January Cover Story: K-pop Star Jay Park Makes His Own Way
Author: KoreAm
Posted: January 17th, 2012
Filed Under: Back Issues , BLOG , FEATURED ARTICLE , January 2012
Posted: January 17th, 2012
Filed Under: Back Issues , BLOG , FEATURED ARTICLE , January 2012
Seattle native Jay Park managed to climb to the top of the K-pop scene as the charismatic leader of boy band 2PM. But when the young performer made some “anti-Korean” comments on his MySpace page and later allegedly confessed to some “severe personal mistake,” according to his record label, he found himself excised from the group and Korea. The singer was prepared to return to a life of obscurity, dancing with his old crew and taking a job at a tire shop in his hometown.
But then, when Park, for fun, posted a YouTube video cover of B.o.B.’s “Nothin’ On You,” which shows him singing in his bathroom and momentarily flashing his well-documented six-pack abs, the video collected more than a million views in just one hour. Eventually it would reach 5 million hits, and then, his phone was ringing off the hook.
Park insists, however, his is not an intentional comeback. “The only reason I went back [to Korea] was because my fans were like, ‘We want you back, we want you back,’” Park tells KoreAm’s Rebecca U. Cho in this month’s cover story. Call it whatever you want, but Park is coming at his fans—and hoping to attract new ones—with a movie he filmed with his dance crew and a new album to be released early this year. And, this time, as a now-solo artist, Park says he’s calling the shots.
To read this month’s cover story on Jay Park purchase a single issue copy for $6.50, shipping included! (U.S. addresses only.) For international shipping rates, please call 310-769-4913.
…And for a limited time only, you can get a SPECIAL K-POP PACKAGE OF 4 KOREAM ISSUES featuring 1) January 2012 with Jay Park, 2) August 2010 with 2PM, 3) May 2009 with Boa, and 4) a special collector’s issue with a printed autograph of Korean pop sensation Rain! All this for only $12.00, shipping included! (U.S. addresses only.) For international shipping rates, please call 310-769-4913.
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Photo by David Studarus
She was the shy, cute singer with the soft voice. Next to gospel singers with booming vocals that easily won audience applause and wows from the judges, NBC’s The Voice contestant Dia Frampton seemed a little out of her element.
Then, on June 7, Frampton delivered a unique, stunningly haunting performance of Kanye West’s “Heartless” that left everyone breathless. Her manager Mike Kaminsky recalls the moment: “You felt the air get sucked out of the room, and everyone collectively gasped. And when she finished that song, you just knew her life was going to change.”
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Unleashing Her Inner Warrior
Jennifer Yuh Nelson didn’t exactly kick her way into the director’s chair of Kung Fu Panda 2. But now that the sequel has achieved blockbuster status, she’ll likely return as master of the Panda universe.
story by Eugene Yi
photograph by Eric Sueyoshi
SHE’S A GIRL.
Kung Fu Panda 2 director Jennifer Yuh Nelson said she got a lot of that when she’d show up for various press events to talk about the movie she’d just directed. “It was a big deal when I showed up at some of the press stuff wearing a dress,” she added, laughing.
Much of Nelson’s press has dwelled on how she, as the director of a big studio film, defies type. Not only is she a woman, not to mention an Asian American woman, but the bespectacled 39-year-old is also unfailingly polite and softspoken. Actress Angelina Jolie, who provides the voice of Tigress in both Kung Fu Panda films, described her as “the calmest person I’ve ever met.” But the notion of the commandeering, chair-throwing director stems from perhaps a very traditional (read: white male-centric) view of the job, and it begs the question: why the surprise that someone like Nelson would direct Panda 2? She is a revered storyboard artist, hailed as a brilliant and nurturing collaborator, and a giant martial arts and action geek to boot.
It’s worked out pretty well. Panda 2 has now grossed more than half-a-billion dollars worldwide, and it’s got a certified 82-percent fresh rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes. Panda 2 appears to be that relative rarity in Hollywood: the crowd-pleasing, critically acclaimed blockbuster sequel. By the time it’s out of the theaters, the movie could be the highest-grossing film directed by a woman in the world.
Nelson has already hit one milestone as the first woman to direct a major studio animated feature on her own—and yet, she was an initially reluctant director, handpicked by DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, among others. That’s almost unheard of in Hollywood, where ambition outstrips talent far too often. It’s perhaps anti-climactic for those hoping for a more classic underdog scenario where the heroine boasts a backstory of unbridled discrimination, slaying bigots left and right on her way to shattering the glass ceiling and emerging victorious with a record-breaking film.
