TOP: Um…well BIGBANG’s concerts in Japan have finished now, and we’re still here for the remaining schedules. We’re eating right now.
Kim Nam Gook: Ah….eating now? Next to me is Moon Ji Ae (news anchor). Say hi to her~
Moon Ji Ae: Hello TOP-goon
TOP: Ah…ah….Hello
Moon Ji Ae: It’s nice to meet you! It must be hard working in Japan?
TOP: Ah, yes. I’ll work hard.
Moon Ji Ae: Ah well you know, Manager Kim Nam Gook went on this show to talk about BIGBANG members.
GD: KIM NAM GOOK! KIM NAM GOOK! KIM NAM GOOK!
Moon Ji Ae: ……this is?
GD: KIM NAM GOOK!
Moon Ji Ae: Excuse me but who’s this…?
Kim Nam Gook: It sounds like G-dragon
Moon Ji Ae: Oooh…well it seems you’ve all heard the news about Kim Nam Gook manager coming on the show?
TOP: Yeah, we heard about it. We really wanted to listen in on it but since we’re in Japan, we can’t….so everyone’s kind of depressed now.
Moon Ji Ae: Ah, I see (laughs)
GD: SARANGHAEYO KIM NAM GOOK!
Moon Ji Ae: Manager Kim Nam Gook….
GD (cuts in) THE ONE AND ONLY KIM NAM GOOK!
Moon Ji Ae: what are you to BIGBANG members?
GD: COUNTLESS CHANGES KIM NAM GOOK!
TOP: Um please repeat the question again.
Moon Ji Ae: Ahhh…..they’re so fun. What is Manager Kim Nam Gook’s existence like to BIGBANG members?
TOP: Um…..he’s like spiritual support for us? Well, he’s like family to us now…like our own brother. He always takes care of us. When we finish our schedules and we’re tired, he’ll take us out to eat BBQ meat. The members love it, love eating meat so he always buys it for us to eat.
GD: HURRY UP AND HANG UP THE PHONE!
Moon Ji Ae: Ah…..I see
TOP: He’s a hyung that always takes care of us.
Kim Nam Gook: I bought the meat because I did something wrong…
TOP: Secrets….he’s heard a lot of our secrets. Well, he’s really the best person to talk to about these kind of stuff.
Moon Ji Ae: Is there anything you want Kim Nam Gook to do to make BIGBANG work even harder?
TOP: About this…..mm…not really~
Moon Ji Ae: Ah…well…anything you regret?
TOP: No, nothing. He’s just a hyung that really takes good care of us.
GD: KIM NAM GOOK! KIM NAM GOOK!
Moon Ji Ae: Well then….we’re going to end our conversation with you two now (laughs)
Kim Nam Gook: Work hard ok? Come back soon, hyung’s waiting for you.
Shipping GTOP Isn't Just For Fans - It's For Friends and Family Too!
A definitive list of all the people in Jiyong and Seunghyun's lives who have made subtle but clear nods of support towards them as a couple over the years, because maybe we're all just old man yaoi fetishists together
Part 1 because there are just THAT MANY people to talk about
Seunghyun's family
Starting strong! Seunghyun's mother and sister have both been quietly supporting them for years at this point. During the MADE era, when his sister and nephew (in the blue) came to watch BigBang perform, Hyeyoun posted this about Yeonjun loving his Uncle Jiyong so much that he wanted kisses from him:
Jiyong has also included Seunghyun's sister and nephew in gifts before now - this was posted by Hyeyoun, of a PMO x Nike collab in 2021, where her and Yeonjun both received a pair. The caption says "Yeonjun and I wear matching sneakers ❤️"
Seunghyun's mum has also quietly shown her support over the years. I don't really believe those old fan sightings from the early, early days, but this one is too cute not to imagine:
'I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post things like this……. It was last October when it happened! Seunghyun’s mom visited the dorm but the members were in the car due to their schedule.
Seunghyun’s mom opened the car door and said a few things to him but Seunghyun just replied carelessly, unwrapping a candy like this……. “Yeah, No, yeah yeah, okay.”
His mom told him see you later and closed the door, then the car door suddenly opened again and someone stuck his body out and said “Omonim (means mother but it’s also a term used to call “Mother in Law”)!!!!!!! Hello Omo… It's Jiyongie…."
Jiyongie didn’t even care about all the fans were around and he greeted her like that... Jiyong made sure that he said goodbye to her as well. Seunghyun’s mom was very happy to see him and she greeted him back in a really lovely way… "Oh~ Jiyong-ah~~ Long time no see~”
She showed a smile that she didn’t even show to Seunghyun... the mother-in-law is in love with her daughter-in-law.'
