Chae Yeon Finally Tells the Full Story of Her Iconic Crying Selfie — 'I Took 300 Photos While Crying at 3am'

Twenty years after a single late-night photo turned her into an unlikely internet icon, singer Chae Yeon has finally told the full, unfiltered story of the famous "crying selfie" that became a legendary piece of Korean pop culture history. Appearing on KBS2's long-running music competition Immortal Songs (불후의 명곡) — Episode 755, a special dedicated to celebrated composer Joo Young-hoon — Chae Yeon opened up about the emotional reality behind an image that her fans and the internet have been referencing ever since.

The confession, which aired on May 9, 2026, struck a chord not just for the story itself but for its honesty about the hidden pressures of sudden stardom — a theme that resonates as deeply today as it did in the early 2000s when Chae Yeon first became famous.

The Selfie That Started a Legend

The photo in question was taken during the early years of Cyworld, South Korea's groundbreaking social network that predated platforms like Facebook and Instagram by nearly a decade. Cyworld's personal "minihompi" pages were a central part of Korean digital life in the early 2000s, and celebrities sharing personal moments there was novel, intimate, and — as Chae Yeon discovered — potentially permanent.

"I was genuinely in so much pain back then," Chae Yeon told the Immortal Songs MCs, Kim Jun-hyun and Lee Chan-won. "There was some showing off involved — I was young, after all — but I was also really, truly struggling." The reason for the pain, she explained, was something that might surprise anyone who only sees the glamour of celebrity: the disorienting disconnect of sudden fame. "I'd started to receive so much love all at once, and I felt this strange sense of alienation from it," she said. "The emotions didn't match up. There was no outlet for what I was feeling."

Her solution, at three in the morning, was to open her Cyworld minihompi. "That was the mistake," she laughed, looking back. "Opening Cyworld at midnight — that was the problem." Sitting alone with her feelings, she started to cry. Then, almost on impulse, she decided to photograph herself. "I thought, should I take a picture? And then I just... kept going. I took about 300 photos while I was crying." The photo that ended up online — one blurry, raw, tearful frame out of three hundred — went viral in the way things went viral in that era: slowly, then everywhere.

From Viral Moment to Cultural Landmark

What followed was something Chae Yeon could not have predicted. The photo became a meme, a touchstone, a recurring joke and a sincere point of reference in Korean internet culture. Two decades later, MC Lee Chan-won introduced her on the Immortal Songs stage by saying the photo had "hit all of South Korea." The audience laughed. Chae Yeon laughed too — but her willingness to speak honestly about the pain that produced the image gave the moment something more than nostalgia.

The image has endured for two decades for reasons beyond its specific emotional content. It captures something true about being young, overwhelmed, and reaching for connection in the middle of the night. That the platform was Cyworld and the format was a grainy early-digital selfie only adds to the time-capsule quality of the moment — a very specific slice of a very specific era in Korean pop culture history.

Y2K Revival and a New Generation of Fans

Chae Yeon's Immortal Songs appearance came at a moment when the singer is experiencing something of a cultural renaissance. She has recently launched a YouTube channel focused on Y2K content — fashion, music, and sensibility from the late 1990s and early 2000s — and has found an enthusiastic audience among younger viewers who were not yet born when the crying selfie was taken.

"People who love nostalgia have been really supportive," Chae Yeon told the MCs, "and the younger MZ generation seems to genuinely enjoy looking back at that era's fashion and trends. The timing felt right." The vintage Y2K aesthetic that drives so much of today's fashion and social media content turns out to align naturally with the visual world Chae Yeon inhabited at the height of her fame — and she has navigated that alignment thoughtfully, without feeling like a relic being recycled.

Part of that navigation has taken the form of new music. Chae Yeon recently released a ballad titled "I Sometimes Cry" (난 가끔 눈물을 흘린다), which directly draws on the emotional experience behind the famous selfie. On the Immortal Songs stage, she sang a verse of the song, offering something fuller and more deliberately crafted than the late-night impulse that produced the original photograph. Where the selfie was accidental, this song is intentional — a way of owning the moment rather than being owned by it.

The Lasting Power of an Accidental Image

Chae Yeon's performance on Immortal Songs — a cover of her signature hit Storm (스톰) for the Joo Young-hoon special — was met warmly. But it was the candid conversation between songs that gave the episode its most memorable moments. Lee Chan-won, himself a popular singer known for his warmth with guests, asked questions that drew out the kind of honesty that Chae Yeon has clearly grown into over two decades in the public eye.

Other performers on the night included Son Seung-yeon, Jo Hyung-kyun, Aiki, Lee Hei, Hyojin Choi, NEXZ, and D82 — a diverse lineup that positioned Chae Yeon among both veterans and current acts, a framing that felt apt given her current moment.

The crying selfie is not going anywhere. If anything, Chae Yeon's willingness to revisit it with honesty and even humor has only deepened its status in Korean pop culture. The photo was an accident. The story behind it — about isolation, sudden fame, and a 3am impulse to connect with the world through a camera — turns out to be one worth telling properly, twenty years on.