Liv – K-wave Insider

The eldest member who helped carry RESCENE this far — and the role most people missed.

RESCENE’s Woni is one of the most talked-about idols in Korea right now. “LOVE ATTACK,” a song RESCENE released in 2024, climbed to No. 1 on a major Korean streaming chart two years later, and for months Korean YouTube algorithms have been flooded with RESCENE. At the center of that wave is the group’s leader, Woni.

But Woni’s real role in this team becomes much clearer when you go back to the videos from before the buzz. RESCENE can look like a group that suddenly exploded overnight, but follow Woni through the last two years and the story looks anything but sudden.

Video: RESCENE “LOVE ATTACK” Official MV / Source: RESCENE (YouTube)

Who Is RESCENE’s Woni? The Leader and Eldest Member

RESCENE is a five-member girl group — Woni, Liv, Minami, May, and Zena — that debuted in March 2024 under The Muse Entertainment. Woni, born in 2004, is the leader and oldest member of the group, and she is from Okpo in Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province.

Early in her career, Woni said in an interview that she wanted to become someone the younger members could lean on when things got hard. Looking at what she has done over the past two years, that line feels remarkably accurate. She kept encouraging the members, met people, created content, and gradually widened the places where RESCENE could be seen.

Before she was the member standing at the front of the stage, Woni was someone who kept creating points of contact between her team and the outside world.

The “Sonyeo Gajang” of RESCENE — Holding Together a Team No One Knew Would Make It

Woni is 22 this year. In K-pop, where many idols start training in elementary school and debut as teenagers, that is late for a group still fighting to break through. It made the opportunity feel more urgent, and she had to live with the possibility that there might not be a second chance. The weight she carried was different from that of her younger members.

Korean has an expression, sonyeo gajang (소녀가장), literally a “girl head of household.” It refers to a young daughter who ends up carrying the responsibility of the family like its provider. Woni really did resemble that kind of figure within RESCENE.

When the group’s survival was uncertain, the members were desperate, and some even thought about giving up. Fans know the story of May well. When May said she wanted to quit, Woni went to meet May’s mother in person and asked her to trust her. She was barely out of her teens, making that promise to the mother of a girl around her own age. Woni later said on YouTube that the weight of telling someone she would take responsibility for another person’s life stayed with her.

There are smaller stories too. When Minami and Liv secretly ate something while dieting, Woni couldn’t bring herself to simply tell them not to eat, so she took some of their food and ate it herself, hoping they would end up eating a little less. And whenever Zena, the youngest, cried because she wanted to go home, Woni was the one who comforted her.

Looking back on those days in a recent video, Woni put it simply: she ran bal beotgo (발 벗고, literally “barefoot”), a Korean idiom for throwing yourself into something with everything you have, because she was afraid RESCENE would disappear.

From the beginning, Woni described herself as a leader the younger members could lean on. Once you know what RESCENE went through, that sentence lands differently. Leading a successful team is one thing. Saying “let’s keep going” when there is nothing in sight is much harder.

The Idol Who Worried About Her Company’s Money

The Muse Entertainment began with three people pooling 10 million won, including a CEO and director who had studied at Berklee College of Music. They had musical skill, drive, and sincerity, but the company itself was tiny. The CEO drove the members to schedules himself, and the company printed hundreds of profile sheets and delivered them directly to broadcasters. Even after all that effort, RESCENE managed to book only one music show after debut.

From the beginning, RESCENE had to worry about survival. During that period, Woni became one of the group’s strongest centers.

On Woni’s personal YouTube channel, 안녕하세요원이입니다잘부탁드립니다 — shortened by fans to Anwonjalbu — there is a scene from the gyaru episode that says a lot about her. When Minami, dressed in full gyaru style, fails to promote RESCENE enthusiastically enough, Woni gets genuinely annoyed and says they haven’t even made back the money spent on the makeup and clothes. What kind of idol worries about that on camera? When middle-aged viewers later discovered RESCENE through the Geoje videos and went back through older content, that scene hit differently.

Woni has said the members even talked about pooling their money to open a café if RESCENE didn’t make it. The members had some sense of the company’s financial situation, and they were already thinking about what they would do together if the group ended.

Even now, RESCENE takes PPL, or paid product placement, seriously. They put visible effort into sponsored content. Many viewers normally hate PPL, but people who know RESCENE’s history often cheer when the group gets advertising work. On a TV appearance this summer, the agency said it had received more than 100 advertising inquiries. RESCENE has become one of the names Korean advertisers are watching closely.

How Woni Grew RESCENE by Meeting People

What I find most interesting about Woni is the way she promotes RESCENE. She doesn’t behave like someone trying to act like a star. She meets people, talks to them, laughs with them, and somehow turns them into people who want to see her succeed.

One early example was a web series in which two comedians who had never quite broken through gave Woni, a beginner driver, driving lessons. With two men old enough to be her uncles, she showed the kind of chemistry you’d expect from a professional entertainer. The series built some word of mouth, but it never truly exploded.

What did explode was Woni’s personal channel. Anwonjalbu launched in February 2026 and passed RESCENE’s official channel in subscribers within a few months. Minami’s gyaru character drew attention first, and Woni’s unfiltered return to her hometown of Geoje then became a nationwide talking point. The Geoje video alone passed millions of views in a matter of weeks, driven overwhelmingly by Korean viewers.

