Yoanna Haeun Jang, photographed last year at Toronto’s ‘Rogers Stadium’

K-pop dance is now expanding beyond major genres and cultural boundaries into a ‘language of movement’. How is this trend perceived by second-generation Koreans raised abroad? Starting from this question, I interviewed Yoanna Haeun Jang, a second-generation Korean who grew up in Canada.

Q1) Please introduce yourself.

“Hello, I’m Yoanna Haeun Jang.

I was born in Seoul and emigrated to Canada before my first birthday, and I am currently majoring in the Neuroscience Specialist program at the University of Toronto. At the same time, I study violin at The Royal Conservatory of Music and continue to perform. I’ve liked K-pop for about nine years, and I’m a fan of BTS and ATEEZ.”

Q2) When did you first get into K-pop?

“I became a BTS fan in 2018, when I was 10, and at school I was sometimes teased for liking K-pop.

Canada tends to adopt trends more slowly than the U.S., so back then it didn’t seem ready to embrace this culture. Now, after ‘Dynamite’ or ‘Butter’, it has gone fully mainstream to the point that no one fails to recognize a BTS song, and the fandom has spread worldwide. People all around the world now sing along in Korean and cheer for seven idols from Korea.”

Haeun’s interview clearly shows how K-pop, once the culture of a particular fandom, has now expanded into mainstream popular culture.

Q3) What is the appeal of K-pop performance?

“I think K-pop music isn’t complete without performance.

Music, dance, and presence on stage must come together to make it a fully realized genre. For example, when you watch BTS’s performances, their dance feels like part of the song. It can even look like a physical expression of the lyrics. Rather than something merely ‘memorized’, it feels like movement arising from within. They seem to use their bodies as a storytelling tool. I think this storytelling is what makes K-pop dance even more compelling, because it can lead the audience on a journey.”

This answer precisely reveals the essence of K-pop dance. Choreography is not a simple string of moves; it is closer to rendering the lyrics through the body, and dance is not a mere supplement to the music but another expressive mode that completes it.

Q4) When you watch K-pop performances, what is interesting from a neuroscience perspective?

“I think K-pop performances are extremely interesting content from a neuroscience standpoint.

Because music (hearing), choreography and vision, and emotional expression operate simultaneously, multiple brain systems are activated at once. For this reason, it’s hard to lose focus, and　beat drops, choruses, and dance breaks continuously build anticipation and　induce strong pleasure through dopamine release.”

This answer explains K-pop performances we have long consumed in a completely different way. The moment familiar scenes are unpacked in the language of neuroscience, the experience becomes unfamiliar yet persuasive.

According to the mirror neuron theory of the Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, when humans watch others’ movements, the brain simulates those actions as if they were one’s own. From this perspective, the audience goes beyond ‘watching’ a performance and already enters a state of ‘participating’ in those movements. In the end, a K-pop performance is less a simple show than a kind of ‘mental exercise’ that continuously stimulates the brain. So we may not be merely ‘watching’ it; we may be ‘responding’ within it.

What we confirmed through this interview is clear. K-pop performances now operate in a way that enables countless people to share the same emotions across genre and cultural boundaries. And at the center of that is ‘movement’, which precedes language.

Thus, K-pop dance, at this very moment, is functioning as a language that resonates anywhere in the world.

(Foundation) Good Arts Culture Foundation, ‘Performance and People’ Research Institute Director | Leo Kang