IU

IU, born Lee Ji-eun on May 16, 1993, is a South Korean singer-songwriter and actor. She signed with LOEN Entertainment in 2007, debuted in 2008 with the mini album Lost and Found, and reached a far wider audience with “Good Day,” the lead single from her 2010 album Real. The song’s climactic three-note high vocal run became a defining feature of her early public image. Its success established her as a major figure in Korean pop while she was still a teenager. She soon moved beyond the innocent concept associated with her first television performances and recordings as an artist. Her 2011 album Last Fantasy included “You and I,” another chart success, and she followed it with the 2013 album Modern Times, whose jazz, swing, bossa nova, and pop influences marked a deliberate stylistic expansion. In 2015 she released Chat-Shire, writing lyrics and taking a larger role in composition and production. Palette, issued in 2017, won Album of the Year at the Melon Music Awards and featured collaborations with G-Dragon, Oh Hyuk, and Sunwoo Jung-a. Its title track directly addressed her changing self-understanding as she turned twenty-five in Korean age. The album also contained the hit “Through the Night” single. Alongside music, IU developed an acting career that gave her several sharply different screen roles. She played the determined singer Kim Pil-suk in Dream High in 2011, then appeared in television dramas including The Producers and Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo. Her performance as Lee Ji-an, a young woman burdened by debt and family hardship, was central to the acclaimed 2018 drama My Mister. In Hotel del Luna, she portrayed Jang Man-wol, the centuries-old owner of a hotel serving ghosts. She later led the film Dream, opposite Park Seo-joon, as a documentary producer covering a football team for South Korea. IU has repeatedly paired commercial popularity with authorial involvement in her work. She wrote lyrics for many of her songs and has been credited as a composer on multiple releases, including tracks on Palette and Lilac. Lilac, released in 2021, was presented as a farewell to her twenties and produced the singles “Celebrity” and “Lilac.” In 2022 she issued The Golden Hour: Under the Orange Sun, a concert film drawn from her Seoul Olympic Stadium performances. Her concerts have included performances at Seoul's Jamsil Olympic Stadium, where she became the first Korean female artist to headline the venue in 2022.