Formed in 2018 on the television show King Maker, the Hong Kong boy band Mirror rapidly ascended as the "New Kings of Cantopop". While their popularity is often framed as a political phenomenon, this study redirects attention to the under-examined spatial and everyday practices of their fandom, particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand the significance of the Mirror phenomenon, this paper interrogates how the lived experiences of fans engage simultaneously with Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry and Stuart Hall’s theory of multiple decoding positions.

Drawing on ethnographic observation, focus group discussions with participants of varying ages and attitudes toward Mirror (2024–2025), and analysis of fan and media discourse (2021–2025), the research traces the embodied dimensions of this fandom. These range from digital communities formed under lockdown to advertisement-saturated urban spaces and carnivalesque fan gatherings. In these environments, fans consciously negotiate between corporate manipulation and communal agency, generating distinctive local expressions in the process.

Employing this multi-method approach, we argue that Mirror fandom constitutes a dialectical synthesis of Adorno’s culture industry critique and Hall’s encoding/decoding model. Operating firmly within a commercial system, fans nonetheless actively produce meaningful communities and reinvent Hong Kong’s everyday landscape through practices that are both reflective and generative.

Authors:
Tracy Lee, Hong Kong Chu Hai College, China

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Lee Kwok Fong, Tracy, associate professor, Department of Journalism and Communication, Hong Kong Chu Hai College. Her researches are on gender studies and media studies. She is engaged in a project that examines the Hong Kong boy band Mirror

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