because they discussed sensitive issues that might affect their employment status or public image. For this reason, I have replaced their names with letters (e.g., Worker A, Idol B, Rapper C, Company D).

I identified four groups of participants and institutions in the K-pop world: the K-pop industry (i.e., Korean entertainment companies and the mass media), the South Korean government, idol singers, and fans. In an industry where idols’ bodies serve as unstandardized products through volatile media (re)presentations, how do entertainment companies produce idols? How do idols manage their multiple roles and expectations as media commodities, affective laborers, and cultural capitalists? How does the government intervene in this global trade of affective commodities like K-pop, protect the human rights of the idols, but also benefit from the soft power that the idols produce as national icons? Last, how do fan communities circulate this commodified intimacy and make themselves de facto shareholders of entertainment companies? Although I have categorized actors in the K-pop world, I will explore how K-pop is sustained as a culture formed through interactive communications, conflicts, and negotiations.

Idol Recruitment and Contract

The idea of idols as puppets of the industry derives from idols’ limited agency, especially in the first three to four years after their debut. They are not simply musicians but also affective laborers who perform “fan service” – that is, verbal, physical, textual, and/or musical performances that offer pleasure – and work ceaselessly to maintain a close relationship with their fans. For this reason, entertainment companies select idol trainees based on several factors, such as appearance, kki (aura or stage presence, including charisma and sex appeal), talent (singing, dancing, and/or rapping), inseong (politeness, kindness, and sincerity), and teamwork.

Prospective idols must be extraordinarily attractive or talented to pass the audition. Once they are selected as trainees, they are expected to demonstrate inseong and cooperative teamwork until they join a debut team. Some private institutes (hagwon) for vocal and dance training partner with entertainment companies and send their students to company auditions, while other aspiring idols make their debuts through television audition shows. Most companies hold weekly auditions at their building while the cast division goes on an audition tour inside and outside Seoul, or even overseas. The casting division often goes to middle and high schools, singing/dancing contests, and K-pop festivals to discover good-looking and talented teenagers. It is common for companies to sign non-Korean idols who can speak other languages so that the idols can speak for their group without a translator at overseas promotions.⁸

Entertainment companies occasionally recruit trainees solely based on their appearance. Some companies host beauty pageants for preteen girls and boys in order to track potential idols for several years. Worker C at the new artist development department at Company D explains that if the potential idols are too young, casting managers will maintain contact with them without signing a trainee contract. Even though they are not under contract, the managers give an impression that the company is interested in them, by regularly contacting and asking them to inform the company if they receive an offer from another company.⁹ Once the preteens enter adolescence, the company will sign a contract with discretion after evaluating how their appearance will change as they mature. Worker C explains how the casting managers take profile pictures of audition applicants:

Both female and male idols are under pressure to look attractive through diet and cosmetic surgery. After four years of rigorous training, JinE made her debut in 2015 as a member of Oh My Girl, although soon after, she went on hiatus for a year due to extreme weight loss, anorexia nervosa, amenorrhea, hypothermia, and hypotension. In 2017, she left the group. It is common for idols of both genders to share their diets with their fans. BTS member Jin states that he was once on a crash diet where for an entire year he ate only two packs of chicken breast a day: “I was told to take vitamins, but I refused to do so to lose more weight, so I eventually suffered from malnutrition.”¹¹ Another BTS member, Jungkook, was not allowed to bulk up before he became an adult, because his company wanted him to “maintain a boyish image.”¹²

Idol C states that liposuction is the most common surgery that female idols undergo, as they are compelled – by both the company and their own fans – to be thin. According to her, an idol with a height of 160 centimeters (about 5’3”) must maintain a weight of 40 kilograms (about 88 pounds).¹³ Idol B says he was 180 centimeters (about 5’9”) tall and weighed 60 kilograms (about 132 pounds) right after the debut, as he had “tuna sandwiches and chicken breasts every day – the company told us to do so. We had to do whatever they ordered, so I just did whatever they wanted me to do.”¹⁴ Fans and the public do not hesitate to tell idols to lose weight or undergo cosmetic surgery. Idol B recalls the online comments he received in his early career: “Now I don’t get hurt by people saying that I’m ugly. But back then, it was so hurtful when they said I was ugly. ‘How dare you make a debut as an idol [with such an appearance]?’ There were definitely many fans among those who criticized my appearance.”¹⁵

A flirtatious aura, or kki, is also a significant asset. Worker A at a cast division states that Idol N, whom she scouted simply because she found him cute, was a flirt: “[Idol N] was annoying while I was setting up an audition schedules for him. He didn’t arrive on time, asked irrelevant questions, and kept saying things like, ‘I can’t go today.’ But later I realized that those annoying kids were often good at flirting with their fans.”¹⁶ Appearance and flirting skills are important, but performing techniques must also reach an acceptable level before the trainees come onto the market as idols. Once they have been recruited, entertainment companies teach them singing, dancing, foreign languages, etiquette, and other skills. Based on each trainee’s personality and talents, the company assigns them a role as a vocalist, rapper, or dancer.

Education curricula generally include singing, dancing, foreign languages, courtesy and manners, elocution, and acting. Some companies cover expenses for music (composition and instrument) lessons, mental health care, academic tutoring, and Korean language for foreign trainees.¹⁷ Because most trainees are teenagers, they practice after school, and some quit school to dedicate themselves to training. Kim Sung-eun stresses her role not only as a vocal trainer but also as a life mentor of the trainees: “[Vocal training] is not just about singing. You should keep an eye on how the trainees’ personalities and potentials are shaped as individuals, because you never know how this will lead to growth, just like Seokjin [BTS’s Jin]. I never knew Seokjin would listen to and study music to such a deep level.… If we build a good foundation for [the trainees], they’ll perceive themselves as singers and will study music by themselves. How meaningful and fun would that be?”¹⁸ Kim argues, “One’s retirement as an idol shouldn’t be the end of one’s singing career. Even after they retire as an idol, you should help them survive as a musician.”¹⁹

Trainees practice singing and dancing for several hours a day and take weekly and monthly exams that determine whether or not they will remain in the program. Among dozens of trainees, the company selects a group for the so-called debut team (debwi tim). Big companies like SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, and HYBE reveal their new idol candidates on television audition programs to promote them before the debut. In the meantime, the producers (in-house producers and some CEOs) decide the group’s “concept” (keonsep) and “worldview” (segyegwan), an alternate universe that undergirds the group’s concept. For example, EXO’s concept and worldview are “aliens with supernatural powers who came from the exoplanet.” BTS’s early concept was “hip hop-dol” (idols who perform hip hop), whose worldview was to “secure their music and values from social prejudice and suppression for those in their teens and twenties.”

