[Issue 1] K-pop’s Transnational Technique: Affective Aesthetics in Protest Infrastructure across Korea and Taiwan

Minu Park(minupark0@gmail.com) and Chee-Hann Wu (cheehann.wu@gmail.com)

Preface: Why This Journal Exists

This journal began as a necessity. The piece you are about to read—co-written across Korea and Taiwan, across performance and media—was told it did not quite belong. More precisely: an editor at an online platform (on media, performance, and popular culture) imagined a different home for it than the one we carried in mind. We revised in good faith, clarifying our argument and making our aims legible within the venue’s frame. The response was familiar: our language was not met on its own terms but gently, insistently redirected toward someone else’s terrain.

This was not an aberration. It reproduces a pattern we have encountered as scholars and writers: that “Asia”—Taiwan, Korea, the wider constellation—becomes valuable primarily as extractable context, with our role circumscribed as culturally legible “insiders” who deliver local facts to be translated for others, and as if we were something to be drawn from rather than dwelt within. Strikingly, this pressure often comes from friends, from allies, from those who speak their own ties to “Asia,” who nonetheless channel our work back into the same interpretive grooves.

We are tired of such narrowing frames. Our work moves through performance, media, and art, but also across forms that exceed disciplinary capture. We stand with artists, writers, and practitioners whose work resists reduction to data or policy, grounded not in procedure but in attunement—to the aesthetic, sensorial, affective, and infrastructural textures of lived knowledge.

The Witching Archive: Journal of Knowledge Academia Couldn’t Hold exists to make room for those forms of thinking that keep overflowing established containers—for writing that stages or materializes its own epistemology, and for work that treats knowledge not as a static truth but as relation, experiment, and presence.

It also matters that timing shaped this story. We began drafting this essay in December 2024, amid political turbulence in South Korea, and we offered the piece in the hope that it might meet the moment. The slow turning of review and revision changed the texture of what should have been timely—another, quieter kind of disciplining. Our aim here is not to reject delay (reflection unfolds at its own pace) but to insist on academic pluralism in which the timely and the durational can breathe together, rather than one being used to disqualify the other.

This inaugural piece appears not only as scholarship but as evidence: an essay that a prior venue refused to hold. We invite readers to sit with the question that animates this journal: when “facts” are presented as neutral, whose interpretive systems are being reproduced, and what forms of knowledge get appropriated in the process? Our wager is that the arts of protest—its techniques, affects, and images—are not “background” to politics, but one of its infrastructures.

And while feedback and revision are vital forms of intellectual exchange, we note how often authors’ stated intentions are overridden rather than negotiated, revealing how even well-meaning review processes can reproduce hierarchies of legibility and fold emerging epistemologies back into familiar grooves. Too often, peer and editorial reviews rely on fixed notions of “quality,” shifting the exchange toward corrective comments on form rather than the work’s central questions.

-

The communication has been anonymized and the original platform left unnamed to protect personal information.

We also want to be clear that we are grateful for the chance to work with the platform and to dwell with the topic in the ways it allowed. The issue was not one of fault but of fit—of differing shapes and expectations meeting in ways that did not quite align. And this experience is not singular. Each of the authors has encountered similar moments in other spaces, multiple times, which is why we offer this instance not as an indictment but as an opening, a way to think with the broader landscape in which knowledge is created and circulates.

From the Correspondence: On the Subtle Drift from Feedback to Force

Below are excerpts from the editorial exchange with modifications, included to document the dynamic that led to this journal’s creation.

1. On “grounding the analysis” within existing grammars

   Presumes a single, correct ground and demands on which such work must stand. The gesture recenters disciplinarity over argument.

2. On “anchoring”

   Labels arts-based reasoning as “unanchored” and “relying on broad claims,” measuring validity only through empiricism. What is called “grounding” here is, in fact, a gatekeeping of methods.

