Ni-Ki

Who is Ni-Ki?

Ni-Ki is a member of ENHYPEN, the six-member group formed on Mnet’s I-LAND. BELIFT LAB’s official profile gives his birth date as 9 December 2005 and the group’s debut date as 30 November 2020. News1, interviewing him on 1 June 2025, introduced him as being from Japan.

It began with a Michael Jackson video

Dance came first. “When I was small my father played me Michael Jackson’s music videos, and that is where my interest in dance came from,” he told News1 in that interview. He copied the moves on his own until he wanted to learn properly, then spent about ten years at a dance school near his home, picking up several genres there.

K-pop reached him through a choreographer. He travelled to another region to meet one, and the man happened to be working as SHINee’s director and looking for ‘SHINee Kids’ dancers; Ni-Ki was chosen, and in 2017, in his sixth year of primary school, he danced on stage at SHINee’s Tokyo Dome concert. After that he started looking K-pop up, he said: “It felt like a job I simply had to do.” He auditioned in his second year of middle school and moved to Korea as soon as he passed.

The trainee period lasted about eight months. News1 reported that he spent it practising alone and that the hardest part was the language. Once he was inside I-LAND he had to lead the other trainees in dance without being able to communicate, he said, and Jay, who speaks Japanese, helped him a great deal.

His place in the group

BELIFT LAB’s profile states no position for any member, and Ni-Ki says the same thing. “Our team has no official positions, so I’m known as the member who pays a bit more attention to dance than the others” was how he introduced himself. He is also the youngest member of the group.

Coachella, and the song it left behind

In 2025, the year of the group’s fifth anniversary, he changed his answer about his most memorable moment. It used to be the Tokyo Dome concert, he said, and it had become Coachella. He had prepared for over a month and had a say in the staging from beginning to end, News1 reported: “It was a stage we put together our own way.” The sixth EP DESIRE : UNLEASH followed on 5 June that year.

The stage led to solo work the next year. Ni-Ki released a cover of ‘LIMBO’ in April 2026 and explained to Esquire Korea how it came about: keshi, who recorded the song, had been on the Coachella line-up the year before, he had watched the rehearsal, and a song he already liked grew on him further. “While we were preparing for Coachella I listened to it every day for the two weeks or so we were in the United States, and in the end America meant ‘LIMBO’ to me,” he said. Asked what he wanted the cover to show, he said he wanted to carry both his low register and the falsetto he rarely gets to use: “I think I focused on showing a little more of the side of me ENGENE already like, rather than on reinventing myself.”

The first album as six

The media conference for the eighth mini album THE SIN : BLISS, held in Seoul on 20 August 2026, opened with his greeting. The group was coming back after seven months, he said, and he was glad and honoured to show ENGENE a new side.

Asked which track he would recommend, he chose the ninth, ‘Highlight’. It is the song that closes the brilliant end of the flight, he said, and it nearly did not make the record: “There were several candidate songs and it almost dropped out, but when I heard the demo I could picture the six of us singing it on stage.” He told reporters he had put the case to the other members that it should be on the album. Of the title track he said: “It carries a sound that is current, but for us the genre is a first, so you will feel the trend and the novelty at the same time.” The album went to number one on the Billboard 200.

What to watch

ENHYPEN’s official music videos are published on the HYBE LABELS YouTube channel and the group’s own channel is youtube.com/@ENHYPENOFFICIAL. K-Culture Radar does not re-upload video; it links to the official upload. The records and the members are gathered on the ENHYPEN hub.