Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader meets MENT Magazine

Co-presented by GYOPO and hosted by dublab

Celebrate the publication of Bangtan Remixed and the digital release of MENT Issue 02 with some of the co-editors and contributors!

Bangtan Remixed delves into the impact of celebrated K-Pop boy band BTS, exploring their history, aesthetics, and the fan culture and industry that surrounds them. MENT considers Korean popular culture’s increasingly central role in (re)shaping personal narratives, diasporic communities, digital networks, and global media paradigms. The contributors featured in these publications—who include artists, scholars, journalists, activists, and fans—show how BTS specifically, and Korean popular media more broadly, can inspire millions and provide a wide range of insights into contemporary social and political life. Join co-editors, contributors, fans, and the GYOPO community for an afternoon of presentations, panel discussions, interactive art-making and movement activities, adorable merchandise, boba, books available for purchase, and a closing dance party.

The editors of Bangtan Remixed are donating all royalties earned from the book to Dding Dong, South Korea’s largest LGBTQ Youth Support Center. As BTS has inspired fans to speak about the social struggles faced by young people in Korea and around the world, we have chosen to redirect funds to support one of Korea's most vulnerable communities.

Doors open at 1:30. Come early to enjoy arts and crafts before the panel discussions begin!

Please be advised that this event will be photographed and filmed and that GYOPO may use such photos and videos in print and online, including in social media. By RSVPing and attending this program, it signifies your consent to be photographed, filmed, and/or otherwise recorded.

Jheanelle Brown is a film curator/programmer, educator, and writer. Brown is a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts in the Program of Film and Video and curator of Film at REDCAT. Her curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is interested in the space between fugitivity and futurity and elevating an ethic of care, with a special interest in the sonic in film, political film and media, and Caribbean film/video. Her recent programs and exhibitions include KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Media Arts of Ben Caldwell, at Art + Practice, in collaboration with the California African American Museum and LA Filmforum Getty PST:Art film series Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film.

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke 2013) and Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke 2021), and co-editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i (Duke 2019) and Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader.

Rani Neutill is the author of the memoir Do You Know How Lucky You Are? (forthcoming HarperCollins India) and co-editor of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (Duke 2024). She is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and has taught ethnic American and postcolonial literature at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins University and other institutions. She currently teaches classes in creative writing at GrubStreet in Boston and Asian and Ethnic American literature at Tufts University and Emerson College. Her work has been published in The New York Times Book Review, ELLE.com, Al Jazeera English, CNN, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, amongst other publications. She is currently working on a novel about desire, race, and academia, titled Pick Me, and is represented by Lucy Cleland at Frances Goldin Literary Agency and Naomi Barton at A Suitable Agency.

Andrea Acosta is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. She works at the intersection of digital media and critical race studies, and her primary research focus is South Korean popular media. Her work on K-pop can be found in JCMS (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies), Post45 Contemporaries, and in Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader. She is co-editor and co-founder of MENT Magazine.

vvtobbi is a persona for the interdisciplinary artist, editor, and scholar, behind creative meditations on fandom, philosophy, arts and culture. These intermedial artworks function as a way to explore our relationship to the things, figures, idols, and pop stars we worship. Their work weaves together sound and visuals from K-pop videos, films, and other visual content which are re-contextualized, re-aestheticized, and illuminated through the intrusion of both original and sourced poetic/philosophic text.

Maddie Kim is a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley, where she studies early modern literature. Her writing has appeared in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Evergreen Review, The Journal, and elsewhere.

Amber Lee (they/them) is a Korean diasporic writer based in Southern California who writes poetry, fiction, and essays.

Yin Yuan is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her work examines the intersections between literature, popular culture, and empire. Her first book, Alimentary Orientalism, considers how racialized forms of consumption both perpetuated and unraveled British fantasies of the East. She is the co-founder and co-editor of MENT Magazine.

Yutian Wong is the author of Choreographing Asian America (Wesleyan 2010); editor of Contemporary Direction in Asian American Dance (Wisconsin 2016); and co-editor of The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, 3rd Edition (Routledge 2018), Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence (2023), and Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (Duke 2024).

Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of Korean Media and Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto. She is author of the forthcoming book Genre Worlds: Global Forms and Millennial South Korean Cinema and co-editor of two books, Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader and Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea. Her public-facing writing appears in such venues as The LA Review of Books, and she's a regular guest on the CBC's daily culture show Commotion and a frequent commentator in other outlets ranging from NPR to The New York Times to The Washington Post. She once hosted a public conversation between Squid Game star Lee Jung Jae and actor Jung Woo Sung at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Born and raised in Southern California, Trần Châu Hà/Havannah Tran (she/her) is a Long Beach-based designer, illustrator, and zine-maker. Her work is a little all over the place: works that explore stan culture, queerness, love (in all its incantations), and the prison industrial complex as it colludes with legacies of imperialism and colonial occupation. Tran’s illustrations have shifted the narrative tide on criminality in support of organizations and coalitions such as the Asian Law Caucus, Survived & Punished, Urban Peace Movement, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, and ICE out of CA. Her essay and illustration on feminist care work and abolition organizing titled “Where No One Suffers Hungry” is featured in the Margins best of 2021 published by the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. Her most recent published work is a 15-page comic about Maria Legarda,a survivor of sexual violence who migrated to the US from the Philippines. The piece chronicles the criminalized immigrant’s fight against the criminal legal and immigration systems to prevent her deportation and debuted at the Edge of the Square in San Francisco Chinatown. She’s currently at work at whatever suits her fancy at the moment. Find her work at tranchauha.tumblr.com