Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1464-9373 (Print) 1469-8447 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riac20

East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian

consumption

C. J. W.-L. Wee

To cite this article: C. J. W.-L. Wee (2016) East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian
consumption, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 17:2, 305-315, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2016.1184428

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2016.1184428

Published online: 21 Jun 2016.

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 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES, 2016
VOL. 17, NO. 2, 305–315
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2016.1184428

East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian consumption

C. J. W.-L. WEE

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article focuses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that cultural studies; East Asia;
became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the pop culture; consumption/
circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed consumerism
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linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work

indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the
globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be national
in origin but can hail from different national origins – and this despite the
existing political realities of the region and its history of political fractures.
Chua Beng Huat cautions, though, that the national popular can also be
marshalled to defeat the border-crossing potential of an inter-Asian pop
culture. What is the “Asia” imagined or being represented in such cultural
production? Chua’s work is also distinctive in that it deals with the political
and economic conditions that underpin mainstream pop consumption as a
socio-cultural phenomenon, instead of examining consumption as identity
politics. The article concludes by noting the significance that Chua as an
institutional builder has played in enabling the study of East Asian pop
culture in the region.

Professor Chua Beng Huat’s work on East Asian “sustained economic growth had translated
pop culture is significant in the manner by into a rapid expansion of consumerism as part
which the development of a multilingual and of daily life,” so that
multi-format pop culture can be indexed
[i]ndeed by the time of 1997 economic crisis in
against the emergence of the 1980s “East Asia, the broad-based expansion of consump-
Asian Miracle” economies that, perhaps unsur- tion had already been established in most of
prisingly, deepened a regional desire for mod- the affected locations in industrialised East
ern cultural formations that could accompany and Southeast Asia[,] … spawned not only
this expansive economic buoyancy. His earlier by rapid economic growth in contemporary
Asia but also by the global expansion of consu-
work on consumption and its link with urban
merism. (Chua 2000a, 1, 2)
culture goes back to at least 1990, with his
essay “Steps to Become a Fashion Consumer That is to say, increased consumerism relates to
in Singapore.” Many of the essays or articles both national and regional economic growth
related to Singapore have been collected in and in relation to the expansion of consumer-
Life is Not Complete without Shopping: Con- ism worldwide – the different levels interact
sumption Culture in Singapore (Chua 2003a).1 and it is not one level that is paramount. The
Beng Huat’s fundamental stance is that con- clear implication is also that the 1997 crisis
sumption inevitably increases with an emerging will not in itself dampen the ongoing “expan-
middle class, and during the Miracle years, sion of consumerism.”

CONTACT C. J. W.-L. Wee cjwlwee@ntu.edu.sg

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 306 C. J. W.-L. WEE

The following assessment by one of the few issue, “The Cultural Studies cluster was insti-
American cultural critics to even notice “resur- tuted because it was an emergent field in Asia
gent” Asia in the 1990s, Fredric Jameson, of (the and yet to exist in NUS.” His leadership in the
weakness of) Japanese cultural power at the Cluster created a distinctive space where inter-
height of their bubble economy underlines a disciplinary work on the pop culture of not
central issue on cultural productivity and the only East Asia, but also of Singapore, Southeast
sustaining of everyday economic development Asia and South Asia across a variety of media
that Beng Huat’s work unintentionally but in was enabled, and a productive network of scho-
effect questions: lars fostered.
[I]t does seem to me that fresh cultural pro-
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duction and innovation – and this means in