Anyway, even if that didn't happen, we absolutely have concrete proof that she still loves her favourite child-in-law haha. She follows Jiyong and Taeyang on Instagram (no Daesung, sorry Todae stans!):
And she also follows several GD-specific and GTOP specific fan accounts:
I can't lie, there is something very funny about the idea of Seunghyun's mum following an account called 'gdragooner', who drops shit like this on the regular:
I don't think I'd follow an Instagram account posting things like that about my son and his childhood friend that he no longer talks to, unless there was truly something in it. And if you want to call Seunghyun's own mother a yaoi fetishist pervert too, be my guest!
Jiyong's family
I mean, obviously. Most famously, they stood outside for about half an hour waiting for Jiyong to get out of the car before enlisting for his military service, and it turned out all along he was in that car with Seunghyun. Again, why give him all that time alone with his childhood friend (who caused a scandal to their group not long before), unless there was something important there? I love my friends dearly, but I'm not sure my mother would be cool with me spending my last minutes before being enlisted in the army with them instead of her, unless my friend was also... oh, I dunno... my partner?
It's also clear that there's often a sixth adult with them during family dinners and events - we can absolutely write these photos off as being taken by a server at a restaurant, because most of them have been taken at either Jiyong's or Dami's homes, and there's absolutely evidence of a sixth person eating and drinking at the table.
Speaking of Dami, she's also posted things about the artwork featured in either Jiyong's or Seunghyun's apartments, such as this gold Rudolf Stingel piece and the Alexander Calder mobile above it, two things that have switched homes between them in the past:
Mark Grotjahn
Mark Grotjahn is a close friend of Seunghyun's - they've been friends for at least a decade at this point. He's an artist known for his abstract, geometric paintings, and both Seunghyun and Jiyong have featured his work in their homes and have personal connections with him.
I can't tell if Mark himself is queer - I know he's had female partners, but he's also worked closely with amfAR, a foundation for AIDS research, with his work raising significant amounts of money for the foundation at the Two x Two For Aids and Art benefit. He also created his Butterfly series of artworks, which feature rainbow colours. Obviously, there's a huge connection between butterflies, rainbows and the queer community.
It's worth noting that the above picture is one of the many many instances of GTOP sharing artwork (or, if not the same piece specifically, then pieces in the same collection). For an even more interesting bit of lore, Jiyong posted the above photo around the time of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, 2016 - he had to take down his post in outright support of those affected and the LGBT community as a whole, and subsequently snuck a lot of rainbows into his posts afterwards. You can read more about that here!
This is also a really fun thing that I found recently:
Mark has a series of works that look like... idk, spirals and random squiggles lmao, but he's pretty famous for them. Obviously, they've also featured both on Jiyong's and Seunghyun's Instagrams.
However, Mark's artwork entitled 'Baby Dragon No. 2 Face' featured as the background of Jiyong's phone not too long ago! I just thought that was very neat and fun hahaha:
Anyway, what has all this got to do with him shipping GTOP?
Well, Mark has famously posted things of the two of them before now, which have also been acknowledged by Jiyong and Seunghyun. This very famous GTOP picture is of them stood in front of his artwork, which was initially posted by Mark (and liked by Seunghyun), and then reposted by Jiyong himself (see below). Remember this, because it'll be coming back later!
He also posted the photo on the left of GD&TOP era Jiyong and Seunghyun wearing faces from his Angry Flower series of works. Seunghyun then used the one covering his face in his infamous 'chicken and beer' insanity when he received his exclusive matching flower shoes from Jiyong:
Finally, this is just cute, lol.
In 2016, Seunghyun posted a photo of himself with Mark, plus a picture of the stylised autograph that Mark had done for him. Later that same day, Jiyong (who was on holiday in Hawaii with Daesung at the time) posted a photo of a drawing he'd done in the sand, captioned: "I also got an autograph for TOP!" with the hashtag "#MarkGDrotjahn" hahahaha. Seunghyun, being the prick he is, commented, "I don't need that copy."
Richard Prince
Richard Prince is a pop artist who became famous in the 1980s - he worked in New York, so he was a contemporary of other big GTOP heroes like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He's most famous for the Nurses series, and oh boy do we have a lot to say about that.
