CKR Talk: Impasses and Openings in K-pop Idol Celebrities and Fandom

This talk takes a historical approach to the popular cultural sector as a public sphere, focusing on interactions between celebrities and audiences over time. In particular, it foregrounds new forms of popular cultural icons and publics emerging in the neoliberal digital age by examining the modes of existence of K-pop idol celebrities and the specific configuration of K-pop fandom produced under a highly distinctive industrial system. Despite their staggering global popularity and glamour, K-pop idol celebrities are positioned not simply as stars but as workers who mediate emotion and relationships through digital media technologies, including the platformization of fan communication—a condition that distinguishes them from both classical Hollywood celebrities and other popular music figures. At the same time, K-pop fandom emerges as a complex agent that operates simultaneously as a consumer and a participant in affective attachments with idols, a dynamic that can be read through the notion of the “intimate public.” By juxtaposing the structural impasses faced by idols and the porous boundaries of fandom with the possibilities opened up by the K-pop scene as a digital public sphere, this talk will highlight the contested intersection of intimacy, labor, and agency that structures contemporary popular culture.

Jiyoung Suh is a research professor at the Center for Hallyu Studies, Seoul National University Asia Center. She has published widely on issues of gender and modernity in colonial Korea, including “The Gaze on the Threshold: Korean Housemaids of Japanese Families in Colonial Korea,” positions: east asia cultures critique (2019). She is the author of the monograph Modern Girl in Colonial Seoul: Colonial Modernity Seen through the Prism of Consumption, Labor, and Gender (Yeoiyeon, 2013; Misuzu Shobo, 2016). Her Ph.D. dissertation (UBC, 2018) is on vernacular music and female musicians in Joseon Korea. The current research focuses on celebrity culture in both colonial and contemporary Korea, including the publications “Modern Media and the Formation of Gisaeng Celebrity: Public Intimacy in focus,” Women and History (2023), and “Apologizing K-pop Idols: The Crisis of Celebrity Brands in Cancel Culture” (book chapter, Palgrave, forthcoming). She is the co-translator of Kim Chang-nam’s The History of Korean Popular Culture (Brill, 2025).

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Host or Publisher UBC Centre for Korean Research