Between K-pop and Global Pop
 
BTS emerged in Korea and developed within the cultural and industrial framework of K-pop. Yet the market in which its music is produced and consumed, as well as its audience and influence, moved beyond Korea’s geographical boundaries long ago.
 
Is BTS, then, K-pop? Or should it be understood as a global pop act in its own right?
 
BTS has received five Grammy nominations to date without a win. This alone, however, is not enough to conclude that the Grammys have failed to recognize K-pop.
 
At the 2026 Grammy Awards, “APT.” by BLACKPINK member ROSÉ and Bruno Mars was nominated for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year. “Golden” from 《KPop Demon Hunters》 was also nominated for Song of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, among other categories. Music associated with K-pop was no longer confined to a separate peripheral field; it had entered the Grammys’ major pop categories.
 
Then, in June 2026, the Recording Academy announced the introduction of Best Asian Pop Music Performance beginning with the 2027 Grammy Awards—an official category encompassing K-pop, J-pop, C-pop, and other forms of Asian pop.
 
The category prioritizes musical form over the nationality or ethnicity of the performer and requires the meaningful use of one or more Asian languages. Songs performed entirely in English remain eligible for other existing categories rather than this one.
 
The creation of an Asian Pop category represents institutional recognition of the growth and distinctiveness of Asian popular music. At the same time, it separates music already produced and consumed worldwide by placing it once again within the regional category of “Asian.”
 
Recognition and separation occurring simultaneously.
 
K-pop is both global pop and Asian Pop. Neither name alone can fully account for this complex reality.
 
The essential issue is not which name is correct. Music already moves across national borders, while the institutions that explain and evaluate it are still searching for new standards.
 
Asian contemporary art faces a remarkably similar situation.
 
Asian artists already operate as producers of Contemporary Art within museums, biennials, galleries, and art markets around the world. Yet their work continues to be described through regional labels such as “Asian Art,” “Chinese Art,” “Japanese Art,” and “Korean Art.”
 
If Contemporary Art is now produced simultaneously across the world, why is some art simply called Contemporary Art while other art still requires a geographical qualifier?
 
 
 
Temporal Concepts and Regional Classifications
 
Modern Art and Contemporary Art describe specific historical transformations, temporalities, institutions, and discourses. “Asian Art,” by contrast, is a classification based primarily on geography and civilizational history.
 
The two concepts do not operate on the same conceptual level.
 
One is a historical and institutional paradigm; the other is a regional framework for collection and research. The problem lies in the way these fundamentally different categories have functioned within the international art world as a hierarchy between the “universal” and the “regional.”
 
The concepts and canons of Modern Art that we use today—and the museums, criticism, markets, and educational systems that support them—were formed largely around Europe and the United States.
 
Different modern arts and forms of modernism, of course, existed in other parts of the world during the same period. Hence the need to speak not of a single modernism but of multiple modernisms.
 
During the process of modernization, Asian countries actively adopted systems first institutionalized in the West: art schools and museums, exhibitions and criticism, distinctions between painting and sculpture, the professional identity of the artist, and the structure of the art market. Given the concentration of industrial, financial, academic, and geopolitical power in the West at the time, this was to some extent unavoidable.
 
But who established a system first and who should remain its permanent standard are entirely different questions.
 
The situation changed dramatically after the dissolution of the Cold War and the acceleration of globalization in the 1980s and 1990s. Biennials, museums, galleries, and markets spread across the world, diversifying the places in which art was produced, exhibited, collected, and studied.
 
A global art world that had largely followed a blueprint drawn by New York, London, Paris, and Berlin began to give way to multiple, simultaneously operating “art worlds.”
 
The production of Contemporary Art is now globally dispersed.
 
The dispersal of production, however, does not necessarily mean the dispersal of power.
 
 
 
The Expansive Category of “Asian Art”
 
“Asian Art” is neither a single art movement nor a unified style. Nor is “Asia” itself a single cultural sphere.
 
