Lee Jae-won
The youngest member and a rapper of first-gen idol group H.O.T. After the split he left with Tony An and Jang Woo-hyuk to form jtL, and he's still performing as a solo artist and DJ.
Born in 1980 in Seoul's Gangdong district, he lost his mom in sixth grade and grew up with his dad and a sister four years older. Money was tight, but his father bought him a color computer on installments, and the kid disappeared into his room with it. According to Kangta, he was the one who first told the other H.O.T. members that something called the internet existed. Taekwondo gave him his first taste of moving his body; Bruce Lee movies sent him hunting for a kung fu school, and later a gymnastics coach. In middle school he taught himself to dance by rewinding taped performances of Seo Taiji and Boys and DEUX. His grades were good enough for an academic high school, but he insisted on a technical school to free up practice time.
In his first year of high school he tagged along with some older dancer friends and just walked into the SM office. The verdict was that he needed more work, but two days later they called him back: his skills needed polish, but they wanted his image. He spent days wondering if it was a scam before going back, dancing and singing for Lee Soo-man himself, and getting in. As a trainee he worked as a backup dancer alongside Moon Hee-jun and Kangta. Once he overslept, hopped in a cab thinking Bucheon was inside Seoul, and missed the entire show, so for a while the hyungs just called him Bucheon.
H.O.T. debuted in 1996. With Jang Woo-hyuk and Moon owning the dance spotlight and others handling the big vocals, he got few lines early on, and years later a Radio Star joke crowned him the least popular member of the most popular group. He was so quiet that more than once the members drove off after a show without him, only to spot him in the rearview mirror sprinting after the van yelling hyung. Still, the pretty maknae of the Candy era grew into a real rapper from the third album on, and he wrote You Got Gun?, Pu Ha Ha and Abandoned Children himself. When H.O.T. headlined Seoul Olympic Stadium in 1999, he was 19, making him the youngest artist ever to play a solo concert there. On TV he came off as mysterious, but among the members he was the maknae on top, always pranking his hyungs.
In 2001, contract renewals with SM fell apart and H.O.T. disbanded. He walked out with Tony An and Jang to form jtL, whose debut A Better Day was his Korean rewrite of a pop song of the same name. After jtL he dropped his solo album No Pain No Gain in 2005. He enlisted in 2009 and was the last member to finish military service. At his 2011 discharge ceremony, all five members stood together for the first time since the split. They never managed their old promise to enlist and get out together, but they did show up for their youngest.
After that came work in China, thyroid cancer surgery in 2013, and from 2017 a new chapter as the EDM DJ J-Want. When Infinite Challenge's Totoga 3 reunited H.O.T. in 2018, he kept drifting off to dance alone at rehearsal until Yoo Jae-suk asked why he was wandering around by himself, and the world learned he followed exactly zero accounts on Instagram. In 2022 he finally showed off his vocals on King of Mask Singer, and in 2024 he released his first mini album, ONCE AGAIN, his first physical record in 17 years.