As a child, Moobin had been a model and actor in a hit TV series. Since 2016 he had been singing and dancing alongside five other boys in the boy band Astro, one of the latest K-pop phenomena. Millimeter choreography, tangy scenography, the group has released three albums, including Baby.
Seen from France, it may be difficult to measure the shock wave that his death caused among his fans, the vast majority of teenagers, but this goes far beyond South Korea. The keyword #moonbin has generated nearly three million tweets in Korean, English, Spanish, Indonesian, Thai… and social networks are flooded with souvenir videos and tributes to the young singer. In Seoul, flowers and messages were placed in front of the premises of his label.
An industry with inflexible methods
His death mainly shines the spotlight on the ruthless universe of k-pop, vector of global influence but above all a lucrative industry with inflexible methods, in which the seeds of stars are recruited from the age of 12, taken away from their families to be trained and trained for several years before even having the chance to present their first song. This is the path followed by Moon Bin.
Then, behind the glamor and the glitter there is the obsession with excellence, the strict control of the image, the permanent public exposure. But as one of Moonbin’s fans wrote on social media, “it’s always the people who smile the most who suffer the most“. In recent years, several rising K-pop stars have taken their own lives, including two singers in the span of a month in 2019. One of them, Sulli, killed herself after being harassed by Internet users who accused her of not wearing a bra.
Suicide record in South Korea
K-pop is only the magnifying mirror of a society where the cult of performance and perfection, which are learned from childhood, sometimes become too much to bear. Ihe global suicide rate is already very high: there are twice as many suicides in Korea as in France, for example (26 per 100,000 people).
But what worries the Ministry of Health is that they are much more common among young people in their twenties. It is even the highest figure of all the countries of theOrganization for European Economic Cooperation (OECD). The government has attempted some prevention campaigns after disappearances that have moved the country. Without succeeding in reversing the trend.