Beyond binary oppositions in pop-
the area of mass-consumed culture – are the
crucial index of the centrality of a given area cultural formations
and not its wealth or productive power. [ … What is the image of “East Asia” that surfaces
Despite] Sony’s acquisition of Columbia Pic-
tures [in 1989] and Matsushita’s buyout of through the burgeoning pop culture that we
MCA [in 1990], … the Japanese were unable see since the 1980s? And does it exceed clichéd
to master the essentially cultural productivity binary notions of the local and localities in
required to secure the globalization process opposition to the universal and hegemonic
for any given competitor. Whoever says the modern West?
production of cultures says the production of
There are a number of positions that Beng
everyday life – and without that, your econ-
omic system can scarcely continue to expand Huat takes that mark his writing from his
and implant itself. (Jameson 1998, 67) studies on Singapore to his later examination
of East Asian pop culture. One key position fol-
Jameson, unsurprisingly, was unaware of the lows from how consumerism and consumerist
wave of Japanese pop culture in East and South- culture from “elsewhere” interact with local
east Asia occurring at the precise point of the desires for consumption, given economic devel-
publication of his chapter in 1998. The impor- opment: he was and remains against a notion of
tant implication of Beng Huat’s work is that blunt Americanisation or cultural imperialism,
the “cultural productivity” that could support if that meant that the “invasion” of Western
and “secure” the region’s interconnected econ- goods and culture under the condition of rising
omic system need not be national, but could prosperity would threaten the cultural identity
come about from a number of different national of Singapore youths. This stand similarly
locations – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and applies to various forms of Chinese-language
Korea – and jointly reproduce the cross-border pop music that circulated in the city-state in
“production of [a] daily life” that reinforces the the 1980s and 1990s:
region’s ongoing capitalist production, even if
the challenge of regional nationalism continues Indeed, a major teenage phenomenon in Sin-
to exist.2 gapore is the “fandom” of Mandarin and Can-
tonese pop-singers from Taiwan and Hong
Equally important in relation to Beng Huat’s
Kong. The reference point for Singapore’s
achievement in this inter-Asian arena of both youths is, therefore, a global mix of images
social and cultural study was the related insti- of “youth”, instead of confusion. However,
tution building undertaken at the Cultural consumption of global images unavoidably
Studies Cluster that he started in 2005 at the passes through local cultural and political con-
Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National ditions. (Chua 2003b, 27)
University of Singapore (NUS); as he puts it The local does comingle with the difference
himself in the Interview that appears in this from various “other” cultures West and East –
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 307

namely, the “global mix” of Euro-American and Hallyu from the late 1990s – beyond the then-
Hong Kong- and Taiwan-related pop cultures; dominant confines of Cantonese and Mandarin
but this comingling and therefore erasure of TV dramas, film and pop music from Hong
binary positions does not confuse and does Kong and Taiwan, the trajectory of Beng
not eradicate but instead passes through the Huat’s work on Asian consumption and
lens and practices of the local – even when middle-class formation expanded to cover
what arrives are supposed notions of Chinese- “Asia.” It was one thing to have some sort of
ness that from some perspectives ought to ethnic Chinese realm of cultural circulation,
directly relate to a city-state that is 75% ethnic even if a number of Chinese languages have to
Chinese. If any binary discourse of “‘Asian’ ver- be taken into account, but Cantonese or Man-
sus ‘Western’ values” (Chua 2000a, 28)3 is to be darin speakers consuming foreign-language
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rejected, so are discourses on the Asian or even TV dramas in Japanese or Korean at a popular
the Chinese. “Us” impinging upon “them” is too and not high-cultural level? That was new.5
simplistic an analytical take in the study of Beng Huat wrote (accurately) in 2000:
inter-Asian cultural production.
It is obvious that the [1997 Asian] economic
Chua Beng Huat also tends not to be overly crisis has not, and will not, lead to a regression
concerned with the theoretical and analytical to before the days of the “miraculous” growth
considerations of what he calls “postmodern of the 1960s. When recovery comes around,
writers,” here referring to some versions of cul- and as confidence expands, the “consumption
tural studies criticism done on both sides of the of lifestyles” will surely begin again. (Chua
2000b, xiv)
Atlantic (Chua 2000a, 5), which treat style as
the resistant expression of subjective individual But no one could have fully anticipated the mas-
or collective identities. Instead, his focus is on sive and rapid developments that transpired.
“the political and economic conditions that We might say that the essays collected and
underpin consumption as a social cultural reworked for Beng Huat’s (2012a) Structure,
phenomenon, at a time when these conditions Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Cul-
have been often neglected by many analyses ture collectively ask the question: is there really
which are focused on consumption purely as a such an entity now apparently pop-culturally
form of identity politics” (Chua 2000a, 29). It imagined into existence called “East Asian Pop
is not that he rejects identity politics as a perti- Culture”? The book deploys a distinction
nent issue in the then-pronounced mode of cul- between “pop culture” (profit-driven mass
tural (and indeed literary) studies criticism in entertainment) and “popular culture” (“the lar-
the 1980s and the 1990s; rather, Beng Huat ger cultural sphere that encompasses the every-
rejects the study of consumption “purely” (as day life of the masses in contradiction to and
he emphasises it) as identity politics, as that contestation with elite culture” [Chua 2012a,
ignores the significance of mainstream pop cul- 9]). As cultural critic Meaghan Morris observes
ture and its relation to the imagining of a trans- of Beng Huat’s scholarship in “‘Doing’ Cultural
national Asia – when, it is often argued, there is Studies: Chua Beng Huat on Popular Culture”
no such cultural entity as Asia (Sakai 2000). (this issue),
As the East Asian pop cultural scene quite
surprisingly expanded in the 1990s – it com- One distinguishing feature of Chua Beng
menced with what I call the first but smaller Huat’s work … is that it stays close to com-
mon meanings in methodologically significant
regional Japanese wave in the 1980s, then the
ways. [Structure, Audience and Soft Power] …
much-more pronounced Japanese wave tran- certainly begins with [Stuart] Hall’s basic dis-
spired in the 1990s (Wee 1997; Chua 2003c),4 tinction between the commercial products of
followed of course by the Korean wave or the cultural industries and popular culture
 308 C. J. W.-L. WEE

