EXO’S Suho is on a Quest to Reclaim Time
Suho was a senior in high school the first time he felt time freeze. The leader of EXO, whose birth name is Kim Jun-myeon, was a seventeen year old trainee at SM when his friends Onew, Jonghyun, Key, Minho and Taemin were selected to debut in SHINee. Due to several conditions, including an injury, Suho was not chosen to join them – even though he had spent the previous three years training with the boys.
“The seniors I had practiced with were debuting. At that time, I had a leg injury and there were a lot of different reasons why my debut was pushed back,” he remembered. “In that state, I prepared for my college entrance exam.” This time of confusion lasted throughout the teen’s first year of college. “Isn’t grade 12 hard,” he asked rhetorically.
Instead of becoming an idol, Suho continued to train. "There were times when I really wanted to give up everything,” he remembered. “Thanks to the encouragement of my parents, older brother, and acting teacher, I was able to do it until the end.”
Suho trained with SM for seven years before he was selected to debut in EXO in 2012, a feat few idols pass. His hard work paid off: Suho was chosen as the leader of EXO – and within just a few short years, EXO would become the leaders of K-Pop.
Over a decade later when Suho entered the military, he felt time freeze again. While in the military, he read the science fiction novel “Momo” and found a metaphor for the emotions he felt gripped by. He realized that the most precious thing that can be stolen from a human is something both intangible and invaluable: Time.
“When you read the book, there are people in grey suits that take away time from others. At the center of the novel are the gentlemen in grey suits who steal time and the mysterious girl ‘Momo’ who chases these gentlemen down to reclaim others’ time. While it’s a fairytale, it’s a novel adults can read too that deals with how precious time is.”
Military conscription, in Suho’s metaphor, is a man in a gray suit who halts and steals time from young men. “From a certain perspective, the year and nine months that I couldn’t meet with fans feels like lost time to me. I used the gentlemen in grey suits who steal time as a metaphor for my album name,” he said. “During that time, I watched my members promote and thought, ‘The world is that beautiful and time moves so fast, but I’m the only one stuck in this moment. The time I’m living in now is black and white, but that world is colorful.'”
When Suho returned in early 2022, he knew exactly what story he wanted to tell with his coemback album. The body of work would be titled “Grey Suit” and it would give him back time. Here, Suho could unpack the trange year and nine months he experienced while in the military. Through his art, he could begin to make sense of what happened to him.
Military conscription is compulsory for all Korean males between 18 and 29, but attitudes regarding the draft are shifting. In a 2021 survey, the Korean Herald reported that 43% of Korean citizens felt that military service should be voluntary instead of a draft. South Korea maintains that conscription is essential to maintain a defense against the 1.88 million members of the North Korean army, but attitudes towards this South Korean duty is cooling. “There’s a growing sense of the price we pay for running the conscription system,” Kang Inhwa, a research professor of history at Seoul National University, noted in a Times story.
“South Korea is one of the few industrialized countries that still drafts its young people. Less than a third of the world’s countries actively draft their people into the military, according to a Pew Research analysis from 2019,” John Yoon wrote this year, in an article that reviews the shift in public opinion of the draft.
K-Pop fans are familiar with this rite of passage for young men in the South. For the last decade, idols have worked at breakneck speed until their time came to enlist. When they returned, they found the industry already lurched ahead – sometimes without them.
Leader Yoon Dujun of Highlight remarked upon his return from the military, “Something has definitely changed, but it’s hard to say exactly what it is. I think that there’s a greater gratitude for little things, gratitude to be able to do music together. I think often, ‘I don’t know when this moment will come again.’ I’m grateful for all the things I can do with fans.”
Suho’s first comeback following conscription comes at a unique time for the K-Pop industry. There has never been a time more prominent for Korean singers to find an audience across the globe. Ten years after PSY’s infamous horse trot in “Gangnam Style”, critics appear ready to embrace the genre as more than mass-produced bubblegum pop.
This is good news for the leader of EXO: His music is layered in concepts that resemble a visual artist’s dedication to exploring themes of identity. His first album, “Self-Portrait”, was created in tribute to the iconic Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, whose self-portrait captivated Suho’s imagination the first time he laid eyes on it. The leader of EXO has always been a cut above what critics expect of the genre.
