“There are no words to describe what that moment was like. I felt like I could not breathe,” Yang tells AFP.

He is “extremely surprised” by his new-found popularity, he adds. “I’d like to ask them: ‘Why do you like me?'”

It was a marked contrast from his early music career.

In the early 1990s, the South was emerging from decades of military rule, but a nascent cultural renaissance had yet to influence social values and neither his appearance nor performance style conformed to Korean norms of the time.

Nationalist sentiment was widespread and his culture-crossing background — he was born in Vietnam to Korean parents who later emigrated to the US — was unwelcome.

He was once banned from radio shows for speaking English on air and a civil servant told him that “people like you take away jobs from us Koreans”.