Outside your area: Negotiating K-pop fan zones in a Blackpink concert

From 13 to 15 January 2023, the Korean pop (K-pop) idol group Blackpink held a three-day concert in Hong Kong, the first large scale event for the city still emerging into a post-COVID normality. Based on an ethnographic participatory observation of the activities around the premise, this article seeks to draw out a more dynamic initiatives of committed individual fans or ‘fan volunteers’ in active negotiations with frontline venue managers to permit them corners for their activities. Described here as negotiated fan zones, these premises become the quasi and transient public space for more organic fan activities from distributing and selling fan merchandise as well as exhibitions and dance cover performances. Such spontaneous community gatherings have not been witnessed since the simultaneously implemented draconian National Security laws and COVID restrictions. Discussions on negotiatory practices in Fandom Studies are positioned predominately within textual readings of interpretative communities. In this respect, this article extends its scholarly trajectory towards the spatial dimensions. Framed along Henri Lefevbre’s spatial practices and Doreen Massey’s power-geometries, these negotiated K-pop fan zones arise from the affective and independent fan labour of critical place-making. If Blackpink’s official slogan ‘in your area’ represents the global commercial K-pop industry, the K-pop fan zones within the concert venues stand autonomously ‘outside your area’.