The price of success: rethinking South Korea’s celebrity culture

After a spate of celebrity suicides, Hanseul Lee thinks it’s time for South Koreans to stop idolising, and then demonising, their K-pop and cinema stars.

On Sunday 16 February the well-known South Korean actress Kim Sae-Ron was found dead. Given that she had been starring in major films and television shows from the age of nine, her abrupt death came as a shock to South Korean society. 

And yet this was not the first time that a national celebrity had committed suicide. In the K-pop industry, after Jonghyun’s death in December 2017, three more idols (Sulli, Goo Hara, and Moonbin) went down the same tragic path. And within the acting community, Lee Sun-Kyun, a main character in the film ‘Parasite’, also took his own life before Kim. 

But the deaths of these celebrities raise questions about the South Korean entertainment industry and Korean society as a whole. For a big shadow over the global popularity of the K-pop and K-drama industries is the public demand for young celebrities. Except for Lee Sun-Kyun, who was middle-aged at the time of his death, all the other victims were in their mid-to-late twenties. 

Moreover, they had been building up their careers and fame from their teenage years. Particularly in the K-pop industry (more than in other countries), the average age of newly debuting singers is going down every year. A 2023 survey revealed that almost 40% of the Korean entertainment trainees are younger than 19. 

However, due to the high demand for and supply of young artists, entering the Korean entertainment industry requires teenagers and young adults to bear a large amount of public scrutiny, often expressed anonymously. The public tends to comment not just on their performance as artists but also on their physical appearances and how fan-friendly their behaviour is. 

Therefore, no matter how busy, ill, or sleep-deprived they are, young celebrities are expected to execute every stage of their lives to perfection.

If they do not perform to public expectation in any of the criteria above, social media and YouTube clips will easily edit and collate moments of misbehaviour or mistakes to ‘witch-hunt’ them online. The problem is that such a malicious culture is perceived as the norm in the industry, thus pushing countless celebrities to take a break for medical reasons. 

As much as some forms of misbehaviour by certain celebrities can never be justified, neither can the hate comments or the wave of negative judgments from the public. As happened to Kim Sae-Ron and Lee Sun-Kyun, South Korean celebrities are often subject to extreme scrutiny even for a single mistake – or unconfirmed rumour. 

Kim was derailed from her acting career after her Driving Under the Influence error in 2022. Although this incident was clearly her fault, the public would not even allow her to get a part-time job at a café to earn her living. Fake news was spread almost daily through YouTube videos, her every move was publicised, and she was criticised for not ‘repenting properly’. 

Similarly, Lee had to encounter harsh condemnation for alleged drug use. In this case, the police publicly let journalists take photographs and interview him in front of the prosecutor’s office as part of the investigation process, leading to indiscriminate public shaming and, ultimately, to his suicide. 

As their deaths came from extreme public scrutiny, a South Korean psychiatrist has called the wave of public criticism toward celebrities a ‘giant Squid Game’. Nevertheless, the culture of naming and shaming celebrities is still prevalent – many idol ‘fandoms’ often justify their rude comments by blaming the celebrities themselves for choosing to be public figures while not living up to public expectations.

But excessive public expectation is not the only problem celebrities face. Unfortunately, many of them often quit schooling once they debut, since going to school prevents them from carrying out their official schedules. This not only impedes young artists from developing social skills and self-esteem in a comfortable, non-filmed environment but also isolates their job prospects. Thus, in every way, it ill-prepares them for life.

Given how young artists push themselves to their limits to become idols or actors/actresses from such a young age, one idol member who has been on stage for 10 years confessed that she would not know what to do for a living if her contract were to end. 

This of course only increases the risk of mental health problems, notably depression. Nevertheless, many entertainment companies simply conceal these possible negative consequences from prospective and current artists. This is because, from an entrepreneurial perspective, artists are potential cash cows that generate profits to keep the company going.

Looking to the future, the shadows cast over the K-entertainment industry will only disappear when society as a whole becomes more mature.

The teenagers who aspire to become celebrities should also be guaranteed education alongside their training so they can earn a living when they move on from this sector. 

Companies should prioritise and pay close attention to the artist’s mental and physical health, even if that might mean not taking every opportunity available to make profits from them. And most importantly, the view that public figures should be able to bear everything and anything must change. Celebrities, too, are humans after all. 

Changing this deeply ingrained celebrity culture will be challenging and might take a long time. However, doing nothing will only mean that many more South Korean artists will come to a tragic end.

The repeated deaths of young celebrities demonstrate the level of envy and jealousy widespread in South Korean society, which gains momentum through the anonymity of media platforms. 

Certainly, there are common assumptions which only compound the problem. For example, there is a dominant perception that the living standard of popular celebrities is more stable and affluent.  

And this perception is intensified in the case of stars who have debuted from a young age – there is an implicit assumption that their earnings in a few years will exceed what a ‘normal Korean’ would earn throughout his or her lifetime. In other words, just because early success in one’s career is not granted to everyone, achieving this makes young celebrities an easy target of extreme public scrutiny combined with jealousy. 

One possible explanation for this phenomenon might be that South Koreans are culturally wired to speediness, and thus wish to succeed as fast as possible.

Ironically, the very fact that Koreans are accustomed to speediness is also one of the reasons why we tend to unwind by consuming entertainment products. 

This ambivalent attitude to speediness – aspiring to early success in one’s career, but feeling worn down by such a busy lifestyle at the same time – creates a constant demand for celebrities to cure the latter. 

And this explains why the public sentiments of both envying the seemingly prosperous life of celebrities and expecting them to execute everything to perception coexist. Under the weight of such cultural hypocrisy, the mental drain from pursuing a rapid yet hollow success is significantly overlooked.

The fact is, Korean society faces a daunting task, by which we have to reflect on the side effects of collectively idealising early success. Maybe the time is ripe to rethink our trans-generational cultural norms, the social standard of success, and the pace of life, which will ultimately require a re-definition of what constitutes happiness.

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