understood as “the larger cultural sphere that While Beng Huat modestly describes Struc-
encompasses the everyday life of the masses ture, Audience and Soft Power as an “introduc-
in contradiction to and contestation with tory text” that “parasitic[ally] … draws on the
elite culture”. However, unlike many scholars
who share this starting-point Chua does not existing [research – and especially empirical
use it to divorce the study of media production research –] material in order to attempt a rela-
from that of consumption practices. From the tively coherent mapping of the contours of the
outset he situates both as participating along object of analysis” (Chua 2012a, 1), the book
with governmental forces in the creation of a is more an innovative setting out of what he
“cultural economy”. Furthermore, he main-
believes are the most salient intellectual and
tains across all his work an emphasis on the
largeness of the popular as an encompassing practical approaches to enable flexible research
cultural sphere. (Emphasis in original) strategies and approaches to pop-cultural
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studies of East Asia to escape the trap of being

Morris’s observation further indicates why the stuck in binary opposition. Fundamentally, the
question of minority resistance is not prioritised book thinks through, first, the boundary cross-
in Beng Huat’s work, as that emphasis would ings that are incurred in both pop-cultural pro-
detract from the flexible and multiple examin- duction and consumption (specifically, the
ation of pop culture taken in interaction between audience reception of pop programmes or per-
the media companies and the large audience that formances); second, the need for comparative
they desire – and so, another binary opposition analyses to gain non-national perspectives on
is breached, that of the producer and the consu- cultural phenomena; third, the possibilities of
mer. Conjoining producer and consumer in turn imagining East Asia, given the existing political
allows an understanding of how the two may realities of modern East Asian national-state
then in turn relate to a third entity, the “govern- formation and a historical record of conflicts;
mental forces” that may seek to foster “a cultural and fourth, the difficulty in gaining any effective
economy” and perhaps even obtain soft-power national “soft power” advantage from pop-cul-
benefits from the “largeness of the popular” in tural success, when we take into account the
question. The possibility of engaging with such regional history of political fracture. As with
“largeness” then allows us to think in turn Beng Huat’s earlier work on consumption on
about the “Asia” that emerges from the produ- Singapore, the existence of the local makes lar-
cers of an inter-East Asian pop culture. ger regional(ising) or global(ising) culturalist
The socio-cultural phenomena surveyed imperatives challenging. However, he cautions
from the 1990s, along with a significant amount that local here can also be mobilised by states
of the research in the field that Beng Huat has to become the national-popular or national-cul-
reviewed, taken together, “constitute a larger tural that can defeat the border-crossing
entity of East Asia Pop Culture as a loosely inte- capacity and potential of inter-Asian pop cul-
grated cultural economy” (Chua 2012a, 5). So ture (I will return to this issue later).
an actual integrated regional economy exists,
even if loosely so, and there is a more socio-cul-
How does pop culture Asia exist?
tural sense of the East Asian that comes about:
the audience reception to (particularly) televi- The research approaches listed above as to how
sion dramas “evinces the emergent possibility East Asian pop culture might be examined is in
of a sense of the ‘pan-East Asia/n’, which does accord with Beng Huat’s inclination to think
not amount to a stable identity but, neverthe- about “the political and economic conditions
less, retains a certain coherence” (Chua 2012a, that underpin consumption” (Chua 2000a, 6)
xii).6 We definitely see something – but what rather than about content. The content of any
exactly is it that we see? cultural product is evanescent, here today and
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 309