Last, inseong and teamwork are important properties for an idol. Worker A explains that it is possible to check trainees’ sincere attitudes or inseong: “There are kids who are kicked out just because of their inseong. There are kids who drive a wedge between trainees and cause drama, or date other trainees and get caught after taking weird photos. There is a lot of drama happening here.”²⁰ When idols are suspected of school violence, drug use, prostitution, or other types of crimes, television and radio stations immediately cancel their appearance on shows to avoid complaints from the audience.

There are two types of contract: one for trainees and the other for idols. Trainee contracts may last for one to two years or may be connected to the idol contract and remain in effect for seven years. In this case, the trainee cannot move to another company but should wait until the current company schedules the debut. The trainee contract requires the company to pay for the trainee’s lessons, meals, and lodging, and the company has the right to end the contract if the trainee makes “trouble,” fails to improve their singing and dancing skills, or does not pass the monthly exam. “Trouble” may consist of conflicts with other people in the company, dating scandals, and/or crimes.

Once the trainees have been chosen to debut as an idol group, they sign a seven-year idol contract. The company first pays all expenses during the promotion period, such as hairstyling, makeup, and skincare treatment, in addition to lessons, meals, and lodging.²¹ However, the majority of small companies sign a contract that compels the idols to pay back the expenses for training, music production, and promotion. As a result, idols from these small companies earn no profits in the first three to four years of their careers, until they pay the “debt” (bit). Then they can receive their portion of the profits earned.²²

By 2015, the amount of investment for debuting an average idol group – of five members who underwent two years of traineeship – reached 940,000,000 KRW (approximately US$830,000). According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the average period of traineeship was 25.6 months. The expenses for a debuting idol group are shown in Table 7.1.²³

Although the K-pop training course is known for its rigor, it also becomes an important source of fans’ love for their idols, because they understand how demanding and difficult the training is. Presuming K-pop idols as puppets of their companies also neglects the latter phase of the idol career. As I will address later in this chapter, idols gain more voice and power in the production process as they develop their career and establish a larger fan base.

The South Korean Government’s Role in the K-Pop Business

In the early 2000s, the South Korean government and the entertainment industry began discussing the “slave contract” between entertainment companies and entertainers.²⁴ Three months after actress Jang Ja-yeon died by suicide (her company allegedly forced her into sexual service), the Korea Fair Trade Commission finalized the Standard Form of the Exclusive Contract (pyojunjeonsoggyeyakseo) for entertainers, based on the guidelines provided by the Korea Entertainment Producers’ Association in June 2009. The contract period for singers was limited to seven years, taking into consideration the long training period.²⁵

In March 2017, the Korea Fair Trade Commission released the Improvement of Unfair Trading Convention between Entertainment Companies and Affiliated Trainees after evaluating the trainee contracts of SM Entertainment, LOEN Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, FNC Entertainment, YG Entertainment, Cube Entertainment, Jellyfish Entertainment, and DSP Media. The commission amended six articles from the previous contracts, and all eight companies revised their trainee contracts to include the changes shown in Table 7.2.²⁶

Because most idols and idol trainees are minors, entertainment companies are bound by the “Protection of Children and Teenagers,” Article 18 of the Standard Form of the Exclusive Contract for Entertainers (Singers) in Popular Culture provided by the Korea Fair Trade Commission:

While some companies use a standard contract, an industry executive states, “Honestly, the standard form of the (exclusive) contract is disadvantageous for the companies, so what company would observe all [of the articles]? No one cares whether they observe it or not.”²⁸ Although the South Korean government continues to set and revise criteria for the rights of idols and idol trainees, the criteria remain on an advisory level.

Because of the performers’ young age and subordinate position in the industry, the company CEO and idols’ relationship is often described as paternalistic. John David Ebert, in his biography of Michael Jackson, states that Diana Ross and Berry Gordy were “displaced parental figures of Michael, and thus played roles in the very ancient myth of the birth of the hero, in which the hero’s original parents are swapped out for a new set who happened to stumble on the child in the wilderness, where he has been abandoned and then raised him.”²⁹ Typical K-pop stars, as seen in dozens of documentaries and interviews, tell a similar story: Idols are passionate youths who are so diligent and desperate that it would seem unfair if they were not to succeed. Yet they seem to be financially naïve, because they care only about becoming a singer. Then they find the “right” CEO, who can give them that opportunity. The CEO is not merely a business partner but also a father figure who cares about his idols’ welfare.

This paternalistic relationship can also be abusive. In October 2018, eighteen-year-old Lee Seok-cheol and sixteen-year-old Lee Seung-hyun, two members of East Light, revealed that they had been exposed to four years of assault, verbal abuse, and death threats from Moon Yeong-il, the in-house producer of Media Line Entertainment. Lee and Lee’s lawyer stated, “Until now, Media Line has controlled the members by making them surveil one another. Because all members were minors, they were worried that the executives of Media Line would find out if they discussed the abuse with their parents.”³⁰ The members were beaten with baseball bats and microphone stands, forced to smoke cigarettes, and choked with guitar strings. They stated that they had not reported the abuse because of their “dream and fear that [they] might not be able to continue performing music once [they] were kicked out of here.”³¹

Ideally, once the parents sign the contract and send their children to the company dorm, the company executives should take on the parenting role for teenage idols and trainees. BLACKPINK’s Rosé states that YG Entertainment’s in-house producer Teddy supports her group as an experienced friend and mentor.³² Girls’ Generation’s Tiffany also recalls, “I was fifteen, I didn’t have parents around me in Korea, I didn’t speak Korean fluently at the time, so I was scared … trying to blend in but still have my own opinions and be around K-pop parents [the company executives].… My bandmates were at the label starting at ten, so their lives are based around, like, going to practice and rehearse and then going to school and kind of maintaining it all at the same time as ten-year-olds. Yeah, you do need [company executives as] parents to manage that.”³³ JYP Entertainment, for instance, offers mental health and sex education for its trainees and terminates the contract when the trainees get failing grades for two semesters in a row.³⁴

Controlling Self-Expression, Human Relationships, and Affective Outcome

To be commercially successful, idols must tolerate several restrictions. As Rapper E, who gave rap lessons to idol trainees and wrote songs for idols at Company S, recalls,

When I asked what Idol B thinks about fan complaints against the punishingly hectic schedules managed by his company, he replied, “Some say the company is abusing us, but honestly, we are in the same boat, and the company is obviously trying to treat us well. After all, it’s fans who will leave us if we don’t appear often [on the media].”³⁶ It is common for companies to control the idols’ behavior, relationships, and online activities, especially in their early career before they have a fan base.