3. On “definition” that needs to be demonstrated through empirical evidence

   Conflates empirical proof with quantification, implying that without metrics, civic form cannot be known. This subordinates interpretation to measurement.

4. On “framework”

   Recasts affective and aesthetic terms as moral-behavioral categories illegible to a social-scientific lens, erasing the transnational and performative register we proposed.

Why this matters:

Both authors hold PhDs and write from distinct yet rigorous disciplinary homes. The comments above do not converse with that framework; they nudge us away from it. That is disciplining, not dialogue, one that signals which forms of knowledge are welcome and which are not. Our journal begins here—with the resolve to let such work proceed on its own terms.

-

K-pop’s Transnational Technique:

Affective Aesthetics in Protest Infrastructure across Korea and Taiwan

In recent years, K-pop fandom has unsettled the boundary between popular culture and political activism. Candlelight vigils in Seoul have given way to glowing seas of LED light sticks during the mass protests that followed President Yoon’s declaration of martial law on December 3, 2024, as citizens demanded his impeachment, while humorous protest banners reframed street demonstrations in playful, unexpected registers. Across the ocean in Taiwan, light sticks of every shape and color shimmered through the crowds, slowly illuminating the night as fandom’s devotion intertwined with civic concern for the nation’s future. At the same time, in seemingly distant digital spaces, fan fiction genres such as K-pop Demon Hunters (2025) imagine idols battling apocalyptic forces to protect fragile everyday joys.

Rather than treating fandom as a passive sphere of consumption, this essay foregrounds the creative labor of fans themselves, reimagining their idols, reappropriating objects, and repurposing rituals. What matters here is less the “objective” authenticity of K-pop than the generative energy it unleashes: an affective surplus that circulates, mutates, and takes root in disparate contexts. In South Korea and Taiwan, this surplus appears in protests against authoritarianism despite distinct contexts. In diasporic digital cultures, it surfaces in fantasy narratives that translate endurance into myth.

While sociological scholarship has illuminated protest through statistics of participation, demographic profiles, and policy outcomes, this essay takes a different approach, foregrounding the arts-based dimensions of protest, of humor and imagination, as central to its political force. Rather than dismissing empirical accounts, we aim to add another register that is attentive to how protest is embodied through aesthetic play and how seemingly trivial acts can open onto enduring visions of democracy. To compare Korea and Taiwan, then, is to trace the global politics of K-pop: the ways its symbols and affects travel, transform, and unexpectedly forge solidarities across borders.

K-pop in/as Protest: From South Korea to Taiwan

South Korea’s December 2024 martial law crisis drew extraordinary crowds into the streets (organizers estimated nearly one million gathering each weekend), making it one of the largest mobilizations since 2016. Rather than simply replicating the familiar imagery of the 2016 candlelight vigils, demonstrators in 2024 brought K-pop fandom culture to the forefront. While Korean mass activism has traditionally featured peaceful demonstrations, often symbolized by candlelight vigils, this time, K-pop light sticks replaced candles. This was a response to conservative party member Jin-tae Kim's derisive remarks during the 2016 vigil for President Park’s impeachment, which mocked the candles' vulnerability to wind [1]. In 2024, light sticks, normally reserved for K-pop concerts and prized as cherished merchandise for special occasions, replaced candles as the dominant visual device. Their durable LED glow turned the avenues into a concert arena, where collective gestures long choreographed in the space of entertainment now became the grammar of dissent. Indeed, few forms of cultural practice have trained bodies so well in synchronizing affect and movement for hope and joy; the very adaptability of concert protocols gave the protests their pulse [2].

Figure 1. Seoul, Dec. 14, 2024. Crowds cheer outside the National Assembly moments after parliament voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol. Note the sea of LED light sticks, the flags, and the concert-like atmosphere, where pop’s objects and gestures become the demonstration’s primary form.

