Meet Big Ocean: K-pop's first hard-of-hearing group is winning hearts with use of sign language in their songs

Big Ocean, consisting of Lee Chan-yeon, Park Hyun-jin (PJ), and Kim Seok, debuted last year with the single Glow. They trained for two years before their debut.

K-pop groups such as BTS, BLACKPINK, TXT, EXO, Stray Kids, GOT7 among many others are a rage across the world. They even have their own fandoms. So what sets apart K-pop group Big Ocean? Well, for the unversed, Big Ocean is the first hard-of-hearing group in K-pop and they are winning hearts with the use of sign language in their songs.

Big Ocean consists of three members--Lee Chan-yeon, Park Hyun-jin (PJ) and Kim Ji-seok.

An introduction to Big Ocean

The group, formed under Parastar Entertainment, debuted on April 20 last year with the single Glow. This coincided with the Day of Persons with Disabilities in South Korea. The group consists of three members--Lee Chan-yeon, Park Hyun-jin (PJ) and Kim Ji-seok.

They trained for nearly two years before their debut. Each of them has different levels of hearing loss. While Ji-seok was born with a hearing impairment, Hyun-jin lost part of his hearing when he was three years old, and Chan-yeon had hearing loss at the age of 11, as per Korea JoongAng Daily.

About Big Ocean songs, concert

Their first single was a remake of the 1998 song Hope by H.O.T. A few months after their debut, Big Ocean released their second single Blow in June last year. In August, they released their third single Slow. In November last year, Big Ocean released their first EP Follow. It featured a new track Flow.

Parastar Entertainment had announced that Big Ocean will perform using Korean Sign Language (KSL), American Sign Language (ASL), and International Sign Language (ISL). As per Parastar Entertainment, the members recorded the songs in their own voices, but for some parts, the recording got assistance from AI.

Their first concert took place in March this year in Nagoya, Japan. Their first European tour, titled Underwater, began in April this year.

Big Ocean's social media presence

The group has 206K subscribers on YouTube and 474 videos overall. They not only share videos of their songs but also give fans glimpses inside their lives. They share videos from their trips and tours, tutorials, stage performances and BTS clips among others. Big Ocean has 997K followers on Instagram. They are only following their agency.

What Big Ocean said about themselves

Speaking with Korea JoongAng Daily last year, Hyun-jin had said that they "usually talk to each other, but we end up using sign language sometimes if we don’t get each other".

Ji-seok had talked about their hearing. "We all have different hearing abilities, which means that our reflexes and reactions toward the same sound are also different. This made it harder for us to get our dance in sync, but we knew that we couldn’t — and shouldn’t — use our impairments as an excuse. We asked everyone at the agency for every little detail and just practised and practised until we shoved all the moves into every cell of our body," he had said.

Chan-yeon had talked about people's reaction to their work. "Rather than getting complimented from the very beginning, I hope that people stay tuned with our activities and say, 'I can see that you’re getting better and better with each new event.' I want people to think that we’re a team that gets better with time," he had said.

What did they do before debut

Before their debut, they had full-time jobs--Hyun-jin was a TV personality-YouTuber, Chan-yeon was an audiologist at Korea University Anam Hospital, Ji-seok was a professional alpine skier as well as a member of the Seoul Disabled Ski Association.