Introduction
Freyberg Place in Auckland’s CBD (central business district) is a popular gathering spot for Auckland-based youth in Aotearoa, New Zealand.Footnote 1 Most days, young people can be seen in this small square skateboarding, playing music, or dancing. Korean Dance Auckland (KDA); Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland)’s student club K-pop Planet; and the KPOP club at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) are some of the many university student groups that dance in the square. Hallyu and K-pop fan communities emerged in New Zealand later and perhaps less prominently than in other countries in Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Even so, K-pop fan activity and public performances in Auckland reflect the transnational culture and identities the city is home to and represents.
This paper investigates the intersection between K-pop, New Zealand youth, university life, and urban spaces. We draw from the stories and reflections of university students who self-identify as K-pop fans. Since 2020, we have interviewed fans who organise Auckland’s K-festival; dancers and initiators of K-pop random play dance events; and members of the K-pop Planet club and its Konstellation dance crew. Interviewees talked about their relationship with this global pop music genre and the major part it played in their lives during their studies. They described how their fan scene participation helped them to adjust to new cultural, social, and educational environments. Many of them explained how important their participation in K-pop clubs and events was for finding community during their studies, especially for those living away from home. One unexpected result was that many of them felt that through their fan participation, they had gained practical skills for future employment. Their embodied, social engagement with this music – through dancing, fan clubs, and more – mitigated some of the peer pressure, social and cultural displacement, and lack of agency they experienced during their university years. New Zealand’s K-pop fans are ethnically and racially diverse and represent various genders and sexualities as is the case with K-pop fans in many other global contexts (Baudinette Reference Baudinette2020, Reference Baudinette and Kim2023; Guevarra Reference Guevarra2014; Gutierrez-Jauregi et al., Reference Gutierrez-Jauregi, Aramendia-Muneta and Gómez-Cámara2025; Keith Reference Keith, Lam and Raphael2018; Reference Keith, Chik, Benson and Moloney2019; Lee Reference Lee2018; Miniaci Reference Miniaci2022). Our participants were from a range of diverse backgrounds, and many had been K-pop fans in high school prior to university. Besides their involvement with K-pop in university, many were also key figures in the K-pop scene and organisers of K-pop events nationwide. Their fan stories and embodied fan practices offer a subject-centred ethnographic window into the complex transnational alliances, identities, and musical tastes of university-aged people.
Our article has three sections. Section one describes the emergence of K-pop in New Zealand, looking at the adaptation and impact of K-pop in this specific multicultural context. Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent) dominate social, representational, and political power in New Zealand. Nonetheless, Māori, the Indigenous people of New Zealand, and other Pacific peoples, who have immigrated here over decades, are recognised as playing a significant role in the cultural milieu of New Zealand beyond the proportion of their population. Māori are tangata whenua (“people of the land”), and their Pacific cousins are acknowledged as connected to New Zealand through regional Oceanic genealogies and politics. Asians and other peoples making up New Zealand’s diversity have long-established and varied histories in the country, with multiple waves of migration and increasing numbers, but they have a different relationship than do Māori and Pacific Island immigrants to the centres of Pākehā political and cultural power (Anderson et al. Reference Anderson, Binney and Harris2014).
Our second section codifies our methodological and theoretical framework, situating our work within broader discussions in popular music and fan studies, as well as scholarship specifically addressing K-pop fandom and fan engagement. This section summarises how our work relates to other K-pop fan research, which features non-Korean fans’ engagement with K-pop scenes and how they see their fan practices as a marker of distinction from their peers; how K-pop circulation can be read as a sign of a global literacy; and how fan engagement offers a way for fans to connect with not only Korea and Asia but also with a global K-pop fan network/community.
Our third section features the voices of K-pop fans in Auckland. While they self-identify as fans, we found that their relationship to K-pop and intensity of dedication can vary over time, as life circumstances and priorities shift. Fans and fan engagement are not uniformly characterised, with some fans moving beyond purchasing and listening to generating social groups and identities and eventually becoming participants and producers of localised fan content themselves (Keith et al. Reference Keith, Chik, Benson and Moloney2019). Keith cautions against the hierarchisation of varying levels of fan activity and devotion, instead advocating for the use of contextualised field research to garner a nuanced understanding of fans’ own perceptions and labelling of their level and scale of activity.
Fan practices such as concert attendance, cover dance participation (Liew Reference Liew and Kim2013), social media activity (Choi and Maliangkay Reference Choi, Maliangkay, Choi and Maliangkay2014), and participation in K-pop-related events and competitions (Sung Reference Sung2014) offer valuable insights into fan communities, creativity, and culture (Hellekson and Busse Reference Hellekson and Busse2006; Keith et al. Reference Keith, Chik, Benson and Moloney2019). But not all fans engage in such observable participatory activities (Keith et al. Reference Keith, Chik, Benson and Moloney2019). Our study explored local participatory and social fan engagements with K-pop, but we also included K-pop fans whose active participation had faded, as we consider their experience with the genre equally valuable. New Zealand K-pop fans experienced diverse meanings, modes of engagement, and connections. Our multiethnic research team brings attention to the stories of our interviewees and how they negotiated identity, community, and consumption through K-pop participation and advocacy in our local New Zealand context – one in which global cultural flows are reworked into situated practices of belonging, community-making, and multiethnic self-understanding.