Flags and banners multiplied endlessly. Many were tongue-in-cheek declarations (“National Cat Butler Labor Association - Welcoming online Butlers,” “National Procrastination Union,” and countless others), representing no real organization at all [4]. By spoofing the bureaucratic cadence of national bodies and unions, these slogans converted everyday identities into civic subjects: the “cat butler” reframed private care as public value, while the “procrastination union” mocked productivity regimes that measure worth by output. In contrast to the homogeneity of conservative “Taegukgi rallies,” often caricatured as crowds mobilized for pay, these banners marked the protests as heterogeneous, festive, and self-authored. Each flag dramatized the fact that political participation did not require mastery of policy or ideology: anyone could show up, invent a slogan, and claim space. Circulating rapidly through Twitter, photos of newly spotted flags and DIY banner-making fueled the hype, sustaining a sense of delight alongside urgency.

The aesthetic affluence of the protests extended into how people inhabited public space. At Gwanghwamun (Seoul’s central square, in front of the Blue House), the rhythm of protest shifted: while weekends drew massive crowds, during the weekdays smaller groups remained to hold the space. Among them were demonstrators who camped for days in silver thermal blankets. As snow accumulated on their shoulders, they were nicknamed “Kisses,” after the American chocolates, sweet and delightful [5-1][5-2]. Farmers brought tractors into the city, adding another register of imagery and linking urban youth with rural labor struggles [6]. These images of light sticks, playful flags, silver-wrapped bodies, and tractors formed a kaleidoscopic landscape of protest. Importantly, festivity was not only loud and exuberant; even endurance and stillness, as in the “Kisses,” became woven into the collective joy.

One of the protest’s most powerful anthems was Into the New World (2007), the debut single of Girls’ Generation. The song had already become an activist emblem when students at Ewha Womans University sang it during their 2016 protests against police suppression under the Park administration [7]. Its lyrics, “Don’t wait for any special miracle / Our rough path might be an unknown future and challenge / But we can’t give up,” resurfaced in 2024, crystallizing K-pop’s ongoing role as a resource for collective resistance. Its impact was also present in Taiwan’s Winter Bluebirds protest.

In Taiwan, as a mild tropical winter settled over the island—a contrast to Korea’s biting cold—a political rally called “Winter Bluebirds in Taipei” also took flight. It was a continuation of the earlier May protest, a civic-led social movement in response to perceived abuses of legislative power by opposition parties, which had secured a legislative majority following the January 2024 elections [8]. Protests erupted over controversial parliamentary reforms that many feared signaled an imbalance of power between the legislature and the executive, spurring mass mobilization to defend Taiwan’s democratic institutions.

During the May protests, a protester’s sign stood out for its striking message: “We can buy HYBE + JYP + YG + SM with two trillion dollars.” This statement cleverly contextualized the vast amount of money at stake by comparing it to the combined value of South Korea’s four largest entertainment companies: HYBE (home to BTS), JYP (Twice and Stray Kids), YG (Big Bang and Blackpink), and SM (Super Junior and Girls’ Generation) [9]. The sign was a creative and humorous response to the parliament-proposed large-scale infrastructure projects with a staggering estimated cost exceeding NTD 2 trillion (approximately USD 61.72 billion), raising concerns about the long-term impact on the nation’s economy and governance [10]. This notably demonstrated how one connected political concerns with personal cultural interests, using relatability to communicate complex issues [11]. While these messages may have initially appeared as inside jokes comprehensible only to dedicated K-pop fans, their impact extended far beyond niche audiences through social media, effectively bridging generational and cultural divides.

Growing tensions and divisions across society eventually erupted into renewed protests six months later. During the same month as South Korea’s martial law crisis, a Taiwanese NGO called for another rally to protest the opposition’s obstructionist tactics within the legislature to force through amendments to Taiwan’s recall law and other controversial reforms [12]. Winter Bluebirds rapidly gained momentum and spread to cities across Taiwan, with demonstrations continuing into 2025 and later coalescing into a movement to petition for the mass recall of several legislators in the summer of 2025.