Korea, China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam possess different histories, languages, religions, political systems, colonial experiences, and processes of modernization.
 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Asian Art alone covers an area extending from Afghanistan and India through Southeast Asia to China, Korea, and Japan. It encompasses more than twenty present-day nations and approximately five thousand years of history.
 
“Asian Contemporary Art,” by contrast, is a comparatively recent concept that developed more fully after the 1990s through exhibitions, biennials, scholarship, publishing, markets, and archives.
 
The necessity of regional research is clear.
 
It provides the historical context for understanding how different processes of modernization, colonialism, war, and political change shaped art. It also offers a foundation for discovering and documenting artists and works long overlooked by Western-centric art history.
 
The name “Asian Art” is therefore not inherently problematic.
 
The issue is the function and power of the name.
 
As a category for studying the histories and artistic developments of a region, it can be useful. But once it becomes an identity framework that prescribes what Asian art should be, a category of research becomes a boundary of interpretation.
 
The term “Asian Art” may indicate where and under what historical conditions art was produced, but it should not determine what that art must be.
 
 
 
The Asymmetry Between the Universal and the Regional
 
Modern Art and Contemporary Art, despite having developed largely around Europe and the United States, were long used without geographical qualifiers.
 
Art from other regions, by contrast, was described as Chinese Contemporary Art, Japanese Art, Korean Art, or Southeast Asian Art.
 
Terms such as Western Art, European Modernism, and American Art are, of course, also widely used today. It would therefore be inaccurate to claim that all Western art has invariably been treated as a placeless universal.
 
Nevertheless, because the dominant narratives of global art history were constructed around Europe and the United States, Western art tended to become the standard, while art from other regions was required to explain its relationship to that standard.
 
Asian modern and contemporary art has long been interpreted according to when it encountered Western modernism, how it transformed it, and how closely it resembled or differed from particular Western art movements.
 
Comparison itself is not the problem. Western modern art had a real and substantial influence on the formation of modern art in Asia.
 
The problem is the one-way direction of comparison.
 
The art of Tokyo, Beijing, and Seoul is explained through Paris and New York, while the art of Paris and New York is rarely explained through Tokyo, Beijing, or Seoul. It is a relationship between a center that does not need to account for its universality and a periphery continually required to explain itself.
 
 
 
Who Still Sits on the Throne?
 
Asia already produces countless artists and artworks, museums and biennials, galleries and markets.
 
Yet the authority to determine what constitutes important art, which artists enter the international canon, and which exhibitions are recorded as art-historical events has not been evenly distributed.
 
Acquisition and exhibition by leading museums, invitations to major biennials, representation by international galleries, English-language criticism and academic publishing, the global auction market, and the choices of influential collectors—all play decisive roles in determining the international value and art-historical position of a work.
 
A substantial part of this institutional system continues to operate around Europe and the United States.
  
The sites of production have become multipolar, but the power of recognition and canonization has not yet become sufficiently multipolar.
 
If the works and exhibitions produced across Asia are regarded as truly “international” only after being selected by major Western institutions and markets, Asia remains both a producer and an object awaiting recognition.
 
Today’s throne no longer resides in a single city or country. It exists within a complex network of museums, biennials, universities, publishers, galleries, and markets.
Yet the geography, language, and institutional foundations of those occupying that throne remain profoundly uneven.
 
 
 
Orientalism as Representation, Classification, and Power
 
It is at this point that Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism becomes relevant again.
 
Said’s theory, however, must be applied cautiously to contemporary art in East and Southeast Asia. The principal historical focus of his 1978 book 《Orientalism》 was the relationship between Europe and the Middle East and Islamic world.
 
What Asian contemporary art requires today is not a mechanical extension of Said’s geographical framework, but a renewed examination of the relationship between representation and knowledge, classification and power.
 
If Western artists are primarily asked about their individual forms, concepts, and art-historical genealogies, while Asian artists are first asked about tradition and nation, colonialism and religion, politics and community, regional background becomes more than context. It becomes a predetermined interpretive frame.
 
