KARA

A story in the NY Times about pressures on K-Pop stars, focusing on Goo Hara.

By the time she climbed into bed at the end of the livestream in November 2019, she had reached a low point after a lifetime of struggle. As a child, she was abandoned by her parents. Her father at one point attempted suicide. After grueling training, she debuted in a K-pop group at 17, early even by the standards of the Korean hit-making machine.

With the group, Kara, she found international fame, and Ms. Goo became a regular on Korean television, eventually anchoring her own reality series. But with celebrity came ravenous attacks on social media from a Korean public that is as quick to criticize stars as it is to fawn over them. Following a sordid legal fight with an ex-boyfriend, the harassment only intensified, as commenters criticized her looks, her personality and her sex life.

Ms. Goo’s suicide, at the age of 28, shocked South Koreans. But it was just one of several among young Korean entertainers in recent years. Weeks before Ms. Goo’s death, one of her best friends, a fellow K-pop star known as Sulli, 25, also died by suicide. And last year, two performers — Jung Chae-yull, 26, an actress at the start of a promising career, and Moonbin, 25, a member of the K-pop band ASTRO — were found dead within days of each other.

The deaths have exposed a darker side to South Korea’s entertainment industry, a cultural juggernaut whose crushing demands often fall on the performers who fuel an insatiable assembly line of pop bands and streaming series.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/world/asia/k-pop-suicide-goo-hara.html

KARA in 2012.



A memorial room in 2022



in 2018