• Date: May 26th, Friday, 2023, 12:00 – 13:40
• Online via Zoom

Presenter: Gyu Tag Lee (Associate Professor, George Mason University-Korea)
Discussants: Keewoong Lee (Sungkonghoe University), Dongjoon Lee (Seoul National University)
Moderator: Sojeong Park (The Center for Hallyu Studies, SNUAC)

From BTS’ announcement of hiatus to HYBE chairperson Si-hyuk Bang’s claim that ‘K-Pop is in crisis,’ there are worrying voices about K-Pop’s decline after seemingly reaching its peak with the highest sales ever in 2022. However, some refer to the emergence of  ‘4th generation K-Pop’ artists who have continued to make it big after 2020 as an example that the future of K-Pop is not all that grim.  Is K-Pop, having achieved such enormous success in the global market with its hybridity of the local ‘K’ and global ‘Pop’, in crisis due to that nature? Or will K-Pop, as it has until now, adapt to the new media and cultural environment of the new era and evolve yet again? In K-Pop’s new transition era, we survey K-Pop’s developmental process, the current state, and the future through three books in a series on K-Pop: The K-Pop Age (2016), K, Pop in Conflict (2020), and Poetry for Z (2023).