The company and fans take a special interest in an idol’s friendship with other members of the band, outdoor activities, and love life. Through analyses of idols’ interactions with each other on television shows, social media, real-time chats, and fan-filmed videos, fans constantly evaluate friendships among the idols. Almost all of the fans I interviewed told me stories about their idol’s best friend in the group. Based on the chemistry between two members, fans develop a “shipping” relationship that becomes a primary source of fan fiction (see Chapter 13 in this book). Then successful idols must be capable of controlling their relationships. Idols explain that they learn how to display their friendship in public in the most natural way. During my interview with Idol A, we watched a television interview of his group. Idol A observed that his group members were intentionally touching each other, although the touch seemed completely natural and habitual to me – it was a way of displaying a shared homoerotic or homosocial connection with each other before their fans.³⁷

It is difficult to maintain a solid fan base when idols are caught dating, drinking, smoking, or doing any other type of “misdemeanor” outside the dorm. Fans do allow their idols to go outside but urge them to take responsibility for what they do. Because fans are the ones who are paying the “debt” – by buying concert tickets and merchandise – idols must show gratitude and appreciation by “working hard,” not by dating in public or going out to bars and clubs. For our interview, Idol B met me at 2 o’clock in the morning, to avoid both his fans and his managers, who wouldn’t let him go out. His manager eventually called him around 4:30 a.m. To avoid giving the wrong impression to any fan who might be watching, we kept a distance of ten to twenty feet from each other.

A company will ask its idols to be kept informed of their romances, in case of dating scandals and rumors. Super Junior member Heechul states that his company, SM Entertainment, encourages its idols to date each other, because it is more convenient to handle dating scandals within the company.³⁸ Meanwhile, small companies try to prevent idols from dating by confiscating their cell phones, although the idols will eventually contact others via social media.³⁹

Idols’ Roles and Agency in the Production

In the early stage of their career, idols’ musical tastes and opinions are rarely taken into consideration. A company will recruit the broadest pool of idol trainees, choose a concept, and select the trainees who best fit that concept. Those who fail to join the debut team may wait for another chance or leave the company. Due to the lack of debut opportunities, trainees often make their debut with a concept or worldview that does not reflect their musical taste and artistic preference. Idol C, who left his group after a seven-year contract, states, “My company wanted to make an idol version of a hip hop crew. I like hip hop, so the plan sounded nice to me, but the company really worked with no plan. After all, the production had changed after the company collected random tracks via acquaintances. Because [the company people] recklessly received songs from their friends or famous people, our group’s music eventually became more similar to Japanese rock sound than to hip hop.”⁴⁰

As they develop their careers and establish a fan base, idols engage in making music, selecting themes, and expressing their individuality in music production. Girls’ Generation’s Tiffany states, “Because there are so many things to juggle, I’ve got to be really hands-on in terms of the creative direction, like, what kind of music and what kind of fashion and videos.… I’m just very passionate and expressive, and they were just like, ‘No one loves this more than you, no one loves us more than you, we trust you!’ and it led to me taking control and also being able to create a subunit out of it.”⁴¹ Albums by a solo artist or a subunit group (a smaller group within the group) can give idols a great opportunity to showcase their musical virtuosity, artistic sensibility, and thoughts. Idol D explains, “For a group album, I make music based on our concept and stories that need to be added to the album. There’s a certain theme set up [for the group], so sometimes we cover something trendy. When I make music alone, I don’t think about my group. I just find a subject that pops up in my head … because that’s most genuine, as if your unconscious mind is reflected in your dream. I try to make my music only when I have such intuitive moments.”⁴²

As multimedia entertainers, idols also develop their talents in art and fashion. SHINee’s Key, for example, helped design the stage costumes for the group’s single, “View” (2015). K-pop male idols used to customarily wear tailor-made suits on stage. However, Key pointed out that suits do not match the sounds of deep house and suggested that his members wear off-the-rack clothes – this style later became a new norm in K-pop.⁴³ Key also prepared a thirty-five-page PowerPoint presentation to explain his ideas on stage costumes to the company and coordinated the costumes for SHINee’s 2015 and 2016 concert tours.

Fan Management

As much as idols are subject to meet the demands of their fans, fans are also expected to follow the rules set up by their idols and entertainment companies. During the era of the first-generation idols (between the late 1990s and early 2000s), fan clubs were run by fan club executives who volunteered. They were the liaison between the company and fans, managing food and transportation and delivering gifts from fans to the company. In return, the fan club executives stayed in touch with idol managers, acquired advance information about the idols’ schedules, and met idols when they made their deliveries to the company. Only those who were well known in the fandom through active, long-term participation in offline events could be elected to fan club executive positions.⁴⁴

With the debuts of the second-generation idols (between the mid-2000s and early 2010s), entertainment companies started creating in-house fan club management divisions. As soon as a company debuts a new idol group, it recruits members for its fan club. To join, fans pay annual membership fees and will receive a gift box that contains a photo book with messages from the idols; access to the idols’ exclusive messages, photos, and videos; and priority when purchasing concert tickets. Meanwhile, idols’ schedules are announced to the public on the official website.

In-house fan management brought several changes to the idol-fan relationship. Removing the hierarchy between the fan club executives and nonexecutive fans standardized the proximity to idols across the fandom. Fans are now able to communicate with idols directly through social media under the company’s fan management. Maintaining fair access to idols has become one of the most important values in the K-pop business. For this reason, neither idols nor fans consider sasaeng (people who hack idols’ cell phones, follow their private schedules, or trespass on their property) “fans,” because respecting idols’ privacy is one way of maintaining a healthy and respectful idol-fan relationship.

Conclusion

In an active participatory culture, such as K-pop fandom, celebrities assume several roles: Their mediated images circulate as textual commodities; they please their fans through “fan service” performances as affective laborers; and their publicity and music productions transform into cultural influence that allows them to accumulate more cultural and economic capital. While K-pop idols have many obligations and restrictions, music offers them a space of empowerment through which to express their thoughts and build a reputation, wealth, and relationships. Fans are also active consumers and promoters of K-pop productions. Through active interactions with idols and other fans, K-pop fans learn how to maintain a healthy idol-fan relationship. “True” fans respect idols’ privacy, maintain ideal idol-fan relationships, and sustain the K-pop economy; those who do not will be expelled from fandom and lose company fan club membership.

When BTS’s J-Hope was asked, “How do you measure success?” he answered, “When I see people around me smile in any situation.”⁴⁵ The K-pop industry is easily labeled as a machine, but despite its fast-paced, profit-oriented nature, there is endless effort, caring, and support by people who value each other’s hard work, personal growth, and labor rights. If there is a “dark side” in K-pop, there should be a “bright side” as well, because all industries are intertwined in the complex affective flows and multidirectional cultural dynamics.

