In KPop Demon Hunters, the American-made animated musical recently released on Netflix to an all-time record-breaking global viewership, Korean American co-director Maggie Kang has created what she calls a “love letter to K-Pop” and her “Korean roots.” The lead male character in the film, the demon Jinu, plays the  bipa (琵琶 “lute”).

In “Sonic Ideas,” composer Ken Ueno writes about how technology tends to shift the ontological landscape, citing Jacques Derrida’s [1977] theory of iterability, in which “every sign carries within it the possibility of being repeated, cited, or detached from its original context.” In writing about AI-generated artifacts, Ueno coins the term “hyper-iterable” to describe events “plausible enough to pass as real but unmoored from lived experience or situated meaning.” Kang’s choice of the bipa as the instrument to reinforce her screenplay’s cultural authenticity provides but one 21st century example of such an event.  

The bipa was introduced to Korea from Central Asia via China and the Silk Road during the Three Kingdoms period. It eventually fell out of favor in Korea, ultimately facing a crisis of broken transmission during Japanese Occupation. In spite of official efforts to return it to prominence, the bipa in South Korea today remains, for the most part, outside the realm of the country’s active traditional stringed instruments. As of 2023, there were only 10 active players in the country.

In this paper, I explore the hyper-iterability of Korea’s traditions as expressed in today’s digital media, resulting sometimes in the expansion of their global reach and, at other times, in cultural distortion and disappearance.