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By Saturday afternoon, many of us had heard the news about football star Hines Ward getting arrested in DeKalb County, Georgia, for driving under the influence. For followers of iamKoreAm.com, you can see Ward, a wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers, is our July cover story, and we quite unabashedly celebrate his accomplishments as a Super Bowl MVP, Dancing With the Stars champion, White House advisor and, perhaps most importantly, as an influential role model to biracial children in Korea. The July issue had come back from the printers less than 24 hours before news of the DUI allegation broke.
According to DeKalb police, Ward, who reportedly has a home in Sandy Springs, Georgia, was stopped about 2:30 a.m. Saturday on a local highway after an officer noticed his Aston Martin failing to maintain lane and hitting a curb, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. The newspaper said Ward failed a field sobriety test and refused to take a breathalyzer test. He told officers he had had two drinks at a downtown club, the newspaper said. Police said Ward cooperated during the traffic stop and was booked on the misdeameanor charge at 3:41 a.m. at DeKalb County jail and released on a $1,000 bond.
By Saturday afternoon, Ward’s manager, Georgia-based attorney Andrew Ree, released a statement saying, “We are currently in the process of ascertaining all the facts. From our preliminary investigation we can tell you that we are confident that the facts will show that Hines was NOT impaired by alcohol while driving. However, Hines is deeply saddened by this incident and apologizes to his fans and the Steelers organization for this distraction.”
Ree, who has known Ward and his mother Young He Ward for 20 years, told KoreAm on Monday that Ward has “always been a model citizen.
“And he is still the same man everyone knows him to be,” Ree said. “I feel confident that he will come out of this just fine.”
That said, the short-term effect is a hit to Hines Ward, the brand. The fall-from-grace angle has dominated a lot of the coverage thus far. His recent appearance on Dancing with the Stars has become more open to mockery, and his reputation as a brutal blindside blocker on the field is mentioned as if it provides a clue into his psyche.
However, in the comment sections of many Ward-related articles, it is not schadenfreude, but disappointment that reigns. People seemed to feel like they knew and trusted Ward, and they feel their trust has been betrayed. Ward has been so good at building that trust that many seem ready to forgive him. What he does with that goodwill may be his greatest public relations challenge yet.
The DUI takes nothing away from what Ward has accomplished on and off the field. The cover story focuses on his off-the-field activities, and he has had a real impact on the lives of many. This should be celebrated.
–Ed.
The Hines Factor
Hines Ward’s turn on Dancing With the Stars may be over, but his charm offensive on America is just beginning
by Eugene Yi
Dancing with the Stars is a staggeringly popular reality show on ABC about has-beens. The fact that it regularly pulled in 22 million viewers a week last season says less about America’s hunger for dance than our abiding fascination with the almost-famous and the recently famous and the just-were famous and the desperately-want-to-be-more famous. The best of a long-gone era of unsullied Hollywood glamor, twinkly staircase and all, is mobilized to create an institutionalized second chance. Everyone from fading reality stars to disgraced congressmen have walked those stairs.
The athletes who have appeared on the show have, interestingly, provided a touch of dignity to the proceedings. They generally appear on the show freshly retired, with the tacit acknowledgment that the Olympic medals, the Super Bowls, the stadium klieg days are done. DWTS, as it’s dubbed for short, becomes a chance to apply their immense physical gifts to one fun last hurrah. And it’s a formula that works: Athletes make up about a third of the contestants who have won or placed on the show. That is, by far, the best record of any category of contestant on the show.
So perhaps it’s not a surprise that on May 24, Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward took home the top prize for the just-completed season 12 of DWTS. The Mirror Ball, as the winner’s trophy is called, now sits improbably between his two Lombardi replicas, which he got from his Super Bowl victories. But what remains a surprise is that Ward was on the show in the first place.
Ward still plays for the Steelers, of course, and is still one of the best wideouts in the game. He’s still a co-captain on the team, a vicious blocker and a spokesman known for his straight shooting on everything from concussions to his teammates’ dalliances. He’s still the franchise’s all-time leader in catches, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns. He’s still training for next season. He’s been in three of the last six Super Bowls, and it’s hard to imagine he won’t be in another. This is not a man who would seem to need DWTS.