Seven girls elegantly walk toward a large, magnificent door. Light pours onto their anticipating faces as the door opens to reveal a small box. A girl opens the small box and beholds a shiny, silver medallion in her bejeweled hands. Engraved in a futuristic font with the letter Z, this round object is revealed as the source of emanating light. Beats and colors roll in to the dynamic tempo of Z-Girls’ debut song, “What You Waiting For”; the camera cuts to juxtaposition between two sequences – close-ups of each girl holding fresh flowers up to her face in bright light, and the girls dancing in a synchronized formation to sleek backdrops of an indoor set. They are the Z-Girls: Bell, Queen, Vanya, Priyanka, Carlyn, Mahiro, and Joanne, who won the first season of Z-POP Dream, a 2018 pan-Asian audition competition televised and held across seven countries from which each member respectively hails: Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan. Under the combined name “Z-Stars,” the seven Z-Girls and seven Z-Boys – their equally transnational male counterparts – made their official South Korea debut in February 2019 with a sizable concert at Seoul’s Jamsil Arena, featuring as guests the prominent K-pop stars A.Pink, Monsta X, Rain, and Chungha. While the South Korean media primarily took note of the Z-stars as curiosity K-pop acts “with no Korean members,” more welcome awaited the groups in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines in March 2019 showcases; Vietnam’s POPS Worldwide even awarded them the “Best Idol Debut Award” for the year. Later that year, Zenith Media Contents (ZMC), their former management agency,¹ held the second season of Z-POP Dream auditions in Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India.

The Z-Girls released their music video of “What You Waiting For” on February 21, 2019; it had garnered 8.1 million views on YouTube by March 2021, making it the most popular song by Z-stars.² The stylish up-tempo number is also a transnational endeavor, written by Japanese songwriter Kanata Okajima, English songwriter Abi F Jones, and Swedish producer Dejo. Its music video features the visual and auditory formula familiar to a trained K-pop audience – catchy riffs and hooks, organized choreography, sartorial style, elaborate camera work, and computer-generated graphics – with one major difference: the girls sing entirely in English. At a press show in Seoul’s Gangnam district in August 2019, Jun Kang, the founder and executive producer of ZMC, revealed that the issue of language was indeed a major hurdle for Z-Girls and Z-Boys in trying to break into the K-pop industry. In an interview with Korea JoongAng Daily, Kang said that K-pop music shows refused to feature Z-Girls and Z-Boys on their programs: “I’ve been working in the industry for 30 years and have many connections, but music shows tell us that they want K-pop and Korean songs and that our groups don’t fit in.”³ When asked about his vision for the two groups, Kang replied: “to create a K-pop project based on cultural exchanges with many countries.”⁴

The 2010s saw K-pop’s rapid globalization in the US-dominant international pop music industry; the World Economic Forum noted that K-pop’s global revenue in 2016 reached $4.7 billion,⁵ while the New York Post reported that BTS alone brought $3.6 billion a year to South Korea.⁶ If the nascent era of Hallyu (“Korean Wave”) of the early 2000s beckoned scholars and the general public alike to ask the ontological question, “What is K-pop?” by 2020, K-pop’s transnational impact and niche within the global pop music industry had shifted the question to “What counts as K-pop?” or “Who gets to do K-pop?” An early controversial public debate on these questions came from the 2014 debut of EXP Edition, a “K-pop boy group” composed of four American men, three of them white-passing.⁷ A most vehement criticism against EXP Edition came from American K-pop fans from the point of view of US racial politics, disappointed to witness “white men” take over yet another nonwhite, “niche” popular culture. And in April 2020, the first London-based K-pop girl group, KAACHI, debuted as an international, multiethnic group of four, managed by FrontRow Records, of the United Kingdom – generating perplexed reactions and debates about cultural appropriation from online K-pop fans on yet another K-pop act from the so-called First World. Such debate on “who gets to do K-pop,” then, is more relevant now than ever. Alecsandra Tubiera of the South China Morning Post asks whether it is fair for anyone to determine the legitimacy of certain K-pop artists on the basis of their nationality.⁸ I argue that the deeper issue underlying this debate has to do with complex tensions concerning inter-Asia politics, the rhetoric of technology (which is part and parcel of K-pop as a “Korean” cultural export), and the perceptions of a hierarchically racialized world ordered by the logic of global capitalism. This is evident in the anonymized comment section of Jun Kang’s interview featured on the popular English-language K-pop blogs Allkpop and Kpopmap, where users questioned the fairness of how K-pop music shows seemed to allow only certain artists to be on K-pop music stages.

“Chuck_T” on Allkpop pointed out how famous non-Korean-speaking Euro-American pop stars were invited to perform on numerous shows that rejected Z-Stars. Beyond the obvious fact that American media imperialism has considerable effect on the regional music markets in Asia, this comment allows us to rethink the exclusion of Z-Girls and Z-Boys from the shows as less about their foreignness per se than about their “minor” presence as South and Southeast Asians in the global hierarchy of racial capitalism, in which the export-oriented K-pop industry is imbricated. In other words, are Z-stars too “third world” for Korean television? “Yehn” on Kpopmap calls out the “ethnocentrism” of “Knetz,” accusing domestic K-pop fans (rather than the industry personnel) for being proud of the “global” popularity of K-pop yet having a closed mindset in maintaining a purist definition of who counts as a K-pop artist in terms of race and ethnicity.

To be clear, the partial nature of anonymous online comment threads cautions us against assuming that such opinions are a majority voice of international K-pop fans; nor is there any substantial evidence that proves Korean internet users to be more “ethnocentric” than non-Korean ones. That said, these comments demonstrate that the K-pop industry’s reluctance to accept Z-pop into its arena is an urgent yet underexplored subject, especially given that the K-pop industry famously touts globalization and transnationalism as signature qualities as it expands into the South and Southeast Asian markets. This strategy resonates with how Ingyu Oh redefines “glocalization” – from its original use as dochakuka (global localization), a buzzword in the 1980s Japanese business sector – as “high quality localization that is meant to be re-exported to other countries due to a small domestic market.”¹⁰ Lee Soo-man, the founding chair of one of K-pop’s big companies, SM Entertainment, actively uses glocalization to make K-pop an international enterprise. SM Entertainment has been branding their K-pop enterprise as a system of cultural technology that combines recruiting idols across Asia and “re-localizing” them to the preferences of local consumers. This rhetoric of K-pop as technology has become their signature strategy to produce apparently multiethnic, multinational K-pop groups for markets in and beyond South Korea.

The prevalence of such glocalization, however, should not be mistakenly translated into a celebration of diversity. The K-pop music scene is a cutthroat neoliberal market, with far too many performers with far too short careers. Even those who become successful, Suk-Young Kim notes, have an “an extremely short life span, usually five years or so,” due to the “high pressure of the industry that cultivates the insatiable appetite for newer and younger idols.”¹¹ This, coupled with years of training and financial investment put into the idols-in-making, compels the industry to run on tested formulas of success in producing new idols. In other words, that an idol group has never been entirely non-Korean and primarily English-speaking and produced by a non-Korean management company is anomalous enough to make Z-stars instantly dubious as potential K-pop idols.

