By Hasan Beyaz
Creative Director: Jose Moreno // Creative Assistant: Marie Terese Quirapas // Visual Director: LOUDI // Producer: Kuya Allen // Photographer: Ahn Hongje // Photography Assistants: Soomin Choi, Daney Kang, Jungmin Ha // Editorial Coordinator: Scarlett Kersey // Stylist: Kittie Yiyi // Makeup Artist: Bitna // Hair Stylist: Eunyoung // Production Company: Mondays // Production Manager: Charlene Ho // Production Assistants: Glory Chen, Matthew Ma, Joanne Zhang, 김은총 // Videographer: Shey Allen
For the uninitiated, BIBI is one of the most singular artists to emerge from South Korea’s contemporary music scene
A singer-songwriter whose music has always existed somewhere between the seductive and the unsettling – moving from the sleek eroticism of ‘The Weekend’ to the visceral provocations of ‘BIBI Vengeance’ and ‘Animal Farm’, the absurd sweetness of ‘Bam Yang Gang’, and the sprawling fictional world of her second studio album, EVE : ROMANCE, released in May 2025. Born Kim Hyoung-seo, she has spent her career resisting easy categorisation, building a world entirely her own where provocative ideas and surreal storytelling sit comfortably alongside deeply personal confession.
A year ago, BIBI and I had been talking about the ways she changes – her appearance, her personality, the different selves she has inhabited through her music – when she suddenly wondered aloud whether all that shapeshifting had left her exhausted. It was an unguarded moment: the kind of thing an interviewer hopes might happen, but can never manufacture.
The question had become a thought she was having about herself in real-time.
A year later, I wanted to know what happened to that thought. Since our last conversation, BIBI has taken EVE : ROMANCE around the world for the [EVE] WORLD TOUR, watched songs like “Scott and Zelda” – a deceptively sweet, mischievous meditation on desire dressed up as literary romance – find a life beyond her own intentions, finally released “BUMPA” after years of fans asking for it, and continued moving into whatever wild corner of her imagination comes next.
When we speak again, it quickly becomes clear that the most interesting changes aren't necessarily visible from the outside. “I don’t think I’m a ‘shape-shifting’ person after all,” she tells me. Instead, she now sees herself as someone “finding my true, pure self by learning how to process my own traumas.”
It is a striking reversal. The artist who once wondered whether she was endlessly adapting to the people around her is now questioning the premise itself.
That idea runs through our conversation. We talk about the strange distance between how we see ourselves and how other people see us; about the versions of BIBI that exist inside her music; about what happens when a song leaves its creator and becomes someone else's; about performing night after night for audiences across the world; and about the peculiar freedom – and pressure – that comes with becoming an artist people expect to surprise.
There are unexpected discoveries along the way. BIBI tells me that touring revealed she is, surprisingly, “a creature of routine.” She reflects on how audiences can give a song its final “green light.” She admits that she has “barely scratched the surface” of what she wants to express musically.
And then there is the future. After building the elaborate, populated universe of EVE : ROMANCE, you might expect BIBI's imagination to be reaching for something even larger. Instead, she is coming back down to earth.
“I am in the process of coming back to the real world after being immersed in that floating world of imagination,” she says. For her next album, she wants to “ground myself in reality and focus on the five senses.”