K-pop and New Zealand
K-pop refers to a South Korean youth-oriented music genre that has spread globally as part of Hallyu (한류, lit. Korean Wave), a term widely used for the transnational dissemination and consumption of Korean cultural products. From the mid-1990s, K-pop spread from South Korea to its neighbouring countries, namely China and Japan. It was then quickly picked up in Southeast Asian and South Asian countries before reaching the wider world, with fanbases on every continent. Since 2000, K-pop artists such as BoA, BigBang, Girls’ Generation, and SHINee have amassed large followings worldwide (Jin and Yoon Reference Jin and Yoon2016). In 2012, the video of a K-pop hit, PSY’s “Gangnam Style,” went viral on YouTube, further propelling K-pop into global pop culture.Footnote 2 Soon after PSY’s global success, the dancing-and-singing K-pop boy band BTS broke into the mainstream popular music market and global music charts.Footnote 3 K-pop, predominantly sung in Korean and with its cultural origin clearly marked, was taken up by international audiences (Dorof Reference Dorof2018; McLaren and Jin Reference McLaren and Jin2020). K-pop fans then tended to go on to discover broader Korean consumables such as K-beauty, K-drama, K-film, K-fashion, and K-food. These products were vigorously marketed by Korean manufacturers keen to cash in on the global success of K-pop.
K-pop has made highly effective use of digital media technologies, which has led to the coining of the term Hallyu 2.0 (Jin and Yoon Reference Jin and Yoon2016; Lee and Nornes Reference Lee and Nornes2015). This term reflects the emergence of a transnational, hyperconnected K-fandom. While it is difficult to accurately measure the number of K-pop fans worldwide and the scale of the phenomenon, according to a year-end report by the Korea Foundation, a government-affiliated institution dedicated to promoting Korean culture and international exchange, the global number of Hallyu fans reached approximately ninety million worldwide as of 2018, marking a sharp increase of over sixteen million from the previous year and nearly thirty million since 2016. This rapid growth has been closely tied to the global rise of K-pop, particularly the unprecedented popularity of BTS, whose expansive international fanbase and highly visible social media presence have significantly amplified the reach and appeal of Korean popular culture.Footnote 4
While in New Zealand, K-pop did not achieve wide circulation and broad consumption until the mid-2010s, the country did gradually embrace both Hallyu and K-pop. We have observed that both are now ubiquitous in major New Zealand cities and can be seen in many aspects of life within New Zealand’s continually diversifying population, especially in Auckland.
New Zealand is a settler colonial state with a multiethnic, multiracial, and multicultural society. Major population groups include Pākehā (67.8%), Māori (17.8%), Asian (17.3%), and Pacific (8.9%).Footnote 5 These demographics offer a compelling environment for investigating how K-pop fandom manifests and evolves in offline spaces, serving as a microcosm for understanding global–local cultural interactions.
While K-pop is likely enjoyed by New Zealanders of all backgrounds and across the country, this study specifically focuses on K-pop fans who are students attending the University of Auckland. This university, with approximately 46,000 students, is the largest of New Zealand’s eight universities and is located in the country’s largest and most densely populated city. The student population breaks down to 49% Asian, 31% Pākehā, 7% Māori, 8% Pacific, and 5% other ethnoracial groupings.Footnote 6 Given this diversity, the University of Auckland is ideal for research focused on cultural communities, alliances, and identities. Student interactions with the Asian/global popular culture juggernaut that is K-pop articulate well Auckland’s broader transnational linkages, articulations, and affinities.Footnote 7
One of the physical spaces where Hallyu and K-pop fan culture can be vividly observed in Auckland is Freyberg Place, located in Auckland’s CBD. Close to popular restaurants (including Korean), high-end shops, and the University of Auckland and AUT, the square has become a favoured gathering place for diverse communities. Groups such as KDA, K-pop Planet, and local K-pop dance cover groups Konstellation and Tteokbokki NZ have showcased their love of K-pop by organising K-pop random play dances – where participants perform dance covers (standard choreographies) without knowing in advance what the songs will be – at the square. Other Auckland sites for K-pop fan gatherings and performances include Aotea Square, Takutai Square, Te Komititanga, and Silo Park, all of which are in the CBD (see Figure 1). Outside the city centre, K-pop fandom and consumption can also be observed at various events and Asian community festivals such as the Armageddon Expo (for sci-fi, geek, and fan culture), the Lantern Festival, the Moon Festival, and the annual K-Festival. Over several years, we observed and participated in these activities and interviewed student leaders and club/group members.
Map of Auckland’s CBD showing the locales mentioned in this article.
Research methodology and framework
Inspired by K-pop activities and interactions in the city and campus, we set out to observe and document some of these activities and talk to organisers and participants. Our research looked at how K-pop and Hallyu were adapted in our local context, observing how New Zealand youth integrated music scene participation into their university life stage (Chin and Morimoto Reference Chin and Morimoto2013; Otmazgin and Lyan Reference Otmazgin and Lyan2014; Yoon Reference Yoon2018). We include stories and voices of a diverse range of students – Asian (Korean, Malaysian, and Filipino), Pākehā, and Māori – to explore how a “foreign” mass-mediated, commoditised, global pop music genre can be engaged to foster local agency, community, creativity, and ingenuity.
This research has been conducted since 2020 as a multiyear team project among two anthropology faculty members and one postgraduate student at the University of Auckland.Footnote 8 All three have been engaging with K-pop in one way or another. The student researcher has been participating in K-pop scenes in Auckland as a leader, organiser, active fan, and consumer. Like much fieldwork-oriented research during the COVID-19 pandemic, our project was greatly affected by the prolonged social restrictions in New Zealand between 2020 and 2021, and we were not able to achieve all our study goals during that period. However, we pressed on, observing the fan community and conducting interviews online during the pandemic and resuming our research in person as soon as restrictions were lifted. This paper combines participant observation, semi-structured interviews, personal stories, and reflections of our interviewees as well as of us as researchers, focusing on specific Auckland university clubs, dance groups, public dance events, and a festival. The following list documents the key interviews that informed and shaped the development of this article: Charlotte (20 January 2022); Juliette (14 August 2021); Niko (14 August 2021); Phil (31 August 2021); Sofia (14 August 2021); Elena (14 August 2021, personal reflection; 9 December 2023; 23 August 2024); Jason (7 September 2021); Martin (14 November 2021); Terina (22 November 2021).
