• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.1-13
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• 2018

Idol goods refer to products such as cups and towels, or mementos or souvenirs that are manufactured to gratify the desires of fandom and may include the facial images of a star. The objective of this research was to explore the purchase behaviors of K-pop idol goods. Two hundred and sixty female idol goods purchasers in their twenties participated in an online survey. Cheering tools were the most often purchased idol goods, followed by idol slogans and dolls. To investigate the difference in idol goods' attributes they considered when shopping, respondents were divided into three purchase groups based on their annual total expense for purchasing idol goods. There were significant differences among light, medium and heavy purchasers in terms of goods' price, practical features, and scarcity. The light shopper group was majorly guided by price and practical features as compared to the other two groups, and heavy shopper group was majorly guided by scarcity attribute than in the other two shopper groups. The more they identified their favorite idols, the more they worked hard, the higher their income, the higher the expenses of investing in idol products, the more likely they were to repurchase idol goods. In term of post-purchase behavior of idol goods, most idol goods purchase by fans were stored rather than used, and few indicated that they purchase two identical idol goods for use and storage.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.25 no.11
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• pp.1601-1612
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• 2022

As human brands, Idols, the central members of K-pop, are actively engaging in various industries based on the support of their fandoms, greatly impacting the national economy. In particular, due to the development of digital devices and technologies, they are active both online and offline, and idol avatars are a significant part of their activities across diverse contexts. Therefore, this study aims to categorize avatars used in various contexts and explore fandoms' perceptions according to each type. Based on case studies and literature review, idol avatar usage was categorized into products, supplier-led content, and interactive content, and accordingly, surveys and in-depth interviews were conducted. As a result, regardless of category, fandom showed a negative perception of idol avatar usage, as shown in the order of interactive content, supplier-led content, and products. Regarding human brand characteristics of idol avatars, attractiveness was evaluated higher than intimacy and likeability. However, the attachment to real-life idols showed a higher correlation with the characteristics of intimacy and likeability than attractiveness. This study is significant as it looked at the future directions of idol avatar usage by analyzing the fandoms' perception of avatar usage in the K-pop industry from a human brand perspective.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.9
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• pp.221-232
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• 2019

The uniqueness of the K-Pop 'idol' culture, which is a key area of its success, can be found not only through the acceptance of diverse cultures and the strengthening of the performance capacity, but also by the effective utilization of new technological environment. As a result, the Korean idol system, which is distinguished from the Japanese idol system, is established. And these systems are evolving with new technological environments. This paper examines the process of evolution of the Korean idol system that adapts to the technical environment through the case of the idol girl group 'IZ*ONE'. 'IZ*ONE' not only achieved rapid success by actively utilizing SNS and new media and producing interactive narratives, but also establishing stable expansion and homogeneity of fandom through interactive rituals. By comparing the evolution and achievement of such a system with the Japanese idol system, we will be able to present the factors of K-Pop success more clearly.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.71-82
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• 2021

The main purpose of this study was to investigate K-pop stars' images in photos presented by social networks in China. In this study photos of K-pop stars were collected from a community site of Baidu as one of the biggest portal sites and were five idol groups (EXO, IKON, T-ara, Wonder Girls, and Girls' Generation) which have beeb getting famous in China. For this musical styles and backgrounds of the K-pop idol stars were scrutinized in brief and explored in respect with its images. The results of the study were follows: First, the overall pictorial images of K-pop boys' groups were characterized in masculine and stylish images emphasizing the western appearance. In case of K-pop girl groups, sexy, gorgeous, feminine and youthful images were identified. In conclusion, K-pop idol stars is contributing to expand Korean pop arts into Chinese public culture as Chinese people produced and circulated the pictorial images of K-pop stars and facilitated consumption activities of K-pop contents.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.1-14
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• 2022

K-pop stars are an important influence in the era of digital culture based on emotions. The purpose of this study is to visually express the identity and worldview of their music in the virtual and real world, and to promote Korea's current and past culture. The study also intends to appeal to the emotions of the global fans by designing original textile in their music video 'IDOL' on Tiny TAN - a symbol of world pop star BTS. For design development, traditional Korean images shown in the 'IDOL' video were collected, patterns for each member were selected, and a motif was designed on Adobe Illustrator. We selected the dragon as the motif for V, cloud for Suga, chrysanthemums for Jin, mask for Jung Kook, hanok pavilion for RM, fan for Jimin, and Sam Taegeuk for J-Hope. The selected motifs were designed as per the four textile design arrangement methods: square pattern, 1/2 half drop pattern, turn-around pattern, and panel pattern. The design was presented by mapping Kwaeja to Tiny TAN character. The developed textile design can be used not only for character costumes in virtual space, but also for various products such as clothes, accessories, bedding, cosmetics, stationery, and food. By using it to produce goods inspired by K-pop stars, it can be used as basic data for the development of high value-added competitive products in the global market and create synergy effects of K-Design, which would lead a new trend in the design world.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.69-78
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• 2020

