Jennie’s latest visual comes courtesy of a name you’ll want to remember. Meet Sunburnkids, aka Lee Eun-chan, the 20-year-old director behind Fallen Angel, who transformed the music video into something that feels like a memory pulled from a half-remembered dream. But this is hardly his first foray into the spotlight. Having entered Seoul’s fashion scene at a young age, the multidisciplinary creative has spent the years since building a universe that moves fluidly between fashion, music, photography and film. His past work has already caught the attention of names beyond Seoul, including Travis Scott. Now, as he makes his mark on Jennie’s latest project, his distinctive, nostalgic aesthetic is stepping onto a decidedly bigger stage. And if Sunburnkids isn’t already on your radar, it probably should be. Here are seven things to know about the young creative shaping what comes next!
1. He’s only 20. We’ll let that sink in.
If you assumed Sunburnkids had been quietly making films for decades, think again. Still only at the beginning of his twenties, Lee Eun Chan is already directing for Jennie with a creative résumé that somehow has skipped several chapters. While the rest of us were busy surviving our awkward teenage years, he was sketching out a world of his own. As a fellow ’05 creative, I have to admit: I have some catching up to do.
2. It all started with a drawing
Fourteen is around the age most people are still trying to figure out what their first Instagram profile picture should be. Meanwhile, Sunburnkids was already finding his way around Dongdaemun. His creative journey began with pages full of sketches while he was still living in the US, before returning to Korea and deciding to make these ideas come to life as clothes. With no formal fashion training, he headed straight to Dongdaemun Market, figured out how to make his concepts a reality and began sending his creations to artists he admired. One of them was Zior Park, who eventually asked the teenage Sunburnkids to style him. And just like that, a stylist was born.
3. He’s a little bit of everything
Stylist, artist, designer, visual director, filmmaker, and musician, Sunburnkids seems to collect creative disciplines the way the rest of us collect saved Instagram posts. What started with drawing eventually led him to fashion, styling, art direction, then music and film. But rather than treating each as a separate lane, he lets them bleed into one another, building realms where a song can become a video, a sketch can become a garment and a garment can become a character.
4. His signature is in the details
Look closely at Sunburnkids’ creations and you’ll find a world suspended somewhere between the handmade and the digital. Hand-drawn illustrations meet photography, while grainy textures, vintage lens flares and softened, warped light give his images an almost dreamlike haze. Even at their most surreal, there is something intimate and perfectly imperfect about them. It is this deliberate blend of analogue sensibility and digital image-making that has become central to his visual language and part of what makes his direction of Jennie’s Fallen Angel feel so distinctly his.
5. 1.7KG is more than a number
It is where his story begins. Born prematurely at seven months, Lee Eun-chan weighed just 1.7 kilograms. Years later, that number became the name of his fashion label, transforming a tiny and personal detail from, quite literally, his earliest days into the foundation of another creative world. The number carries meaning beyond his own story too: the brand pledges at least 1.7% of its total revenues from each collection to fund medical care, formula and support for premature babies and underprivileged children. In a way, 1.7KG feels like Sunburnkids in miniature, rooted in the idea that even the smallest details can grow into something much bigger.
6. His childhood lives on in fairytale form
For Sunburnkids, childhood isn’t something to simply grow out of. It is material. For instance, his now-inactive fashion label CHAN revisited memories from his younger years, reimagining them through the hazy, fantastical lens of a fairytale. For chapter 4 of his collection, BABY BEETHOVEN, childhood drawings, pianos, bricks and Beethoven’s compositions became fragments of a larger story that felt both nostalgic and ethereal. As he takes glimpses of the past and gives them a life of their own in his projects, Sunburnkids refuses to leave his childlike imagination behind, returning to those memories time and again to dream them anew.
7. His creative world has its own soundtrack
As if the résumé wasn’t stacked enough, Sunburnkids is a musician too. His creative universe extends beyond the visual, with releases including his CRYBOYS MIXTAPE and debut album Elephant in the Room. And naturally, he doesn’t keep his disciplines in separate boxes. Music becomes another way for him to explore the same introspective, slightly surreal world that runs through his fashion and imagery. By now, it’s probably safe to say that one creative outlet was never going to be enough. And if this is what he is already creating at 20, we’ll be keeping our eyes and ears on whatever comes next.
Editor
Noella LeeCredit
Lead Image: @sunburnkids via Instagram
