With actresses like Dolly de Leon, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan making waves this Hollywood awards season, we’re seeing Southeast Asian talents finally getting their due recognition on the global stage.
It’s been a long time coming. When it comes to the entertainment leaders in Asia, first to mind are countries like India, South Korea, and Japan for their massive contributions to the realms of film, music, and television. Previously relegated to the sidelines, recent moves have proven that Southeast Asia is already on the track to follow suit.
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For WILD CEO Leonard Lim, global recognition for SEA is a matter of timing and strategy. Having lived in Seoul for a few years, Lim says that he’s applying lessons learned from the Korean entertainment industry to WILD, a two-year-old talent and management agency based in Singapore.
The company has expanded since Lim started it in Seoul in 2020. Initially a talent agency to help his content creator friends find connections in Korean entertainment, it grew further when they signed K-pop idol Sorn (formerly of CLC) and began managing her solo career.
Though they take cues from Korean entertainment, Lim says that their approach is a lot more lax in the sense of artist creative freedom. “We are an artist-first agency and we feel like every time we sign an artist exclusively it’s a partnership, 100% it’s a partnership,” says Lim. He adds: “What we do is we work together and we decide together and we provide every single piece of resource we have to make that project and their term with us and everything we do successful.”
Last year, they added a record label arm to the fold and now have a dedicated A&R and music team. Apart from managing their current roster of content creators like The Hammington Family, Christine Park (@soobeanie_), and Richard Juan, they’ve signed former CLC leader Seungyeon, hip-hop artist Junoflo, “Produce 101” China alum Lana, and are partnering with Yubin (formerly of Wonder Girls) for her SEA promotions. According to Lim, they’ll be announcing more artist and talent partnerships within the year.
Just this January, they debuted their first homegrown Singapore artist Haven (stylized as HAVEN), and have plans to debut more acts, with some artists already in training.
Below, Lim answers a few questions about the relationship of content and music production, the challenges of expanding a hybrid entertainment agency, and putting Southeast Asian talent on the global stage.
How has the year been so far for you and the folks at WILD?
It’s been good. We’re coming off a very big year. I moved WILD from Korea to Singapore last year so it’s been seven months since we moved headquarters. Since then we’ve scaled our team to about 20 staff locally in Singapore. We’ve grown our artist roster to about six and our agency to about 50 creators and producers. Our team is getting pretty big. Singapore is our base and we want to be known as the leader in foreign entertainment but we’re actually looking at setting up office in both the Philippines and Malaysia this year.
The Philippines is a very exciting market for my team. With Singapore being our headquarters, the Philippines was a market that we were very drawn to. So many talented people in the Philippines and we want to bring our artists to the Philippines more often to promote their music and that’s between myself and my head of music and my artist management team. We’re looking forward to that.
I saw in an interview before that you said you mostly signed on friends at the beginning who needed help branching into the Korean entertainment space. Right now though, what do you look for in your talents and artists?
When I first spoke about WILD, it was very much a business that ran out of my personal network and my capabilities. But now because we have a team of 20, we can then give the resources that I’ve built to more artists that are outside of my personal network and connections. When I look at artists now, we’re looking for one, people that understand how to promote themselves as an artist, that aren’t looking to be hand-fed an easy way to fame or to becoming a well-known artist. I think it’s very important in this day and age to know how to self promote. And that’s their understanding of content, that’s their understanding of music, that’s their understanding of how to utilize the resources we have and we give them. [Two], talent. I mean, there’s so much untapped talent in Southeast Asia. The reason I moved my company from Korea to Southeast Asia is that my feeling is everyone can learn from K-pop. K-pop is at its peak. You’ve got groups like BTS and BLACKPINK that are the groups, the artists of their generation. And how do we compete with that? I think at this point, it’s more about learning from that. I think that they’ve created something that a lot of Southeast Asian talent are so ready to replicate and a lot of talented people in Malaysia, in the Philippines, in Singapore, in Thailand, in Malaysia, we are able to support our own artists to get on that global stage too.
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