Client: GQ
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On November 30, 2020, two weeks after his 18th birthday, JAKE, having been publicly voted in as one of seven members of a new K-pop boy group, debuts in ENHYPEN—who will sell millions of records in a very short space of time—and his entire world completely changes.
BELIFT LAB wasn’t JAKE’s first audition. He was, he says over a video call from Seoul, awaiting a final decision by K-pop giant, SM Entertainment, having already passed several rounds. But training can take years with no guarantee of a debut, and JAKE was ambitious and impatient. “I thought that [a survival show] might be a much quicker way for me to debut,” he adds, longish hair jammed under a trucker cap.
Still, he’d had his doubts. “I never imagined that I’d be a K-pop idol. Because I hadn’t sung or danced, I didn’t even know if I could. I’m still curious about why they were positive about me,” he laughs. You wonder if when the label brought him into the fold that it was, in part, down to how easily he pulls you into his orbit. He’s softly spoken with a distinctive, hypnotising tonality, his hands (artsy hands with long fingers and slender wrists) in a near-constant motion.
Taylor Glasby 