Xiaojun steps out of the wings and into the light — armed with a voice that bends time, a style that redefines K-pop luxury, and a quiet certainty that his moment is right now.
Artist images, likenesses, and related intellectual property belong to Label V and SM Entertainment respectively.
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There is a kind of stillness that precedes a storm. You feel it before you hear it — a shift in atmospheric pressure, a held breath, a silence that suddenly has weight. That is the energy Xiao Dejun, known to the world as Xiaojun, brings to every room, every stage, and every note he’s ever let loose into the air. And in 2026, that storm is finally, irresistibly here.
Born in Dongguan, Guangdong on August 8, 1999, Xiaojun grew up in a household where music wasn’t a hobby — it was a heartbeat. His father’s voice echoed through the walls; his brother followed close behind. When a young Dejun stepped onto the stage at Zhejiang Television’s X-Fire competition in 2015, performing self-composed songs with the kind of conviction that belongs to artists twice his age, it was clear he hadn’t just inherited musical talent. He had something rarer: a perspective.
SM Entertainment came calling in 2018. By September of that year, he was introduced as the first member of SM Rookies SR18B, announced to a world that didn’t yet know his name but would soon learn to say it with reverence. On December 31 of that same year — as the world counted down to a new chapter — SM announced WayV, the China-exclusive sub-unit of NCT managed by Label V. Xiaojun was at its center.
“He has vocal range, yes — but more importantly, he has vocal intention. Every note Xiaojun sings sounds like a decision.”
— WAVES Editorial Assessment, April 2026
From Vision to Reality
WayV debuted on January 17, 2019 with The Vision — a six-track EP that announced their arrival with the kind of authority that most groups spend years trying to achieve.
Their lead single, a Mandarin reimagining of NCT 127’s “Regular,” crackled with polished choreography and multilingual magnetic energy. Xiaojun’s role as main vocalist wasn’t just a title. It was a mandate.
What followed was a discography built on duality. Trance-inducing EDM in “Moonwalk.” Intoxicating R&B in “Love Talk.” Cinematic grandeur in “Phantom.”
With each release, WayV layered contradiction upon contradiction — dreamlike and urgent, playful and serious, hyper-modern and shot through with emotional rawness — and Xiaojun was the thread that held those contrasts together.
In 2020, his journey expanded beyond WayV when he joined NCT U for “Make A Wish (Birthday Song),” one of the most infectious anthems in NCT’s celebrated catalogue. It marked the first time many international fans truly heard what Xiaojun could do in a pan-NCT context, and the internet took notice. His NCT member code, M08, became a rallying point for a fandom already devoted, now electrified.
The Art of Becoming
Ask any dedicated NCTzen what sets Xiaojun apart from the extraordinary roster around him, and you’ll hear variations of the same answer: texture. Where others reach for the note, Xiaojun arrives inside it. His training at Shanghai Theatre Academy’s musical department gave him something beyond technique — it gave him the actor’s instinct to inhabit a lyric, to treat each line not as syllables to execute but as scenes to perform.
June 2021 brought WayV-KUN&XIAOJUN, the group’s first official sub-unit, whose debut single “Back To You” remains one of the most emotionally precise pieces of music in WayV’s entire discography.
The intimacy of a two-person project stripped away the spectacle and revealed something essential: Xiaojun thrives in proximity. The closer the camera, the more he gives.
He’s not solely a vocalist either — and this is key to understanding his evolution. His b-boy background surfaces in performances where others might simply stand and deliver. He choreographed sections of WayV’s “Phantom” alongside member Ten. He plays piano, guitar, ukulele, and drums. He has four languages at his command — Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and Korean — and approaches all of them the way he approaches music: with total presence.
“Xiaojun doesn’t perform a song. He translates it — from sound into something you feel in your chest before you even register you’re listening.” — WAVES Magazine, April 2026
Fashion as Autobiography
In K-pop, styling is rarely personal. It’s a committee decision, a brand calculation, a visual language written by someone else. But over time, Xiaojun has made even the most styled moments feel like self-expression.
Watch his fashion evolution from WayV’s early precision-cut streetwear to the Phantom era’s darkly cinematic looks, and you’re watching someone quietly but consistently negotiate with their own image — accepting, redirecting, and eventually, leading.