Theoretical approaches to fandom
Like popular music genres in general, K-pop goes beyond the mere circulation and marketing of a musical product. Fans find creative ways to interact with their favourite stars and music (Yoon Reference Yoon2019). K-pop features spectacular fashion, catchy dances, elaborate staging, and flashy videos. The fashion, beauty products, and merchandise featured in K-pop music videos can lead to substantial sales and corporate sponsorships. Some fan activities can be expensive, like collecting merchandise, emulating fashion styles, buying tickets, and attending concerts. Dance performances, on the other hand, do not demand much financial expenditure and investment. Rather, grassroots fan participation, such as organising events, holding workshops, and performing in public spaces, relies on time and emotional labour and, as we found, long-term dedication and commitment to their fan/music communities. Fans organise and perform at local events, often filming their activities, editing the footage, and posting the videos to social media (e.g., on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram). In this way, fans circulate their local productions into the global fan space, showcasing their passion for and engagement in the fan culture. These local live and digital fan activities, productions, and interactions demonstrate how popular music fans and fandoms are not purely about consumption but facilitate active agents to manifest and articulate their relationships with global pop music and artists.
Back in 1979, Hebdige explored how post-war working-class UK youth signalled alliances and rebellion through their participation in punk and reggae music subcultures (Hebdige Reference Hebdige1979). His sociological study highlighted to academia how popular mass-mediated music could create distinctive local scenes and identities in opposition to “mainstream” culture. K-pop does not have the politically rebellious or anti-mainstream elements of Hebdige’s punks and mods – rather, K-pop is a billion-dollar industry and is often seen as a homogenising “commercial” enterprise. Even so, many studies on K-pop fandom have revealed that the genre is not simply about the consumption of mass-media culture but about performative and spatial practices (e.g., Liew Reference Liew and Kim2013). Our research found young people literally out in the streets of Auckland, building communities of activity, and interacting based on a shared interest in K-pop, reworking a globalised mass culture into locally structured networks and groups. This suggests that K-pop is not merely a consumable musical commodity but an affective space in which local fans actively mediate global cultural flows and reinterpret and resignify them with and according to their own social meanings, relationships, and values.
Bennett (Reference Bennett2000) used ethnography to argue that music fans are not merely passive consumers but critically engage with and interpret popular music, making their own meanings. Thornton (Reference Thornton1996), looking at dance clubs in Britain, showed how young people used their fan community knowledge and participation as “subcultural capital” to gain respect and admiration but also to be seen as being “better” (more discerning, more creative) than other pop music listeners because they were “outside the mainstream.”
Scholars in K-pop have noted that in contexts where White and Western cultural norms are dominant – such as Europe, North America, and Australia – K-pop fandom can function as a marker of a distinctive music choice (Baudinette Reference Baudinette2020; Keith et al. Reference Keith, Lam and Raphael2018; Keith et al. Reference Keith, Chik, Benson and Moloney2019; Swan Reference Swan2018; Yoon Reference Yoon2018). In these contexts, engagement with K-pop – as well as other transnational cultural products such as Japanese manga and anime – can offer cultural capital based on being “different,” “alternative,” or “cosmopolitan,” with fans seeing themselves as globally connected while also standing apart from their country’s dominant norms (Baudinette Reference Baudinette2020; Keith et al. Reference Keith, Lam and Raphael2018). Likewise, for our research participants in New Zealand, K-pop fandom was seen as unique and unusual, providing both a point of personal difference and a connection to wider transnational communities. This is despite K-pop’s commercially driven global mass-marketed capitalist consumption priorities and technology-mediated, formulaic musical elements.
Swan (Reference Swan2018) talks about how global K-pop fans are “physically dispersed, but affectively connected,” arguing that they have a “dynamic community that imagines itself as transcending national boundaries” (p. 549). Similarly, Yoon and Labarta Garcia (Reference Yoon and Labarta Garcia2024) talked about K-pop fans “realiz[ing] their identity in the global fanscapes” (p. 1674). They spoke to K-pop fans in Peru, where K-pop is considered a minor “racialised” pop music form, often disparaged, and found that the fans liked how their taste for K-pop challenged dominant sociocultural norms. In Canada, Yoon (Reference Yoon2022) also found that fans prided themselves in enjoying a non-Western genre: he viewed belonging to this scene as “mov[ing] beyond racial hierarchies and power relations” towards a transcultural “cosmopolitan utopia” (p. 198). K-pop’s “versatile cultural meanings” allowed it to be enjoyed outside its “geocultural origin” (p. 198).
Capistrano (Reference Capistrano2019) looked at Filipino K-pop fans and found that the fan community cut across and unified different socioeconomic groups. The music and fan engagement helped fans to “feel good, think positively,” and communicate with others (p. 81). In Romania, Marinescu and Balica (Reference Marinescu and Balica2013) surveyed K-pop fans. In their responses, fans talked about how K-pop made them happier and helped them through difficult moments. They enjoyed the links it gave them to the Korean language and society. Malik (Reference Malik2019) looked at Korean popular culture in Qatar. He found that, despite the geographical, linguistic, and sociocultural distances between Qatar and South Korea, Qatari Hallyu fans emotionally and culturally related to Korean TV dramas and K-pop.