If anything, things seem to be ramping up for Ward. His organization, Helping Hands, still works on behalf of biracial children in South Korea, a cause close to Ward, who was raised by his Korean mother after she divorced his African American father. Now, the organization is expanding its charter to help improve literacy for inner-city children. Ward also was appointed to President Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders late last year. The only celebrity on the panel, he’s emerged as the public face of the group, promoting healthy habits and taking part in an anti-bullying campaign. Last month, in a ceremony in New York City, the South Korean government made Ward an honorary ambassador.
If anything, Ward seems to be the rare case where his appearance on the show has been good both for him and DWTS. This season was the most popular one to date, and the calls and emails for media appearances and endorsements have been flooding in, according to Ward’s people. Just talking about Ward’s “people” points to the curious thing about him. The scaffolding required to support 21st-century fame necessarily obscures our view of the person, and their view of us. The best we can know is what a person seems to be. Isn’t that how we usually talk about celebrities? So-and-so seems like this or that. Once this seeming quality turns unstable, we start to question not ourselves, but the celebrity.
But there seems to be a stable quantity at the core of the Celebrity Known as Hines Ward, from his days growing up as a bullied biracial kid in Atlanta, to being nearly overlooked as a third-round draft pick, to the Super Bowl XL MVP trophy and the whirlwind tour of South Korea in 2006 with his mother that first made him a celebrity there, and now, with his win on one of America’s most popular shows.
Photo credit: Adam Taylor/ABC
Everything spins faster and faster, but there’s Hines Ward, still flashing that million-dollar smile, still talking up his immigrant mom as his mentor and his inspiration, still doing and saying the right things with an effortlessness that reads as authenticity. Humility. Integrity. All traits that those close to him bring up again and again. This is a man who can get mistakenly handcuffed by the Los Angeles Police Department, as he was in May, and still seem like a winner (From his Facebook page: “The police were just doing their job. Apologies were made and it’s now in the past. Moving forward … Hines”). This is a man who can be on a show like DWTS and somehow avoid seeming like just another celebrity, desperate for attention. This is a man whom, as one high-level White House staffer put it, Korean American moms love. And if Korean American moms love him, he must be doing something right. He just might be the most famous Korean American in the world right now, and for once, it seems like it’s for the right reasons.
***
Pittsburgh 25, Green Bay 31. Super Bowl XLV ended in defeat for Ward’s Steelers. He finished with seven receptions for 78 yards and one touchdown, but it wasn’t enough.
“I was depressed after losing the Super Bowl,” Ward said. It looked like it’d be a quiet offseason for Ward. But with next season in limbo due to labor negotiations and an owners’ lockout, Andrew Ree, Ward’s manager, saw an opportunity.
“I told Hines that DWTS would be a great way to not think about the lockout and to stay in great physical shape in the offseason,” Ree said. “I wanted him to be the first active player to ever win the Mirror Ball.”
Ward was initially resistant.
“This is my off-season. This is my time to go home, be a father, take my son to school,” he said. If Ward made it deep into the show, his son Jaden’s school year would be over, taking away the chance to do even that. The time with his son, who is 8, is probably even more important for the recently divorced Ward. But he said Jerome Bettis, the garrulous retired halfback for the Steelers, once gave Ward some advice: Do everything. You may not want to. You may be tired. You may want your offseason. But do everything. Because once the football career ends, it will matter.
So, a few short weeks after the Super Bowl, Ward was learning his first dance steps in Los Angeles.
Ward smiles on the sideline at the preseason Carolina Panthers game at Heinz Field on Sept. 9, 2010.
The reactions from Ward’s circle were predictable.
Corey Allen, friend: “I laughed long, and I laughed hard.”
Young He Ward, his mother: “I’m shocked, really. I tell him, ‘You don’t know nothing about the dancing.’”
James Farrior, Pittsburgh Steelers inside linebacker: “Me and all my teammates thought the same thing: He’ll last maybe like a week or two, and then he’ll be gone.”
Farrior got an early peek at Ward’s ballroom efforts, though, and he quickly came around. “[Ward] showed me a video of one of his practice tapes, and I was like, ‘Wow.’ I told him right then, you can win,” he said. The rest of his teammates quickly followed suit.
“Every Monday, guys were planning around seeing me dance,” Ward said.