Chinese artists become automatically associated with Chinese politics, Japanese artists with tradition and popular culture, Korean artists with division and Confucianism, and Southeast Asian artists with colonialism and community.
 
Many Asian artists genuinely address these subjects. Their work emerges from actual histories and realities of considerable importance.
 
The problem arises not when artists choose to speak about these issues, but when audiences and institutions expect them to do so and interpret their work accordingly.
 
When regionality becomes a framework that determines a work’s meaning in advance, the complexity and alternative possibilities of the individual work are diminished.
 
 
 
Experiments and Failures Since 1989
 
《Magiciens de la Terre》, presented in 1989 at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, was a landmark attempt to expand the scope of international contemporary art beyond the West.
 
Approximately half of its one hundred participating artists came from outside the Western art world. For its time, this was a significant effort to bring artistic practices previously excluded from international visibility into a single exhibition.
 
Yet the exhibition also attracted substantial criticism. In attempting to overcome Western-centrism, it was accused of representing non-Western art once again through cultural difference, ritual, spirituality, and regional specificity.
 
Its central lesson remains clear.
  
Exhibiting the world’s art in one place is not the same as understanding different forms of art as equal intellectual and art-historical subjects.
 
Since then, countless biennials, international exhibitions, and museums have continued to revise their approaches. MoMA’s C-MAP initiative—Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives—which conducts long-term research into modern and contemporary art beyond North America and Western Europe, is one institutional effort to reconsider the limits of the established canon.
 
Western art institutions do not possess a complete answer either.
 
 
 
Shared Confusion and Unequal Authority
 
It is too simplistic to describe the issue of Asian contemporary art and Orientalism as a conflict in which the West possesses a distorted gaze and Asia must overcome it.
 
The global art world has changed too rapidly.
 
Western museums, universities, biennials, and markets are revising the categories and systems of classification they have used for decades.
 
Asia faces its own contradictions. It argues for liberation from Western-centric standards while continuing to measure international recognition largely through major Western museums, biennials, galleries, and markets.
 
It criticizes the West for demanding something recognizably “Asian,” while strategically emphasizing tradition, regional identity, and political history to distinguish itself on the international stage.
 
Both the West and Asia are searching for a language capable of explaining this new reality.
 
Shared confusion, however, does not mean equal power.
 
The authority to classify, recognize, and assign international value remains asymmetrically distributed.
 
The confusion is shared, but the power is not equally dispersed.
 
 
 
The Cycle of Self-Orientalism
 
Orientalism is no longer produced exclusively from the outside.
 
Asian artists, galleries, curators, and institutions also learn which images and narratives are most readily understood, selected, and circulated within the international art world.
 
As a result, traditional images and materials, religion and philosophy, political history and social trauma may be used less as expressions of a work’s actual concerns than as signs of an internationally recognizable identity.
 
This is self-Orientalism: the process through which Asian subjects internalize external expectations of what appears “Asian” and repeat or reinforce those expectations in pursuit of international visibility and recognition.
 
This phenomenon cannot simply be reduced to the opportunism of individual artists.
 
When international exhibitions and markets repeatedly select certain regional images, producers learn the criteria of selection. Through the recurring expectations of those who select and those who seek to be selected, identities such as “Chineseness,” “Japaneseness,” and “Koreanness” can solidify into international brands.
 
Contemporary Orientalism is therefore no longer a simple system in which the West unilaterally constructs images of Asia.
 
It is a circular structure jointly produced by institutional classifications, market demands, curatorial and critical language, the strategies of regional art worlds, and the choices of artists themselves.
  
A fixed identity produced jointly by the external gaze and internal strategy.
 
 
 
Regionality as Resource and Boundary
 
The answer is not to abolish “Asian Art” or erase the regional identities of artists. That would merely create another form of standardization.
 
All art is produced within a specific time and place.
 
History and language, politics and society, religion and everyday life, personal memory and collective experience are essential artistic resources.
 
Regionality itself is not the problem.
  
The distinction lies between beginning from a region and becoming confined by it.
 
