TWICE leader Jihyo has officially parted ways with JYP Entertainment after 21 years and launched her own agency, EMITHAUS.
On October 21, the singer shared a handwritten letter on Instagram, addressing the end of her two-decade relationship with the company she joined as a child. “After 21 years, my journey with JYP Entertainment, which began when I was just a child, has come to an end,” she wrote, thanking the staff who had “been by my side and helped me grow over the years.”
Jihyo framed the move as a personal choice about the future. “To me, independence is not so much a conclusion about the time that has passed, but a choice about how I want to live going forward,” she wrote. She introduced EMITHAUS as “the first step in this new chapter,” explaining that just as “EMIT” means to “express or release,” she hopes the company will be a place where she can “freely explore and bring to life even the possibilities within me that I have yet to discover.”
She was quick to reassure fans that her departure from the agency does not affect her group. “TWICE is an irreplaceable part of my life,” she wrote. “I will continue to stand on stage with my members and keep building more memories together for many years to come.”
Jihyo is the third TWICE member to leave JYP Entertainment, following Jeongyeon and Chaeyoung, according to Soompi. The singer, who famously spent about a decade as a trainee before debuting with TWICE in 2015, closed her letter by thanking ONCE for “believing in me and standing by my side for the past 11 years.”
No official statement from JYP Entertainment was available at the time of writing.
