Why Fromis_9’s Roh Jisun Walked Away From Idol Life

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The former fromis_9 vocalist opened up about the gap between how she wanted to be seen and how she was actually consumed and why reclaiming authorship of her own image meant leaving the stage behind.

Roh Jisun knew exactly what made an artist worth admiring. She’d think about the musicians she loved and trace their appeal back to its source their songwriting, their craft, the work they put into the world. So when the comments on her own stages were overwhelmingly about her face and her body, something didn’t add up. In a candid appearance on the YouTube talk show Min Saerom’s Open Studio on October 11, the former fromis_9 member laid bare the quiet dissonance that eventually pulled her out of the idol industry altogether.

The Gap Between Being Seen and Being Consumed

“The way I thought idols should be appreciated and the way people actually consumed me were very different,” Roh Jisun said, describing a disconnect that shadowed her years in the spotlight. She wanted the same currency she extended to the artists she admired: curiosity about the work, interest in the stage, recognition of the craft. What she received instead was a flood of appraisal aimed squarely at her appearance.

Most of the comments under her name, she recalled, were variations of “she’s pretty” or remarks about her figure. Others crossed into something more dehumanizing speculation about who would date “a girl like that,” envy aimed at an imagined boyfriend, and crude boasts about whether she could be “won over.” “I just hated being consumed for my looks alone,” she said. “I really wished people would be curious about my work, the things they could actually see on stage.”

There’s a particular cruelty in that gap, and Roh Jisun articulated it with unusual clarity. The problem wasn’t attention itself it was the kind of attention, the way it flattened a performer into an object to be rated rather than an artist to be understood.

Roh Jisun sitting in front of a white curtain, holding a small object in her hands and engaging in conversation.

‘It Wasn’t Honorable’: The Moment That Cut Deepest

The most pointed wound came from how some online content treated her body. “If I’m being really honest, when I performed somewhere, they’d zoom in on my chest and slow it down and loop it,” she said. “That kind of consumption wasn’t honorable, and it hurt so much.”

That single detail lands harder than any abstract complaint about fan culture could. It names a specific, deliberate act the editing, the enlarging, the slow-motion replay and exposes the machinery of objectification that idols, especially young women, often absorb in silence. Roh Jisun’s word choice is telling: honorable. She wasn’t asking to be shielded from scrutiny. She was asking to be treated with dignity.

The Limits of Speaking Up Inside a Group

What makes Roh Jisun’s reflection resonate beyond her own experience is her honesty about why she couldn’t simply push back at the time. In a group, individual conviction rarely gets the final word. “I exist as part of a team, as someone inside it, so I couldn’t decide things alone,” she explained. “I think I suppressed ‘being myself’ as much as I could.”

This is one of the under-discussed tensions of the idol system. A group’s image is a collective asset, shaped by companies, choreographed by consensus, and defended as a unit. For a member who feels misrepresented, the path to objecting runs through layers of obligation to teammates and label alike. Roh Jisun’s candor illuminates a structural reality that fans rarely see from the outside and it reframes her departure not as a sudden rupture, but as the resolution of a pressure that had been building for years.

Roh Jisun with long dark hair is sitting and smiling, wearing a black top, against a backdrop of light-colored curtains. Text in Korean is displayed on the image.

From the Stage to the Studio: A New Kind of Authorship

Roh Jisun’s road to this moment is worth mapping. She debuted with fromis_9 in 2018 as one of nine members assembled through Mnet’s survival series Idol School the group’s name itself an initialism of “from Idol School.” After the group’s exclusive contracts with Pledis Entertainment ended on December 31, 2024, fromis_9 split: five members continued under the new agency ASND, while Roh Jisun, along with Lee Saerom and Lee Seoyeon, chose to walk a separate path. Her roughly seven-year run as an idol formally closed in early 2025.

What she’s building now answers the very frustration she described. Rather than being evaluated by how she looks, Roh Jisun has reinvented herself as a beauty creator and brand planner roles where the output is the point, where she’s judged by what she makes rather than how she’s packaged. There’s a neat symmetry to it: the artist who wanted people to be curious about her work has moved into a field where the work is unmistakably, authorably hers.

Her story arrives amid a broader reckoning in K-pop about the human cost of idol culture the surveillance, the commodification, the toll on performers who are often still teenagers. Roh Jisun isn’t the first to speak about it, and she won’t be the last. But her framing the demand not for less attention but for more honorable attention may be the most useful contribution of all. She didn’t leave because she stopped loving the stage. She left to finally become the author of her own image. And in that choice, there’s something quietly triumphant.