When Jason Hohyun Lee was 12, he embarrassed himself at church by singing so badly that he vowed to never sing again. More than 10 years later, he broke that promise as his moniker, HOHYUN, has garnered over 350,000 monthly Spotify listeners and millions of streams on his music.
Based in Los Angeles, the 23-year-old Korean American singer, filmmaker, and most recently, actor, has always fixated on different art forms. Lee’s first passion was filmmaking, and as a middle schooler, he spent most of his time learning how to edit videos and create visual effects. Lee, whose dad was in the military, was born on a base in Japan and moved around until his family decided to settle in Houston during his teens. It was in high school that he fell in love with the idea of storytelling through film and music.
Lee’s first heartbreak in his junior year of high school was the catalyst for his leap into music. He started listening to Korean and American R&B artists like Zion.T, Sam Kim, and Joji as a way to process what he was feeling. Then, he realized he wanted to try doing it on his own. “I think I just needed an emotional outlet,” Lee said.
When he first delved into singing, Lee would only sing alone in his car or wait for his family to leave the house before he could start practicing. He began to teach himself guitar and within a year, he was writing his own songs.
“There's just something within me that always feels like even if I'm not good at something, I should at least keep trying,” Lee explained.
The summer before his freshman year of college was when Lee decided he would take music seriously. After coming back from writing songs in Korea that summer, he started working on music with a producer friend, releasing songs from his dorm room in Houston.
His second song made it onto a Spotify editorial playlist titled “Dalkom Cafe,” which boosted his morale and affirmed his choice to pursue music. The third song made it onto a bigger Spotify editorial playlist called “TrenChill K-R&B,” which features chill, Korean R&B songs.
“I was freaking out,” Lee laughed. “It seemed a lot more viable than spending 20 years on a directing career. It's so much more immediate.”
When he started, Lee had difficulty finding his sound and identifying as an artist. He was pulling inspiration from the artists he listened to, and his chill R&B tracks sounded similar to theirs.
“During those first couple years, I was really just learning how to create songs,” Lee said. “Three years in, I’m like, ‘Okay, I understand how to do this now. What can I bring to the table?’”
At that point, he felt he had enough experience to start experimenting with different sounds and styles of writing freely. “SUNSET BOULEVARD” was born in this period.
The single, composed of an exhilaratingly cathartic chorus, soft pulsating piano, and electric guitar progressions that are seemingly meant to be listened to on emotional late-night drives, is what Lee called his “magnum opus.”
“I think that’s when I really hit my peak as an artist, and I felt like I’d come into my own sound,” Lee expressed.
When Lee first released “SUNSET BOULEVARD,” no one really noticed it. He estimated that it got 100 streams per day, which disappointed him.
“The strange thing is when I made it, in my head, I was like, ‘Oh, I know this is the one, this is finally going to be the one that does it for me,’” Lee said. Discouraged by the single’s low streaming numbers, he hit a low in July 2022 and started feeling less confident about what he thought would be his imminent success in music.
Luckily, his faith in “SUNSET BOULEVARD” was what saved him.
“After I got out of that little slump, I was like, ‘You know what, I'm gonna make sure people listen to this because I believe this is the song that people should listen to,’” Lee proclaimed. He started to get the hang of marketing and began consistently posting videos featuring snippets of the song on his TikTok and Instagram.
Slowly, the videos, and in turn, the single, began gaining more traction. By the beginning of 2023, a few of his videos had a couple hundred thousand views, with one video getting over a million views; the numbers translated onto Spotify, and “SUNSET BOULEVARD” skyrocketed. Now, the single has over six million streams on Spotify, and the self-directed music video has about 360k views on YouTube.
While Lee’s music encompasses a wide range of genres, they all have one thing in common – most are macaronic, otherwise known as songs that feature two languages. Lee jumps between singing in English and Korean, wanting audiences to acknowledge his Korean American identity.
When Lee was younger, he listened to a lot of Korean music. Being in America, he had forgotten a lot of Korean, and rediscovering Korean music in high school helped him regain a piece of himself that he felt he’d lost.
“There was a mindset that I wanted to show both sides of my culture,” Lee said. “Studying the lyrics of Korean songs helped me understand how to write more complicated lyrics than just elementary phrases.”
Lee’s focus right now is to grow as an artist and as a brand. He’s trying to release as many singles as he can, and once he feels like he has a more established fan base, he plans on beginning to work on full album projects.
Through all of his artistic endeavors, he’s discovered that his passion lies in verbalizing emotions that he can’t fully process on a day-to-day basis.
The goal of his music is to make people discover a part of themselves, Lee expressed. He writes to make himself and the listener confront emotions they didn't want to think about or feel.
“I think the ultimate passion of mine was never filmmaking. It was never music or acting,” Lee remarked. “It's specifically expression.”
