After first falling in love with K-pop almost 20 years ago, Fine Koloamatangi has now made the genre the focus of her art history PhD, exploring its visual appeal to Pacific peoples.
Even if you're not a fan, it's hard to ignore the global pop-culture phenomenon that K-pop has become.
For most outside of South Korea, awareness of the country's now US$10 billion a year pop music industry dawned with the release of Psy's mega 2012 hit 'Gangnam Style'. K-pop has since become a cornerstone of what's known as Hallyu - the global wave of interest in Korean popular culture encompassing everything from boy band BTS, to the Netflix show Squid Game and the Oscar-winning film Parasite.
But for Fine Koloamatangi, K-pop fandom came before all this. It started one day in the mid-2000s, while she was studying for her law and arts (politics and art history) conjoint degree at Canterbury University, when she got talking to another student outside a lecture about the music they were listening to.
"She goes, 'have you heard of K-pop?' I didn't know what that was, but I was really open to listening, so she lent me one of her earphones. I was like, 'this sounds really great' and she goes, 'yeah, go look it up'."
Fine did, and quickly became a fan. But given the niche nature of K-pop at the time, she largely kept this musical interest to herself.
"Then a couple of years later I discovered some of my really good Pacific friends were also into K-pop, so there was a bit of a group of us. I think if it wasn't for my friends, and experiencing K-pop in that community way, I don't think my love for it would have grown as much as it did."
K-pop through an academic lens
Fine has now completed a PhD in art history looking at the appeal of K-pop to Pacific peoples. Her research involved interviewing people who became fans of the genre prior to 2012, before Hallyu really began to surge, to hear their stories and find common threads of connection.
One thread she discovered was a legacy of engagement among Pacific peoples with Asian media - everything from martial arts films and anime to Japanese pop and conventions like Armageddon - placing K-pop in this lineage. This is backed up by Asia New Zealand Foundation research, which found that Pacific peoples are highly engaged in Asian arts experiences.
It was surreal to be in Korea after so many years of engaging with its culture.
Fine Koloamatangi Faculty of Arts
K-pop fandom is often intensely personal, she explains, with fans following artists, known as 'idols', from their first musical release, known as a 'debut', through the journey of their career. But it's also characterised by its large and devoted fan communities, with idols building massive followings. Last year, Lisa, a singer from the girl group Blackpink, became the first K-pop star to surpass 100 million followers on Instagram
Fine says many Pacific K-pop fans have taken an active role in engaging fan communities in Aotearoa, both online and through events; one of her friends, for example, started the Facebook group NZ K-pop Fans, which Fine now runs.
"Pacific people tend to look to community, so that kind of community creation is a natural extension of that."
Given her art history discipline, Fine has looked specifically at how the visual aspects of K-pop may contribute to its appeal to Pacific peoples. An entire chapter of her thesis is dedicated to music videos, in which she taps into a rich vein of visual material.
K-pop girl group Red Velvet for example, went so far as to recreate specific scenes from works by artists including Claude Monet, John Everett Millais and Hieronymus Bosch in the video for their song 'Feel My Rhythm'.
Music in the family
While Fine was first introduced to K-pop as a young adult, she thinks her openness to it was born much earlier.
In the late 1970s, Fine's paternal grandfather, Saimone Koloamatangi, started Fōfō'anga 'o Aotearoa, a Tongan kava club, out of the family home in Grey Lynn. A place where the local Tongan community could meet and share their traditions, language and music, it provided a safe space during the time of the Dawn Raids.
"As a child I would be serenaded to sleep sometimes from the music they played. I took it for granted at the time, but now I realise I was incredibly blessed to be surrounded by my Tongan culture."
Fine's grandparents were also founding members of Grey Lynn's United Church of Tonga, helping provide a place where the community could share its religious practices, and her grandfather was a musician and composer, with diverse musical tastes ranging from Glenn Miller to Hawaiian ukulele music.
As a child I would be serenaded to sleep sometimes from the music they played … I was incredibly blessed to be surrounded by my Tongan culture.
Fine Koloamatangi Faculty of Arts
She says her father, political studies academic Associate Professor Malakai Koloamatangi, also plays guitar and harboured ambitions to be a musician.
"He opened our eyes to a lot of different forms of music growing up, so I feel that trajectory of cultural appreciation was established early on, which helped me to not dismiss K-pop when I first heard it."
More than 45 years later, the family still runs the kava club, hosting club nights for elders on Wednesdays and for youth on Fridays, where music plays a big part in setting the mood and connecting community members to their culture and each other.
On the ground in Seoul
Earlier this year, Fine was able to travel to the home of K-pop for the first time, when she undertook an Asia New Zealand Foundation internship at the CJ Cultural Foundation. The two-month internship included a four week stint at the foundation's Seoul office, researching popular music industries in Australia, Aotearoa and the Pacific and the potential of Korean indie musicians to enter these markets.
Despite landing in Seoul in the heart of winter, where the temperature plunged to minus 14, it lived up to expectations.
Fine submitted her doctoral thesis at the end of July and says she'd potentially like to do more travel and conduct further research answering questions that emerged while undertaking her PhD. One area for further research, she says, would involve potentially collaborating with another researcher looking at connections to K-Pop among Māori.
So, after viewing K-pop through an academic lens, does she still enjoy listening to it?
Yes, she says. NewJeans, a girl group that debuted in 2022, is a current favourite, with their nostalgic sound that captures the old-school K-pop she originally bonded with.
"I'm still a fan," she says.
Fōfō'anga 'o Aotearoa, the kava club established and run by the Koloamatangi family, features in the second season of the web series Still Here, which highlights stories of inner-city Auckland's Pacific communities.
Caitlin Sykes
This article first appeared in the October 2024 issue of UniNews.
