Former 3rd-Gen Idol Speaks Out On How “Inhumane” K-Pop Industry Triggered His Dissociative Identity Disorder

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He has since co-founded his own company and debuted as a solo artist.

Koreaboo

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Korean Australian singer and rapper DPR IAN (also known as Christian Yu) is now best known as a co-founder of Dream Perfect Regime. He focused on DPR’s visual arts, utilizing his directing skills, before debuting as a solo artist.

Yet, before there was DPR IAN, he was known as the third-generation K-Pop group C-Clown‘s Rome. The group promoted from 2012 to 2015, disbanding as the members followed their paths.

DPR IAN recently spoke with SBS The Feed about how “inhumane” the K-Pop industry was at the time. He explained that the training schedule was “very strict.”

Wake up like five, head to the studio. Practice, practice, practice. If you’re late a minute, you have to kneel on the floor, and you have to sit in the corner like time out, and you’d go back home, 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM, and then you just repeat that throughout the whole week. It’s a lot better now. That’s what I hear. But back in 2000 tens twelves, it was at its peak era of, ‘Do you have slave contracts?’ It is just so shady, but getting the backhand of that just did something to me.

— DPR IAN

The interviewer argued that some trainees “really want” it enough they endure the “inhumane” lifestyle. DPR IAN explained that most don’t fully know what they’re getting into.

DPR IAN: I thought it was inhumane, but that’s literally the life that trainees live.

Interviewer: Yeah, well a lot of people really want that.

DPR IAN: Oh my god. They don’t know. See, I didn’t know that either. You don’t know what that gruesome and grueling side of that life is because no one really tells you. You just think, okay, the minute I’m an idol, it means it’s an immediate success, which is not the case. But you have all these other hidden layers of groups that don’t even make the cut line and there’s about a hundred of them.

He also described his experience living with DID (disassociative identity disorder) and how the K-Pop industry intensified it.

So it’s kind of waking up in a new body, new mind, new likes, new dislikes. It’s kind of living with, I think, another you that is completely separate from who you identify as a person. For me, anyway, personally, I never really get a choice of when that takes a turn, and you just keep going back and forth from that person. If you decide not to show people your most vulnerable side, you would have a choice to not show it. But I never really got a chance to not show it. I’ll switch out. I would all of a sudden be, I’ll be doing something as somebody else And it would feel like when I come back, I wouldn’t really understand what I did or who I was or none of that.

— DPR IAN

DPR IAN explained how, as one is continually traumatized, one’s “kicked out.” As an idol, he especially didn’t know how to cope with it.

It’s okay in the beginning, but the more and more you’re faced with trauma, the minute you feel it, you’re out. So it’s no longer like I’m going to go back. It’s like your body’s immediate response to just open the door and kick you out. So I didn’t know that. So I didn’t know that during my idol days. I just thought this is the only way I can cope with it. The only way. So I just kept doing that.

— DPR IAN

Still, DPR IAN learned what he should and shouldn’t do during this difficult period in his life. Now, as part of DPR, he wants to be as authentic as possible, proving that fans can still stick by you.

Being an idol taught me what I shouldn’t do. There wasn’t really an independent show for artists because we had to follow a system in order to make it or get there. But I wanted to break that. I just wanted to show people that you could be very genuine with what you do artistically and still have an audience.

— DPR IAN