A member of K-pop girl group Gfriend has come under fire for sharing pictures of herself posing with a mannequin wearing a Nazi uniform.
On January 31, Sowon (whose real name is Kim So-jung) shared two images of herself posing with the mannequin on Instagram. She deleted the photos shortly after, but outrage spread online, with many accusing the singer of insensitivity and alleged anti-Semitism.
Sowon’s name and other terms related to the situation trended worldwide on Twitter shortly after she posted the images, and on Monday the incident trended on South Korean portal sites as news outlets in the country reported on the blowback from international K-pop fans.
Source Music issued a statement to South Korean media on Monday evening, apologising for the incident, explaining that the staff involved were unaware of the issue with the decorations at the filming location. The statement included that Sowon had expressed shock at the misunderstanding, and regretted the incident.
“We will exercise vigilance to ensure we are fully aware of historical and social issues and their impact,” the Source Music statement added.
The pictures appear to have been taken at Cafe Zino, a restaurant in South Korea’s Paju city that frequently appears in K-dramas and is a popular tourist attraction due to its picturesque setting inspired by classic German aesthetics. The group filmed content there in line with the release of their most recent album Walpurgis Night, which is thematically inspired by a German festival.
Fans also found a history of other alleged instances in which members of Gfriend appeared to make jokes about the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler’s legacy.
Last year, rapper ISHXRK – who featured on the song Secret with Gfriend’s Yuju – issued an apology after he was accused of insensitivity for including the term “holocaust” in one of his lines.
The term “holocaust” was first used to refer to mass murders, most prominently the massacre of thousands of Armenian Christians under the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s, but later came to be used definitively refer to the genocide of European Jewry in the 1930s and ’40s.
During Hitler’s years in power, six million Jews were murdered on an industrial scale through systemic killings and death camps, collectively known as the Holocaust. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also estimates another 11 million people died under Nazi rule.
In the past, other K-pop acts have been called out for wearing or associating with Nazi imagery. In 2018, Big Hit Entertainment issued an apology on behalf of BTS member RM after he wore a hat with Nazi insignia in a past photo shoot, while in 2014 a little-known girl group named Pritz rose to international awareness after using Nazi-like insignia.