K-pop star Chaeyoung has apologized for wearing a shirt with a swastika.
On Tuesday, the 23-year-old TWICE member took to Instagram to address the backlash surrounding a since-deleted photo, where she's outfitted in a top depicting Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious wearing the Nazi hate symbol.
Writing that she "didn't correctly recognize the meaning of the tilted swastika in the t-shirt I wore," Chaeyoung apologized for uploading the post to Instagram without "thoroughly reviewing it" and "causing concern."
"I will pay absolute attention in the future to prevent any situation similar from happening again," she continued before adding, "Sincerely apologize again.”
Meanwhile, JYP Entertainment also issued their own statement, where the management group saying it wanted to "deeply apologize for not thoroughly reviewing it from the label side, being absolutely responsible for this situation."
The idol was widely criticized after she was recently spotted in the Sid Vicious tee, as well as a shirt referencing far-right group QAnon — which has peddled Jewish conspiracy theories in the past — during TWICE's performance on MBC’s Show! Music Core this past weekend.
Unsurprisingly, both shirts led to a debate over antisemitism in K-pop, with some arguing that the issue was being "overlooked." However, there were also a number of Chaeyoung defenders, many of whom shifted the blame onto her stylists.
"Whoever is picking out her outfits needs to look at them for more then 0.5 seconds and google if the images have any meaning," as one Reddit user said. "bc you’d think one of the biggest kpop groups out there with a large following across the whole world wouldn’t have stylists sending them on stage in nazi shirts."
Anti-semetism in kpop is way too overlooked. Chaeyoung wearing a q-anon AND a nazi shirt two days in a row, BOTH BEING ANTI SEMETIC, STOP hiding this and mind you these her OWN clothes pic.twitter.com/YMYcUFgTiT
— nar (@nrknation) March 21, 2023
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by u/Marco_Memes from discussion Chaeyoung (TWICE) apologizes for the recent shirt she wore
in kpop
Chaeyoung has yet to respond to the backlash related to her QAnon shirt.
Photo via Getty / Han Myung-Gu / WireImage