Jiyong LOOOOOVES the Nurses series, particularly Millionaire Nurse. He's done a photoshoot with it (looking very cunty if I do say), he's got it in his home, he's used it as his lock screen, he's referenced it in his music, he is all over this man and his art lmao:
And, of course, Seunghyun is also a big fan:
In 2016, GTOP met Richard Prince and he signed something for them:
And from that, he seemed to form quite a nice friendship with them. He also posted a manip of the two of them stood in front of one of his artworks, where Jiyong's private account replied 'don't cry, hyung 💕' and Seunghyun responded with a keysmash lmao.
Remember the Grotjahn version of this from earlier? I hope so, because I buried the lead a little there - when he posted it, Richard commented underneath it with the frankly insane response 'Hey. I had that same couple stand in front of one of mine. That's Life.' Might I remind you, he's an American man who was working alongside a variety of queer artists in 1980s New York at the height of the AIDs crisis, there's absolutely no way he'd not know the connotations behind his words there - especially as he knows both of them personally.
You've then also got the time Richard Prince commented under one of Jiyong's posts not long after Seunghyun went into the military:
The turtle has a shell too haunts me in my nightmares, besties. We all, of course, know about turtle and shell, right?
Turtle and shell are their nicknames for each other. Seunghyun is turtle, because he would always carry his backpack around with him and it made him look like a turtle (confirmed in the 2012 episode of Healing Camp). Jiyong would also call him turtle on his old Cyworld messages back in 2005/2006, and would refer to himself as shell:
Jiyong made a reference to turtle and shell as recently as last year when he was on Park Myung-soo's show and they were making, I think, bracelets together:
it makes absolutely no sense for Richard Prince to know about this and reference it if he weren't a personal friend of theirs who knows personal things about their lives, like their little childhood nicknames for each other. Unless, of course, Richard Prince is another yaoi fetishist pervert just like Seunghyun's mother, and he just happens to know the really insane in-depth GTOP lore because he's a secret shipper.
Anyway, I've run out of photo space hahahaha so I'll have to finish this here. Part two will be up soooooooon!
Takashi Murakami is a veeeery famous Japanese artist, known for his blend of traditional Japanese art with surrealist pop culture. He is, if you can believe it... a close personal friend of Jiyong and Seunghyun! Shocking, I know.
And, wouldn't you know it, artwork by Takashi has appeared in Seunghyun's home and then, magically, in Jiyong's home/studio:
What's wild about Takashi is that, unlike Mark and Richard, he went an extra step further with his social media support for them by posting literal shipper fanart of them with his art:
He's also liked posts about the two of them as well, seemingly for no reason other than he just thinks they're cute:
One of the weirder GTOPxMurakami links is when Seunghyun commissioned Takashi to do a Doom Dada inspired work in 2023:
It was initially in the Busan museum of art, but for some reason, a blogger wrote about it and said the following thing:
That middle line starting with the number 5 says 'the work featuring TOP is in GD's possession'. Now, whether that was a mistake or what, we don't know, because nothing else ever got said about it. A few months after this post, Seunghyun posted about it to his Instagram stories to let people know it was home with him:
But, as we're all aware right now, that doesn't always mean anything lmao. These two have so many crossovers with the art their own and where it appears - as Threads user wilmon99 pointed out, 'There was a small incident with this painting: during the exhibition, a blogger wrote that the museum guide said the portrait belonged to G-Dragon, sparking much discussion among fans, though this couldn't be confirmed. However, according to T.O.P's post a few months later, it seems to have returned to his collection. But a chair he previously mentioned sending to a furniture warehouse appeared at G-Dragon's house, so ultimately, the painting's final destination remains unknown.'
Matt Carey-Williams
Man, I love Matt. Matt Carey-Williams is an art curator and gallery owner based in London, although he's also worked in New York, Venice and Hong Kong before now. He's gay, and not shy about it - his Instagram is full of photos of him and his husband, references to queer art, and his outspoken stance on important leftist issues and human rights. He's a close friend of Seunghyun's for sure - he posted about him for his birthday in 2019, and Seunghyun liked a photo of him and his husband in 2020.
It's worth noting that Matt also follows both Seunghyun's and Jiyong's private Instagram accounts, meaning he must be friends enough with Jiyong too to be able to do that. Interesting, considering he's only publicly friends with Seunghyun, huh? Almost like he's potentially been introduced to his friend's partner and they've continued a friendly relationship in private?
