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| BTS perform at the Times Square New Year's Eve celebration on Tuesday, Dec. 31, 2019, in New York. AP-Yonhap |
By Ko Dong-hwan
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| Huang Zitao. Instagram |
On a Chinese entertainment show, the Chinese star from Qingdao, better known in Korea as Tao, approached in the street four women who claimed from France. He wanted to see if they recognized him as a former K-pop star and a singer and actor in China.
Their initial encounter was followed by his voluntary offer to the women to take a picture together.
After the pictures were taken, the women asked him "BTS?" Tao, seemingly embarrassed, answered "I'm not BTS." One woman told him "You look like a member of BTS."
"Oh really? Thank you," he responded. "You know EXO? I was an EXO member before," Tao continued the dialogue, only to the women's apparently uncomfortable laughter. The two parties' brief meeting ended with the parties going their separate ways.
Then the former SM Entertainment member started ranting at a camera crew filming the scene.
"Edit this part out," Tao said. "They said I looked like a BTS member. I know EXO but don't know about BTS."
The embarrassed star, who walked out from EXO in 2015, kept saying, "BTS back then was less popular then EXO and now people say to me I am a BTS lookalike. Sorry, I have just become a BTS member by someone."
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| On an unidentified Chinese entertainment show, Tao, right, was mistaken as a BTS member. Capture from YouTube |
A YouTube and Twitter and other social network video clip of him with the women started spreading online on Jan. 8. But most of the clip's streaming sources became unavailable as of Sunday.
But the clip had already drawn online criticism against Tao. The critics condemned him for comparing his former band to the now world-class band BTS. He was also criticized for calling himself a former EXO member when he had voluntarily quit.
One of three Chinese members of EXO ― who all left the band ― Tao, after leaving the band, had filed a suit against SM to prove that his contract no longer stood. His writ claimed SM "signed with me unfairly by wielding absolute authority over me and 10 years contract period was too long it had limited my freedom to choose professional and economic activities."
His suit was dismissed at a provincial court in 2017. The court had ruled that 10 years was not as long and intrusive to his private life as he claimed. The court decision had also ruled out the unfairness as the contract reportedly abided by the Fair Trade Commission standards of Korea.
By 2018 his appeals were dismissed at appellate and supreme courts, ending the legal dispute.