During the December rally, a stage hosted speakers voicing their concerns. Among them was a group of K-pop fans holding their respective fandom light sticks, a visual symbol of their dual identity as both dedicated fans and engaged citizens [13]. While Taiwanese K-pop fans had already participated in earlier phases of the Bluebird Movement, the influence of South Korean protests—where K-pop played an active role—further galvanized their involvement, driven by pride in being K-pop fans. Compared to the spontaneous, individual-focused, and creatively experimental presence of K-pop fans in the May movement, their involvement in the Winter Bluebirds appeared more sophisticated as a collective force and a part of the transnational culture of resistance. On December 19, South Korea’s JTBC News ran a short segment drawing parallels between fandom participation in protests in both countries, highlighting how pop culture communities were mobilizing for civic engagement [14].

K-pop’s Protest Aesthetics: Hope, Ideals, and Transnational Resonances

The K-pop industry labels its stars as “idols,” figures meant to embody ideals of youth, purity, joy, and shared ethics - worthy of admiration and the investment of time, money, and affection. Beneath the immense pressure to maintain visual perfection, often styled as ethereal, lies a collective longing shaped as much by fandom demand as by industry pressure for these values. While Western critics often reduce K-pop to a capitalist machinery of perfectionism, such readings miss how its idioms are continually reimagined in other contexts. An illuminating example is the Korean American-produced animated film K-pop Demon Hunters, which casts idols as magical warriors whose singing and performance are literal weapons against demonic forces. Here, K-pop’s aesthetics of charisma, discipline, and purity become the grammar of ethical struggle. Such reconfigurations reveal how popular cultural practices do not simply reproduce entertainment but continually transform into shared ideals of hope and endurance.

Early in the protests, fans spoke of using their light sticks to “protect the idols” they cherished. Read literally, this might suggest a narrow devotion, but in practice it was something else: the active re-creation of political ideals through the familiar idiom of fandom. Fans did not simply act as passive guardians of stars; they mobilized the language and rituals of K-pop to articulate a broader desire for joy, dignity, and livable futures. The use of fandom culture here illustrates how protest can take shape not by abandoning the everyday, but by reworking its forms in new registers.

This creativity was thrown into sharper relief by contrast. Yoon’s supporters, known as the Taegukgi protests, rallied under the national flag [15]. In Taiwan, similarly, the situation was perhaps even more fraught, as some opponents of the Bluebird Movements mocked the K-pop fan protesters in a live stream, accusing them of being government-hired impostors—a reversal of the “Taegukgi rallies” dynamic mentioned earlier [16]. While these groups are often caricatured for their homogeneity and suspected of being orchestrated or paid, protesters with fandom lights staged a different vision of collectivity: heterogeneous, playful, and plural, their distinct shapes and colors illuminating the streets in a dynamic, celebratory atmosphere. What the fandom lights illuminated was not a single ideology but a shared insistence that participation itself mattered - that presence could be joyful, inventive, and sustaining even in the face of repression.

In Taiwan, the act of supporting one’s favorite idols is beautifully referred to as star-chasing (zhuixing), which, although it sounds utopian, requires strong dedication. The will is then transformed into a strong motivation for the fans to protect not only the world in which the idols live but also their rights and dignity as fans, in a place where they can thrive with the K-pop stars they support. In addition, the appearance of protest trucks during the protest reshaped the city's usual landscape [17]. South Korean fans often send protest trucks with LED screens to entertainment agencies to display messages of concern or dissatisfaction with agency policies since the late 2010s, with a surge during the COVID-19 pandemic due to restrictions on in-person activities. K-pop fans in Taiwan crowdfunded the trucks within hours after the initial rally, and the trucks hit the road promptly, displaying messages such as “Democracy must be upheld so that star-chasing can be an everyday practice,” and “The light sticks shine for me and for democracy.” [18]

The imagery reinforced the idea that democracy is not merely a political system but a fundamental enabler of cultural expression and individual freedoms. While supporting a star may seem personal, it was articulated that the core of fan culture is shared identity, values, and beliefs. As the protests continued, the presence of K-pop light sticks, fan art, and digital advocacy efforts underscored how fandom communities were harnessing their organizational skills for civic activism.

