PRODUCT 200

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Music is an artform that’s been constantly described as something with no language barriers. This is proven by legendary musicians such as Michael Jackson. However, Asia were never the ones taking initiative over the global music industry mainly because of the lack of engagement from the west, there were less exposure and at the time you could say, language does create a barrier.

This all changed as we step into 2010s, K-pop (Korean pop music) starts to spread outside of Asia. Idol culture started in the late 50s of South Korea, the form of idol groups started in the 90s in parallel with the Japanese pop idol culture. From the 90s to early 2000s, the pop industry of East Asian and South East Asian countries was led by Korea and Japan. Until ‘Gundam Style’ gained popularity world wide in 2012. That’s when the industry saw the opportunity.

The record companies recruit young people (12-17) to become trainees, however each company approximately debut 1 group every 2 years, and the number of trainees in each company ranges from 20-150. The people were meticulously chosen by the company, they’re given group concepts and persona characters to appeal to certain fans. The songs normally fit the group concept and are composed by other musicians. Even if there are idols who wants to compose their own song, it was difficult for the record company to agree. The K-pop groups are nonetheless a product. The mass production of similar groups and similar personas. Without individual meaning, they are created for the purpose to gain as much profit as possible. Within the year of 2012, 72 groups were debuted yet no more than half of them survived as a music group, many even disbanded without a song.

I purposely chose K-pop to represent the idol culture as the kitsch effect would work well with glitched artworks. It is also highly sentimental with relation to pop culture. My artwork refers to this phenomenon where this industry is overflowed with greed and ultimately, a monopoly. In my audio piece, I extracted 1 second from 200 K-pop songs from 200 different K-pop groups debuted in 2012-2019 and made a 3 minute 20 second track. I strictly set a system of extracting the first second of the first song, and then the second second of the next song in the alphabetical order. The system responds to the lack of individual creativeness, it’s a parallel action to the system of a factory. By taking my engagement away from the end product is also echoing back to the fabrication of the industry. The overwhelming transition refers to the overflowing amount of idols in this industry. The print responds to the 200 K-pop songs where the 200 images are glitched individually to create one picture, they are all different yet they are the same. This is also visible in the gif, the ctrl-C and ctrl-V is also referring back to the repetition in this industry.
This industry based on consumerism isn’t the only one but acts as a mirror to general idol cultures in the past centuries. What is the purpose of music in cases like this, where one song has gone through many hands and recreation and then performed by people who were also restricted by their companies. The groups were formed based on a market research, the members might not even know each other before they debut. Are they even musicians? Batches of idols step down the stage, and the new batch steps up straight after. what does the rise of this genre mean to us? Do we want music to become efficient, fast and tasteless?

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