Jeon Soyeon's Former Student Minami Makes Good on a 5-Year-Old Promise in a Stage Reunion

Five years ago, Jeon Soyeon of i-dle stood in front of a group of trainees on MBC's global girl group audition program Bang After School (방과후 설렘) and told one of them, a young contestant named Minami, that they would meet again on a real stage. On July 12, that promise came through.

Minami, now a member of the group RESCENE, posted a video to the group's official social media account titled "Walking confidently anywhere with senior Soyeon." In it, she and Jeon Soyeon perform a choreographed routine together set to RESCENE's recently released single Pretty Girl, the same song the group dropped on July 8 as a remake of KARA's 2008 second mini-album title track. The two had appeared together earlier that day in an interview segment on SBS's Inkigayo.

The context matters. When Minami first appeared on Bang After School in 2021, she was an unknown trainee. Jeon Soyeon joined the show as a trainer and homeroom teacher, a role that, in the structure of Korean idol audition programs, carries genuine mentorship weight beyond the television format. The two made their backstage promise with no guarantee either path would lead to a shared stage.

The video has since drawn a wave of emotional responses from fans online. Comments described it as "a touching saga," "teacher and student reunited," and "moved to tears", the kind of reaction that tends to spread quickly when a K-pop story has a clear before-and-after.

For RESCENE, the timing adds another layer. The group has been riding an unexpected commercial surge after Love Attack began climbing charts retroactively, a so-called "reverse run" (역주행) in Korean industry terminology, where a song gains traction well after its initial release. The group has been nicknamed "the miracle of a small agency", a phrase Korean fans use to acknowledge an independent or smaller-label act breaking through without the infrastructure of a major entertainment company.

Pretty Girl, the remake they're now promoting, carries its own lineage: KARA's original version became one of the defining girl group tracks of the late 2000s, and the choice to revive it connects RESCENE to a lineage of Korean pop that predates most of their current fanbase. That Jeon Soyeon, one of the more production-forward figures in fourth-generation K-pop, is now appearing alongside Minami as a peer rather than a mentor is, in its small way, a marker of how much has shifted for both of them.