Lisa

#1In 2010, roughly 4,000 people showed up for a YG Entertainment audition in Thailand.

#2Only one of them made it through.

#3She was thirteen years old, her name was Lalisa Manobal, and years later the world would know her simply as Lisa.

#4Looking backward, that audition can feel like the moment everything was decided. A kid beats thousands of other hopefuls, moves to Korea, becomes a member of BLACKPINK, and eventually turns into one of the most recognizable K-pop stars in the world.

#5But that isn't what Lisa actually won that day.

#6She didn't win a debut.

#7She won the chance to become a trainee.

#8And those were two very different things.

#9Lisa hadn't come out of nowhere. She had been dancing since she was little, entering competitions and performing with the Thai dance crew We Zaa Cool, which also included a young BamBam. She was already drawn to K-pop, especially artists like BIGBANG and 2NE1.

#10So when YG held an audition in Thailand, Lisa walked into it with years of dancing behind her.

#11We don't have the judges' complete scorecards, so there is no honest way to reconstruct exactly why she was the one person chosen from thousands. But people who later watched her closely kept noticing the same things: how quickly she picked up choreography, how naturally she moved, and how different she seemed once the music started.

#12YG saw enough to say yes.

#13The harder question was what a fourteen-year-old girl was supposed to do after that yes.

#14Lisa moved to South Korea in 2011.

#15She barely spoke Korean.

#16Her parents came with her at first, and Lisa later remembered thinking that she would be going back home with them too.

#17She wasn't.

#18Her parents returned to Thailand.

#19Lisa stayed in Seoul.

#20She was fourteen.

#21Suddenly, being a good dancer was only one part of the problem. She had to live away from her family, handle everyday decisions on her own, manage money, and somehow function in a place where she couldn't understand most of what people were saying.

#22One of the first people who made that world a little less foreign was Jennie.

#23Jennie was already training at YG and could speak English. Lisa remembered her as the person who greeted her in English when she arrived. It sounds like a tiny thing, but when you're fourteen and almost everyone around you is speaking a language you don't understand, one familiar sentence can matter.

#24Then there was Jisoo.

#25Lisa's Korean was limited. Jisoo's English was limited. Somehow, they still went out together and figured out ways to talk. Jisoo helped Lisa with Korean, and a friendship grew before they even had enough shared language to make that friendship easy.

#26Rosé came later, from Australia.

#27That relationship didn't begin as instant sisterhood.

#28Lisa initially saw her as competition.

#29That made sense. In the trainee system, a talented new girl wasn't just a possible friend. She might also be someone competing for the same very small number of places.

#30But Lisa and Rosé had something important in common: both had left their families in another country to chase this strange possibility in Korea.

#31Competition slowly became closeness. Lisa would later describe them as being like twin sisters.

#32The competition never completely disappeared, though.

#33They were all waiting for the same thing.

#34A debut.

#35YG trainees were evaluated month after month.

#36They prepared songs and dances, performed alone and in teams, and sometimes worked on choreography and presentation themselves. People disappeared along the way. Some were cut. Some left.

#37Lisa also had a problem most of the Korean trainees didn't have: the language.

#38At one point, the people around her were discouraged from simply switching to English with her because the company wanted her to learn Korean faster.

#39Still, Lisa was getting noticed.

#40In 2012, YG uploaded a dance video of her without properly introducing who she was. The title was almost a tease:

#41"WHO'S THAT GIRL???"

#42Later she appeared as a backup dancer in Taeyang's "Ringa Linga" video and modeled for NONA9ON.

#43From the outside, she could have looked like someone on the verge of debuting.

#44Except the debut kept not happening.

#45YG's plans for its next girl group changed repeatedly. At different points, a larger lineup was being considered. Possible debut dates came and went.

#46That's where Lisa's situation became especially difficult.

#47Fail an audition, and at least you know it's over.

#48Lisa wasn't failing.

#49She was still there.

#50But being there didn't tell her when—or even whether—the thing she had moved countries for would actually happen.

#51She passed another month.

#52Then another evaluation arrived.

#53Then another.

#54And another.

#55Eventually, Lisa had enough.

#56She was calling her mother in Thailand constantly, and there were times when she told her she wanted to quit. The debut kept moving farther away. Going home, returning to school, and having something resembling a normal life started to sound tempting.

#57Her mother could have said, "Then come home."

#58She didn't.

#59She told Lisa to hold on a little longer.

