The offices of biotech company Lumon are empty. Hallways and rooms are bare, though not totally insipid. Once exiting the corridors, workers’ units bear a splash of colour — green…
Contemporaries Essays
An Introduction to “Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics”
Are we all minimalist now? In early 2019, U.S. news organizations reported a surge of clothing and other donations to charity shops, a surge they called the Marie Kondo effect.1…
Embodying K-Pop in Public: The (Inter-)Subjective Kinesthesia in K-Pop Random Play Dance
The Popularization of K-pop Random Play Dance From the streets along Hongdae to shopping malls in China, from New York Times Square to Chicago’s Chinatown, K-pop dances are more frequently…
Bots and Binaries: On the Failure of Human Verification
In online tests of human verification, K-pop fans will often fail. A song looped on Spotify too many times, a track purchased and then re-purchased on the same music site,…
“Don’t Let Me Fly”: on Intimacy and Fame in BTS’s Map of the Soul: 7
When it comes to the worldwide significance of Korean popular culture right now, the seven-member group BTS (or, 방탄소년단) naturally comes to mind — they are, by almost every measure,…
When Korean Wave Flows Back: The Ethnic Face of Hallyu in Korean Television Audition Programs
On April 6, 2018, WJSN, a Korean girl group, performed a traditional Indian dance with fake mustaches on an episode of TvN’s Super TV. The members attempted to make a…
Woo Young-Woo’s Whale: A Response to K-streams
Indeed, why K-drama, and why now? Here’s another stab at the billion won question that begins with a parenthetical moment in Eunjin Choi and Rita Raley’s essay, where the authors…
K-streams: Global Korea and the OTT Era
“What’s good Korea” — BTS, “Idol” (ft. Nicki Minaj) Midway through the k-zombie drama, All Of Us Are Dead, the high school students seeking refuge from their infected peers on…
Hallyu and Crisis
In episode five (“A Fair World”) of Netflix Korea’s international hit series, Squid Game (Ojingŏ Keim, 2021 – ), we learn the origin of Gi-hun’s (Lee Jung-jae) misery. Keeping night…