Pop Culture Formations across East Asia (review)

Upon first browsing of Pop Culture Formations across East Asia, one is puzzled that this book about popular culture in East Asia does not have a single chapter on popular culture from China, and only has a few pages discussing the culture industries of Japan. It is perhaps more appropriate to title the book as Pop Culture Formations across Asia instead, as there are three chapters in the volume dealing with issues in the national cinemas of Indonesia and Malaysia, which are countries in Southeast Asia rather than East Asia. However, considering that this book is a collection of papers coming out of the 2009 Korea-ASEAN Academic Conference on Popular Culture across East Asia in the 21st Century: Hybridization or Asianization? (held at Burapha University, Thailand), it is little surprise that the book has somewhat disproportionate coverage of the Korean Wave and its influence on countries in Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, this volume provides valuable insights into recent trends and developments in intra-Asian flows of popular culture and raises important questions about the emergence of cultural hierarchies in the "Asianization of cultural production, distribution and consumption" (p. 9).

Edited by Doobo Shim, Ariel Heryanto, and Ubonrat Siriyuvasak, the book is divided into three sections. The first section, Media Consumption in Asia and Identity Politics, opens with a chapter by Young-Hee Chung on the pleasures that audiences derive from watching My Name is Kim Sam Soon, a Korean television drama featuring a pudgy loud-mouthed heroine who defies the image of the submissive woman in Korean society. This section also includes two chapters on Indonesian cinema. Both involve textual analysis of two Indonesian films — Berbagi Suami (Love for Share) and Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Love Verses) — in the context of growing Islamization in popular culture. The fact that one chapter is written by Korean professor Hyung-Jun Kim, and the other by Indonesian professor Ida Rachmah, provides an interesting contrast in readings within and outside Indonesian society, towards two films centred on the theme of polygamy. The fourth essay by Zawawi Ibrahim is an excellent introduction to Malaysian cinema for non-specialist readers, from the early Malay films in the studio era (1940s to 1970s), the social realism of the first New Wave in the mid-1990s, to the increasingly fluid notions of "nation" and "identity" in the Post New-Wave era after 2000.

The second section, Nation-States and Media Transformation, takes on a political economy perspective by examining the centres of production, products, workers, and markets of various culture industries in Asian economies. There are two chapters in this section that specifically address the Korean Wave, a term that has been used to denote the rise in popularity of Korean popular culture across Asia. Both essays point to the Korean Wave entering a stage of decline. Doobo Shim's essay "Whither the Korean Media?" reveals that overseas sales of Korean cultural products (including films, TV dramas, and pop music) have been far less profitable than expected, despite the prevalence of foreign fandom in Korean popular culture. He discusses the internal factors within South Korean media industries that contribute to the financial crisis in TV drama production. Jeongmin Ko's chapter, on the other hand, reviews the influence of the Korean Wave in various countries and regions such as Japan, China, Southeast Asia, the United States, and so on. However, Shim's and Ko's analyses are largely focused on Korean TV dramas (K-dramas), and rely heavily on statistics and media reports between 2005 and 2008. They have not discussed the latest trend whereby Korean pop music (K-pop), along with its boy bands and girl groups, has now replaced K-dramas at the forefront of the Korean Wave. For instance, K-pop idols attract thousands of fans when they perform in Singapore (Straits Times, 15 February 2010), and many Singaporean students have turned up at local auditions held by Korean talent management agencies, hoping to make a name in the...