Existing in the age of innocence: Pop stars, publics, and politics in asia

Although it is not without historical precedences, the 1990s and 2000s have seen a heightened effort by cultural promoters in Asia to bring together big and familiar names from the region to make and market a variety of media and cultural commodities. In 2004, Pepsi put nine popular Hong Kong and Taiwan stars in a multi-market, region-wide advertising campaign. Around the same time, hallyu, or the Korean Wave, marshaled a new breed of Asian- Korean celebrities. The entertainment pages in Asia's major newspapers and magazines contain a flurry of stories and images of pop stars from close and distant neighbors making "hurricane-style" visits. The omnipresence of Asian celebrities-made possible by trans-Asian cultural traffic and constituencies-becomes, inescapably, a matter of public culture. While the star still draws attraction by a self-sustaining logic as noted by film scholar Richard Dyer, political issues are moving to the foreground, especially in the inter-Asian context.