gone before it is barely tomorrow, though The appearance of a multilingual and multi-for-
content mat East Asian pop culture that, since the
1990s, followed but also exceeded the cultural
necessarily constitute[s] some of the empirical
material for analysis. The larger analytic inter- and more established boundaries set by, what
est should be oriented towards the structures Beng Huat calls, “Pop Culture China” therefore
and modalities through which the products can be taken to be part of the emergent “struc-
partake in the political, social, cultural, and ture of feeling” that is “ubiquitous [and] yet,
economic material relations within the differ- ambivalently felt.” Japanese and then Korean
ent locations where the products are pro-
pop culture from the 1990s seemed, as it were,
duced, circulated, and consumed. (Chua
2012a, 12) comfortable with the predispositions of “globa-
lised” capital – and so there is the debordering
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This assertion is to be noted for certainly both both of pop music as a medium and of the
literary and cultural criticism have not perhaps national-linguistic spaces of pop music and cul-
been thorough enough in siting their analyses ture. Can such new cultural productions over-
of pop culture or subculture within their econ- come the older fractious nationalisms from
omic contexts, in particular. Nevertheless, the Cold War and before? Beng Huat’s work
Beng Huat’s position, I think, requires some pushes onwards the process of “generating
qualification, and I shall return to this later. new questions” on the “‘rise’ of Asia”. His
The point here is that he makes effective use research agenda for East Asian pop culture
of this grounded and material approach in has fed into what has become featured in the
his book to thinking through Pop Culture journal itself, and Structure, Audience and Soft
Asia. Power in a sense looks back retrospectively
Importantly, the concern with “political and not only to what he has attempted individually
economic conditions” and the question of but what through the journal and his personal
“Asia” is part of the overall trajectory of the and institutional interaction with scholars in
journal project of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies the region – particularly through the work of
itself that Beng Huat has been involved with the Cultural Studies Cluster at NUS – has
from its inception. The original editorial state- been helped into intellectual and academic
ment for the journal firmly lays out the agenda: existence.
Since the 1980s, a pervasive rhetoric of the I now offer what I take to be some of the
“rise” of Asia has come to mean more than most acute insights that emerge from the trajec-
the concentrated flow of capital into and out tory of Beng Huat’s scholarship and proposed
of the region. It has come to constitute a struc- methodology in Structure, Audience and Soft
ture of feeling that is ubiquitous yet ambigu- Power. To begin with, there is a reminder that
ously felt throughout Asia. Historically, this
feeling of the “rise of Asia” is complicated by new communication technologies, the expan-
the region’s colonial past. While Asia’s politi- sion of TV stations and innovative means of
cal, cultural and economic position in the glo- broadcasting content through satellite TV and
bal system will continue to fluctuate, there is a then through the internet has helped the circu-
need to question and critique the rhetorical lation of TV dramas from Japan and South
unities of both the “rise” and of “Asia”. …
Korea in the region. Drawing upon the work
[The journal’s] political agenda is to move
across: state/national/sub-regional divisions, of Shim Doobo and others, he also reminds
scholarship and activism. … For this reason his reader that the political context of the weak-
the project is more interested in generating ening of authoritarian regimes allowed for the
new questions or finding ways of asking ques- liberalisation of the media: pop-cultural expan-
tions differently, than providing fixed answers. sion did not occur in a void. And in relation to
(Chen and Chua 2008)
the prominent presence of new cultural
 310 C. J. W.-L. WEE

