K-pop Dreaming: A Special Live Event with GYOPO
Here in America, K-pop has seen an incredible surge in popularity, from PSY’s YouTube-record-breaking Gangnam Style in 2012 to BLACKPINK headlining this year’s Coachella. Festivals celebrating K-pop music, fashion, dance, and style draw thousands each year. In a special live event in partnership with GYOPO, Vivian Yoon (she/her), host of the K-Pop Dreaming podcast from LAist Studios, will delve into the origins of the worldwide phenomenon, from the influence of hip hop on the sound and dance, to the impact of American Imperialism on the origins of K-pop. DJ BOBA BEAR will set the mood before we begin and after the event during a reception with refreshments by JUMO.
ASL interpretation will be provided.
SPECIAL GUESTS
- Jheanelle Brown (she/her), film/video faculty, CalArts
- Michelle Cho (she/her), theorist of contemporary Korean media and pop culture
This program was previously scheduled for March 16.
ABOUT GYOPO
GYOPO is a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals generating and sharing progressive, critical, intersectional and intergenerational discourses, community alliances, and free educational programs in Los Angeles and beyond.
ABOUT VIVIAN YOON
Vivian Yoon is a Korean American writer-performer from Los Angeles. Her background is in improv and sketch comedy, and pre-pandemic she performed weekly at the UCB Theater on Harold Night. She also has experience in emerging tech and virtual production, and won an Epic MegaGrant in 2021 for an undisclosed project involving Unreal Engine. Recently, her original hour-long dramatic comedy series was the subject of a bidding war between two major studios.
Currently Vivian is developing an original series idea with Blumhouse TV, working on an XR (mixed reality) short involving LED screens and virtual production, and writing/hosting an upcoming podcast for LAist about K-pop’s early connections to Los Angeles.
ABOUT JHEANELLE BROWN
Jheanelle Brown is a film curator/programmer, educator, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is interested in the space between fugitivity and futurity and elevating an ethic of care, with special interest in the sonic in film, political film and media, and Caribbean film/video. Jheanelle is a board member and a programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum. She is currently Special Faculty at California Institute of the Arts and a lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design.
She recently served as guest co-curator, of Black Radical Imagination: Fugitive Trajectories. Other exhibitions and programs have been presented at Art + Practice, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the National Museum for African American History and Culture, REDCAT, 18th Street Arts, Center, Project Row Houses, amongst others. Jheanelle was a 2019 Flaherty curatorial fellow and is currently a Jamaica Art Society Curatorial/Writing Fellow.
At this moment, she is dreaming about cosmic marronage whilst trying to remember her terrestrial obligations.
ABOUT MICHELLE CHO
Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Cultures and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching areas are South Korean film, tv, pop music, and digital culture, transnational fandom, race and diasporic representation, platforms, and global media. Her published work explores South Korean genre cinemas in the new millennium, the history of the Korean Wave, and K-pop's multi-sited fandoms. She is co-editing a volume on gender and popular media in South Korea after the #MeToo movement and Bangtan Remixed, a collection of academic and fan-authored analyses of the K-pop group BTS. Her public-facing writing on film, K-pop, fandom, and media convergence can be found at Flow, Even Magazine and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She's also a frequent commentator on hallyu media in outlets ranging from NPR to the CBC, the BBC, GMA, Bloomberg, Reuters, Vox Media, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the Washington Post.
Event sponsored in part by:
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