🇰🇷 Hanni

Phạm Ngọc Hân — known professionally as Hanni — was born on October 6, 2004, in Melbourne, Australia, to Vietnamese parents who had emigrated to Australia in the 1980s. She grew up in Melbourne speaking Vietnamese at home and English at school. Her musical training was informal — choir singing, family-recital playing — until she was scouted by ADOR (then a future-HYBE subsidiary in development) at the age of fourteen during a visit to Vietnam. She moved to Seoul at fifteen to begin her trainee period.

She debuted as a member of NewJeans on July 22, 2022, at age seventeen. Within the group, Hanni's role is lead vocalist and one of the principal English-language vocalists — her trilingual register (Vietnamese, English, Korean) became, on subsequent NewJeans releases, a structural feature of the group's bilingual-and-multilingual production. Her vocal delivery on tracks like "Hype Boy" and "OMG" — characterised by a soft, breathy upper register — became one of the recognisable audio signatures of NewJeans's early catalogue.

Outside the group, Hanni's public profile in Korea grew rapidly. She became Gucci's Korean global ambassador in 2023, joining the small cohort of fourth-generation K-pop idols with major-luxury-house ambassador roles. Her early-2024 viral moment — a fancam at a Tokyo Dome show where she danced unselfconsciously during the bridge of "Get Up" — became the most-shared K-pop fancam of the year.

In April 2024, the ADOR-HYBE corporate dispute erupted publicly. Hanni — alongside her four NewJeans bandmates — became a central figure in the dispute as the members issued a series of joint statements supporting their ADOR CEO Min Hee-jin and asserting that HYBE was attempting to harm both Min and the group.

In September 2024, Hanni alleged in a livestream that HYBE staff — specifically, members of another HYBE-affiliated group's management — had instructed staff to ignore her, an alleged workplace mistreatment incident she described as occurring in a HYBE corridor on a recording day. The allegation became one of the central public-image flashpoints of the ADOR-HYBE dispute. In October 2024, Hanni was invited to testify before the Korean National Assembly's Labour and Environment Committee — the first active K-pop idol to do so on the basis of workplace conditions inside her own label. Her testimony, in fluent Korean, described the incident she had alleged and called for stronger workplace protections for K-pop performers.

In November 2024, alongside the other NewJeans members, Hanni announced the termination of her ADOR contract at the joint Seoul Bar Association press conference, citing the unresolved workplace allegations and a loss of trust in the parent company's restructuring of the sub-label. ADOR contested the termination the same week; the dispute moved to the Seoul Central District Court, where a preliminary injunction in March 2025 paused the planned NJZ rebrand pending substantive review.

By 2025, Hanni's legal status as an active K-pop member was unresolved alongside her bandmates'. Her individual brand work — the Gucci ambassadorship, her acting and television appearances, her music production work — continued. She became, in the Korean cultural conversation, a particular kind of figure: the K-pop member who pushed an industry-internal labour-rights conversation onto the national-political agenda.

The Hanni of 2026 is, in the K-pop industry conversation, the first active member to formally testify before the National Assembly on workplace conditions inside her own label. The structural significance of that testimony — independent of the legal outcome of the ADOR-HYBE dispute — is that it created a precedent for K-pop labour-rights discourse that did not exist in October 2024. Whether subsequent idols follow her precedent will be answered, the industry expects, within the next several years.

Her vocal contribution to the NewJeans catalogue is, alongside the political dimension of her 2024 testimony, the other lasting element of her public profile. The trilingual delivery on "Cool With You," the breathy upper-register lead on "OMG," the unselfconscious dance-and-vocal performance on the "Get Up" Tokyo Dome shows — together these have produced, by 2026, one of the most-imitated vocal-and-performance signatures in the K-pop fourth generation. The Korean vocal-coaching community has, in the post-2024 period, written extensively about the technical structure of her breath control and her register transitions.