production in the region, Beng Huat elevates China. Pop Culture China itself, he stresses, is a
TV drama production as the most significant decentred structure and identity: “The configur-
form, as he observes that film screenings and ation of Pop Culture China is materially and
pop music have smaller audience numbers. symbolically without center; any search for a
There is also a vital chapter on Pop Culture cultural center would be in vain” (Chua 2012a,
China in the book. By this he does not mean 39). With multiple language productions in
pop culture that emerges from mainland Hokkien Chinese or minnan hua ([or minnan
China but the complex totality of pop-cultural language] and the differences in what that
production in various Chinese languages – language signifies in Singapore, where it is
mainly from Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is note- repressed and fading, and Taiwan, where it is
worthy that the burst of Japanese and then Kor- dynamic and also called “Taiwanese”8), Canto-
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ean dramas and pop music that emerge from nese and Mandarin, and the challenges that
the 1990s follow the existing distribution flow also arise when producers try to subtitle pro-
of Pop Culture China, and new possibilities of grammes for different Chinese-language mar-
“Asian” identity/ies are enabled, given the kets in demarcated national contexts, the term
layered flows of culture: “Chinese” as a term of reference becomes
problematic:
Without the massive and well-established Pop
Culture China market and its audience that Within the contemporary context, following
receives the Japanese and the Korean pop cul- the practice of Singapore, “Huaren” [Chinese
tures within different Chinese languages, flows people] can be adopted as a nation-neutral
and exchange and exchanges between Japan, but ethnically- and culturally-marked identity,
Korea and other particular East Asian reserving the term “Chinese” for those who are
locations would be merely bilateral rather citizens of China and who could be of Han
than regional. (Chua 2012a, 5, emphasis descent, or be from any of the officially-recog-
added) nized “minority” nationalities. In this context,
local sentiments have provided, and will con-
This chapter offers a salutary but significant tinue to provide, the necessary ideological
reminder to not forget the forms of Chinese cul- resources for the construction of differences
tures that were essential to the rise of a now see- between Huaren of different locations, rather
mingly cosmo-glossy East Asian-ness, especially than building on any idea of a shared “Chi-
nese” identity. (Chua 2012a, 37)
when we take into account the ongoing Korean
pop (or K-Pop) attempts to exceed East Asia The above is partially a critical response to Shih
and to circulate into the USA7 – the final post- Shu-Mei’s concept of the Sinophone, which rep-
colonial pop-cultural frontier – and recently resents her attempt to circumvent the increas-
into Latin America (Trivedi 2013). Beng ing dominance of the mainland as the central
Huat’s inter-Asian adumbration of the link of reference for a monolithic Chinese identity.9
Pop Culture China to the newer East Asian While Beng Huat is aware of the ideological
pop culture has not been significantly picked work that Shih intends, in view of the multiple
up by the existing scholarship and thus awaits Chinese languages even in pop cultural pro-
further investigation to understand how this duction, he enquires: if “‘Francophone’ refers
connection modifies an idea of “Asia” beyond to speakers of French and ‘Anglophone’ refers
(the now-established and also sometimes to speakers of English, then to which Chinese
clichéd) notions of Chinese business networks. language [never mind the added complexity of
Indeed, a particular aspect of Beng Huat’s English-speaking Chinese-Singaporeans] does
thinking on “Chinese culture” that should not the ‘Sino’ in ‘Sinophone’ refer?” (Chua 2012a,
be missed is a critical aside as to how we can 35). Of course, he is well-aware of China’s rising
think of Chinese culture(s) outside of mainland significance as a locale for consumption and
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 311