#60Think about how many people would want the place you have, she told her. You've already come this far. Give it more time.

#61Neither of them knew how this story ended.

#62Her mother wasn't giving that advice because she had somehow seen BLACKPINK in the future. She didn't know her daughter would one day play Coachella or become famous around the world.

#63All she knew was that Lisa had started something extraordinarily difficult, and walking away now would end it before they ever learned where it could go.

#64So Lisa stayed.

#65And around her, the number of trainees kept shrinking.

#66Lisa later remembered that there had once been many girls practicing together. One by one, there were fewer of them.

#67Eventually, Jennie, Jisoo, Rosé, and Lisa were the four who kept training together.

#68It wasn't as if four empty chairs labeled BLACKPINK had been waiting for them from the beginning.

#69The company had considered different lineups and a bigger group.

#70People left. Plans changed. The four kept practicing.

#71And eventually, those four became the group.

#72BLACKPINK debuted on August 8, 2016.

#73Lisa had been in Korea for about five years.

#74"Whistle" and "Boombayah" immediately made the group one of the biggest new acts in K-pop. But even that turned out to be only the beginning.

#75Songs like "Ddu-Du Ddu-Du" pushed BLACKPINK far beyond Korea. They performed at Coachella. Their albums and tours kept getting bigger. Eventually, BLACKPINK wasn't simply a successful K-pop group. It was a global act recognizable even to people who didn't closely follow K-pop.

#76That success gave Lisa fame, money, and an enormous audience.

#77It also gave her something less visible.

#78Leverage.

#79By 2021, she was ready to test whether people would follow Lisa outside BLACKPINK.

#80Her first solo single album was called "LALISA"—her own name.

#81She wanted Thai elements in the music video, bringing part of the identity she had left home with into the first major project built around her alone.

#82Then the songs traveled.

#83"LALISA" entered the Billboard Hot 100. So did "MONEY," which grew into an international hit of its own.

#84There was now evidence that the audience wasn't interested in Lisa only when the other three members were standing beside her.

#85And a couple of years later, that mattered.

#86When BLACKPINK's contracts came up for renewal in 2023, the obvious question was whether the group would stay together.

#87The answer turned out to be more complicated than staying or leaving.

#88All four members renewed with YG for BLACKPINK's group activities.

#89But they didn't renew individual contracts for their solo careers.

#90Lisa hadn't simply walked away from YG and abandoned BLACKPINK.

#91Instead, two parts of her career were separated.

#92BLACKPINK would still operate with YG.

#93Lisa's individual career would be built differently.

#94In February 2024, she announced her own company: LLOUD.

#95Why start a company when you're already a member of one of the biggest groups on earth?

#96Lisa's own explanation was fairly practical.

#97She wanted a team focused on her. She wanted people who could concentrate on her solo projects, help her explore more kinds of music and style, and move when she decided there was something she wanted to try.

#98She wasn't announcing plans to build a giant entertainment empire and sign dozens of artists.

#99She was building a base for herself.

#100And once she did, she discovered that freedom came with a lot of decisions nobody else could make for her.

#101How much should this video cost?

#102Who should we work with?

#103Do I actually like this idea?

#104Do I want to do this at all?

#105Lisa later described one of the things she learned after starting LLOUD.

#106She had to become clearer about what she liked and what she didn't.

#107Saying, "Oh, it's okay," wasn't enough anymore. Other people couldn't know whether that meant she genuinely liked something or was simply being agreeable.

#108She had to say yes.

#109Or no.

#110There's an odd symmetry in that.

#111At thirteen, Lisa needed YG's judges to say yes to her.

#112As a trainee, she kept going through evaluations and waiting for the company to decide when she was ready to debut.

#113Now she was the person expected to give an answer.

#114That doesn't mean LLOUD was some rebellion against years of oppression at YG. Lisa hasn't described it that way, and BLACKPINK still works with YG.

#115The change is simpler—and in some ways more interesting.

#116The success she built inside BLACKPINK had finally put her in a position where she could design a separate structure for herself.

#117Two months after launching LLOUD, she partnered with RCA Records.

#118And there was an important detail in that deal: Lisa would retain ownership of the recordings she made under the new partnership.

#119That doesn't mean she suddenly acquired the masters to BLACKPINK's catalog or everything she had previously released through YG.

#120It meant that going forward, in this new arrangement, her recordings could belong to her.

#121Lisa described that ownership as something that felt almost unreal.

#122Thirteen-year-old Lisa had wanted a major entertainment company to give her a contract.

