🇰🇷 Karina

Yu Ji-min was born on April 11, 2000, in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. She trained as a ballet and modern dancer through her teens; she was discovered by an SM Entertainment scout in 2016 at a local dance event. After three years of trainee work, she was selected for SM's new girl-group project — the company's first new girl group since Red Velvet in 2014 — and debuted as the leader and main dancer of aespa on November 17, 2020.

Karina's role in aespa is structural: she is the leader, the main dancer, and one of the two rappers in the group's vocal-line architecture. Her dance training shows in the group's performances, particularly on the choreography for "Next Level" (May 2021), which became the breakthrough single — accumulating 100 million YouTube views in 24 days, the fastest accumulation by a Korean girl group in 2021, and entering the Billboard Hot 100 at number 79.

Between 2021 and 2023, aespa released a sequence of singles — "Savage," "Girls," "Spicy," "Drama" — that established the group at the top of the fourth-generation K-pop girl-group hierarchy. Their first studio album, "Armageddon" (May 2024), debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, the highest position by any K-pop girl group on the chart at that time. The accompanying "Synk: Hyper Line" world tour (2023) became one of the highest-grossing tours by a K-pop fourth-generation girl group.

Outside aespa, Karina became Prada's first Korean global ambassador in 2023, in an unusual cross-cultural move for the Milan house. She added Chaumet as her global jewellery ambassador in 2024. Her fashion partnerships placed her at the same tier of brand association — first Korean ambassador to a major European luxury house — that Jisoo had occupied at Dior and Jennie at Chanel.

Her personal life has remained largely private, with one notable exception: in February 2024, the dating-news outlet Dispatch reported that she was in a relationship with the actor Lee Jae-wook. The relationship became public; aespa fans, in a coordinated response, sent protest trucks to SM Entertainment's headquarters demanding she apologise — a practice known in Korea as "trucks-on-SM," common to fan-idol relationships in K-pop. Karina published a handwritten public apology three days later. The relationship ended within five weeks. The incident — the trucks, the apology, the speed of the dissolution — became a widely-discussed reference point in the Korean cultural conversation about the parasocial pressures on fourth-generation idols.

By 2025, aespa had become SM Entertainment's largest revenue-generating active artist. The group's third tour was announced for late 2025; Karina's solo solo work, while limited, included production credits and a 2024 solo digital release called "Up" that placed her writing capacity on public record.

The Karina of 2026 is, in the Korean industry conversation, a particular kind of figure: the fourth-generation K-pop face whose visual centrality (the K-pop industry term is "face of the group") drives a substantial share of aespa's brand association. The combination of dance-training fluency, leadership inside a flagship girl group, and luxury-house ambassador status places her in the small cohort of fourth-generation idols whose individual brand value rivals that of veteran third-generation soloists.

Her dance-training background — distinctive among fourth-generation idols, most of whom enter the industry through vocal-track or rap-track audition — has produced, on the SM Entertainment choreography team, a working partnership unusual in the K-pop industry. The aespa choreography is, by SM's own internal documentation, structured around Karina's centre-stage capacity in a way that the choreography for SM's previous flagship girl group Red Velvet was not. The choreographic structure has been imitated by competing labels' fourth-generation girl groups; the Karina dance-line position has become, in industry shorthand, the centre-leader-dancer role.

Her 2024 dating-news handling — the public apology three days after Dispatch's report, the rapid relationship dissolution, the continued professional output through the period — is, alongside the structural fancam queen and luxury-house ambassador identities, the third of the major contemporary Karina reference points. The handling of the incident represented, to the Korean industry, a particular kind of resilience: a fourth-generation idol can absorb a fan-protest cycle, issue a structurally sound public apology, and continue at full professional pace inside the same week. For young Korean women navigating idol careers, the Karina case has become a frequently cited contemporary-management reference.