G-Dragon: "The King of K-pop" from Indigenous Korean Performing Arts

This article examines K-pop dance as a product of Korea's elite performing arts education rather than as a reproduction of Western popular culture. Focusing on G-Dragon, known as "the King of K-pop," it draws on autoethnographic fieldwork and close analysis of his 2025 music video DRAMA to argue that K-pop dance emerges from Korea's legacy of syncretic prodigy training traditions. By tracing G-Dragon's education at the National Middle and High School of Traditional Korean Arts, the article identifies continuities between traditional Korean performing arts and modern K-pop, including versatility, synchronous group choreography, and affective shamanic energies such as heung and sapuri practices. In DRAMA , G-Dragon integrates Korean and Western performing arts and becomes a genre of his own, resisting fixed genre classification and reframing K-pop dance as a contemporary extension of living Korean heritage.