potential production of mass culture – and the ideologically and strategically only available to
possible nationalistic reinforcing of monolithic the non-audience population. (Chua 2012a,
notions of being Chinese that is detrimental to 134)
the region’s plural Chineseness: “China … is “East Asia” can be culturally evoked; but this
likely [in due course] to emerge as a major trans-local identity can also be defeated by
exporter of pop culture in the near future: evi- calls to national solidarity – an older national
dence is already observable. Until then, with modernity can still defeat the desire for a
Taiwan and Hong Kong as intermediaries, Japa- more multicultural post-national identity.
nese and Korean pop culture is [sic] incorpor- I conclude this section with two responses to
ated and integrated into the larger East Asian Professor Chua’s vibrant intervention in the
Pop Culture sphere” (Chua 2012a, 16). What realm of East Asian pop-culture studies. The
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are the unknowns for regional cultural pro- first response is to the question of “content,”
duction and reception that the future portends mainly narrative content, as it appears in film
in relation to China? and television dramas. Pop-cultural content in
However, the above does not imply that Beng dramas of course can be (and often is) clichéd
Huat thinks audiences sit down and feel “East and disposable, but some programmes will pos-
Asian” in some direct sense when watching sess more high-grade and imaginative content,
East Asian TV dramas: he offers empirical or might stand out as representing or even
research that indicates that both identification creating a possibility-filled socio-cultural
and distancing can occur when audiences moment. For example, Fuji TV’s Tokyo Love
respond to Japanese and Korean teledramas. Story (1991; Tōkyō rabu sutori) was the drama
Dubbing the programme into the domestic that helped lead the revivified Japanese cultural
language can make it more local – but there is wave in televisual dramas in the 1990s. Its gen-
also a pleasure in watching foreignness and der-role-breaking heroine was unhesitating in
famous regional icons on TV, such as Tokyo her choice of the man she wanted, even if she
Tower or the Bund. Inter-Asian pop culture does not win him in the end from his more
offers a not-quite-post-national experience socially submissive former high-school class-
that is, however, still multicultural. This point mate.10 On display was an emancipated attitude
follows from the earlier work on Singapore on that contrasted with, say, the heroine of the film
the foreign being filtered through the lens of The World of Suzie Wong (1960), with Suzie’s
the local. Still, his thinking that the partially dependent attitude on her American hero.
domesticated sense of a national foreignness Tokyo Love Story was a surprise hit in Taiwan,
that does not quite go away, combined with Hong Kong and, in 1997, also in China, trans-
his observation that those who do not consume lated as Dongjing Ai de Gushi. Tokyo itself, as
East Asian Pop Culture will outnumber those the foremost East Asian metropolis, seemed a
who do, lead to his conclusion that any Japanese key part of the serial’s popularity.11 Perhaps
or Korean reach for “soft power” through pop- unsurprisingly, the urbanising-industrialising
cultural exports will be hard to fulfil: developments related to the East Asian econ-
the pop culture sphere rubs up against the lar- omic success in the 1980s, resulting in both
ger public sphere of which it is a part. In every the possibilities and difficulties of new ways of
case, the ensuing contest is ideologically being-in-the-world, would be enmeshed with
unequal, reinforced by the unequal size of cultural production from the 1990s onwards.
the non-audience of imported pop culture. Film and, it might be added, televisual dramas
The sign of the “nation”, and with it the ima-
are aesthetic technologies suited for the rep-
gined national public sphere and national cul-
ture [i.e. the national popular], is discursively/ resentation and narrativising of social worlds
 312 C. J. W.-L. WEE

