As academic researcher as well as journalist on popular culture and cultural industries in Asia, my research is about emerging border-crossing cultural flows between different parts of Asia. The main subject of the research will focus on Korean popular music and popular culture in general, which has been regarded as being produced and consumed on domestic base but has begun to cross the borders since mid-1990s. The research will deal with the dynamics of globalization as well as "regionalization (Asianization)," which increasingly cannot be analyzed on national level(s).
By doing this, I will locate cultural production in broader social and political contexts and explore changing value and belief within the circuit of culture. I will examine the constantly evolving meaning(s) of "Asia" within a larger frame of border-crossing cultural economy and articulate it with emerging new subjectivities in the region. This new subjectivities in Asia will be approached through the perspective of inter-Asia(n) cultural studies, which refute not only "single Asia" perspective but also nationalist one.
The research will cover not only what is happening recently but what had happened since "modern" period. In that sense, another focus of the research will pay attention to "hidden" history of border-crossing cultural flows and their economies among different parts of Asia during the Cold War period and colonial period as well.