Book Reviews 793

Suk-Young Kim, K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance. Stanford University Press:
Stanford, CA, 2018; ix + 275 pp.; ISBN 9781503605992, $29.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Jing Xian Yang, University of Southern California, USA

In K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance, Suk-Young Kim, professor of
Critical Studies and Director of the Center for Performance Studies at the University of
California Los Angeles, complicates definitions of K-pop as being purely a music genre
to illustrate how the label of “multimedia performance” more aptly describes K-pop and
its position in contemporary entertainment, focusing specifically on the roles that live-
ness and digital mediation play on the industry (p. 5). At first glance, the connotations of
liveness and multimedia seem to set them apart, with liveness evoking copresence and
mediation evoking distance. Kim, however, defines liveness not as actual bodily copres-
ence but as the perception of social interaction and emotional intimacy. Kim argues that
K-pop, an industry obsessed with immediacy and intimacy, capitalizes on the affective
and sensory effects of digital media to bring idols (the stars) and fans (the audience)
closer together.
To support this thesis, Kim adopts a multidisciplinary framework, drawing on a vari-
ety of different frameworks that reflect the multifaceted nature of the K-pop industry.
The ethnographic approach, in which Kim is a participant observer providing anecdotal
evidence (photos, interviews, tales of personal experience) from time spent within K-pop
fandom culture (conventions, concerts, exhibitions), provides a qualitative perspective
on audience experiences. The historical analysis, centered around statistics and descrip-
tions of key South Korean and international events, provides the sociopolitical and tech-
nological contexts under which K-pop operates. The cultural analysis recognizes that
K-pop is built on both the specificities of Korean culture and its negotiations with glo-
balization. With the exception of Chapter 1, which establishes a historical background to
K-pop, each subsequent chapter utilizes a combination of methodologies, establishing a
description of media practices using historical research and ethnographic evidence
before diving into the theoretical implications of such practices.
As previously mentioned, chapter 1, called “Historicizing K-pop,” provides an over-
view of the cultural, social, and technological context of early K-pop. The chapter
describes the initial stages of hallyu (the Korean cultural wave of the late 1990s that
included K-pop), the viewing practices of K-pop fans (what Kim coins the Teletubbies
Generation, born and raised in the mid–1990s), and the climate of digital music that
welcomed the rise of K-pop in the early 2000s. Chapter 2, “K-pop from Live Television
to Social Media,” begins the analysis of media practices by contemplating how exactly
K-pop television programs can be considered live, considering their mix of pre-recorded
and live studio performances, of pre-registered and live voting, and of home and studio
audiences. Kim emphasizes the media tribalism among fans who participate in such pro-
grams and argues that the perceived temporal simultaneity of this participation is what
ultimately establishes liveness in this context. Chapter 3, “Simulating Liveness in K-pop
Music Videos,” discusses music videos’ rise in cable television, synesthetic esthetics,
and remediation of live performance. The chapter features two case studies, TaeTiSeo’s
“Twinkle” and G-Dragon’s “Who You?,” which incorporate Broadway and performance
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art styles respectively in order to simulate liveness within the style and production of the
video itself. Chapter 4, “Hologram Stars Greet Live Audiences,” explains the govern-
ment involvement that kickstarted K-pop hologram exhibitions, which create a virtual
copresence and a commodified aura that is equal to, though not mistaken for, real bodily
interaction. Finally, Chapter 5, “Live K-pop Concerts and Their Digital Doubles,” dem-
onstrates how concerts, presumably the pinnacle of liveness, use technological media-
tion to elevate sensory intimacy and performative complexity to heights the regular
human body cannot achieve. This chapter also describes the phenomenon of KCON,
international conventions dedicated to selling Korean nationalism via live cultural inter-
action, or as Kim puts it, to “branding the nation and nationalizing the brand” (p. 194).
Overall, this book provides a detailed description of a complex industry that will
appeal to a wide variety of disciplines. While the social sciences can appreciate the
empirical evidence the book provides, media theorists can engage with the book’s
nuanced accounts of liveness, interactivity, mediation, consumerism, and tribalism. As
well, due to the fast-pace of the industry, a constant challenge for the field is to keep up
with the major trends within K-pop; this text serves as a comprehensive update to previ-
ous texts on the topic. Although this constrains descriptions of the industry to a specific
point in time, K-pop Live’s historical approach illustrates how this description fits into a
larger progression of K-pop.
This emphasis on history, however, also takes away from the book’s main thesis. Despite
the media theory basis of the introduction, K-pop Live still falls into the cultural-historical
approach common to the field, as if it is not entirely committed to its refreshing media stud-
ies perspective. For the most part, the structure of the chapters decentralizes media theory
in their factual narrations of the industry, which dominate over dispersed pockets of theo-
retical contemplations. Each chapter, with its stand-alone premise, illustrates a slightly dif-
ferent version of liveness that does not interact with those of other chapters or with the
unified definition of liveness in the introduction about perception and sensation. In addi-
tion, this introductory definition of liveness centers audience experience, thus necessitating
engagement with fan studies. While Kim’s anecdotes are insightful, the thesis could be
better supported with more stringent audience research that directly reveals the affective
and perceptual participation of the fans, who are foregrounded in the introduction and title.
In spite of these limitations, K-pop Live does reach beyond the historical and cultural
perspectives of other books within the field. The thesis situates the book within perfor-
mance theory, agreeing with theorists who see liveness and mediation as intertwined and
going against those who hold the purist perspective that liveness only equates to bodily
copresence or to an irretrievable moment in time. In emphasizing this strong correlation
between liveness and digital technology, the book positions itself at an intersection
between studies in media, performance, culture, and history. In recognizing the impor-
tance of liveness and mediation in K-pop, Kim taps into the substance of the industry’s
success and paves the way for investigating the industry’s media practice, which, argu-
ably, is one of K-pop’s most significant contributions to our current mediascape.