The attention focused on Woni flowed back into RESCENE. People who went looking found an enormous archive waiting for them. Even before the group became known, the members had been communicating with fans through livestreams and appearing at every small event they could get. Once people started digging through that history, there was a mountain of content to discover.

Korea has a saying, mul deureool ttae no jeoeora (물 들어올 때 노 저어라), “row while the tide is coming in.” Someone described RESCENE with a variation of it: “They were rowing hard even when there was no water, and when they finally looked up, the tide had come in.”

Woni was at the center of that absurd, almost novel-like story.

What Does “Deokyeon’s Daughter” Mean? Woni’s Geoje Moment

Idols are usually consumed mostly by younger audiences. RESCENE is unusual in having many middle-aged fans, and much of that began with Woni’s hometown content. The moment that fixed Woni in the Korean public’s memory happened in her hometown, far from any glamorous stage.

It began with a gyaru video uploaded in March. Woni joked to Minami, dressed in full gyaru style, that the people of Geoje would scold her if she showed up looking like that. Minami immediately answered, “Geoje, yaho~!” The phrase became a meme, and in May the two actually went to Geoje.

Woni walked into a neighborhood shop and greeted the owner by saying, “Auntie, I’m Deokyeon’s daughter.” She came back out with fried chicken and side dishes. Deokyeon is Woni’s mother’s name.

That expression touches a very particular kind of nostalgia in Korea. In small towns, “so-and-so’s daughter” or “so-and-so’s son” used to be enough to explain who you were. Relationships came before names. It is a kind of neighborhood familiarity that has become harder to find as Korea has urbanized and become more individualistic.

Koreans often talk about hakyeon (학연, school ties), hyeoryeon (혈연, family ties), and jiyeon (지연, hometown ties). After the video, fans added another one: Deokyeon. The joke works because her mother’s name ends in the same-sounding yeon.

Woni went back into that world, and paradoxically, that ordinary version of her is what made her a star.

Geoje later appointed RESCENE as an official ambassador. When the group visited Geoje City Hall, the welcome banner read An meoldeuna (안 멀드나), a Gyeongsang dialect expression meaning roughly, “Wasn’t it a long way?” But the phrase carries more than the literal question. It also contains something like, “You must have had a hard trip. We’ve missed you.”

Woni said her mother was happier when she became a Geoje ambassador than when she debuted. Older people in Geoje don’t necessarily watch YouTube, she joked, so if you’re not on television, they may not even think you’ve really become a celebrity.

Her mother eventually became famous too. On a variety show, Woni joked that her mother had sent her daughter away to become a celebrity, only to become a celebrity herself.

In July’s individual idol brand reputation rankings, Woni ranked No. 1, and “Deokyeon’s daughter” appeared among the keywords associated with her.

Still the Same Woni After Becoming a Star

Woni is no longer an unknown idol. In September’s individual idol brand reputation rankings, she stayed at No. 1, ahead of BTS’s Jimin and BIGBANG’s G-Dragon. She also ranked first among girl group members, while all five RESCENE members placed within the top 11. In the singer brand rankings, RESCENE placed first ahead of Lim Young-woong and BTS.

What stands out is the language associated with her. Alongside words like “cute” and “like,” one of the related terms was “root for.”

What people love about Woni is the story they watched unfold around her. She has the kind of rise people naturally want to support, so she feels less like a distant star to admire and more like someone you genuinely want to see do well.

Woni’s Real Strength: A Strategist with Good Instincts

When I watch Woni, the word “strategist” comes to mind. What I mean is closer to instinct than calculation. She seems to sense, moment by moment, what the team needs.

Who to meet, what kind of content to appear in, how to bring the other members into the picture naturally — Woni keeps creating new points of contact between RESCENE and the public. The attention she receives personally repeatedly flows back into the group.

To me, that’s the most interesting thing about her as a leader. She doesn’t seem to be trying to stand at the center, but somehow she keeps becoming the center.

Why Woni Matters So Much to RESCENE

Every RESCENE member has a distinct character. Minami can pull attention in an instant. Zena is the youngest, but she is powerful on stage. Liv and May are developing their own identities as well.

Woni’s role is different. She helps make those five people feel like one team, while constantly connecting people outside the group with the members inside it. She is one of the main bridges between RESCENE and the world outside the group.

The results followed. On July 8, RESCENE released a remake of KARA’s 2008 hit “Pretty Girl,” and six days later they won their first music show trophy. Their first win on a major terrestrial broadcaster followed soon after. This was the same team that had managed to book only one music show after debut. MBC later named RESCENE its broadcast ambassador for the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games.

Why All of Korea Fell for Woni

Saying Korea loves Woni because she’s “cute” doesn’t explain enough. People watched the process of her success.

They saw the eldest member of a group nobody knew look after the younger members, return to her hometown, meet people, and slowly widen the space around the group. Then, at some point, she became one of the most talked-about idols in Korea.

And yet “Deokyeon’s daughter” still feels like the description that suits her best. Maybe that gap is her charm. She became a superstar, and you still see the person before the star.