Yim Si-wan, the ZE:A singer who waited 15 years to make his own record

Yim Si-wan

Photo: K-POPIT 케이팝잇 / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 1, 1988 Busan, South Korea
Occupation	Singer and actor
Known for	Squid Game: Making Season 2, Emergency Declaration, Unlocked
Awards	Baeksang Award · Blue Dragon Award · Buil Film

For most of his career, Yim Si-wan sang only when a character needed a song. He was a vocalist in a nine-member boy band before he was anything else, yet the voice the public heard came mostly through drama soundtracks, tucked into the closing credits of series in which he already played the lead. His first solo record arrived after he had been a student activist tortured by police, a bioterrorist on a passenger jet and a debt-ridden crypto YouTuber in Squid Game. It is a soft, deliberately uncomplicated EP called The Reason, and he has talked about it less as a reinvention than as a way back to the stage he left in his twenties.

The name on his birth registration is Yim Woong-jae; he changed it legally before his debut. He grew up in Busan, where he was born on December 1, 1988, and went on to Pusan National University. The music business found him there too: a scout from Star Empire Entertainment noticed him at the Chin Chin Song Festival in Busan and signed him as a trainee.

He spent about three years training with eight other young men under the working name Children of Empire. From 2009 the group staged guerrilla performances around the country, and Yim took the stage name Siwan. They debuted as ZE:A on January 7, 2010, with the single album Nativity and its lead track Mazeltov, and he also sang in the sub-unit ZE:A-Five. The catalogue that followed, from the full-length Lovability to the mini albums Illusion, fronted by The Ghost of Wind, and First Homme, fronted by Breathe, is second-generation K-pop at its most earnest, built on big choruses and nine voices passing lines between them. ZE:A never reached the front rank of its era, but it launched more than one screen career, Park Hyung-sik’s among them, and some K-pop critics still call its discography underrated.

The pivot began while the group was still promoting singles. In 2012 Yim played the young Heo Yeom in the historical drama Moon Embracing the Sun, which passed 40 percent ratings. A year later he was the student detained and tortured by police in The Attorney, a courtroom drama that sold more than 11 million tickets, and in 2014 he played the rookie office intern Jang Geu-rae in Misaeng: Incomplete Life, the series that won him Best New Actor in television at the Baeksang Arts Awards. For about two years he had been a singer with an acting sideline. After Misaeng, the proportions reversed.

Music did not stop; it changed address. He sang Be Alright for the Misaeng soundtrack, which reached No. 42 on the Korean download chart, then recorded songs for The King in Love, Tracer and Boyhood. For Run On he co-wrote the lyrics of I and You and sang it, his first drama song in four years. Away from soundtracks he recorded Tick-Tock Tick-Tock with Jo Hyun-ah of Urban Zakapa and Win for You with Winter of aespa, the official theme of the 2024 World Team Table Tennis Championships in Busan, an event he also promoted as an ambassador. Between July 2017 and March 2019 he served in the army as an active-duty soldier with the 25th Infantry Division, where he was picked as an assistant drill instructor. ZE:A went quiet in the same period, although Star Empire insisted the group had not disbanded.

The roles grew darker as the voice receded. He played the bioterrorist on board a passenger jet in Han Jae-rim’s Emergency Declaration, which premiered out of competition at Cannes in 2021 and won him Best Supporting Actor at the Buil Film Awards, and then a timid loner mistaken for the toughest fighter at a new school in the comedy Boyhood, which brought the Blue Dragon Series Award for Best Actor in 2024. Audiences outside Korea met him as Lee Myung-gi, Player 333, a crypto influencer whose bad tip had ruined his own followers, in the second and third seasons of Squid Game, released in 2024 and 2025. In September 2025 Netflix released Mantis, an action film he headlines.

The return to music was planned around that screen calendar. On October 13, 2025, SM Entertainment confirmed that Yim would release a solo album through SMArt, a new music label run by Kang Ta, the former H.O.T. singer who had worked as a creative director inside the company; Yim was its first artist. Weeks later he signed with The Black Label for acting management, so his career now runs through two companies, one for screens and one for records. He bleached his hair for the comeback, and during press for Mantis he joked that he had gone back to idol hair to try being a singer again. The Reason came out on December 5, 2025, with five tracks: the mid-tempo title song, Dear My Love, Two Of Us, Where I Need To Be and Pieces. He told the label that he imagined every song on a stage while recording, asking himself whether fans could sing it with him in a concert hall, and that although he personally prefers quiet songs, he looked for a middle point that would still work in performance.

The record did not change his standing, and it was not built to. The Reason peaked at No. 18 on Korea’s Circle album chart for December 2025, with 8,923 copies sold, a tiny number next to the audience of Squid Game. The K-pop blog The Bias List called the title track a swinging mid-tempo that “practically defines easy-listening,” while praising his voice and finding more heft in the production than expected. Some international coverage went further than the facts and described the song as written and composed by Yim himself; the published credits list other writers, among them Joohyoung of MonoTree, Kyle Wong and JINBYJIN. That gap shapes how the comeback should be read. What it offers is an interpreter’s record, made by a label that knows how to frame a voice for a fan base that has followed him from ZE:A stages to film festivals, rather than an actor reclaiming authorship of his own songs.

On screen, the pace has not slowed. On October 15, 2026, he hosted the closing ceremony of the 31st Busan International Film Festival in his home city, the night the Busan Awards were handed out, and on October 19 tvN begins Love in Disguise, a thriller-romance in which he plays Yoon Yi-jun, a likely heir of Taegang Group who becomes a murder suspect, opposite Seol In-ah as a detective who goes undercover as his male secretary. No second record has been announced. Whether The Reason stays a single gesture to the fans who remember Siwan of ZE:A, or becomes a parallel career he keeps running beside the one that made his name, is still open. The song he recommended from the EP, Where I Need To Be, is the one he described as good for quietly looking back at yourself.

Tags: singers, K-pop, aespa, Squid Game, Yim Si-wan, Kang Ta