Gammon (Reference Gammon2025) explored K-pop in the urban spaces of Hanoi and Hallyu consumption practices in Vietnam and Korea. She found that Hallyu in city spaces added to Hanoi’s cultural and commercial economy and argued that Hallyu and K-pop were able to simultaneously be Korean, transcultural, and global, yet localised. Zhou et al. (Reference Zhou, Yang and Zhang2025) looked at K-pop random play dance in mainland China, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Melbourne as a global fan practice. They found that through random play dance, participants fostered community and reinterpreted global pop culture in local contexts which, they argue, produced “moments of joy, energy, and collectivity.” Liew (Reference Liew and Kim2013) also examined the emergence of K-pop dance cover culture, focusing on fans who learn and perform K-pop dance covers in urban centres in Asia. Liew analyses how these fans – often called dance trackers or cover dancers – engage deeply with K-pop through embodied practice rather than passive consumption. Liew’s study made an important contribution to the study of K-pop with an emphasis on the concept of “local spatialization,” highlighting how global cultural flows are materialised through fans’ embodied performances in specific local settings (pp. 170–174). Käng (Reference Käng2013), in a study of feminine-identifying K-pop cover dancers in Thailand, built on Liew’s study and showed that K-pop challenges the “hegemonic neutrality of American pop music,” thus providing an Asian-allied culture in response to concerns about Western cultural imperialism in Thailand. Thai K-pop cover dancers embody, parody, and admire K-pop, as well as the femininities expressed through K-pop, producing their fan performances online and in live spaces. These dancing fans themselves have now become stars in their own community, “demi-idols” with their own fan bases.
While academics have observed K-pop fandoms across the globe, including Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia, there has been a paucity of research on K-pop in New Zealand, with the exception of Epstein (Reference Epstein2016), whose exploration of K-pop and the Korean Wave in the Southern Hemisphere included Australia and New Zealand. Baudinette’s (Reference Baudinette2020) analysis of Japanese and Korean popular culture consumption in Australia highlighted how engagements with K-pop enabled some White Australian fans to connect with and better understand Asian cultures and peoples in a national context of historical and contemporary debate about Australia’s relationship to the Asian region (Baudinette Reference Baudinette2020, 320). Baudinette cites Pearlman’s (Reference Pearlman2019) discussion of how Asia occupies a closed and contested place in Australian national imaginaries. Certain affective and experiential dimensions of this dynamic are also observable in New Zealand. Like Australia, New Zealand’s narratives of belonging and multiculturalism have been shaped through settler–Indigenous relations. But New Zealand also has distinctive affiliations and identification with Pacific Islands nations and peoples through immigration, economic ties, and military geopolitics. The University of Auckland mirrors these global/regional dynamics, with a student population that reflects the evolving ethnocultural landscape of New Zealand, particularly the city of Auckland. Through this context, our study addresses an existing gap by offering a case study of K-pop fandom in New Zealand, with particular attention to young fans connected to Asia at the local, national, and international levels both as citizens and as consumers of transnational popular culture. In the next section, we offer comments and insights from University of Auckland student K-pop fans from various backgrounds: Pākehā, Asian, Māori, and Pasifika. These fans explain how they see K-pop as a meaningful anchoring point for youth culture, with a positive impact on their university experiences and sense of identity/community.
K-pop planet and the stories of its members
K-pop Planet is a social club based at the University of Auckland. It was registered as an official university club in 2013. According to its founders, it started as the Anime and K-pop Club, catering to the Asian diaspora as well as non-Asians with interests in anime, manga, and K-pop. The founders’ goal was to host social gatherings and facilitate interactions between like-minded people looking for friendship and camaraderie during their university years. Over time, the club’s interests shifted to focus entirely on K-pop, with fans of anime and manga having found other avenues to express their engagement with those genres.
K-pop Planet held events fortnightly, organised by its executive committee, which met regularly. Financially, they relied on the University of Auckland’s student club support fund and nominal membership fees ($5 per person per year). K-pop Planet celebrated its tenth anniversary on 13 May 2023. The club started small in terms of its membership and scale of activities, gradually expanding as more people joined. The executive committee and regular members gradually built their confidence through their experiences running the club and organising events. The club served as a social hub for those university students interested in K-pop and Korean popular culture. It regularly organised dinners, karaoke nights, and game/trivia nights. It also facilitated opportunities for members to engage in charitable work through K-pop dance. For example, in 2021, K-pop Planet collaborated with other Auckland-based K-pop dance cover groups to raise funds for Orange Sky Aotearoa, a local organisation providing free showers and laundry services to people experiencing homelessness. Other accomplishments club members recollected over the preceding decade were the launch of the club’s own dance crew, Konstellation, in 2019, and the production of a short documentary film featuring their club and love of K-pop.
Elena, who served on K-pop Planet’s executive committee between 2019 and 2022, reminisces that the founding of Konstellation was a rather spontaneous decision. Elena recounted how one day in 2019, two University of Auckland students approached the club’s president and enquired if there was an official dance crew within the club. The president’s response was direct and inspiring: “No, but do you want to start one?” That moment marked the birth of the Konstellation dance crew. Initially, the dance crew was part of K-pop Planet and relied on the club’s support and resources: these included access to university spaces for rehearsals and performances, as well as administrative and financial assistance for dance events. Their unique presence and performance ability soon caught the attention of university staff, and they were invited to perform at cultural and promotional university events, including the university’s Open Day.
Konstellation’s talent, passion, and growing reputation began to extend beyond the university. They became a sought-after act at various events across Auckland and, eventually, New Zealand. Notably, they were featured at the Armageddon Expo, the country’s largest annual pop culture convention. Held in multiple cities, including Auckland, Christchurch, Tauranga, and Wellington, Armageddon celebrates pop culture in many forms, from TV shows to comics, games, cosplay, and animation.Footnote 9 The crew also performed at the Moon Festival, an annual event aimed at the broader Asian diasporic population in Auckland. They also took the stage at K-Festival and K-Wave, both of which feature a range of Korean performers, including local and international Korean artists and local K-pop cover groups. Even as members of Konstellation graduated from the University of Auckland, their commitment to the group did not wane. The crew’s activities continued to thrive beyond campus.
