Rima Yoon Joins ELEANOR Under the Crown
ELEANOR announces exclusive US and UK representation for Rima Yoon, the Seoul-based director behind some of the most-watched music videos on earth and one of the defining visual voices of the K-pop era.
When the biggest artists in the world need more than a music video, when they need a universe with its own weather, mythology, laws, and pulse, they call Rima Yoon. She has built lasting collaborations with aespa, BLACKPINK, IVE, TWICE, SEVENTEEN, Taemin, XG, and BoyNextDoor, a client list that spans every major house in K-pop, alongside brand films for PUBG Battlegrounds, Gentle Monster, and Tamburins.
Consider the scale. K-pop does not merely climb charts; it detonates across continents. A single song can become a global event overnight. And again and again, the videos behind those events lead back to one director. Armageddon. Heya. GO. FAMOUS. Different houses, different artists, one unmistakable gravity.
The numbers travel with her. Her film for aespa’s “Armageddon” sits in YouTube’s 100-million-view club and won the 2024 MAMA Award for Best Music Video. IVE’s “Heya” crossed 100 million views and took the Melon Music Award for Best Music Video. Her latest, BLACKPINK’s “GO,” opened to 21.3 million views in 24 hours, the biggest debut of any music video released in 2026. It went straight to number one on YouTube’s global chart as the most-watched video in the world that day, and has since sailed past 30 million. The work arrives, and the records move.
But numbers only tell the public version of the story. What sets Rima apart is not simply reach. It is authorship at the scale of a new reality. Labels hand her the first day of an act’s entire life and trust her to imagine it whole. She does not merely direct an image around an artist. She builds the world that makes the artist feel inevitable.
AllDay Project’s debut film “FAMOUS,” the launch of The Black Label’s new group, was hers: a whole identity conjured from a single keyword, then expanded until it had architecture, temperature, appetite, and myth.That is what makes Rima feel less discovered than foretold. A flicker becomes a kingdom. A brief becomes a prophecy. A star enters her frame and leaves with a universe around them.
“There is no one comparable to Rima, and that is precisely the point. Rima doesn’t show you a world. She makes you certain she has already lived in one the rest of us have not built yet. That is not something you can teach or counterfeit. Her films hold both the scale of a collapsing universe and the slow ache of a dream that refuses to dissolve, even after morning comes. The distant past and the far future converge inside a single frame. To call the result surreal does not go far enough. The language to fully describe what she does has not been written yet. That is what makes her such an unexpected talent. She does not simply enter a room. She expands what that room is capable of becoming,” says ELEANOR President Sophie Gold.
Time moves in one direction for the rest of us. Rima seems to have negotiated an exception. She works somewhere past the present, where the future has not finished taking shape, and sends the pictures back ahead of schedule. Everything she makes is stylized to a flawless edge, then set loose to break every rule it just wrote. Flawless and lawless in the same breath.
Her vision carries a gravity of its own. Whatever enters the frame is pulled into its logic and remade. She works in plain daylight with the materials the rest of us reach only in sleep, and the terrain that surfaces is less a place she designs than one she returns to from memory.
That is why her arrival under the crown feels less like expansion than alignment. ELEANOR has always gathered directors whose work cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s. Rima belongs to that rare order: the filmmakers who do not follow the future, but leave evidence of it behind.
For “Armageddon,” she scaled a single performance into a planetary one. For “GO,” she handed BLACKPINK a fantasy that did not want them to win, then let them fight their way out and prove it wrong. STASH Magazine called the result a “surreal fantasy.” Its executive editor, Stephen Price, wrote that she leads the group “down a rabbit hole of frenetic design and VFX filled with nods to traditional Korean culture.” The nods are exact: the sujamun pattern that wishes for long life, the looping Hoemun line that never finds its end. Built in-house with the le truc team in Geneva and Paris, the film holds ancestral memory and far-future invention inside a single breath, with no seam to show for it.
Critics have followed her frame for frame. NME called aespa's "Armageddon" video hypnotising; Billboard described BLACKPINK's "GO" as an intergalactic, effects-heavy spectacle. The awe keeps gathering around a single name.
Her brand work holds the same frontier. Films for PUBG Battlegrounds, Gentle Monster’s Veggie collection, and Tamburins’ Sunshine campaign starring Stray Kids’ Felix all live at the design-forward edge where she is most at home. In her hands a product stops being shown and starts being remembered, recalled fondly from a season the calendar has not printed yet.
“Joining Eleanor is more than finding a new agency. It is about finding people who truly understand why I make films. I have always wanted to create work that gives form to emotions we don’t yet have words for, and invites people to believe in worlds that don’t yet exist. I believe Eleanor is the right place to push those possibilities even further, and I am genuinely excited for everything we’ll create together,” says Rima Yoon [Translated from Korean.]
Rima is not the answer to a reference. She is the reason the reference will not exist until after she makes it. What she brings cannot be moodboarded, reverse-engineered, or safely explained in advance. It arrives already alive, with its own physics, its own private logic, and the strange certainty of something that was waiting to be found.
You hand her a threshold, and she returns with a world already worshipping its own sun. The future will get here eventually. Until then, it can be found under the crown.
Rima Yoon will be represented by ELEANOR in the US and the UK across commercial and branded projects.
