An open letter in appreciation of BIGBANG

I first saw a BIGBANG music video at a party. I don’t know who I went with. I hardly remember. I was too young and life was a blur of interesting, strange moments; of nights spent finding fresh new expressions of art. A search for people who spoke in creative tongues and carried art appreciation in their minds and hearts.

I watched the BIGBANG music video with fascination. It was the days of TV and VHS. People brought tapes of entertainment back from Asia that broke the mind with its originality. I didn’t know who the group were, but I remembered the glare of colour and life. I remembered the passion.

A few years later, a time when my dad was still alive, he called my name. “Gillian, there are weird Asian boys on the TV, you’ll like what they’re doing.”

I did. I had seen them before. They were magic again, in that blurry old screen. Every week, I waited for them to come back. I got drunk on the symbols and patterns, the references layered and bold and brilliant. I wanted more, more, more.

They understood that music videos were an art barely explored. I could talk about the corporate artistry if you will because BIGBANG excelled there too: how they carved their own corner of K-Pop, until it swelled and swallowed the world.

But mostly I wanted to talk about the art. You could feel the tension, between the format and their imaginations. Between their version of their art and the creative direction. The swell and fall and growth of control.

They embodied the appetite for everything beautiful and vulgar, obvious and construed: that need to fuse past, present, and future in your own way. When BIGBANG were on the screen, I felt alive, and understood.

I would style fashion shoots for work with BIGBANG music videos playing. Sitting in a rainbow of pop culture shreds, I’d layer clothes and colours and messages—but still within safe parameters, that people would recognise. I wanted to be like BIGBANG. I wanted to express more, and break things a little.

My father got sick and died, and I kept watching. My mother would sit with me now, staring in equal fascination. Technology moved forward. I could watch them on my own. On a smart TV, a laptop, a phone. Whenever, wherever, with whomever. And the internet, like a digital altar, offered their names.

They were patterns woven through my life. I would dye my hair strange shades, play with makeup and colour, all the time telling my own stories in the blur. And all the time, the beat, in my head, and my heart, resonated with echoes of BIGBANG’s art.

Whenever my heart broke. BIGBANG sang along with my tears. Life turned, and they kept giving us new pieces. Their songs filled my car. I drove and drove, drowning in BIGBANG.

I got sick, and became still, but I kept watching. My blood kept flowing because I basked in that energy, in an expression of art I understood without language. We were all the same, but different, whether dancing or surviving.

I showed BIGBANG to friends. I found friends through BIGBANG. I moved house but took BIGBANG with me. I found more friends filled with art, like the people on the screen.

More people I loved died, and each time, after the shatter, I watched BIGBANG. They always brought my wounded fragments back to life. There would always be people who could make the art come out.

The press played games with them. People threw words like darts and sometimes the internet seethed. All those years of tears and laughter—and following. I did follow. On social media, I tried to see what they saw.

G-Dragon laughing with Karl Lagerfeld, and his endless daisies. We all watched G-Dragon, spinning like a top, a person in-between dreams and reality.

I watched T.O.P convince the wealthy to collect contemporary art, walking through Sotheby’s, the height of sophistication. I saw music videos in his shadow, and the path of his talent.

The clothes, the colours, the style, the patterns. A group of friends woven with work and wild with talent.

Always, I wanted to see more, beyond the BIGBANG performing veil. Daesung singing trot; soloing across Japan. The soul in Taeyang’s voice, and his beautiful wedding. Seungri’s self-deprecating humour. Always their endless enthusiasm, turning my world, as the world turned. They were celebrated facets, revolving.

I watched their movie. They made me laugh. They were BIGBANG. They were talented and difficult and awkward and unique. I learnt Hangul, and loved their art in every language. They already communicated so clearly.

BIGBANG were always on the edges of the everyday. A surreal blur. Beloved contradictions.

I watched South Koreans come out en masse to welcome G-Dragon back from military service. I felt the same relief, as if art had come home.

I knew they were rich now. People would comment on the money they had made. I was rich with the memories they gave me. The inspiration, and the solace.

There were tragedies, because life itself is tragic. I remember TOP’s overdose, as if my own heart would stop beating. Then Seungri’s legal troubles, and the band’s troubled faces.

Life kept rushing forward. Always, the rush. The splashes of colour in my Instagram feed when G-Dragon and T.O.P posted. The calm I felt seeing them active, because it meant art was active. Alive. Still growing. Still there.

I watched Still Life. Four, for now, but five in memory. And I cried. I wanted to say thank you as they laid out all their pain. As they walked in in fields of artifice and flowers, offering authentic thoughts. It’s what they do. Still so beautiful. Still speaking in a visual language of endless merging aesthetics.

BIGBANG take what is not real and infuse it with a reality that is wholly theirs. That is holy mine. An enigmatic yellow thread, if not a flowering vine, flowing through life in every season, tied to and entwined around so many hearts.

(Image Credit: G-Dragon's Instagram account, xxxibgdrgn)

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