Elena shared with us that they had observed student-driven cultural initiatives expanding into broader communities, leaving a lasting impact on New Zealand’s K-pop scenes. This not only reflects the growing influence of K-pop as a global phenomenon but also how localised fan groups, such as Konstellation and K-pop Planet, in engaging with the broader university community and sharing their passion in innovative ways, contribute to the shaping of transcultural affinities.
Phil was also involved with K-pop Planet. She obtained her BA in anthropology and Japanese in 2021 and now lives in another region of New Zealand (Coromandel). Phil remembers 2015 as the year she got into K-pop: it was just after moving to Kerikeri, a small town in the upper North Island, from the South Island as a Year 11 student. A classmate showed her the video for “I Got a Boy” by Girls’ Generation (also known as SNSD). At that time, Phil was developing an interest in Japanese popular culture. She vividly remembers her first impression of the video as “something different.” She and her friends casually began to watch K-pop videos here and there, at first not knowing or caring much about it, and it took her several months to really get interested. Eventually, she became the only K-pop fan at her school.
Joining online communities and spending a lot of time on Tumblr and in KakaoTalk chatrooms enabled her to connect with other K-pop fans. Even before arriving at the University of Auckland, she knew about its K-pop club and was excited to join it once she got there. Her move to Auckland’s CBD greatly changed her life, especially in terms of her relationship with K-pop. According to Phil, before joining the club, she had no people beyond digital spaces with whom she could share her love of K-pop: “That changed entirely. I mean, being able to actually go to physical events which were centred around K-pop and hearing people just talk about K-pop in day-to-day life was just such a different experience.” Phil found her first K-pop Planet event somewhat intimidating: “It was very nerve-wracking for me […] I’d only just moved to Auckland. I am very shy. And there were so many people […] probably eighty-plus people at this event. And it was very hard to meet people, and it was just kind of jumbled.” While she was excited about meeting people who shared her interests in K-pop, she felt uncomfortable in crowded rooms full of people she didn’t know. She also had to get used to the large size of the population and peer community that she encountered at the university and in her broader CBD life. She clarified: “[Auckland] was a huge city […] so many people in Auckland seem to know each other. And I was so interested in that because how do you have these connections? I just feel like I am alone from the small town here.”
Eventually, Phil joined the K-pop Planet committee after participating in smaller club events and getting to know the members better, and she finally felt comfortable in the club. For Phil, not only was the club a place where she could meet people interested in the same music as her, it also enabled her to connect with a wider student body and begin weaving her social net as a person new to Auckland. As she indicated, being a member of the committee, which consisted of just a few members, also helped her feel comfortable in the club. In her interview, she mentioned several times how enjoyable and memorable her time on the club committee was, interacting and building friendships with other members: “I think that element of running things behind the scenes was definitely appealing. But the biggest thing definitely was the community, like the sense of community and friendship […] that is what I could make [gain] serving as a committee member.” She also expressed that her engagement with the club as a committee member and later as an event organiser gave her a sense of gratification, knowing that her work had made an impact both within and beyond the university. For example, when a video of a dance event she produced in Freyberg Place reached more than 30,000 viewers on YouTube, she felt her hard work had paid off.Footnote 10 Phil stated that since graduating, she has had little time to engage with K-pop as a fan or participate in K-pop club activities in person. However, looking back, even during her university years, K-pop, for her, proved to be less about fan identity and more about friendship and community as a small-town girl in a big city adjusting to a large-scale tertiary educational environment and city life. As a recent graduate, Phil is trying to find a full-time job, which has made it harder to find time for any serious leisure activity, which she previously had as a university student K-pop fan. She said that K-pop will always be part of her life as a memory of her university years in Auckland, where she was not alone but embraced. For Phil, K-pop provided a home away from home through cultural and transcultural affinity. Being a K-pop fan enabled her to find a comfortable space in the big city and connect with people she was meeting for the first time.
Jason is another University of Auckland graduate who was a committee member of K-pop Planet. Jason’s family moved to Auckland from Malaysia when he was 11. He graduated in 2018 with a BA in anthropology and philosophy and now owns and runs a small culinary business in Auckland’s CBD. He served as a committee member for several years and was an event coordinator for the club in 2016 and 2017. Jason is slightly older than Phil, and his exposure to K-pop started earlier than hers, although he considers himself to have never been as intense a K-pop fan as many others. Jason stated that he was a fan of Girls’ Generation starting in 2010. By 2015, when newer K-pop idol groups such as BTS and Blackpink found appeal among the broader New Zealand youth population, his interest had already begun to slow down, even if he joined K-pop Planet around that time. He said he had found the K-pop fan community cool as a subculture scene, but when it got more popular in New Zealand, he began to find it less appealing.
For Jason, joining K-pop Planet was not driven by his own interest in K-pop: rather, as an extrovert, he wanted to help shy students find community. Jason emphasised that he had made good friends and valued the student community and friendships from when he was part of club activities: “We didn’t host events to spread the word of K-pop. The events [were] created to bring members together. They just have fun and sort of create a sense of community within K-pop Planet. So my objective wasn’t to entice new people into K-pop. It was to make the people inside K-pop Planet even stronger, to essentially be friends.” Like Phil, Jason continues to maintain friendships with people he got to know through K-pop Planet.
Jason also pointed out that although K-pop participation helped many people, there was also discrimination and racism from outsiders who denigrated those who enjoyed it: “You don’t feel good liking K-pop. You were sort of made fun of and persecuted for liking it. It wasn’t something that you tell people about. It wasn’t even something that you would even mention to your friends because, yeah, it was definitely stigmatised.”
