Seung K. Yang is a manager at Kyounggi Digital Content Institute, a government body specializing in the promotion of digital content locally and globally. Seung K. was a Composer/Vocalist/Guitarist in a band that released two albums.

Abstract:

"Fashioning the Wave of K-Pop beyond Asia through Transnational Communities"

This paper explores the rise of Korean creative industries, notably K-Pop, and how K-Pop have been in fashion, first across, and then beyond, Asian markets into Western European and North American markets at least partly from psychological perspectives. Korea has driven a surprise emergence of creative industries in Asia. Major creative industries in Korea including music, TV drama, film and online game have recently been in fashion across Asian countries ranging from China and Taiwan through Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand to Japan. The above influence has recently been spread into other regions of the world including Western Europe, and North America. The rise of Korea as a leading supplier in Asia’s creative industries reflects the convergence of three forces: creativity, cultural capital and global technologies.

Yet, this paper is an attempt to investigate the role of diaspora in major cities including Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, and Berlin in North America and Western Europe in the spread of K-Pop in the western world. We notably focus on the role of transnational communities as an advanced form of diaspora. Existing literature deals with two types of transnational communities: transnational communities from the above and transnational community from below (grassroots). The focus of this paper is to look into the role of transnational communities from below in the urban areas in North America and Western Europe in their strategic role for K-Pop at least modestly in fashion in both regions.