Sunmi - Inha Technical College Festival 2017

On the final night of the Inha Technical College festival, a huge crowd gathered to see Sunmi, who had come to close out the festival’s performance stage. I gladly joined them. Driven by a longing to see her up close by any means, I jostled my way through crowds of sturdy young men and somehow managed to reach a spot about fifteen meters from the stage—a bit disappointing, but any closer was impossible. A few seconds after her cheerful voice began to ring out, I started to catch glimpses of her between the heads and shoulders of all those men. In the more than ten years since her debut I had never once thought of Sunmi as pretty, but all of that was forgotten now. She was beautiful. Nothing beyond that came to mind. As soon as the song began to sound, a low, rough cheer rose up and everyone’s arms shot into the air all at once. Every raised hand held a phone. Since there was no way to see her at all with people blocking the view, it was out of a longing to see Sunmi at least through the screen of a phone camera. Thousands of smartphones glittered and swayed like a forest, all driven by a longing for the beauty of just one person. As Oscar Wilde said, beauty is a form of genius. No—it is superior to any other form of genius, for it needs no explanation.