Students from diverse backgrounds or diasporic groups expressed that their engagement with K-pop in many ways has to do with identity. Diasporic Asians like Jason have a particular relationship with Asian media genres, not just K-pop but also anime, manga, and K-drama. Even though he was born in Malaysia, he views himself as culturally half diaspora and half Kiwi (New Zealander). He wanted to “be different” and find things that he felt were “alternative” to a “typical Kiwi,” and enjoying Asian popular culture was connecting to his “heritage” but also part of shaping his own unique identity as both a “local” and a “migrant.” Similar sentiments were also expressed by other K-Planet members, like Sofia and Elena, both of whom migrated to New Zealand from the Philippines in the mid-2010s as early teens. Sofia attributes her relationship with K-pop and Korean culture to the diversity of Auckland, the city where she grew up after migrating. It is clear that her love of Auckland is intertwined with her relationship with Korean culture, as growing up, her interactions with K-pop were always in that city. Similarly, Elena’s life and cultural engagement in New Zealand have been largely centred around Auckland’s CBD. They find Auckland a comfortable place to live and be themself: as the New Zealand city with the most ethnic and cultural diversity, Auckland is where they feel most welcome and “at home.”
Like Jason, 22-year-old Juliette pointed out the stigma of being a K-pop fan in New Zealand. Juliette was born into an intercultural family: her mother is Korean, and her father is Pākehā. Juliette got into K-pop around 2015, although her exposure went back much further, as her father was a casual listener while she was growing up. Juliette, who had grown up on rock music, said she had been biased against K-pop, which seemed like a manufactured product lacking in stylistic diversity and artistic authenticity. The schools she attended had predominantly Pākehā student bodies that did not find Asian popular culture appealing in the early 2010s: indeed, her friends often made fun of Asian popular culture. Juliette stated, “[I] was not really interested in that kind of stuff. Just like growing up in New Zealand, I had to adapt. Be like the whitewashed Asian, you know. But nowadays, I’ve been very into Korean culture and trying to reclaim my roots, and K-pop has kind of been helping me out with that, especially with trying to relearn Korean.”
Both Jason and Juliette expressed that being a K-pop fan before 2015 was more stigmatised then than it is today. For them, it also represented more than mere enjoyment of mediated culture. Juliette’s interest in K-pop was linked to her awareness of her heritage and the issue of her identity, which led her to take Korean classes as a university student. In contrast, for Jason, K-pop had provided the impetus for him to support his peers and help the club develop. As with many organisations, he found that K-pop Planet experienced ups and downs, dramas, and hiccups during his time with them. However, he emphasised that the social relationships he built as a K-pop fan and university student will always be with him, and he holds his favourite K-pop idols and groups close to his heart even if his fan fervour has faded.
K-pop random play dance (RPD)
Like Phil, Elena joined K-pop Planet as a club member in 2018 and became part of its executive team in 2019, eventually leaving in 2022. They took on various roles over the years: secretary, MC for events, communications manager, and social media officer, while continuously weighing in on bigger decisions for the club’s direction:
I joined K-pop Planet when I was going through a depressive episode on impulse during the club expo, wanting to push myself out of my comfort zone because I felt that there was no way out except through. I felt that the club was the answer to my listlessness; I imagined the club and the responsibilities that a committee member role entailed would give me a purpose.
Random play dances (hereafter, RPDs) are popular in Auckland as community-based events for K-pop fans. At an RPD, a medley of popular K-pop songs is played, and attendees dance along with standard choreographies. In this section, the RPD is examined as a key participatory practice within K-pop fan culture. The concept of the RPD was inspired by the South Korean variety TV show Weekly Idol and adapted to local K-pop events around the world (Zhou et al. Reference Zhou, Yang and Zhang2025). The RPD was initially a fun bonding activity rather than a competitive show of skill: more recently, expectations of quality have increased, attributable to social media sharing and friendly competition.
K-pop RPDs can be held indoors or outdoors, as long as there is enough space for many people to dance. Anyone can organise or attend them. At an RPD, players gather into a circle or two straight lines with a space in the middle. A medley of K-pop songs – traditionally edited to feature just the song’s chorus, though sometimes including dance breaks – is played. Anyone who knows the choreography to the song rushes into the middle and dances it to the best of their ability. Participants are cheered on and encouraged to join in even if they hesitate. Usually, there is no competitive aspect, either in terms of dance skill or the number of songs in which dancers participate. Fan clubs or organisations hosting RPDs might award spot prizes to anyone they feel danced exceptionally well, or they might “gamify” the event in some way. RPD events tend to foster a mutually supportive environment that encourages fans’ efforts. Less skilled dancers will seek to train before coming to the event, and many fans make K-pop RPD playlists and upload them online for public viewing and comment. Elena states, “RPDs serve many purposes: to have a good time, to show fans that there are other fans who are just as passionate about K-pop as they are, to spread K-pop songs to non-fans.”
K-pop fans may be drawn to RPDs for the sense of community and the ample opportunities they offer to make new friends through shared interests. Having a place where they can embody that feeling of being a K-pop fan gives them joy; they can see others like themselves expressing themselves and their love of K-pop in a public space. People on the sidelines cheer others on, chat with their neighbours, film their friends, or move around the crowd, searching for a better view. According to Elena, one participant she conversed with at an RPD event declared that the choreography at RPDs should feature sharp and impressive dance moves that showcase their idols’ high level of skill seen in music videos and concerts, but simplified versions of the moves should also be attainable for dedicated fans who are willing to put in the effort to learn them. Some RPD participants said there was pleasure involved in learning a choreography even if it is very challenging.
RPDs were a core means of self-expression and involvement for Elena as an undergraduate student. Elena talks about how, especially since the COVID-19 lockdowns, the K-pop RPD events have been very important for the fan community:
After attending an RPD recently after two years of lockdowns, I saw with my own eyes the energy and passion that fans had stowed away in the years of lockdowns. People were grateful to be together again and made it obvious through their cheers, outfits, and passionate dancing. Despite K-pop’s habitat seemingly within online spaces, no one can doubt that K-pop fans value these in-person gatherings just as much, if not more so, as online interactions.