#123Now her own company was sitting on one side of a partnership with a global record label, negotiating the terms of what came next.

#124So had she finally reached the part where everything became easy?

#125Not exactly.

#126The first single released through her new setup was "Rockstar."

#127The video wasn't built around Seoul or Los Angeles.

#128It was shot in Bangkok.

#129The girl who had left Thailand to build a career in Korea was now launching a new phase of that career by turning Bangkok itself into part of the stage.

#130"Rockstar" reached No. 1 on Billboard's Global Excl. U.S. chart and won Best K-pop at the MTV Video Music Awards.

#131Then, in 2025, came Lisa's first full solo album, "Alter Ego."

#132Instead of trying to present one definitive version of Lisa, she split herself into five personas, using them to move between different sounds and styles.

#133The album debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200.

#134She also returned to Coachella—this time not as one quarter of BLACKPINK, but with a solo set built around her own music.

#135On paper, the experiment was working.

#136But creative freedom didn't magically produce a final answer to the question of who Lisa was as a solo artist.

#137"Alter Ego" drew mixed reactions. Some of the criticism landed on exactly that issue: with so many sounds, collaborators, and personas, what was unmistakably Lisa?

#138It was a new kind of problem.

#139For years, the question had been whether YG would debut her.

#140Now nobody needed to give Lisa permission to make an album.

#141The harder question was what she wanted that album to be.

#142And before she had fully answered that, she chose something else she had never done before.

#143Acting.

#144Lisa joined the third season of HBO's The White Lotus as Mook.

#145But she didn't simply receive the part because she was Lisa from BLACKPINK.

#146She auditioned.

#147After everything—the world tours, the chart records, the enormous fanbase, her own company—she walked into a new field and once again had to show someone what she could do.

#148Of course, this wasn't the same situation as that YG audition in Thailand.

#149At thirteen, she was an unknown kid trying to get through a door.

#150Now she was one of the most famous performers in the world.

#151But acting didn't care that she had already mastered a different stage.

#152She was new at this.

#153Lisa talked about being nervous on set, worrying about forgetting her lines, and learning how a film production actually worked. Other actors and crew members helped her through something that was completely normal for them and completely new for her.

#154And then there was the location.

#155"The White Lotus" filmed in Thailand.

#156Lisa had left Thailand at fourteen and spent most of her adult life building a career elsewhere. Now her first major acting job brought her back for an extended stretch of time.

#157Her mother came to visit her during filming.

#158Years earlier, the movement had gone the other way.

#159Lisa had arrived in Korea with her family, then watched her parents go back to Thailand while she stayed behind.

#160She had called her mother wanting to come home.

#161Her mother had told her to keep going.

#162More than a decade later, Lisa was back in Thailand, this time because a completely new career had brought her there, and her mother was the one coming to see her.

#163Years after that first YG audition, Lisa was asked what she would tell her thirteen-year-old self.

#164She didn't say she'd reveal everything that was coming.

#165She didn't tell that girl about BLACKPINK, Coachella, Billboard, LLOUD, or Hollywood.

#166Her advice was much smaller.

#167Don't think too much about the future.

#168Focus on what you're doing now.

#169And don't quit.

#170It sounds strangely close to what her mother had once told the homesick trainee in Korea.

#171We don't know whether Lisa intended that connection. There is no reason to turn it into one if she didn't.

#172But something else has clearly changed.

#173At thirteen, Lisa auditioned and waited for somebody else's answer.

#174At fourteen, she waited for a company to decide whether and when she would debut.

#175Becoming a global superstar didn't make auditions disappear. Enter a new world, and sometimes you still have to prove yourself all over again.

#176What changed was everything between those auditions.

#177Lisa can now decide which music she wants to make, who she wants beside her, which opportunities deserve a yes, which deserve a no, and whether she wants to remain inside the things she already knows she can do—or choose something that makes her a beginner again.

#178Whether Lisa can turn BLACKPINK's enormous global fame into a solo music and acting career that lasts on its own terms is still an open question.

#179She's still finding out.

#180At thirteen, Lisa was waiting to see whether she would be chosen.

#181Now she's finding out what happens when the next choice is hers.

#182Lisa wasn't the only future K-pop star in We Zaa Cool. One of the boys dancing beside her was BamBam, who would also leave Thailand for Korea and eventually debut in GOT7. How did two kids from the same Thai dance crew both end up making it through two different K-pop trainee systems?