The phenomenon of K-pop fans engaging in activism challenges common misconceptions that fandoms are politically indifferent. Rather than retreating into an escapist fantasy, many fans view their engagement as an extension of their values. As one protester eloquently put it during a speech, “We are not willing to give up our beliefs for the sake of star-chasing. We don’t want to be deprived of our rights and dignity.” This sentiment reflects a broader understanding that fandom spaces—while offering emotional refuge—do not exist in a vacuum. For Taiwanese fans, this was particularly significant given the trauma of past events, such as the 2016 controversy surrounding Twice’s Taiwanese member Tzuyu, who was forced to issue a public apology for holding the national flag of Taiwan [19]. The incident remains a painful reminder of Taiwan’s precarious geopolitical position and the pressures faced by its citizens, even in seemingly apolitical domains like pop culture.

Entangled Histories, Postwar Protest Grammars of Feeling

K-pop fandom’s political mobilization is less a deviation from pop than a proof of pop’s civic plasticity. The same techniques that bind dispersed strangers into audiences can be retuned to bind them into publics. Studying this plasticity across media and histories shows how contemporary resistance is organized not only by programs and parties, but by repertoires of feeling that make democracy imaginable and ongoing.

Rather than standing alone as the driver of resistance, K-pop was part of a wider artistic landscape of solidarity, where literature, music, and performance converged to sustain the affective energies of collective action. A circulated slogan, “The past is helping the present, and the dead are saving the living,” invoked deep historical connections—The line comes from Han Kang, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2024 (the first Korean laureate) just two months earlier [20]. Her work has long centered on collective trauma, including Human Acts (2014), a novel about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when citizens resisted the military government and were met with a brutal massacre. The global recognition of her art infused the protests with renewed cultural energy, as if to remind participants that art, like protest, carries the power to reanimate memory. K-pop’s presence, then, was not about embodying an overarching ideology, but about the repertoire of popular-cultural techniques, of songs, gestures, luminous objects, and above all the figure of the star-idol as a vessel of youth, joy, and common ethics, through which collective energies were reimagined as new ways of feeling and enduring together.

It is no coincidence that this essay has followed K-pop-inspired protest aesthetics to Taipei. Han Kang’s novel resonates beyond Korea, as Taiwan’s own history of authoritarian rule, political awakening, and collective trauma similarly demonstrates how the memory of the dead continues to shape struggles for democracy and justice in the present. In Taiwan, martial law governed the island from 1949 to 1987, a period remembered as the White Terror and marked by mass incarcerations, political repression, and executions [21]. The Formosa Incident in the late 1970s, though different in scale from the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in Korea, signaled a rising public consciousness and helped catalyze democratization [22]. These memories sit close to the surface. Taiwan’s past meets Korea’s own histories of authoritarian rule and upheaval. Together, they shape a region where protest already has a vocabulary, and where the forms of popular culture can quickly be adapted to speak in that vocabulary.

This essay has traced how what first looks like merchandise and choreography becomes a means of gathering, speaking, and staying together under pressure. It followed those shifts from Seoul to Taipei, where light sticks, chants, and playful banners returned as civic instruments. The speed of that circulation was not accidental; it drew strength from a shared postwar ground shaped by Japanese imperial legacies, Cold War politics, U.S. militarism, and the digital media infrastructures that grew alongside them. Across social media feeds and digital platforms, these gestures acquired new velocity and visibility, amplifying their affective and political charge as they spread across the interconnected online spaces. These entanglements formed publics that already knew how to read one another, so a concert object could be heard as a political sign and a lyric could cross a strait. Attending closely to these postwar routes, and to the cultural industries and translation communities that sustain them, remains an important area for future work on how media-based social choreographies travel and land transnationally and transregionally.