A DIE-HARD Queen fan unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Freddie Mercury on Thursday on South Korea’s resort island of Jeju, after an eight-year quest to honor his late hero. The music of British rock band Queen is popular in South Korea, a country more associated with home-grown K-pop dance bands, including global megastars BTS. Jeju businessman and Queen superfan Baek Soon-yeob, 57, used to listen to bootleg recordings of Mercury — who died of AIDS-related complications in 1991. Mercury’s songs “kept me going despite many hurdles along the way,” Baek said, adding it had been an emotional eight-year effort to build the statue. “I started e-mailing Queen’s company in 2014 asking for a rights approval” to erect the statue, Baek said. He wrote an e-mail every month but did not get a reply for seven years. In early 2020, he finally received a response ahead of Queen’s first-ever South Korean concert — band members and label officials were prepared to meet him in Seoul. That concert was a result of South Korea’s recent fervent embrace of Queen, after nearly 10 million people watched the 2018 Oscar-winning biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” starring Rami Malek. In a country of 51 million people, that means approximately a fifth of the population watched the movie in cinemas, where it grossed US$70 million and sat atop box office lists for weeks. After receiving approval in 2020, Baek spent 50 million won (US$40,000) commissioning the 177-centimeter statue of Mercury clenching his fist, which was finally unveiled on Thursday on the scenic Jeju coast. It is the second statue of the late singer approved by Queen’s label — the first is in Montreux, Switzerland, where Mercury lived and recorded Queen albums. South Korean fans of Queen made a pilgrimage to Jeju Island to attend the Thursday event. Queen guitarist Brian May, clutching a model of the statue Baek had sent him, told fans via video message that he was with them “in spirit” on Jeju, and that Mercury would like the tribute. (SD-Agencies) | 