Terina, a founder of KDA, frequently organises K-pop RPD events in New Zealand. In sharing her experience, she stated that she was “captivated” by the dancing in K-pop music videos and found learning the moves very “exciting and fulfilling.” In 2019, Terina and her friends formed KDA with an eye to hosting RPDs and posting their dance covers on social media. Since then, they have performed K-pop dance covers around Auckland on a reasonably regular basis throughout the year. KDA chooses the time and location of the RPDs and organises the playlists and filming of these events. Their RPD videos are uploaded monthly and are labelled as filmed in Auckland, New Zealand, thus bringing New Zealand into the spotlight of global K-pop fandoms. Many of their videos, hosted on KDA’s official channel, amass tens of thousands of views. Their channel and videos sit alongside the many other videos of K-pop RPDs posted online: fans are clearly hungry to see how other fans in different locations participate in their shared global fan community.
K-festival
On 14 August 2021, the K-Festival was held at the Trusts Arena in Auckland. The festival was organised into three zones: exhibition, experience, and food. Despite being a Korean cultural event, the food stalls included diverse cuisines such as Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese, as well as standard snack fare like ice cream and hot chips (French fries). This eclectic mix of food offerings highlighted the multicultural crowd the festival attracted and suggested that perhaps there were not enough Korean food vendors in Auckland to cater for the event fully.
The Exhibition Zone was filled with traditional elements of Korean culture, including a wall timeline of Korean history, calligraphy stalls, and a rental station for hanbok (traditional Korean dress) for photographs. The performances in the Experience Zone offered a balanced representation of traditional and modern Korean culture. Traditional dances such as fan and sword dances were performed by both older and younger dancers; in contrast, almost all K-pop dancers were young (with Konstellation and Defy Dance featured).
Commercialisation and sponsorship at the K-Festival were apparent, particularly by Samsung and the soju (distilled rice spirit) brand Jinro. The presence of non-Korean politicians and sponsors – some of whom awkwardly mispronounced basic Korean phrases – was a reminder of the intertwining of cultural events and economic and political interests. Even so, this was a moment of cultural celebration, not just about Korean culture but also at the interface between Korean and local New Zealand cultures. A well-attended and well-received performance on the song stage was that of Taylor&Roses, a Māori singer performing BTS songs in te reo Māori (the Māori language). Other performances of K-pop songs by Sāmoan and Tongan artists, such as Mel and Rome, were indicative of the festival committee’s effort to reflect New Zealand’s various communities and cultures. Another key feature of the K-Festival programme was a 30-minute K-pop RPD, during which the audience was invited to participate alongside dancers from K-pop cover groups.
According to Elena, she attended the event with Sofia, Niko, and Juliette. They had interesting conversations during and especially after the event. Travelling together back home in the same car, Sofia remarked how much she was impressed by Taylor&Roses and appreciated her performance, since Taylor&Roses had learned Korean, translated K-pop songs into te reo Māori, and posted her cover performances on social media:
I just was thinking about how amazing of a display that whole performance was of cultural exchange and appreciation, like after properly thinking of how much work it took to properly understand the emotions and nuances of the original Korean lyrics and then try to accurately express those in her native language. […] It’s so meaningful and deep, and she’s so humble and honest about her work. And I just kinda compared all her work to those speakers that were invited on stage who spoke one word of Korean and horribly butchered it, but still sounded so smug? [I don’t know] if that’s the right word but they just sounded like that was enough cultural participation, and they didn’t even bother putting effort into making sure it sounded even a little bit right.
Sofia’s remark and Elena’s experience attending the event prompted Elena to comment on how a cultural festival can be influenced by external agendas and used as a political and economic platform.
Nonetheless, the event was organised to cater to both Korean migrants in New Zealand and non-Korean New Zealanders, with South Korean tourism as a focus. This arrangement also included the promotion of Korean products like soju and the latest models of Samsung phones. The use of Korean traditional or cultural elements like dances, rituals, traditional dress, and language was curated, assembled, and presented.
Juliette, who is half Korean, expressed that she did not feel connected to her heritage in attending the event. While her individual experience may not be representative of the ideas or perspectives of Korean Aucklanders in general, it is still notable that she strongly felt this event was not for her. Meanwhile, Sofia and Niko were excited to have an event that offered Korean culture in a way that also validated their own identity as Aucklanders. As mentioned earlier, Sofia is a Filipina who migrated to New Zealand with her family as an early teen. Niko is a Māori New Zealander who identifies as a K-pop fan. The excerpts that follow, drawn from the conversations between Niko and Sofia in reaction to Taylor&Roses’s performance, show how people resignify K-pop to refine and define their own unique identities.
Niko: I just thought it was really cool, right from the beginning, knowing that […] I don’t know, to hear my own language [te reo Māori] […] in something that I also enjoy and songs that I love. I don’t know, it’s just like two of my favourite things coming together, making one amazing thing.
Sofia: Do you feel that it’s more personal to you?
Niko: Yeah, it definitely, like makes the songs—I feel like I can actually connect to them a bit more. Because even though I don’t understand the Korean lyrics, I can still like vibe to it. But then hearing it in te reo [Māori], it hits a bit harder. And I guess that’s what it’s already like, for people who speak Korean, who are Korean, but I don’t know, I guess hearing things in your own language is always different.
Sofia: Yeah, it’s like speaking to your soul a bit more.
Niko: You actually feel it on a different level.
Sofia: Because, you know, there’s that whole—sorry, I’m just like, adding on to it—the whole theme about K-pop music transcending borders and all that, but she put extra effort in making it reach certain people.
Niko: And also like really connects more directly? Yeah, like really brings everything together like not just like me on a personal level but like other people in New Zealand.
Even if these young students who identify as K-pop fans attended the K-Festival out of their personal interest in Korean culture and the K-pop event at the festival, they were moved by the cultural intertwinement of local artists performing K-pop in te reo Māori, New Zealand’s Indigenous language, leading Niko, as an Indigenous person, to feel even more connected to and aligned with this performance of K-pop.
