The Korean pop-culture fest KCON Los Angeles has wrapped up the in-person edition with a second multi-act concert that largely filled the city's Crypto.com arena.
The mania for Korean culture seemed to be untouched by the Covid-19 hiatus, during which time the genre's digital natives gathered virtually and KCON morphed into KCON:TACT.
The convention, held in person for the first time since 2019, was marked by the seamless flow between fandom's online and offline iterations, according to the reports .
The organisers on Monday confirmed that the three-day event at the Los Angeles Convention Centre attracted more than 90,000 real world visitors, plus a further 7.17 million worldwide via video streaming.
"The Asian American community existed 12 years ago (when KCON started.) They were at home. Now they are everywhere. They didn't have a community," said Kevin Woo, a San Francisco-native singer and actor who was trained and achieved success within the Korean talent system. He is next heading to Broadway with 'K-Pop: The Musical' in mid-October.
According to the reports, many convention floor attractions featured video technology that allowed fans to pose virtually with stars or to insert themselves into scenes from Korean TV dramas -- modern-day equivalents of the distorting mirrors and your face-goes-here cardboard cut-outs from fun fairs and circuses of old.
Reports further states that the college-age fans appeared to stretch across the US's racial divides and to joyously embrace multiple aspects of South Korean soft power. These included booths operated by food and cosmetics companies.
A two-day Marketing Summit also gave KCON Los Angeles a more high-minded academic and commercial angle. The sidebar included insightful presentations from US university professors and how-to lectures from platforms such as TikTok intended to help U.S. businesses harness the K-wave for themselves.
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