Matt, like the others, has also made hints towards his support of GTOP over the years. On a post about him and his husband's anniversary, he liked a comment about GTOP and replied with love-hearts:
He's also liked posts about GTOP:
The beginning of this year was a very fun time for us Matt-pilled gtoppers! Matt went to Seoul in January 2026 and posted the following things at the beginning and end of his trip:
Now, for someone who is such good friends with Seunghyun as this man is, would it not be insensitive for him to make so many references to the group he's left and supposedly cut out of his life for three years? Matt is not coy about things, as you'll see in a second, so I absolutely believe these were deliberate nods to the fact that a) he met up with Seunghyun and Jiyong while he was out there and b) he's slyly showing his support and knowledge of the fact that of course they're all still in contact. Then, utterly hilariously, a couple of days later he posted this artwork, which a few fans immediately latched onto haha:
One of my most favourite things about Matt is how intensely passionate he is about queer art, and how outspoken and in-your-face he is about queerness. His 'give a fuck' attitude makes me proud to be a fellow British gay hahaha. He'll come back up in the next section when we come to talk about Pierre and Giles, but I really loved this take from him when Still Life dropped. The way he talks about Jiyong is especially beautiful and very, very intentional from Matt: "There's no prouder a signifier than a #rainbow and #gdragon looks simply G-divine sporting his new feathery rainbow hair-do whilst spinning around with his prismatic parasol."
Frankly, there's no reason for Matt to be quite so invested in GTOP and how they subtly show their queerness if none of it was real - he's a man who lives, breathes and has worked with art for decades, he knows how this game works, and he also knows them personally.
Pierre and Gilles
Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, more famously known by their art duo name Pierre et Gilles, are not just collaborators - they're also romantic partners. Pierre is a photographer and Gilles is a painter - they met in the 1970s and began living together and working with each other. They're super well-known in the popular culture scene, working particularly with queer icons such as Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Tilda Swinton and Chi Chi LaRue. And, wouldn't you believe it... T.O.P!
Yes, Pierre and Gilles worked their magic with Seunghyun, and produced the following photography/painting masterpiece:
And here is where we bring back our old friend Matt, because he also posted about it and talked about it in that gorgeous no-bullshitting way of his:
I'm sorry... "#tttop is embraced by bejewelled blooms of red and purple that amplify the image's kitschy campness and which resists his #hollywood #badboy index. As does his #asian identity. That familiar sign of the smoking (anti)-hero - part #brando, part Sinatra - now signifies otherness and its power to transform. The stereotype of a caucasian, heterosexual star of the silver screen becomes a glitzy, lavish, exotic love letter to contemporary homoerotica." That's insane, right?! He's basically saying the whole gag of this piece is that he's supposed to look like a big hotshot 1950s movie star, but subverting it because they were butch, manly, heterosexual white men and T.O.P is a gay Asian man. Just in case we didn't get it, he also followed it up with #mcwqueer #bigbangvip lmao. Gay man gives his take on gay art produced by gay artists featuring the image of a gay man. Oh, and liked by that gay man's boyfriend's private Instagram account:
Oh and, of course, Pierre and Gilles have liked GTOP fanart, because of course they have. They've liked some really raunchy stuff too hahaha.
I've hit my photo limit again, come back for part threeeeeeee!!
Hi, I'm new here, mm I love GTOP, so I'll share some of my top three favorite GTOP moments HAHA😏🩷🫂
(I really hope this is read by good people and not by those who say they're disgusted by the G-Top ship, because I know there are some VIPs who are unfortunately disgusted by G-Top... I don't hate them, haha. They simply don't want to see reality.)
Well.
Top3🥉: When GD called T.O.P on a show because he wasn't there, and casually dedicated "Eyes, Nose, Lips" to him—Taeyang's song 🫠🫠..... Of course, of course, this was just a joke. ,no? ... jiji
Top2🥈:Like, everyone knows this, but the Secret Garden parody 🥹🥹🥹🥹 I've been watching it nonstop for ten years... Damn it... and all because of Top's kiss, if you don't know Top was supposed to kiss the surface of the lip, but we all saw that wasn't the case; the first take was a deep kiss.🫠And they said it wasn't just one take, it was several takes of that specific scene.............
Ammm
Top1🥇:This story always makes me laugh 🤣, we all know Taeyang has a wife, and we also know he has her because of GD hahaha, I don't know if you knew this, but Taeyang's wife, before talking to him, She said on a show that she loved Top's gaze, she said it was very deep or something like that... And Mr. GD 🤣 couldn't stand it, he couldn't hear that a girl loved her husband's gaze Then he told her, "Get a grip, bitch," and sent his friend Taeyang to seduce her, get her to marry him, and leave her husband alone.🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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