– here worlds related to a putative regional Korean TV dramas to become the main com-
economic system. Narrative figurations, Fredric ponent in Hallyu, make us rethink the signifi-
Jameson has contended, have a “structure [that] cance of music and its present role in the
encourages a soaking up of whatever ideas [are] imagining of contemporary Asia. The regional
in the air [ … Film as] narrative [text] today live concerts, from Tokyo to Jakarta, by K-Pop
conflates ontology with geography and end- stars since at least 2010 (with the singers singing
lessly processes images of the unmappable and speaking in Japanese, and to a lesser extent
[world capitalist] system” (Jameson 1992, 4). in Mandarin and English12), and the DVDs that
The studying of key content in representative are recorded of such concerts, fulfil the commu-
or otherwise significant productions requires nity-creating process as Beng Huat outlines it
some understanding of “the structures and and become one major way to encourage the
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modalities through which the products partake consumption of Korean pop music. A trans-
in the political, social, cultural, and economic local staging of Asia transpires in the concerts,
material relations” (Chua 2012a, 12). in which – as a Japanese performance studies
The second response pertains to the signifi- colleague of mine says of some contemporary
cance of pop music – more specifically its live Japanese performance – “‘the national’ is
performance, recording and distribution/broad- assumed as given, but somehow, something
cast – in relation to how, as Beng Huat phrases oozes out of the ‘national’ boundaries, to the
it, the “statistically overwhelming presence of a extent that those boundaries become opaque,
passive audience can be transformed into an almost invisible, though not necessarily sub-
audience ‘community’ or ‘communities’” verted” (Uchino 2011).
(Chua 2012a, 104). We can take to heart what
he indicates is at stake in the making visible of
Institution building
a consuming community – be it through a live
concert, fans turning out for stars appearing at Finally, there is the question of Beng Huat’s role
a shopping centre, etc.: as an institution builder. The Asia Research
Institute at NUS was set up in 2001. On its web-
First, the individuals that gather, without any
prior organization, become aware of others site, we are told that: “The mission of the Insti-
who share the same passion, and hence gain tute is to provide a … resource for research on
subjective, individualized realization of being the Asian region located at one of its communi-
part of a community, however ephemerally, cation hubs. ARI engages the humanities and
with the others. Second, the constituted social sciences broadly defined and especially
crowd is inevitably transformed into a “specta-
interdisciplinary frontiers between and beyond
cle” by media [or I might add recording com-
panies’] attention. (Chua 2012a, 106) disciplines.”13 The Cultural Studies Cluster in
ARI that Beng Huat has led since its inception
Beng Huat opines that “the conventional popu- since 2005 has been exemplary in being inter-
larity of foreign-language pop music in any con- disciplinary in its orientation to the study of
sumption location has always been limited to a popular culture beyond the limitations of single
smaller population of dedicated fans, largely disciplinary orientations such as film, theatre,
because the majority of the potential audience literary studies or the sociology of culture; and
do not possess the requisite skills to appreciate its fellowship programme has brought in senior
the lyrics of the song” (Chua 2012a, 2). The and junior scholars from universities from both
language gap is certainly a challenge, and yet more and less developed economies – the Clus-
the ongoing spectacularisation of K-Pop that ter therefore has indeed been a “resource for
has exceeded the scale of J-Pop from the research” for scholars from East, Southeast
1990s, and then, from about 2005, its overtaking and South Asia, creating a space where
 INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 313