The teammates’ enthusiasm must have been gratifying, but for Ree, who speaks at the breathless clip of someone who’s already five minutes late for his next meeting, the goal of Ward’s participation was to reach a different audience. “With him playing only a few more years, I felt that now was the time to begin that transition from football to life after football,” Ree said. “I wanted him to gain a broader fan base and connect with that part of the population who knew next to nothing about football.”
Ree said he studied the reality show market and considered other contests as well: Celebrity Apprentice, Survivor and Big Brother. But DWTS won out. It’s a much more popular show, for starters. But it also was the only one where Ward would really be in control of his own fate. No alliances, no teammates. Just good old-fashioned hard work. Ree, who has known Ward for about 20 years, felt good about
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Skankin’ Around The House
Mike Park makes music for his kids, and yours, with his new album, Smile.
story by Jimmy Lee
photographs by Vivien Kim Thorp
Mike Park admits he’s being selfish, when it comes to raising his two children under the constant presence of music.
“But I think it’s a good selfish,” said the 42-year-old former frontman of ska band Skankin’ Pickle and longtime punk rock impresario. “Kids who are well-rounded, who have a better shot at life, are even more so if they’re surrounded by music.”
Music has been really good to Mike Park, ever since his days growing up in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, Calif. He would become one of the pioneers of the third-wave ska scene in America, when he co-founded Skankin’ Pickle in the mid-1980s. He would go on to start his own independent label, Asian Man Records, which celebrated its 15th anniversary last year (and still operates out of his mother’s garage, even as the music industry has undergone radical changes as a result of digitization). And music would even quell his kids’ sour moods, as Park would often pick up his guitar and sing to get them to stop crying.
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A Family Affair
Wedding Palace is a romantic comedy about a quirky Korean American family that will be hitting theaters nationwide later this year. KoreAm spoke with writer/director Christine Yoo and leading man Brian Tee for a behind-the-scenes look at how the movie— filmed with two separate crews in the U.S. and Korea—got made, how Yoo wouldn’t take “no” for an answer and how a community said “yes” to a dream.
by Oliver Saria
They say to make it in Hollywood, it takes moxie, grit and a bit of good luck. You might want to add a PowerPoint presentation to the list.
“I had a PowerPoint presentation, and I literally walked in off the street and would talk to anybody that would talk to me,” Christine Yoo, director of the romantic comedy Wedding Palace, tells me as we sit in a coffee shop in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, where much of the film was shot. “If I wanted to shoot here in this location. I would just come in, I would introduce myself, and I would ask who do I need to talk to.”
Her ambitious indie film certainly needed all the production help it could muster.
With a sizable cast, a flashback sequence set during the Joseon Dynasty, and the film touted as the first U.S.– Korea independent co-production, Yoo had no choice but to go big.
Wedding Palace tells the tale of Korean American Jason Kim (played by Brian Tee of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) doomed by an ancient family curse to die if he does not wed by his fast-approaching 30th birthday. Left at the altar by his fiancée (played by Joy Osmanski), Jason must contend with a family frantically scrambling to find him a new wife, and thus save his life. But Jason chooses to tempt fate by holding out for true love, which he finds during a business trip to Korea, embarking on a long-distance, online relationship with the enchanting Na Young Song (played by Korean starlet, Kang Hye-Jung, the ingénue in the critically acclaimed classic, Oldboy, in her first English-speaking role). But when the family finally meets Na Young, some aren’t convinced she’s the right one to break the curse.
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Featured Event
One of the the biggest Asian cinema events to hit Southern California opens on May 10. The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, presented by Visual Communications, features the latest works by established and emerging filmmakers, along with seminars, panel discussions and symposiums on topics relevant to Asian Pacific cinema.
Opening Night features “Shanghai Calling,” directed by Daniel Hsia and starring Korean American Daniel Henney, who plays a Chinese American expat lawyer navigating his way through the mean streets of Shanghai (the picture above also indicates he is a raisin smuggler). But does he take off his shirt? Go watch the movie to find out! read more
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thanks for what you’ve done for you and your people. thanks for spreading your little two wings just for the future of yourself, Jay!
OMJ I’ve wanted KoreAm to put Jay on the cover and do a cover story on him for the past 2 years and FINALLY!!!!!! Immah go buy this as soon as the bookstore opens up later this morning!!!!!!!!!!! Can’t wait to read it!!!!!! My goshhhhhhh!!!