Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
aespa recently performed at Kyungbock High School, where SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo Man graduated from. People were looking forward to it as it’s seen as an SME tradition, with most of their marquee groups performing there over the years. But the mood was sullied by what was disturbing atmosphere for the group due to lack of security by the school and from the company.
They are visibly uncomfortable with all this, though granted the mobbing of idols going to and from the performance is unfortunately nothing new. But the behavior was compounded by the students posting sexual captions over pictures they took of the members.
It’s negligent for any company, but especially one with the resources of SME, to not be prepared for this at all. In terms of these masses, the school holds some responsibility but the majority of it is on the company to take care of their own artists.
What made things worse was the stage incident, which are an obvious risk that SME should be quite aware of considering what happened to Taeyeon years ago.
Due to the growing backlash, the school released an apology addressing the incident.
“Today, a celebration for the 101st anniversary of the school was held by the Kyungbock Alumni Association at our auditorium. Idol group aespa was invited to perform at the ceremony. However, after the event, there were reports and events that unilaterally damaged both aespa and SM Entertainment’s reputation, so we would like to apologize first. However, as a result of conducting an in-school survey of our students following the media reports, it was determined that some outsiders who are not affiliated with our school visited the venue and we did not allow them to enter for security reasons. Thus, we can infer that the malicious comments that were posted on the internet are not true. However, after today’s event, we would once again apologize to SM Entertainment and aespa for damaging their reputation.”
This didn’t satisfy anybody, as it attempts to blame outsiders when at least part of the responsibility clearly lies with the students. It even ignores that the student taking the video on stage with them apologized for his actions. Regardless, the school “apology” is now removed as well.
Worse yet, the school seems to be aware about who is responsible for most of the mess, sending out a text to students to delete social media posts about the performance.
<Emergency notice – request to delete all contents related to aespa’s performance>
There was a performance by aespa for Kyungbock High School’s 101st anniversary. However, there are suggestive photos, videos, and posts made on our students’ SNS accounts. This is a situation where we could be held legally responsible. We would like you all to immediately delete all posts and contents uploaded online relating to their performance.
If this escalates to the press, the ministry of education will receive many complaints.
Parents, please guide your students to do as stated.
Basically, they just come off as trying to cover it up.
Unfortunately for them, basically everybody sees through it, and I can’t think of a better metaphor for what’s happening right now both in Korea and internationally than this picture:
