Water Byongsok Chon, assistant professor of dramaturgy and theatre studies in the Theatre Arts Department, publishes his book review of Suk-Young Kim’s K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance in the fall 2021 issue of the journal Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context (Yonsei University).
The book makes a significant contribution to K-Pop and popular music studies, performance studies, and multimedia studies, among others.
Excerpt:
“As K-pop fans celebrate this [Korean] “wave,” anticipating how much further and higher it can reach, Suk-Young Kim’s K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance offers an accessible, in-depth perspective on K-pop. Using empirical case studies, this book illustrates how K-pop formed its own version of ‘liveness’ that generates heung—a uniquely Korean emotional state, which Kim translates as ‘spontaneous energy stemming from excitation, inspiration, play, and frolicking’—and thus transcended cultural, medial, and national borders in its appeal to fans.”