K/DA is a K-pop virtual idol based on the game character. This study analyzed the creation process, characteristics and existential meaning of virtual idols from the perspective of Pataphysics. K/DA is a character with both characteristics of game character and K-pop girl group. Also, virtual character and real idol share the body through motion capture and augmented reality(AR). As a result, K/DA crosses virtual and reality, and at the same time becomes a pataphysical subject that does not belong to either virtual or reality. K/DA is suggested a third zone where digital subjects will be located in the future.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.34
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• pp.129-165
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• 2014

K-pop performances are in the center of the contemporary popular arts and cultural industry, and implicitly reveal the way that our society views the body and the time-space. This paper explores the motif of automaton in the K-pop idol group ShiNee's stage performance of 'Everybody' and the song's music video. At the same time, the paper relates the motif with the automaton of the digital era-that is, the sense of time-space in digital animations. The motif of the automaton has its origins in the mythical forms related to the animation, and is related to the human desire to create humanlike forms. Also, this motif is closely linked to the aesthetical meaning of the animation, being played in different variations since the beginning of the animation. This paper explores the tradition of automaton motif in culture and the arts, and look into the cases in which the history of the relationship between the media and body performance harboring the automaton motif has been displayed in 19th century ballet or modern body expressional arts. In addition, this paper will compare and analyze representative contemporary works that reveal digital viewpoint and the choreography of 'Everybody', and compare other works that stand in similar aesthetic tradition, investigating the influence of digital animation reflected in the K-pop idol and its aesthetic and social undertones.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.1-18
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• 2021

Idol music, which began to gain huge popularity in the domestic music market in the mid-1990s, has become one of the major global contents thanks to the global popularity of K-POP. As a result, the Korean music market continues to grow, forming the world's sixth-largest music market, and domestic music agencies are focusing more on fostering idol groups and producing idol music. The global success of idol music is surprising, but this has resulted in the domestic music market being biased toward idol music. As a result of the study, it was confirmed that there are several problems with the phenomenon of being biased toward similar types of musicians and music content. First, just as trend-oriented cultural contents face the problem of life expectancy all the time, the "Korean Wave" is also forced to think in terms of identity and sustainability. Second, it was observed that only consumers of a certain age may cause cultural alienation of other age groups, and thirdly, various problems such as shrinking creative paths due to the size of the cost required for idol group production and the lifespan of idol musicians' art activities. This paper derives the reality of the domestic idol bias phenomenon through comparative analysis of the English-American music market and the domestic music market, which have had a profound influence on the global music market in popular music history, and verified the theory and results through an expert survey using the Likert scale. In addition, the problems caused by the idol bias phenomenon were considered based on the theory of cultural diversity, and improvement directions were also suggested to solve this problem.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.291-302
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• 2020

Korean popular music industry, which is lead by "Idol group", has forsaken their fandom all over the world. Therefore, idol groups has become not only an artist but also the most influential people in the Korean economy. A global idol group with a strong fandom can earn more than a trillion-dollar by attracting their global fan's interest in Korea. In other words, it is considerably important to carry the idol to a successful conclusion. This study tries to expect whether the idols can be survived or not at a certain point after their debut by ANN, Decision Tree, Random Forest. We decide that certain point as the three-year and eight-year after their debut, because it is their break-even point year and the year after their average renewal of the contract. In addition, this study also explains which feature is the most important to their survival by feature importance and Logistic regression. In conclusion, features like the number of idol competitors, the number of debut members and the number of the genre are significant. These results shed light on the efficient management of K-Pop idol to improve industrial competitiveness.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.13 no.8
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• pp.189-198
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• 2019

This study aims to make meaning of the reactions of the Korean people through the text mining of comments on videos of the December 2018 MMA performance of intro on YouTube. For this, comments on 15 YouTube videos were collected over the past 10 months. With the collected data, a total of 5,135 comments were analyzed through crawling using the Python and BeautifulSoup programs, data was refined over a total of 3 sessions, and a final total of 5,080 comments were used as analysis material. A mining technique was used for data analysis and the process of refinement, analysis, and visualization was achieved using the Textom program. Research results showed that keyword analysis showed the keywords of 'performance', 'Korea', 'video', 'top', 'cool', 'dance', 'idol', 'legend', 'love', and 'gratitude' in that order and keywords such as 'patriotism' and 'Olympics' also appeared frequently. N-gram analysis showed that comments with contexts such as 'a top performance that will remain a legend among Korean idol performances', and 'an idol performance that displayed the traditional culture of Korea' were in higher ranks. Based on such keyword analysis results, topic modeling was applied and 5 top keywords were extracted from a total of 5 topics. Analysis results of topic contents and distribution showed that topics in the comments of this performance's videos largely consisted of the 3 reactions of 'high praise regarding the stage performance', 'affection towards the fusion and artistic sublimation of Korean traditional dance', and 'gratitude towards the uploading of cool dance videos'