aespa’s Winter has shared the story of how she wound up joining SM Entertainment!
On the latest episode of the web variety show “Salon Drip 2,” Winter appeared as a guest to promote aespa’s new single “Dirty Work.”
During the show, Winter spoke about her time as a trainee, saying, “I signed a contract [with SM Entertainment] in 2017 and [trained] for about three and a half years. I auditioned for SM about three times.”
She then revealed with a laugh, “When I first went to audition for SM, the SM employee who oversaw my audition looked at my brother and took my brother instead of me. So I thought to myself, ‘Wait, wasn’t he just here because of me? Was it this easy [for him to get in]?’ So my brother also auditioned, but I sang better than him. My brother wasn’t bad either, but I was a little better.”
“Actually, I didn’t get in back then either,” she continued. “I was scouted at a dance festival, and then I went to Seoul for a proper audition, but I didn’t get in. After that, I auditioned at SM’s global audition in Busan, but I got rejected again. So I thought to myself, ‘Ah, I guess it’s not going to work out with SM,’ and I auditioned for a number of different companies.”
“All of the companies [I auditioned for] asked to see me again,” Winter went on, “and I was still in contact with the [SM employee] who scouted me, so I told them, ‘I think I’m going to wind up at a different company.’ Then they asked me to come in and audition just one last time. I was like, ‘So they turned me down, but now that I told them I’m going somewhere else, they want to stop me?’ But because I wanted to go to SM, I auditioned one last time, and that’s when I got in.”
Watch the full episode of “Salon Drip 2” with English subtitles below!
You can also watch aespa’s variety show “aespa’s Synk Road” with subtitles on Viki here:
