In June, thousands of  K-Pop fans in Vancouver flocked to the Amuse Market, a K-Pop community event hosted by Canada-based store Amuse Ground, and the event returned with a Halloween twist on the weekend. The Amuse Market, which brings together fans, K-Pop-inspired businesses, and local dance crews, held its second iteration, Amuse Market: Fall Edition, on October 26, 2024. Amuse Ground, the Canadian branch of the ARTBOX brand in South Korea, hosted the event at Metropolis at Metrotown, a mall that also served as one of two Canadian locations for BTS V’s <ARTSPACE: TYPE 1> photo exhibition in July. 

The 10-hour event, which ran from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., pushed the company’s vision of becoming the to-go place for the local K-Pop community. “We aim to be more than just a gathering spot,” Amuse Ground Special Events Assistant Jake Kang said in an email. Between “3,000 to 4,000 visitors” showed up to the first Amuse Market, according to him. Other staff members corroborated the initial event’s success.  

“Vancouver, I would say, does have a large community of K-Pop lovers,” said Antoinette Coronel, who works on Amuse Ground’s online team processing and packing orders. She said the turnout of the first event “made us want to do it again.” 

At the fall Amuse Market, Coronel manned the trivia table, one of the many activities offered that day. Attendees were encouraged to fill out a stamp card that grants chances to win a variety of prizes. Prizes ranged from general offerings like stationary to K-culture-specific prizes such as K-Pop albums or coupons for Korean photobooths like LIFE4CUTS and photoism. Individuals could earn stamps by participating in activities like photocard trading, creating their DIY keychains, getting their caricatures drawn, dropping by the K-Pop-inspired businesses vending at the market, and participating in a random play dance. 

Local fans like Audrey C., who requested to not be named in full, said that the Amuse Market allows her to interact with others like her in a central space. She enjoyed the summer Amuse Market as the first K-Pop she “ever went to,” and was looking forward to trading NCT photocards at the second event. 

“One of the only outlets I have for K-Pop would be my [Instagram] trading account,” she said. “But that’s very online. So, I’m glad we have places like [Amuse Ground] as an example.”   

This desire to connect with more fans also rings true for Nedene De Guzman, a vendor at the event. De Guzman’s shop, Atenede.withluv, offers K-Pop-inspired accessories such as phone charms, bracelets, and “island crowns” (decorative pieces of art wrapped around the lightstick’s globe interior) for SEVENTEEN’s official lightstick, Carat Bong. The business was inspired from De Guzman’s experience attending BTS’s PERMISSION TO DANCE ON STAGE concert in Las Vegas, which exposed her to the “trading community” and K-Pop concert culture, where handing out fan-crafted goods occurs frequently. She has been interacting with the community through opportunities such as cupsleeve events, but De Guzman said the Amuse Market is the largest local K-Pop inspired-event that brings in mainstream traffic. 

“There’s a lot of opportunity to reach people that don’t normally go to cupsleeve events, which are much smaller,” she said, noting that Amuse Market’s location within a central mall makes it accessible. 

The exposure to a broader audience also allows more unconventional K-Pop-inspired merchandise to be sold, like in Jame Lee’s business, Connex3D. Lee, a Chinese Canadian, blends his hobbies of 3D printing, gaming, and K-Pop in creating 3D-printed keycaps and keychains inspired by Asian culture. 

“There is kind of a market for people who wanna spice up their keyboard,” said Lee. 

Lee originally started off only making the keycaps—the small covers on computer keyboards—but also offers them as fidget keychains for a broader consumer base, “not just niche to the [mechanical] keyboard community.”   

He said though the business started in 2021, his keycap designs inspired by the cartoon rabbit Miffy and the NewJeans’s lightstick “blew up” on TikTok in summer 2023. This generated more sales to his Etsy shop, and allowed him to expand into three local Shop Makers stores, a Canadian company providing storefronts for local artisans to showcase their works. 

The clock striking 1 p.m. signaled the start of a random play dance session, where fans can test their K-Pop choreography knowledge by hitting the dance floor during a randomly-selected playlist of popular songs. Hits ranged from popular title tracks like NCT 127’s “Kick It,” to B-sides like aespa’s “Set the Tone,” and even K-Pop classics like Crayon Pop’s “Bar Bar Bar.” Even at the slightest of technical mishaps, such as when the music of LE SSERAFIM’s “ANTIFRAGILE” dropped out briefly, the crowd continued to keep the beat by singing along.  

In addition to random play dances, the market also invited local dancers to show off their skills. These public dances serve as a bonding experience, a sentiment echoed by those in Vancouver’s K-Pop dance scene. Gabe Le, a K-Pop fan since 2009, led the performance for the local dance crew Kaleidoscope.

“It was very unpopular back then in mainstream culture,” Le said. “As I grew up, I found my friends— my second family—here.”

Le and other Kaleidoscope members still find K-Pop's local reach unbelievable. Kaleidoscope dancer and videographer Andrew Wong said the local K-Pop dance scene and interest in the genre has exploded in the last few years. He has seen dancers starting out younger, and more willing to publish their covers online. 

“I feel like everyone coming out of high school is just like, ‘let’s make a cover dance group,’” Wong said. “So, K-Pop feels super attainable, super close to us in proximity.” 

Kaleidoscope itself started from a group of then high schoolers Naomi Chen, Ricca Aquino, and Maymay Prado in 2016. The team continued after high school, where the founders met members like Le and Wong at the University of British Columbia’s K-Pop club, UBC K-Wave. Dancer Adam Chen said that the local K-Pop community has found its stride in recent years. 

“At this point, [K-Pop] feels very normalized in a good way,” he said. “There is so much love in the community in a place like Vancouver.” 

The trio enjoys seeing everyone come together to embrace their love for the genre. 

“Look at this event: there’s hundreds of people here.” Wong said. “It feels like a genuine community now.”