What I DESCRIBE About Korea

My interest in Korea has grown so much over the past few years. I can admit, I do have some concerns and questions as far as traveling there. But we can look at that another time. For some reason, it’s strange to me that my research into Korea grew from just one song (How I Became a Kmusic Fan?) It was “POP/STARS by K/DA”. I started listening to that after hearing someone using it as background music for their YouTube video. Let me tell you, I played that song WAY too many times, over and over. Because of this, Spotify started recommending Korean artists to listen to. Through that I found some of my favorite artists like PH1, ATEEZ, Eric Nam, JUNNY, Gsoul, JAMIE, Moon Sujin, SuperM, Chung Ha, KARD, NCT, AleXa, ITZY, just to name a few. I started watching Kpop music videos. I love that each group has individual concepts, themes, storylines, and the visual effects plus editing blew my mind. I’ll be going to an ATEEZ concert in November of 2022! This will be my first ever Kpop concert! I’m so excited about my first real Kpop experience. ATEEZ has become my ultimate group for a while now. They are just beyond talented and I really like their personalities.

The love for these artists led me to doing more research on Korea. I started watching youtubers who lived there. I found so many entertaining people like joanday, Natalia Garza, Peach, oh no Nina, DIVE Studios, ashleybchoi, etc who caused me to be more curious. Unfortunately, as a young black woman, there weren’t very many creators that looked like me back then. But after really searching, I found some great creators like “hey, it’s Anne", Rakiyah In Space, TinaMirae, Peris Kagiri, tihanaMae, Daylightful, Megan Moon, WhitneyBae, Caitlin Benson, DezzyMarch, FO Squad Kpop and quite a few others. Some of these creators live in Korea, used to live there, or never lived in Korea at all but their content really helped me out. There’s also media companies I pay attention to like EnVi Media. I worked as a team lead of the design team and social media team at Blax Seoul. This was the place where all things Black and Korean meet. We talked and created social posts about our History, Studying the Korean Language, Traveling, Beauty, Music, etc. I was not only brainstorming and pitching content ideas for our social media accounts like Instagram and YouTube. But I was also drawing Kpop fanart and researching news and trends. (I’ll insert some of our work below) This company is unfortunately no longer active but I gained so much from working there.

All this research and content grew my curiosity about Korea. I started looking at the food and traditions of Korea. I’m even trying to learn the language currently. I looked at the colleges and thought maybe I should study abroad there. I’m currently an Emerging Media Arts student with a minor in Music Technology at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. I’m learning and training to combine art with technology. Entertainment/Experience Design, Drawing/Manga, Video Editing, Music Production, along with many other skills I’m working to improve. I would love to be able to see how a Kpop music video is shot and edited or how the music is produced. Learning about technology/VR and what are future plans for it? Samsung and their devices are usually great so I wonder what advances are they planning with their technology? How do Idols’ managers and teams work? I’m sure their life is very busy. Could I even be an intern at a Kpop company? Just to see what it’s like. I bet it’s a little stressful due to everyone having to work so hard. I should probably learn Korean first and make some friends before I do any of that. There’s so much more I want to say but I don’t want this to be too long. I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts and feelings about Korea.

My Socials: https://linktr.ee/sharvastudio