When a work emerging from a specific regional history expands into new questions about humanity and society, technology and nature, memory and power, it no longer remains the art of that region alone.
 
Conversely, the use of internationally fashionable forms and concepts does not automatically make a work global.
 
The task is not to choose between regionality and universality. It is to begin with a region’s specific experiences and produce new questions, forms, concepts, and languages that the world does not yet possess.
 
 
 
Beyond Producing Artworks: Producing Discourse
 
If Asia produces artworks while continuing to receive the concepts and criticism that explain and historicize them from elsewhere, the fundamental structure of power will remain unchanged.
 
A growing number of artists and works is not enough.
 
Artistic production must be supported by the intellectual infrastructure necessary for research and criticism, publishing and translation, exhibition histories and archives.
 
Asia’s internationalization can no longer be measured solely by how extensively it enters New York and London. Asian art communities must research, translate, and exhibit one another directly while building multidirectional relationships with art communities across the world.
 
The objective is not to replace one center with another.
 
It is to transform the structure in which one center classifies everyone else.
 
 
 
From “Asian Art” to a Producer of Global Contemporary Art
 
Asian contemporary art is not yet free from Orientalism.
 
But it is no longer enough merely to assess the persistence of Orientalism or to repeatedly identify the failures of the West.
 
The reality of global art has already changed.
 
The world has moved from an era in which the concepts and institutions of Modern Art and Contemporary Art were formed in the West and adopted by Asia to one in which different regions simultaneously produce artworks and markets, museums and biennials.
 
Yet a substantial gap remains between artistic production and the recognition of value, and between the global expansion of regional art worlds and the redistribution of power.
 
This requires an approach that accepts the historical achievements of Western modern art as part of a shared global inheritance without treating them as the only standard. It also requires the use of Asian histories and regional experiences as essential resources without allowing them to become self-imposed boundaries.
 
Above all, it requires the capacity to produce not only artworks but also the concepts, criticism, research, and documentation through which they are interpreted and historicized.
 
Only under these conditions can “Asian Art” cease to signify another regional art observed and classified by the West.
  
Asia can become not merely an object of global contemporary art, but an active producer of the concepts, values, and directions that shape it.
 

The question now returns to Korea.
 
What must Korean contemporary art produce within this changing landscape?
 
How can Korea’s histories and experiences be expanded into new artistic languages?
 
Who will produce the concepts and discourses alongside the artworks?
 
Who will document, research, criticize, translate, and share them with the world?
 
The final installment will examine the concrete realities and choices facing Korean contemporary art.
 
 
How Can Korean Contemporary Art Move Beyond Orientalism?
 



References

Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books, 1978.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Craftsman House / University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998.
Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio, eds., Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader, MIT Press, 2011.
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, 2013.
Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, MIT Press / ZKM, 2013.
Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner, eds., Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, ANU Press, 2014.
Claire Hsu, “Asia as Method, Archive as Method,” MoMA post, 2014.
Centre Pompidou, Magiciens de la Terre: A Look Back at a Legendary Exhibition, 2014.
The Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Asian Art.
Recording Academy, BTS Artist Profile.
Recording Academy, 2026 GRAMMY Awards Winners & Nominees.
Recording Academy, “Five New Categories and Rule Updates Take Effect for 2027 GRAMMYS”, 2026.

Jay Jongho Kim graduated from the Department of Art Theory at Hongik University and earned his master's degree in Art Planning from the same university. From 1996 to 2006, he worked as a curator at Gallery Seomi, planning director at CAIS Gallery, head of the curatorial research team at Art Center Nabi, director at Gallery Hyundai, and curator at Gana New York.

From 2008 to 2017, he served as the executive director of Doosan Gallery Seoul & New York and Doosan Residency New York, introducing Korean contemporary artists to the local scene in New York. After returning to Korea in 2017, he worked as an art consultant, conducting art education, collection consulting, and various art projects.

In 2021, he founded A Project Company and is currently running the platforms K-ARTNOW.COM and K-ARTIST.COM, which aim to promote Korean contemporary art on the global stage.