Choi Ye-na Has ~20 Scheduled Appearances and Is Designing Every Stage Herself

Choi Ye-na posted photos from the 2026 TMA on the 20th, revealing an all-black catwoman bodysuit complete with cat-ear headpiece. The look is her second headline-grabbing full-body suit in recent months, and as it turns out, that is no coincidence: she came up with both of them herself.

The earlier suit, worn at the Waterbomb festival, drew wide attention partly because it covered everything at an event where most performers wear as little as possible. What the public did not know at the time is that the concept was Ye-na's own pitch. She brought a prepared PowerPoint presentation to a company meeting and laid out the idea herself, a detail that surfaced on MBC's variety show Manager (전지적 참견 시점) in its 416th episode, which aired on the 19th.

More than a performer

The TMA catwoman look fits the same creative logic. Ye-na described her process on Manager as something close to a post-mortem: she reviews which recent stages landed well and which fell flat, treating it like an error notebook, then brings concrete proposals for what comes next. The Cheongnyong Series Awards stage, where she performed with a concept drawn from the webtoon Yumi's Cells, also originated with her. Her agency has been in her life for a decade, and she arrives at those meetings with slides.

Beyond the boardroom footage, the episode showed a more offhand side of her daily routine: an apartment packed with animation figures and plush toys, easy bickering with her mother, and then, once her mother left, a visit from Kim Min-ju, her former IZ*ONE groupmate and apparently a standing fixture in her week. The two live close enough to see each other two or three times most weeks. That evening they snacked on convenience-store junk food and played guessing games.

The career numbers

The casual footage is backdrop to a career that has accelerated sharply. Ye-na currently has around 20 scheduled appearances on the books, a figure that reflects the momentum her single "Catch Catch" has built through a viral challenge tied to its point choreography. Her first encore concert moved into a gymnasium-scale venue, a step up in capacity that visibly pleased her during the venue walkthrough. She then spent rehearsal checking audience cue timing, lift speed, and her own stage movement, the kind of specificity that tends to show up in artists who have been thinking about production for longer than their solo career.

At the concert itself, former IZ*ONE member Jo Yu-ri appeared as a special guest. The set closed with a remake of Block B's "Rare Woman" (보기 드문 여자), recorded with NOWIIMYOUNG, making its broadcast debut that night. When she sang the final song, "Smiley," she cried.

She has spoken plainly about how the solo transition felt: anxious, specifically about whether she could hold an audience's attention without a group around her. The way she has worked through that is less inspirational-speech material and more occupational, study the data, prepare the deck, pitch the concept. She said she wants to be the kind of artist people keep returning to over time, a steady seller rather than a debut-week spike. Early returns suggest she is building toward exactly that. Her agency, her fans (called Jigumi), and a growing schedule of appearances all point the same direction. Circle the date on that encore concert. The documentary will start there.