Z-pop fans’ calling out what they perceive as the K-pop industry’s hypocrisy, then, becomes a critical point of interrogation into where K-pop as well as K-pop studies stand in 2020, nearly a decade since PSY’s “Gangnam Style” became a worldwide YouTube sensation in 2012. Globalization positions its subjects in a system of hierarchies, whose logic “materializes in a worldwide grid of strategic places” to form what Saskia Sassen called a new geography of centrality and marginality.¹² This geography certainly informs K-pop’s relationship to American pop and U.S. media imperialism, as K-pop scholars have analyzed in the past decade, from PSY to BTS – most recently in the nuanced interrogations of K-pop’s fraught relationship with Black American culture.¹³ But it also informs K-pop’s – and by proxy, South Korea’s – status as a neo-imperial cultural hegemon in relation to the regional markets across Asia, often overlooked as “peripheral” to the “metropoles” in the globalization grid. Zooming in on the significance of South and Southeast Asian performers in K-pop thus aligns with François Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s argument¹⁴ for the need to see beyond the homogenizing logic of globalization by focusing on “minor transnational” actors, who complicate these processes in the interstitial spaces of cultural clashes and transactions.

Using Z-pop as a case study, this chapter reconsiders the complex relationship among technology, globalization, and K-pop in inter-Asia contexts. First, I trace how the discourse of techno-nationalism undergirded South Korea’s economic development and accelerated the globalization of the K-pop cultural industry. Next, I explore the significance of Z-pop’s tapping into the South and Southeast Asian consumer base – specifically, how the management company (Divtone) and fans (GalaxZ) use the idealized rhetoric of a transnational “One Asia.” Interpreting the GalaxZ’s adoption of English as lingua franca and the Z-stars’ resistance to what I call “K-pop visuality,” I extend the question of “Who gets to do K-pop?” to the K-pop producers and consumers alike. In my discussion of Z-pop, I join Soo Ryon Yoon’s call to rethink how we see and interpret the directions of cultural circulation in Asia to avoid situating the West as “the final destination of K-pop’s ultimate arrival.”¹⁵ So doing also takes up Kuan-Hsing Chen’s framework of “Asia as method,”¹⁶ a self-reflexive intellectual movement that interrogates how we study Asia by addressing globalization with the aim of de-imperialization. As Koichi Iwabuchi noted, inter-Asia referencing as a process of de-Westernizing the interpretation of media cultures in Asia can make possible “hitherto under-explored intra-regional or inter-Asian” comparisons based on “shared experiences of ‘forced’ modernization and less hierarchical relationships than a prevailing West-Asia comparison that is based on assumed temporal distance between them.”¹⁷ Embracing such theorizations, I align with the vibrant research community that Chua Beng Huat calls transnational East Asia pop culture studies.¹⁸

Culture, Techno-Nationalism, and K-Pop

The Z-POP Dream project specifies its primary audience as Asia’s Generation Z, the demographic cohort born into the most widespread use of digital technology in history. Born between roughly the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, these digital natives tend to spend “six hours or more a day on their phones,” and “more time on social media than does any other age cohort in Asia.”¹⁹ Fittingly, the project has maintained an active web and social media presence through the formative three years since its launch in 2018 – so much so that it even had a now-defunct “start-up pitch” site for tech-industry collaborators and financial sponsors. This website included a freely downloadable twenty-seven-page white paper delineating the Z-pop project as a brand new model of technology venture and “the first global entertainment ecosystem” comprising three parts: audition competition show, idol training system, and fan-based digital community platform through a smartphone mobile app. This ecosystem, it stated, would employ Ethereum-based blockchain technology to let fans purchase “Z-pop coins” to vote for the idol trainee of their choice; blockchain ledgers were to create tamper-proof election returns integral to building a trustworthy digital community critical to its transnational business.²⁰ When the newly minted and Singapore-based Divtone Entertainment took over the Z-POP Dream project from ZMC in 2020, the company also wasted no time emphasizing the technological innovations it would bring; its fluorescent-colored website introduces itself as “the world’s first Entertainment Technology (‘Enter-Tech’) enterprise, harnessing the latest technology to deliver electrifying, interactive experiences that transport fans into a breathtaking virtual world.”²¹ This rhetoric of a technology-driven futurism is what undergirds the Z-POP Dream project as a business venture akin to K-pop.

Significantly, the discourse of technology is what launched the globalization of K-pop. In the wake of the 1997 crisis, the Kim Dae-jung administration invested in information technology to resuscitate the nation through neoliberal economic reforms. Noting how the financial crisis thus led to a government-sponsored promotion of broadband and the birth of PC bangs (internet cafés) as “test beds for the high-speed Internet” around this time, Inkyu Kang argues that “it was the symbolic value [of new technologies] rather than the practical one that motivated young Koreans to learn to use them.”²² Engaging with digital technology soon became a cultural, if not neoliberal ethos, reinforced by “positive associations” of progress, innovation, ability to use English, savviness, youth, and upward mobility. Not coincidentally, “culture” itself – or more specifically, the culture industry – was also inducted into the realm of technology in 1994 by Kwangyun Wohn of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), who used the term munhwa gisul (culture technology) to refer to the content-based, multimodal set of technologies involved in the industrial production of film, drama, animations, characters, music, performing arts, games, and theme parks. With the establishment of the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) within the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in 2001, munhwa keontencheu gisul (cultural content technology) became one of six official government-promoted technology initiatives alongside biotechnology, energy/environmental technology, information technology, nanotechnology, and space technology. Taking the 1997 financial crisis as a turning point, then, South Korea refashioned itself into a veritable technocultural superpower at the turn of the millennium.

In the world of K-pop, it was also around 1997 that SM Entertainment’s Lee Soo-man trademarked the corporation’s in-house idol-training system as Culture Technology™ to refer to the fourfold process of recruiting, training, producing, and marketing K-pop idols worldwide. In 2016, in a hologram-incorporated presentation, Lee performed his first large-scale “product launch” of what he called New Culture Technology, introducing the latest platforms, content, and eponymous idol group (NCT) developed by SM Entertainment. It was there that he introduced the plan to “glocalize” the K-pop industry by building a system to locally source (recruit) idol trainees from across the globe²³ and manufacture (train) them into K-pop idols, thus rhizomatically expanding the K-pop industry. Rendering K-pop as a technology thus redefines its idols as transnational biocapital embodying the formula of their own creation. Also apparent in this system is the symbiosis of the technocentric state and the culture industry embedded in the globalization of K-pop.