His July 2024 solo debut, “最佳損友” (Best Friends), came packaged with visuals that felt genuinely his own — warmer, more personal, less armored than the group’s collective aesthetic, and yet still unmistakably elevated. It was the fashion equivalent of hearing someone finally speak in their mother tongue after years of elegant translation.
As WayV continues its Japanese expansion (their debut in September 2024 marked a significant territorial milestone), Xiaojun’s styling is being seen by wider global audiences than ever before. He wears international stages the way few can — not with the anxious precision of someone performing for a crowd, but with the settled authority of someone who belongs there.
The Creator Behind the Voice
What separates the good from the great in any creative field is the question of agency: not just what you do, but whether you’re choosing it. Xiaojun has been choosing, consistently and quietly, for years. As MC of music program The Show from 2023 to 2025, he demonstrated the kind of ease in front of a live camera that only comes from genuine comfort with one’s own presence. As an actor — his 2021 web series Hello, My Youth on Youku cast him as lead character Chang Yan — he showed range beyond the stage.
His creative input within WayV is no secret to fans who follow the behind-the-scenes content closely. The choreographic contributions, the live covers that circulate endlessly on fan edits, the PlayV sessions where he’s reimagined EXO’s “For Life” and Sam Kim’s “Who Are You” — these are the breadcrumbs of a creative mind that doesn’t stop working when the cameras do.
In 2026, that creative momentum has institutional backing. SM Entertainment’s landmark NCT 2026 anniversary project — anchored by the slogan “EVERYTHING, ALL AT ONCE, NEO” — has placed WayV’s new album and tour firmly in Q3. It’s the largest coordinated NCT event in the group’s history, and Xiaojun enters it not as a supporting member finding his footing, but as one of its most compelling storytellers.
Fan Culture & the Global Resonance
Fandom is the infrastructure of modern pop, and WayV’s — a global community spread across Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and international Weibo, Instagram, and TikTok networks — is one of the most passionately interconnected in the ecosystem. Xiaojun’s fanbase operates with the precision of a well-run support system: streaming parties, voting campaigns, birthday billboards, trending coordination. The hashtags move like weather systems across platforms.
What they celebrate isn’t just the music — it’s the person. His self-declared nickname “DJ” (for Dejun, practical for those who struggle with the Mandarin pronunciation), his favorite color green, his love for Paris, his niece Little Pineapple, the fact that he thinks in all four of his languages simultaneously and sleeps with his eyes open.
In the age of parasocial culture, Xiaojun has offered enough of himself to feel knowable while remaining genuinely private enough to remain interesting. He wants to direct films someday — specifically, one set in his hometown. If that aspiration tells us anything about Xiaojun, it’s this: he doesn’t just want to be seen. He wants to make the frame. He wants to decide what’s beautiful, what’s important, what gets remembered. That impulse — creative, directorial, authorial — runs through everything he does. The voice is the instrument. The vision is the real art.
“The hashtags move like weather systems. But what fans are really tracking is a person becoming exactly who he always was.”— WAVES Magazine, April 2026
This is the Moment
In an era when K-pop has exploded into every cultural conversation, when the genre has become both a billion-dollar industry and a genuine art form, the artists who endure are those who know the difference between being popular and being necessary. Xiaojun, at 26, is arriving at that distinction with remarkable clarity
His voice is the obvious entry point. That range — soulful in the low registers, soaring and precise at the peaks, warm in the middle where most singers become technical — is the kind of instrument that music schools try to train and rarely produce. What Guangdong gave him, Shanghai Theatre refined, and ten-plus years of professional performance has tempered into something genuinely rare.
But the voice is only the beginning of what Xiaojun is building.
The fashion sensibility, the creative direction, the multilingual intelligence, the performance instinct, the quiet ambition of a man who already knows he wants to direct films one day — these are not accessories to the talent. They are the talent.
The storm that was always coming is finally making landfall. And the sound it makes is Xiaojun, fully arrived, fully himself, singing exactly what he means.
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© 2026 WAVES Magazine / Kpoppie Magazine. Published by Velocity Entertainment Inc, Japan & New Zealand. All editorial content is the intellectual property of WAVES Magazine and Velocity Entertainment Inc. Artist images, likenesses, and related intellectual property belong to Label V and SM Entertainment respectively. Xiaojun (肖俊) is represented by Label V under SM Entertainment. All fan-related content, hashtags, and social engagement tools are created in a spirit of celebration and do not imply affiliation with or endorsement by Label V, SM Entertainment, or NCT / WayV unless otherwise stated.
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