Yiqi Chang | FAN-SEE: A collaborative website for fans

 
Fans can select any frame from the Fancy music video and redraw it in their ways. Then, fans are asked to upload their drawings to a website that I created. All the frames are placed together to recreate a fans’ version of the music video.
Fan-see’s goal is to present the K-pop fandom as a group of active audiences. K-pop fans engage with the K-pop industry and act as participatory consumers. They not only consume music but also create artworks ranging from drawings to videos. Borrowing the frame-by-frame music video style from the Johnny Cash project that was created in memory of the American musician Johnny Cash, Fan-see showcases transnational K-pop fans’ involvement in community and creativity.
Support for the concept of fandom as a participatory culture was pioneered in the scholarship of Henry Jenkins, who coined the term academic fan to identify a dual role as an academic and as a participant in fan culture. He writes,” fandom… becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media into the production of new texts”. This project’s ongoing creation is enabled by the academic fan’s role in reaching out to the K-pop fan culture. By identifying the social media in China and internationally, where K-pop fandom is most active, such as Twitter, Weibo, and Douban, participation in this project was made available and authentic. I believe that an academic and artist’s role as a fan facilitates understandings with forms of access impossible through other positionings.
The Fan-see website has already attracted participation by over 400 fan artists within its first month on the web. The drawings range from simple sketches to elaborate illustrations, and some of them are readjustments to the original frames.