Lessening the gap between culture and technology also denotes a desire to bridge the core values that entail each notion – such as creativity and innovation – within the neoliberal nexus of individualism and nationalism: to quote Suk-Young Kim, “Creativity and innovation were now heralded simultaneously as both individual achievements and national virtues – the two pillars that sustain South Korea’s brand of neoliberalism.”²⁴ In other words, K-pop’s success resonates from within and beyond the affective register of technonationalist, or the mechanism by which the developmental narrative of nation building, government sponsorship of technology, and nationalist pride amalgamate into a cultural ethos. Tae-Ho Kim points out that such nationalist rhetoric is “so subtle and abstract that it can be compared to the transparent and multi-colored cloak”²⁵ that the K-pop industry dexterously mobilizes to promote the excellence of idols in the global music market. This is closely related to what Doobo Shim observed: “Koreans heartily welcome the fruits of the Korean Wave in the midst of recovery from the 1997 economic crisis, and the subsequent International Monetary Fund (IMF)-directed economic restructuring, which they often refer to as ‘national humiliation.’”²⁶ In other words, the Hallyu globalization echoes the affective cadence of a technonationalist victory embedded in South Korea’s crisis management through a neoliberal turn.

The victory of technonationalism, then, celebrates not only the artistry of the idols’ individual performances – perfectly symmetric choreography, flawless vocals, and an overall visual excellence – but also the artisanry that exemplifies the innovative technology behind their making. The idols are larger-than-life products and proud “faces” of South Korea’s national exports – from soju, electronics, beauty products, and cars to the Korean Tourism Bureau and, by proxy, South Korea itself. As such, they renegotiate the relationship not only between the corporation and the state but also between culture and technology.

The Möbius strip of K-pop and technonationalism also informs how the Euro-American media often treat K-pop as a genre of music with Korea as the single site of origin. In August 2019, for instance, the MTV Video Music Awards gave BTS the first win in the Best K-Pop Group category, excluding them from the marquee awards like Video of the Year or Artist of the Year. Putting K-pop into its own basket – one that Variety’s Jae-Ha Kim quipped is an “exile” into a “nationality-based category”²⁷ – well illuminates what the American media sees as a threat to its long-standing global media empire. The threat is rapidly expanding, as the K-pop-contingent industries of K-dramas, K-beauty, K-food, and other cultural exports synergistically continue to amplify the total revenue generated by Culture Technology. In short, K-pop is very much a national venture that goes far beyond the category of music; it is a revenue-generating mode of “soft power” that the MTV VMAs decided to keep in check – perhaps reminiscent of how the Trump administration banned Huawei products and raised tariffs on imported washing machines in 2019.

If K-pop’s technonationalist expansion poses a threat to the American media empire, it poses a different, perhaps more imminent threat in South and Southeast Asia, where South Korea has become a veritable cultural hegemon. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Hallyu first gained traction in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Philippines through the cultural products of Korean dramas and films. Chung-Sok Suh et al. trace this process through the analytical framework of “cultural proximity” – not only a measure of cultural similarities and differences in societal values, languages, and living standards but also a rubric for a more dynamic mapping of historical, political, economic, and sociocultural interactions between South Korea and the aforementioned regions.²⁸

On using this explanation to draw out a broader “inter-Asia cultural affinity” across the region, however, Mary J. Ainslie astutely warns against reductively homogenizing Southeast Asia “in a similar way to that of the older European colonialist project,” flattening the complexities of how each nation interacts with Hallyu in different ways.²⁹ She delineates how the relatively less developed ASEAN nations referred to as CLMV countries (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam) experienced a concentrated South Korean investment, with Laos as a case study, where Hallyu as a project of “pan-Asian urban modernity” is frequently accompanied by exploitative representational rhetoric portraying the underdeveloped nation to Korean audiences as “uncivilized.”³⁰

While acknowledging such discourses of power carried out through South Korea’s national branding and cultural diplomacy, Peichi Chung also reminds us to see the spread of Hallyu in Southeast Asia as a “regional cultural phenomenon that has a bottom-up, audience-centered approach connecting to pan-Asian consumerism and fan-based communities.”³¹ This, Chung notes, is keenly tied to the rapid digitalization of the region, resulting in skyrocketing consumption of global social media services like Facebook and Twitter having a direct impact on the region’s market power for Hallyu producers by the early 2010s.

One instance of digitalization includes the widespread practice of “fan-subbing” (online fan subtitling) Korean content into multiple languages, leading to the increased visibility of Hallyu content such as the South Korean variety television show Running Man (2010 to present).³² Initially gaining a huge cult following in the Southeast Asian region through fansubs, Running Man began airing on local television networks in Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Often dubbed the most successful Hallyu television show in Southeast Asia, it has spawned a franchise industry with coproduced spin-offs with local television producers in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Such online and on-air proliferation of Hallyu content, in turn, generated a steady increase in the consumption of “made in Korea” lifestyle products in urban city centers across the ASEAN nations. Lotte Shopping has been expanding the number of department stores and supermarkets in Hanoi and Jakarta since 2008, and in 2019, the BT21 Store – a global franchise from Line Friends selling lifestyle goods designed by the members of the K-pop group BTS – opened two offline locations in Manila.

Unsurprisingly, the ubiquitous presence of Hallyu soon generated antipathy toward it. Analyzing the emerging discourse of the Hallyu backlash from interviews with eighty consumers in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, Ainslie et al. offer a nuanced analysis of varied reasons. A significant chunk of Hallyu criticism came from the explicit rhetoric of Korean technonationalism perceived to put on a “very naked show” of Korean superiority through echoes of cultural imperialism not lost on the consumers of the region so fraught with histories of colonialism:

Ainslie et al. carefully delineate how the rhetoric of technonationalism embedded in the export industry of Hallyu/K-pop insinuates a colonial mentality, a term that social psychologists E. J. R. David and Sumie Okazaki apply to characterize how Filipino Americans internalized “a perception of ethnic or cultural inferiority that is … a specific consequence of centuries of colonization under Spain and the U.S.”³⁴ This does applies not only to the obsolete West versus non-West binary; Kuan-Hsing Chen reminds us of the urgency of deimperialization amid inter-Asia imperial structures. Chen particularly illuminates the thin valence between globalization and neocolonial imperialism, “a form of structural domination in which a country with more global power uses political and economic interventions in other countries to influence policy and exercise control over markets.”³⁵ South Korea, an ex-colony and “Tiger economy,” has become a veritable subempire simultaneously dependent on the United States, while politically, economically, and culturally dominating the “third world” countries of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) (currently, ten member states: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam). Reports continually surface of the multinational South Korean conglomerate Samsung’s violation of “minimum wage and probationary worker laws, forced labor, unfair termination, and verbal abuse” in its electronics factories in India, Vietnam, and Indonesia.³⁶ And in South Korea proper, ample documentation attests to how migrant workers (the majority from China, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, Nepal, and the Philippines) and foreign brides (the majority from Vietnam, China, Thailand, and the Philippines) face rampant racism and xenophobia on the basis of their economic status and darker skin.³⁷ Considering that the ASEAN region is K-pop’s critical consumer base responsible for the highest number of K-pop streams on YouTube from 2018 to 2019,³⁸ the unidirectional flow of Hallyu products – which Ainslie et al. called “modern day mercantilism” – reinforces the hierarchical logic of capitalism.

