Born to be K to be POP

With Born to be K to be POP, Jaha Koo and Eunkyung Jeong create a multidisciplinary performance situated between concert, documentary theatre and performance art. Rather than treating K-pop as a global trend, they approach it as a system: a system built on dreams and discipline, emancipation and exploitation, collective desire and hyper-capitalism.

K-pop has become one of the most influential cultural industries of the 21st century. It has generated unprecedented forms of global connectivity while operating through tightly controlled production systems, image politics, and intense labor regimes. Behind its spectacular aesthetics lies an infrastructure that carefully manages bodies, emotions, and identities.

In recent years, K-pop fandoms have acted as collective political agents. During the 2020 U.S. presidential election, fans used digital platforms to disrupt Donald Trump's campaign rallies. When BTS donated USD 1 million to Black Lives Matter, their fandom ARMY raised a matching amount within 24 hours. The concert aesthetics of light sticks, chants, and performative gatherings have been translated, beyond Asia, into a language of feminist movements, democratic protests, and solidarity for diversity and equality across the world.

K-pop thus embodies a profound contradiction: it reproduces hyper-capitalist logics while simultaneously enabling new forms of collective imagination and resistance on a global scale.

Born to be K to be POP examines K-pop from within its cultural and industrial structures. Moving across its generational shifts, from 1990s idol formations to contemporary multinational and even virtual groups, the project asks how pop music might function not only as entertainment, but as a site of political imagination and social articulation. Unfolding on stage as a live composition of electronic music, vocals, rap, choreography, video, and text, the work brings together a rapper, vocalist, dancer, and featuring artists who appear not as fictional characters but as a temporary collective. They do not resolve contradiction; they mobilize it as a generative force for imagining alternative futures.