K-pop idol leaves group hours after return over backlash for smoking, kissing a woman

Amid fan outrage over leaked photos, Seunghan departed Riize on Oct. 13, about 48 hours after Wizard Production, the SM Entertainment production team that handles the group, announced his reinstatement following a nearly year-long hiatus.

Catch up: SM Entertainment initially suspended Seunghan in response to images of him smoking and kissing a woman, with the latter surfacing just before Riize debuted in September 2023. After his return was announced in early October, angry local fans sent funeral wreaths to SM’s Seoul headquarters in a symbolic protest of the group’s imminent “death.” Ultimately, Seunghan decided to leave Riize. “I don’t want to cause any more hurt or confusion for the fans, and I don’t want to harm the members any further, and I also don’t want to hurt the company any further,” he wrote in a handwritten letter posted on WeVerse.
The big picture: The 21-year-old’s unceremonious exit underscores issues of toxic fan culture and acceptable idol behavior in K-pop. While many international fans rally behind Seunghan — emphasizing his right to a private life — and decry what they see as corporate capitulation to toxic fans, some industry experts argue that expectations of idol “virtue” and devotion to fans remain deeply rooted in South Korean pop culture. “In general, Korean fandom expects idols, or celebrities in general, to be role models as they are so visible to teenagers,” Hye Jin Lee of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California told NBC News. “Not only that, there’s this expectation of individuals not being a burden to a collective, and this is a very ancient cultural thing.”

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