How, then, can we interpret Z-pop’s piggybacking on the K-pop industry’s globalization model – especially when Divtone Entertainment, a non-Korean newcomer to the K-pop industry, fully takes up the fraught discourse of cultural technology used in K-pop’s expansion into South and Southeast Asia? As I discuss in the next section, Divtone differentiates Z-pop from K-pop through a rhetoric of transnational community building across Asia. Yet the compound relationship among technology, technonationalism, and the inter-Asia dynamic complicate Divtone’s motives as but another neo-imperialist enterprise tapping into the “underexplored” ASEAN region. This is even further complicated by Divtone’s own corporate structure composed of transnational capitalists. CEO Norimitsu Kameshima is a Japanese entrepreneur based in Singapore; his team includes Euro-American private equity investors and Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs; and the company’s parent corporation (“holding company”), Divtone Group, is located in Luxembourg. Our earlier question, “Who gets to do K-pop?,” then, should be not solely about non-Korean individual performers but extended to the industry bigwigs with the financial stakes.

To be clear, the K-pop industry is always already situated in a curiously ambivalent space; on the one hand, it is a globalizing enterprise run by the logic of global capitalism; yet on the other hand, these globalizing processes of K-pop enable transnational interactions and hybrid popular cultures generated on the local and individual levels of interactions and frictions. How can we navigate the slippery and ill-defined labels of K-pop and Z-pop, not from the top-down perspective but from that of the fans?

“Welcome to Our GalaxZ”

Fans of Z-stars call themselves “GalaxZ,” based on an apt visual metaphor of the world reimagined as a galaxy of Z-pop; this interstellar community consists of present and future Z-stars as well as constellations of fans strewn across the globe. Digital and social media are the gravitational attraction that holds this galaxy together – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Line, WhatsApp, and Glitsy. As of August 2020, the GalaxZ remained an unofficial group rather than a coherently mobilized club with membership dues and benefits, their size and demographic hence largely unknown. Like most social media–based K-pop fandom, the members of GalaxZ organically coalesce on the platforms to share their love for the Z-stars; unlike most K-pop fandom, however, the GalaxZ is more than a community “stanning” their idols; it also empowers members to join the idols by becoming the next Z-star. In the world of Z-pop, fans aspiring to do so are called Dreamers. On Glitsy, a smartphone app designed exclusively for the Z-POP Dream project, Dreamers are actively encouraged to upload thirty-second videos of themselves singing, dancing, or playing musical instruments to pre-audition for the next season of Z-POP Dream. The more “likes” they receive from other users on the app, the more experience points they receive, and high-ranking Dreamers have a better chance at being selected for auditions. They are also encouraged to collect points by streaming Z-stars’ reality TV features, past seasons of Z-pop auditions, and “how to” videos on K-pop dancing techniques taught by the Singaporean choreographer Alif Archo. Shortly after the launch of the Glitsy app in Apple Store and Google Play in June 2019, Z-POP Dream’s season 2 auditions took place; Dreamers pre-auditioned by uploading their thirty-second videos until July 15, and those selected were invited to in-person auditions held in Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India for the final round.

For the Dreamers, the Z-Girls and Z-Boys serve as role models who actively remind their fans that dreams of becoming a K-pop idol can come true; these stars share their daily adventures in Seoul through reality television shows that chronicle their K-pop training (“Z-Pop School A to Z”) and Korean culture education sessions (“Annyeong Korea”). As yet K-pop “underdogs,” the Z-stars also share videos of themselves cover dancing famous K-pop groups as well as “busking” – performing unannounced in Seoul’s various public spaces. Many of those who auditioned for Z-POP Dream in 2017 had been longtime K-pop fans dedicated to singing and cover dancing their favorite idols while active as pop starlets in the local music industries. For instance, Vanya, Carlyn, and Mahiro had debuted in girl groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan, respectively; Priyanka won the Excellent Vocals award by singing Park Bom’s song “You and I” at the 2016 K-Pop World Festival organized by South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2018, as soon as fourteen Z-Girls and Z-Boys were selected, the producers flew them to Seoul to begin training in the K-pop trade: singing, dancing, grooming, language learning (English, Korean), interacting with fans, and learning to embody a level of intercultural competence by cohabiting with one another. Going from performing their favorite idols’ repertoire to becoming a K-pop star, then, is the ultimate dream-come-true narrative at the heart of Z-POP Dream.

Hence, unlike in most K-pop fandoms, fans and idols alike are Dreamers who compose GalaxZ – a community that the idols simultaneously belong to and represent. In a memorable scene from a 2019 YouTube documentary on the Z-POP Dream project, Jun Kang of ZMC speaks heartily to the Z-stars ahead of their debut: “On the stage you will meet the best K-pop stars. When they’re looking at you guys, I don’t want them to look down [on you] like, ‘Oh, they just want to cover dance for me.’ No, you are our true artists.”³⁹ This remark encapsulates the underdog sensibility shared by the GalaxZ, while also foreshadowing the dismissal of Z-stars by the K-pop music shows. Perhaps most critically, “you are our true artists” encapsulates a sense of upward mobility critical to the Z-POP Dream project, the sense that Z-pop is about telling future idol hopefuls who have not been noticed by the conventional K-pop system, “You too can be one of us.”

To put things a little differently, the exclusion from the K-pop industry ironically informs Z-pop’s transnational aim of “One Asia.” Sid, an Indian member of the Z-Boys, told the Philippine Star during a 2019 Manila press conference: “We share a special bond with each other because we come from seven different countries. It’s really innovative, a new feel of how people of different cultures come together and present [music].”⁴⁰ Z-Girls’ Priyanka, who comes from Assam, India, told the Indo-Asian News Service in 2020: “Our goal is to unite Asia and be one Asia. We not only plan to sing in English but also in as many languages as possible. We can be the cultural bridge through music in the world.”⁴¹ Many of the Z-stars’ YouTube and Glitsy videos also demonstrate their emphasis on intercultural adventures; besides learning Korean culture together through their reality TV show, the Z-stars chronicled their travels to Vietnam, India, and the Philippines. For many, it was a brand-new experience; they learned Hindi slang and Bollywood songs from Priyanka and Sid and tried Filipino, Indonesian, and Vietnamese snacks introduced by respective local members. Many YouTube comment threads show the GalaxZ’s enthusiasm for representation, including a comment from “Sanchita Sahana” liked by 14,000 others: “Zstars teaches us ‘Unity in Diversity.’”⁴²

