Growing up in North Korea, Hyuk’s childhood was about survival. He never listened to banned K-pop music but, after defecting to the South, he’s about to debut as an idol.
Hyuk is one of two young North Koreans in a new K-pop band called 1Verse—the first time that performers originally from the nuclear-armed North have been trained up for stardom in South Korea’s global K-pop industry.
Before he was 10, Hyuk—who, like many K-pop idols now goes by one name—was skipping school to work on the streets in his native North Hamgyong province and admits he “had to steal quite a bit just to survive.”
“I had never really listened to K-pop music,” he told AFP, explaining that “watching music videos felt like a luxury to me.”
“My life was all about survival,” he said, adding that he did everything from farm work to hauling shipments of cement to earn money to buy food for his family.
But when he was 13, his mother, who had escaped North Korea and made it to the South, urged him to join her. He realized this could be his chance to escape starvation and hardship, but said he knew nothing about the other half of the Korean peninsula.
“To me, the world was just North Korea—nothing beyond that,” he told AFP.
His bandmate, Seok, also grew up in the North—but in contrast to Hyuk’s hardscrabble upbringing, he was raised in a relatively affluent family, living close to the border. As a result, even though K-pop and other South Korean content like K-dramas are banned in the North with harsh penalties for violators, Seok said “it was possible to buy and sell songs illegally through smugglers.”
Thanks to his older sister, Seok was listening to K-pop and even watching rare videos of South Korean artists from a young age, he told AFP.
“I remember wanting to imitate those cool expressions and styles—things like hairstyles and outfits,” Seok told AFP.
Eventually, when he was 19, Seok defected to the South. Six years later, he is a spitting image of a K-Pop idol.
Hyuk and Seok were recruited for 1Verse, a new boy band and the first signed to smaller Seoul-based label Singing Beetle by the company’s CEO Michelle Cho. Cho was introduced to both of the young defectors through friends.
Hyuk was working at a factory when she met him, but when she heard raps he had written, she told AFP that she “knew straight away that his was a natural talent.”
Initially, he “professed a complete lack of confidence in his ability to rap,” Cho said, but she offered him free lessons and then invited him to the studio, which got him hooked.
Eventually, “he decided to give music a chance,” she said, and he became the agency’s first trainee.
In contrast, Seok “had that self-belief and confidence from the very beginning,” she said, and lobbied hard to be taken on.
Seok said training alongside another North Korean defector gave him the courage to believe he could make it.
The group 1Verse includes a Chinese-American, a Lao-Thai American, and a Japanese dancer. Despite language barriers, Hyuk said they connect well. “We’re learning about each other’s cultures and getting closer little by little,” he said.
Aito, the group’s Japanese main dancer, admitted he had negative impressions about defectors from the news but said those disappeared after meeting Hyuk and Seok.
Now, the five are set for their debut. “I really want to move someone with my voice,” Seok said. Hyuk added, “It hit me—we’re almost there.”