Meaning and makings
According to our study, Hallyu and K-pop have had a transformative impact on both Koreans and non-Koreans in Auckland. The music, the fandom, and the scene offered our participants an alternative cultural experience to “typical” Western pop music. The K-Festival organisers we interviewed found that this dimension of fan participation brought them out of online fan spaces and gave them positive memories of this life phase. They acknowledged that while the event was not organised to promote Hallyu and K-pop, it gave them an opportunity to be with their community in person and to creatively express their fan identity. The random play dance enthusiasts we interviewed enjoyed the physical embodiment aspect of their participation, which they manifested at K-pop cultural events in the city of Auckland. These face-to-face events, in turn, became online phenomena and part of digital global K-discourse, with the event videos garnering thousands of views. The K-pop Planet organisers who shared their stories with us spoke of how their fan activities gave them confidence and practical experience that would later translate into employable skills. They offered examples of their personal journeys into deeper fan engagement over time.
For some fans, like Terina and Phil, K-pop became a form of novel entertainment that allowed them to see themselves as “outside the norm” and “different” in New Zealand but also as globally connected, part of a broader movement, in some ways transcending nation and ethnicity. Phil and Terina, who both grew up in small North Island towns, were introduced to K-pop during high school. In their schools’ relatively homogeneous environments, they initially explored K-pop in isolation – Phil through online platforms like Tumblr and YouTube, Terina with her friends. Moving to a bigger city like Auckland opened new doors for their fan practices. In Auckland, as a university student and new resident of the city, Phil began to meet new people with whom she could share her interests. Terina similarly found that Auckland’s larger communities in terms of size and demographics allowed her K-pop passion to flourish free of the judgement she had felt in her hometown. Charlotte, on the other hand, shared her experience of when she moved from Auckland to Wellington, where the population is smaller and less diverse than in Auckland. She felt there was a kind of snobbery in Wellington towards K-pop, where it was seen as manufactured, commodified, inauthentic pop music, despite the growing participation and acceptance of the music across New Zealand, as this paper has shown. As a student pursuing a Bachelor of Design majoring in photography, Charlotte admitted to being surrounded by “a lot of very artistic people” who looked down on K-pop. She stated:
They always say like, oh, but it’s a sort of factory-made, that sort of thing. Like, they’re all just manufactured. But I think that, like it’s very much a shallow perspective on K-pop. And I wish people like were able to dive in a bit more, because they would actually be surprised.
While living in Wellington may make being a fan slightly harder than it had been for her in Auckland, Charlotte continues to be a K-pop fan, and she continues to maintain her engagement with K-pop through social media.
For fans like Jason and Juliette, K-pop provided a way to connect with their identity. Jason, of Malaysian descent, found in K-pop a reflection of Asian media that resonated more with him than did New Zealand’s mainstream culture, whereas Juliette, who is half Korean and half Pākehā, experienced a more complex relationship with K-pop, as the genre deepened her connection to her identity.
Other students engaged with K-pop as more of a passing interest, like Martin, who is Korean: it was something that kept him and his peers occupied during lockdown but without turning into a long-standing interest or a defining aspect of his life. Almost all informants expressed that their enjoyment of K-pop music, their creation of or participation in K-pop events, and their interactions with other K-pop fans as students were a highlight of their university life phase. Moving to Auckland and joining diverse university populations exposed them to people from different backgrounds. K-pop was accessible and facilitated a sense of community, connection, and identity for them, making Auckland feel like “home.”
There were different degrees of engagement among our participants. Sofia connected her love for Korean culture to a way of enjoying the city’s diversity, whereas Martin preferred to engage with K-pop more passively. Others, like Elena, found that the interactive aspects of fandom offered opportunities to build leadership skills by taking on organisational roles. Elena also ended up performing dances at the university and other public city spaces. Phil and Jason explored K-pop relatively early (before the mid-2010s), finding their community in digital platforms like Tumblr, YouTube, and Facebook. Online spaces have certainly played a big role for K-pop fans both before and after they became university students, particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, moving their fan activities to physical spaces, face-to-face experiences, and embodied participation (dance and community organising) led our participants to feel a greater sense of belonging to both local and transnational K-pop culture (with their local participation in turn shared online). K-pop and Korean culture were a key part of their experiences as university students in Auckland. Taken together, these discussions exemplify how a highly mediated and globalised genre can inspire localised activity and creativity in disparate global spaces.
This paper has focused on what K-pop in Auckland, New Zealand, reveals about the role pop music can play in the lives of young adults. The example of Auckland echoes the tremendous effect K-pop and Hallyu has had on non-Korean fans worldwide. For the participants who shared their stories for this research, their relationship to K-pop, as fans – whether active or passive – and as members of clubs, organisers of events, or dancers in public squares, has led to further opportunities such as language learning, organisational skills, peer support, and mentoring. Their K-pop journey helped them through a confronting time in their life and gave them joyful memories, lasting friendships, and useful skills. Music fan participation helped ease these young New Zealanders’ passage through new social contexts, unfamiliar living situations, and foundational life phases.
Acknowledgements
We thank all our participants who, directly and indirectly, contributed to our understanding of Hallyu and K-pop culture in Auckland. In particular, we thank the students and individuals who kindly spared their time to share their experiences of and passion for Hallyu and K-pop activities. And thanks to Mona-Lynn Courteau and Luka Amber Anapu-Bunnin, who helped us refine our publication with invaluable comments, editing suggestions, and proofreading. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their generous time and fruitful comments on the draft of this article and the editorial team of the International Journal of Asian Studies. This research was supported by two generous grants: the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Arts Research Development Fund and the Strategic Research Institute Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2022-SRI-2200001).
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