Critically, not only the Z-stars’ intercultural adventures but also the GalaxZ’s YouTube comments are exclusively in English. In fact, “GALAXZ,” an active Z-pop Facebook group with 4,900 members, restricts posts to English to facilitate open communication among fans logging in from all over the world. Robert Philipson famously criticized the globalization of English as lingua franca as a form of linguistic imperialism “asserted and maintained through the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages.”⁴³ This view was further complicated by the 2009 sanctioning of English as a common language by the ten ASEAN nations, with varying historical, postcolonial, politico-economic, and sociocultural contexts and relationships to multilingualism. Simply defining English as a form of linguistic hegemony does not adequately address its use as an intercultural method of communication among nonnative speakers coming from varying postcolonial contexts; nor does it address the diverse forms of English spoken by the Z-stars through their respective dialects and vocabularies – many come from countries with multiple languages that Andy Kirkpatrick calls “regional lingua franca” other than English.⁴⁴ Thus, if not using Korean was a major reason the Z-stars found themselves unwelcomed by South Korean music shows, and for their disrupting the K-pop industry in general, using English acknowledged their audience as less defined by nationalities and including any technology-savvy citizen from the digital “galaxy.” In other words, if English carried within it a symbolic value of progress and innovation pivotal to the development of technonationalism in South Korea, English used by GalaxZ is a nod to the digital technology that undergirds the formation of this imagined community.

What perhaps ultimately redefines the Z-POP Dream project’s identity from one of many “K-pop inspired” acts to “the first Z-pop” act is their unapologetic self-propulsion into the K-pop production as brown-skinned South and Southeast Asians from outside the industry. When asked about the negative comments she received online upon her debut in 2019, Priyanka answered, “There were a lot of people who said, ‘She doesn’t deserve to be an idol because she’s brown, she doesn’t look Korean.’”⁴⁵ The comment alludes to what Timothy Laurie described as the K-pop industry’s enforcing of “a subtle code of racial belonging that places uneven burdens on performers relative to their (perceived) skin tone.”⁴⁶ In other words, Priyanka’s exotic appearance – marked by deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and visibly darker complexion – accentuates the unspoken rule undergirding an imagined sense of physiognomic homogeneity of what I call “K-pop visuality.” Although many non-Korean idols hail from different national, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, they are recruited, trained, and groomed according to K-pop’s visual rubric to look and perform in a stylized way, “from vocalization to choreography, to even how to ‘manage your gaze’ when facing the cameras.”⁴⁷ Maaike Bleeker defines the term “visuality” as an intersubjective experience arising from the relationship between the seeing and the seen, constructed according to social, cultural, and historical conventions.⁴⁸ K-pop visuality, then, is a theatrical situation co-constructed by the K-pop idol’s performance rubric to be seen – attractive physical traits; makeup and sartorial choices; styles of gesture, air, and mien; charisma; and general likability characterized by a cadence of humility – and by the subjective identities and expectations of the fans who do the seeing.

Priyanka’s minoritized image simultaneously disrupts and accentuates the K-pop visuality built on the values of unity and synchronicity (see Figure 8.1). Her perceived brownness among the Z-Girls, while perhaps too easily singled out as “Other,” defiantly resists the symbolic value embedded into the K-pop idol’s body as idealized capital that is made, rather than born. If anything, the Z-stars fully acknowledge their nonconformity to the “industry standard” of idols’ physiognomies that John Seabrook of The New Yorker bitingly characterizes as “chiseled, sculpted, and tapering to a sharp point at the chin, Na’vi style,” produced out of the “S.M.-style factory system.”⁴⁹ When asked about the possibility of plastic surgery – yet another Hallyu-contingent industry in South Korea by way of state-sponsored medical tourism – Priyanka shook her head and stated in a reassured voice, “Grooming is also part of our training, and we are taught how to manage ourselves.”⁵⁰ Priyanka’s nonconventional presence, coupled with a quietly self-assured demeanor and skillful onstage performances, all pointedly renegotiate the norms of K-pop visuality. If anything, Priyanka’s perfectly synchronized dance performances blending into the unity of the whole demonstrate a dexterous reappropriation of the K-pop visuality – channeled into a visual discourse of “One Asia” – while each close-up resists homogeneity.

Figure 8.1 Priyanka’s visual performance diverges from the perceived Korean physiognomy.

Thus repurposing K-pop’s cultural technology as only they can, the Z-stars and GalaxZ have just begun calling for more representational diversity in K-pop.

Coda: Looking Ahead

The Z-POP Dream project takes up K-pop’s technonationalism and repurposes it to create a pan-Asian cultural community for a generation of digital nomads. Through their slogan “One Asia,” Divtone Entertainment claims that Z-pop brings innovation to the K-pop industry by using cutting-edge information technology for more ethnically and culturally diverse representation in K-pop. However, this technocentric rhetoric based on global capitalism is perhaps the very thing that undermines its premise of innovation; if applying technology to “source” and to “bringing” underrepresented nationalities and ethnicities into an established cultural industry sounds ominously familiar, it is because of the apparent power imbalance and imperialistic rhetoric that Ainslie et al. argue have generated a Hallyu backlash in Southeast Asia.

That said, the fans and supporters of the Z-stars were quick to call out the foibles of the Z-POP Dream project. Pointing out the irony of Divtone’s inclusion of but seven countries in “One Asia,” many members of the GalaxZ took to social media in 2020 to criticize the exclusionist pre-audition rubric that specified rigid criteria of age, gender, height, language ability, and nationality (fifteen to twenty-three years old, female or male, over 160 cm [5′3″] for females and 170 cm [5′7″] for males, native or fluent English speakers, and citizens of the seven designated countries). Using technology to claim agency and mobilize their nascent digital community, the GalaxZ reminds us that the outdated mode of unidirectional K-pop circulation no longer has relevance. This became most evident when an unprecedented global pandemic hit the world in 2020 and made digital technology the sole mode of sustaining the K-pop community. The GalaxZ have been virtually mobilizing a monthly “Z-Stars Mention Party” on Twitter in order to keep the Z-stars visible in the public media, in addition to “Mass DM [direct messaging] and Email Party” to demand that Divtone provide more updates on the performers’ suspended schedules.

But one year since the official debut of the first generation of Z-stars in 2019, the Z-POP Dream project as a whole leaves many questions for future research. What is at stake in the treatment of K-pop as a mode of technology that can be “applied” to non-Korean performers hailing from different cultures, ethnicities, and nations? How does the rhetoric of technology simultaneously legitimize and undermine the South Korean corporatized monopoly of K-pop? Last but not least, how can we expand upon the question of “Who gets to do K-pop” in the face of an industry rapidly being reshaped by an increasing number of non-Korean idols and corporate entities? The answers to these questions will contribute to further situating K-pop within a discourse of transnational pop culture studies interrogating the political economy of consumption, representation, and inclusion.