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Groan>"Oh no -- not again!" 🙄
Yes, I'm afraid so.
I had to watch it at reduced speed to catch a lot of things (symbolism of which I certainly don't understand.)
Here's one bit of symbolism that sent me down a rabbit hole: the pile of clothes that bookends the beginning and end of the video. The symbolism is obvious at face value, the discarded clothes of people taken by the cubes, but it goes further than that, in both origins and significance.
People have immediately seen a connection with a 2017 music video by BTS, "Spring Day":
But the original inspiration in both cases appears to be a 2010 Paris art installation by Christian Boltanski, in which a pile of clothes is the centerpiece:
I'm not qualified even to attempt an analysis of the symbolism in the BTS video, other than to say there are references to Ursula K. LeGuin's SF story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", which is about a society that survives based on the torture and death of innocents.
Boltanski's work was about the Holocaust, and its title,
Personnes, plays with an ambivilance in the French word, which depending on context, can mean either "people" or "no one". The pile of clothes in the BTS video was widely seen as referring to the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, in which 300 people, most of them high school students, died. The event shook the nation, including Kpop
artists (n fact, the BTS song and video is regarded as marking their breakthrough from "boy band" to serious artists). Along with a number of other people in the Korean music industry, they donated to families affected by the tragedy.
And so did IU, who donated the entire proceeds from her 2014 concert tour, and several of whose songs, especially "Dear Name", appear to directly reflect the deep effect it had on her. Given all this, I can't imagine no connection to the pile of clothes in "Love Wins All"; in fact, Boltanski's installation featured a crane which periodically lifted, then let fall, clothes from the top of the pile; the fall of the suit and wedding dress in the video seems an echo of that.
Speaking of "Dear Name", it provides an insight into the kind of person IU is: asked to perform at the 2017 Melon Music Awards ceremony, rather than centering the performance only on herself, she instead invited a number of the "unsung" of the Korean music industry to appear on stage:
I've read that some of the names appearing on the
walls are of the Sewol ferry victims; I can't be sure of this, but I do know that she was heartbroken over the deaths of so many young people, many of whom were fans of hers. And I know this is another video that brings me to tears, every time I watch.
PS: I see the "Love Wins All" video has gained another million views since I last posted about it
less than a week ago.
Edit: I should perhaps mention the jars people on stage are holding represent fireflies, which I understand are traditionally taken in Korean culture as being messengers, including to and from the departed, as well as symbols of hope. They've appeared in some of IU's music videos, such as "Through the Night":
(English captions available)
They also featured in her Kdrama "Hotel del Luna":
(That's not her singing BTW; apparently it's rare for someone to perform soundtrack songs on dramas in which they appear)