Album art for Suho’s Self-Portrait, in an homage to Vincent van Gogh. Courtesy of SM Entertainment
“I first saw [the self-portrait] in Switzerland, and for van Gogh, it probably meant a lot to him as a person. Since I’m not a painter, I wanted to paint something in my album as a self-portrait, per se, similar to how it was for van Gogh to share his own view of himself,” he explained to Billboard in 2020. As he would recount in interviews, he was fascinated by the way he could read the artist’s emotions simply through brush strokes.
The singer’s desire was for people to see the “four seasons” of himself with this debut album. He wanted fans to see what is “inside” of himself. “To be completely honest, I believe that there are probably more than four sides to me; there are many facets of my personality,” said the leader. “With all these various sides that I have, I tried to condense it to an essence where it can be portrayed in four different self-portraits.”
He especially wanted rock bands to find the album inspiring, and he hoped that it would appeal to a larger audience. Suho’s goal was not to be seen as an idol with “Self-Portrait”, but to come across as a real, flawed human being. “The theme that connects all these songs is the idea that everyone has scars, everyone has been hurt,” he said. But our pain, he reasoned, doesn’t mean we can’t find love.
In comparison to the full canvas of color in “Self-Portrait”, “Grey Suit” begins shrouded in haze.
“Morning Star” is the ambient pulsating opener that builds in intensity with every second. As the song builds, Suho slowly wakes up to the realization that he has lost time. “Keep this silence trapped in my dreams,” he sings in the opening lines. “My silhouette lost in this hazy fog/ A lot of this isn’t unfamiliar to me.” Suho is ready to face what’s been stolen from him by the end of the track: “My heart is filling up,” he claims. “Wake me up.”
In “Hurdle”, one of the album’s singles, Suho admits that his life has gotten tangled up because of the time that was taken from him. “I’m trapped in time endlessly, for no reason,” he wails. “Time is like a hurdle.” He’s caught in a hamster wheel, running with no end in sight.
As he mentioned in interviews, the title track “Grey Suit” is where Suho most explicitly addresses the holding pattern he felt when he was in the military. “I feel faded/ I’m not used to this color” he sings in the opening lines. “Like an achromatic room that lost its colors/ I’m walking through the pale hours.”
Suho moves between a world of bright, prismatic color and stark black and white in the video for “Grey Suit”. Like the book “Momo”, he is shifting and freezing time while attempting to reclaim what he lost. The singer recently turned 30, and as I watched it, I wondered what it must have felt like to lose the last two years of his twenties while inside the military. After all, we can never reclaim our youth again - much as we try.
In “Momo”, the book that inspired this song, the more people save time, the more they lose time, much to the benefit of the Men in Grey. Momo, the story’s ethereal title character, is the foil in the Men in Grey’s plans. Even though the girl is illiterate and has no sense of time herself, she decides to freeze time in an attempt to restore what was lost.
She may not be able to count, but by her measure her time on Earth has been limitless. “As far as I remember, I’ve always been around,” says Momo cryptically. There’s no end when you’re not keeping time.
I am reminded writing this: There is a trauma followed by grief that occurs as we lose our time. As our youth fades away; as we lose friends; as parents pass away, we realize that time moves fast and wild. The rhythm stops for no one. And just like in “Momo”, the more we try to save, the more we lose.
I’d like to offer that perhaps the singer touched on this, in 2019 while he promoted “Self-Portrait”. In an interview with Billboard, Suho revealed that he wished fans would listen closely to the lyrics of “For You Now”.
“When you live life, there are many times you just miss the opportunity to properly thank someone whenever you feel thankful for them. Sometimes you look back and always regret not being able to say, “Thank you.” So in order to express my thankfulness, even though it’s late, I want to tell them, “Thank you.”, he explained. “And I want people to feel the same way; even if it’s late, it’s never too late to say “Thank you.”
Time is a relay race where we pass the torch to the one who comes up behind us. Time evaporates, while the memories hold. We’re told to tell the people in our lives that we love them and that we care about them, but rarely do we listen to this. Ultimately, we lose our chance as time marches on.
“Do you feel you have a lot of those regrets?” Suho was asked in response to why he wants to tell people “thank you”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, there are many.” Suho said, and repeated a word that can contain multitudes. “Many.”
Concept photo for “Grey Suit”; courtesy of SM Entertainment
