To understand how strange Park Geon-roung’s story is, we need to start from a paradox: billions of people have probably seen his face, but very few have known his name. He was just six years old when he appeared in front of a blue background, with his hands above his head to imitate a shark’s fin and that exaggerated facial expression that anyone who has dealt with a child in the last decade would recognize in seconds. The video was Baby Shark Dancepublished by Pinkfong on YouTube on June 17, 2016, and Park wasn’t even the voice of the song: the very young Korean-American Hope Segoine sang it, while he and Elaine Kim Johnston were the children who performed it on camera.
Ten years later, the turnaround couldn’t be more perfect. The child that everyone has seen but almost no one has heard is about to release a song in which, this time, the voice is his.
The Pinkfong Company has announced that Park Geon-roung, now seventeen and still identified in Korea by the nickname “Baby Shark Boy,” will release his next August 20th digital single WAVEa song in Korean for which he participated in writing the lyrics and which will see the collaboration of Joohoney from MONSTA. A choice that is anything but ornamental, because Joohoney belongs to a generation of idols who have built part of their identity precisely on writing, rapping and creative participation in music, and his presence makes what Pinkfong wants to do with Park immediately legible: not just exploit the nostalgia for the child of one of the greatest viral phenomena in history, but accompany him within a language fully recognizable as K-pop.
Seventeen billion views later
The numbers, in this case, are so large that they have almost lost meaning. At the end of July 2026 Baby Shark Dance had passed the 17.1 billion views and continues to be the most viewed video in YouTube history, with a huge lead over other content on the platform. When in November 2020 he passed Despacito of Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, taking first place overall, seemed like one of the many curious firsts produced by Internet culture; in January 2022 it became the first video in the history of YouTube to reach ten billion views and since then it has never really been called into question.
Reduce Baby Shark to a nursery rhyme that has gone viral, however, means not grasping the dimension of what Pinkfong has managed to build around it. In May 2026 the song also topped one billion streams on Spotifyentering the platform’s Billions Club, after remaining on the Billboard Hot 100 for twenty weeks and obtaining certifications that normally belong to global pop, including Diamond in the United States and five times platinum in the United Kingdom. In the meantime, the character has been transformed into animated series, films, live shows, products, immersive experiences and an IP distributed in dozens of languages and countries.
It is one of the most singular stories of contemporary Korean soft power precisely because it grew on the margins of the categories through which we are used to describing Hallyu. Baby Shark it is not a K-drama, it was not born as K-pop in the industrial meaning that we attribute to the term and it does not depend on the traditional construction of an idol fandom; yet it is a product born in Korea that has crossed linguistic borders with a speed and capillarity that very few South Korean cultural phenomena have ever achieved.
Inside that gigantic story, however, there was a child.
From Baby Shark Boy to Park Geon-roung
The fact that Park today wants to turn that memory into a starting point rather than dragging it around as a biographical curiosity is perhaps the most interesting part of his new adventure.
In 2025 Pinkfong brought him back into the spotlight on the occasion of the celebrations for the tenth anniversary of Baby Shark. In the short videos published on social media, the editing inevitably played on the transformation: on the one hand the child of 2016, on the other a now unrecognizable teenager, who however continued to present himself on his Instagram profile as “Babyshark Boy”. The reaction was immediate, fueled by that temporal effect that the Internet knows very well: millions of people who had seen their children grow up with that song suddenly discovered that in the meantime the child in the video had also grown up.
Those celebratory appearances garnered, according to data communicated by the company, a total of around 22 million views. But Park hadn’t been completely out of entertainment during the years between the video and today. In fact, in 2020 he debuted with Play With Me Cluba co-ed musical project dedicated to a young audience, publishing Let’s Play and also participating in the creation of the lyrics together with the other members.
Therefore define WAVE simply as his “K-pop debut” requires a little clarification. It’s not Park’s first time singing or being part of a musical project, but it represents his first real solo passage towards an autonomous artistic identityoutside the infantile container in which the public had known him.
And it is precisely this distinction that makes the story better.
For ten years he was the face of someone else’s voice
There is a phrase uttered by Park in the announcement WAVE which explains much more than a normal promotional statement.
“I was always grateful that people still remembered a video I participated in as a child,” he said. «Ten years ago I danced next to Baby Shark. This time I wanted to share my voice and a story that I wrote myself.”
It is difficult to imagine a more precise statement to describe the condition of those who became famous before they could even choose what to do with their fame.
Park in fact belongs to a particular generation of children who grew up within the permanent memory of the platforms. For previous generations, an advertisement, a television appearance or even a small film role could gradually disappear from the archives of pop culture; for those born in the YouTube era, however, childhood can continue to be reproduced billions of times while the person who appears becomes an adolescent, then an adult, building tastes and identities completely different from those associated with that image.
In Park’s case the proportion takes on almost surreal dimensions: as he grew up, the child he had been at six years old continued to dance in front of millions of other people every day.
And here WAVE it becomes something more interesting than a simple nostalgia operation, at least in the declared intentions. The point isn’t to erase Baby Shark, because Park doesn’t seem to want to do that and actually continues to openly acknowledge that part of his story; it is rather about finally add a subject to the imagetransforming “Baby Shark’s child” into a person to whom we can associate a name, a voice and a writing.
Joohoney and the bridge with K-pop
Joohoney’s presence inevitably contributes to giving the project a different credibility. Member of MONSTA The combination with a seventeen year old who chooses to present himself with a song co-written by him therefore makes the featuring particularly coherent and, at the same time, allows Park to enter the system without being left alone with the label that has accompanied him since childhood.
The title itself, WAVEseems almost impossible to separate from his biography, even without attributing meanings to it that we will only discover when the song is published. A wave is exactly what Baby Shark it was: a little song for children capable of spreading from one screen to another until it became a global phenomenon, dragging with it the face of a child who couldn’t have known where that wave would take him.
Now Park is trying to generate his own.
The most curious side of Hallyu: when Baby Shark meets K-pop
Finally, there is something profoundly Korean in the path that unites the two extremes of its history. Baby Shark has been demonstrating for ten years how the global success of South Korean content is much broader than just K-pop: The Pinkfong Company has built a global business starting from a digital-first logic, localizing its content for different markets and transforming a video of just over two minutes into an intellectual property ecosystem. In 2026 the company continues to describe Baby Shark as its own big international engine, while simultaneously expanding other IPs like Bebefinn and even experimenting with AI-powered experiences.
Park’s debut therefore closes a curious circle: one of the most recognizable faces of the Global K-content before the world even learned to use this expression so easily now enters the musical system that more than any other has made South Korea a contemporary cultural power.
And perhaps the most fascinating detail remains the simplest one. In 2016, Park Geon-roung didn’t sing Baby Shark: Danced in front of the camera while someone else lent vocals to the song. August 20, 2026, when it arrives WAVEthe public who have known him for ten years without knowing him will finally be able to do the opposite: not just watch Baby Shark Boy, but listen to Park Geon-roung.