intellectual engagement is both inter-Asian and publication, conferences and nurturing new
with the metropole. This last matter has been initiatives, such as the annual Southeast
vital in ensuring that the questions that may Asian Cinema conference and the Asian Pop
Music conference. I believe that most Asian
be asked come about with the region’s own con- pop culture scholars probably have been either
cerns kept firmly in view. The regional and then a fellow or participants in our conferences. I
international reputation that the Cluster has am quite happy with the results of the past
since gained is intimately tied to Beng Huat’s 15 years.
own increasing reputation in the area of cultural The Cluster’s record objectively validates what
studies, especially through the establishing of Beng Huat has to say: the beginning of the Clus-
the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) ter’s existence saw (in academic year 2005–
and his expanding interest in popular culture. 2006) a conference on “Asia’s Hou Hsiao-
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The Interview in this volume reveals how Hsien,” a workshop on “Popular Elections as
Beng Huat’s work on Singapore expanded Popular Culture,” a workshop on “East Asian
over the years, and how much the journal pro- Pop Culture: Korean and Japanese TV Dra-
ject was instrumental in reshaping his intellec- mas,” a forum on “Discovery Channel’s The
tual trajectory: History of Singapore” and a workshop on “Cine-
I remember being asked why I do not write matic Representation of the Tropical Urban/
about “Asia”. … But I could not do that, City.” The pace has not let up much since 2005.
because I cannot write about things I do not Professor Chua Beng Huat’s work and intel-
have depth of knowledge. … The Inter-Asia lectual generosity have taken many a good dis-
Cultural Studies project took me out of Singa-
pore and into the region. … Without the tance down the road in the study of East
IACS project, this [ARI research cluster] Asian Pop Culture; and this work also tells us
would not have happened. … Of course, all that much more awaits to be done, given the
the other Asian network things that came paths that have been opened up.
along with our journals and the conferences
that we have held [in relation to both the jour-
nal and the cluster] also provided [the] oppor- Notes
tunities to regionalise myself.
1. Beng Huat likes to respond, when asked what
And it can be noted that the establishing of the he does, “I watch TV serials – lots of them!” It
cluster was done right from the very start of ARI is now apparent that the genealogy of his field-
work sites goes back to the late 1980s, when
in relation to the interests of scholars in the
his initial fieldwork on Singapore consump-
region, and their understanding of the tasks to tion was undertaken in the confines of a
be addressed. Here we can go, again, to the now-defunct but edgy boutique, Man and
Interview for Beng Huat’s own recollection of His Woman, and the Ngee Ann City shopping
his being “regionalised”: centre.
2. Cf. Wee (2012).
As leader for the Cultural Studies in Asia 3. The reference here is to the Asian values dis-
research cluster, the first task was to convene course that was occurring in the Singapore
an inaugural workshop, bringing in people and the region more broadly from the 1980s
[from] across Asia into discussion to set a to the 1997 Asian economic crisis.
research agenda for the cluster. Most of the 4. At that juncture in the 1990s, both writers
participants … have since become senior underestimated the strength of Japanese pop
scholars in the field; Eric Ma and Esther culture.
Cheung from Hong Kong,14 Koichi Iwabuchi 5. Cf. Iwabuchi (2003, 171–172). Media critic
from Japan,15 among others. From this work- Iwabuchi notes that how exactly translation
shop, the cluster developed the pop/media cul- (subtitling of dramas or pop songs incorporat-
ture research programme with more than ing more than one language) or how “cultural
creditable achievements, by way of translation” – that which comes about when
 314 C. J. W.-L. WEE

the viewer feels that there is “cultural proxi- Acknowledgements

mity” between the TV programme he/she is
watching and his/her own urban context – Thanks go for Valerie Yeo and the staff of the Asia
lead to the creation of regional cultural “reson- Research Institute, National University of Singapore,
ance” is not apparent to him, and this despite who gave support for the completion of this article
Iwabuchi’s own pioneering inter-Asian work, when I was a Visiting Affiliate from January to July
Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture 2016, while on sabbatical leave from the Nanyang
and Japanese Transnationalism (2002). Technological University. The article is a revised ver-
6. Elsewhere, Beng Huat adds that: “Parentheti- sion of a paper presented at the conference “Beyond
cally, until now a successful formula for a the Culture Industry,” organised by the Inter-Asia
pan-East Asian film or television series Cultural Studies Society and held at the National
seems to have eluded the regional media or University of Singapore, 3–5 July 2013.
industries” (Chua 2012a, 6).
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7. K-Pop bands steadily assault the USA, but the

progress is slow; cf. J. D. Considine (2014): “As Disclosure statement
Lee Ho-yang, who concocted hits for K-Pop
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
acts T-ara, 4minute and Beast, told The
author.
Korea Times last year, it will take more than
a mega-hit like [Psy’s] Gangnam Style to con-
quer North America. ‘America is a huge mar-
ket with very diverse musical tastes and Notes on contributor
challenges,’ he said. ‘It’s all but impossible to C. J. W.-L. Wee is Professor of English at the
sweep it all with one shot.’ Perhaps it’s a mis- Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He
take … to think of the Korean Wave as a mas- has held Visiting Fellowships at the Centre for the
sive tsunami. Instead, it seems more like a Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India, and the
steady flow, rising slowly but steadily seeping Society for the Humanities, Cornell University,
in.” among other institutions. Wee is the author of Cul-
8. For an elaboration of this point, see Chua ture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern
(2012b). (2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist
9. See, for example, Shih (2007, 2010, 2011). Development, Singapore (2007), and is a board mem-
10. See Ōta (2004). Chua (2012a, 18) does make a ber of the journal Modern Asian Studies.
reference to this drama.
11. Cf. Ko (2004, 118).
12. Cf. J. D. Considine (2014): “However much References
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