Gender, Art, and Popular Culture in East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel consists of four case studies of key topics in contemporary East Asian society, focusing on the interplay of gender, art, popular music, television dramas, and media production in the negotiation of everyday life. Together they explore transnational migration, cultural flow, cultural promotion, changes in consumer behavior and trend, transmission of gender, and other social processes that often encourage hybrid forms of local popular music and art or transnational or translocal forms of cultural communication and space. Particular issues studied are the growing plastic surgery fever in Korea and how it is being represented and critiqued by emerging Korean artists, K-pop’s influences on Taiwanese female pop image making and how K-pop’s image has become a significant other for the Taiwanese music industry and audiences, exploration of diverse Hong Kong female fan receptions by discovering how gender-neutral PRC singer Li Yuchun’s fans negotiate the complex mesh of everyday cultures that involve tensions and desires between Hong Kong and the mainland, and the gradual shift of Taiwanese drama portraying the dynamics of the workplace, which marked as the new era for the production of Taiwan TV drama which widely refers as international equity co-production. These case studies are comprehensive ethnographies, based on personal and email interviews and observation in local contexts, highlighting contemporary trends in East Asian societies.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Sang-Yeon Loise Sung, University of Vienna

Individual Presentations

• Plastic Aesthetics: Cosmetic Surgery in Contemporary Korean Art - Soojin Lee, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• Hong Kong Fans of Mainland Idol Li Yuchun: Cosmopolitanism and Difference - Maud Lavin, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• The Influence of K-pop on Taiwanese Female Pop Image Making - Sang-Yeon Loise Sung, University of Vienna

• Transient Queerness and Spectacular Misogyny on Chinese TV: Female Gender and Sexuality in Your Face Sounds Familiar and the 2015 Spring Festival Gala - Jing (Jamie) ZHAO, University of Hong Kong; Yang Ling, Xiamen University