BIGBANG Summons Dooly, ENHYPEN Joins Forces With Dune 2026 MAMA AWARDS Unveils Its Most Ambitious Lineup Yet

From a 31-year-old rock duo to a charcoal master to a sci-fi blockbuster, the 27-year-old K-pop institution is blowing up its own format turning a two-night ceremony into a 13-day festival across Osaka.

Picture a stage where a 1995 rock duo trades verses with 2026’s buzziest rookies, a Rockefeller Center-caliber visual artist reshapes a K-pop set with burnt wood, and a beloved cartoon dinosaur shares the spotlight with the group that defined an entire generation of K-pop. That is not a fever dream it’s the opening pitch for the 2026 MAMA AWARDS, and CJ ENM just confirmed it is real.

At a media day held October 29 at the Eliena Hotel in Seoul’s Gangnam district, the company behind K-pop’s longest-running awards show laid out a lineup so eclectic it reads like a thought experiment: What happens if you erase the line between eras, genres, and even mediums? The answer, organizers say, is this year’s theme “A Music Interstellar.”

A Theme Built on Breaking Timelines

“The value that music gives transcends time and space,” said Shin Hyung-kwan, head of CJ ENM’s Music Content Division, who joined Mnet business division head Yoon Shin-hye and convention division head Park Chan-wook at the briefing. “We want to deliver an experience that transcends time and space through culture and technology.”

It’s a lofty framing, but the lineup backs it up. Running November 20–21 at Kyocera Dome Osaka the venue’s third time hosting MAMA, after 2022 and 2024 the show will pair legacy acts with current stars, animation with live performance, fine art with pop production, and even generative AI with a live audience koreatimes.co.kr.

This isn’t just a stylistic flourish. MAMA has quietly tracked and shaped the entire arc of K-pop’s globalization. It began in 1999 as the Mnet Video Music Awards, a purely domestic affair, before expanding into the Mnet Asian Music Awards in 2009 and finally landing on its current branding in 2022 chosun.com. Now in its 27th edition, the ceremony has become something like a living archive of the genre which makes “A Music Interstellar” less a gimmick and more a mission statement: if K-pop’s audience now spans every continent and algorithm-driven discovery lets a 2004 song resurface as a 2026 trend, why should the show’s own lineup stay confined to a single era?

“Music isn’t trapped in its era,” Yoon explained. “Songs from the past are being enjoyed as ‘hip’ again, and fans around the world are enjoying the same music beyond the limits of space. We’re in an age where people explore their own algorithms to discover new music. This year at MAMA, we wanted to show the power of music that transcends time and space it will be a journey of discovering new tastes in an unknown musical world.”

The Collaborations: Five Crossovers, Zero Safe Choices

The marquee reveal is a slate of five genre-crossing collaboration stages, and each one is a small case study in MAMA’s “no safe choices” approach this year m.koreaherald.com.

Panic and the next generation. The rock duo of Lee Juck and Kim Jin-pyo debuted in 1995 the same year Mnet itself launched — and were branded rebels for singing about difference and nonconformity. Thirty-one years later, having just wrapped a solo comeback concert this year, Panic will share a MAMA stage with CORTIS members Martin and Sunghyun, WOODZ, ZEROBASEONE’s Kim Tae-rae, ALLDAY PROJECT’s Woochan, and tripleS/HEARTS2HEARTS’ Yuha chosun.com. It’s a rare instance of an underground-rock-coded act from K-pop’s analog era sharing real stage time with idols born after their debut — a lineage moment as much as a performance.

Lee Bae brings fine art into the arena. Perhaps the most unexpected name on the bill is Lee Bae, the Cheongdo-born visual artist internationally recognized for monumental charcoal works including a 21-foot sculpture that stood at New York’s Rockefeller Center in 2023 en.wikipedia.org. Lee trained under Mono-ha master Lee Ufan before moving to Paris in 1989, where too poor to afford paint — he began working with charcoal bought from a gas station, eventually turning it into his signature medium exploring destruction, purification, and renewal wallpaper.com. For an artist whose entire practice is about material transformed by fire and time, MAMA’s “craftsmanship never changes” framing is a genuinely coherent pairing, not just prestige-by-association. “The value of craftsmanship won’t change no matter how technology develops,” Yoon said. “Working with Lee Bae isn’t simply combining art and music it’s asking what the essence of art is that we should protect in an age of advancing technology.”

BIGBANG meets Dooly. In the lineup’s most nostalgia-loaded pairing, BIGBANG celebrating its 20th anniversary this year with the ongoing XX: Cosmos world tour, its first global run since 2017 will share a stage with Dooly the Little Dinosaur, Korea’s most beloved animated character en.wikipedia.org. Two icons from radically different eras of Korean pop culture, one in satin stage outfits and one in green scales, colliding on a single bill is exactly the kind of generational wall-breaking the “Interstellar” concept promises on paper.

ENHYPEN crosses over with Dune: Part Three. The group currently prepping a new single for next month will stage a performance built around Dune: Part Three, merging the film’s desert-planet mythology with ENHYPEN’s own long-running vampire concept. “ENHYPEN is a team with a clearly defined universe,” Yoon said. “We hope you look forward to the stage where the space universe of Dune meets ENHYPEN’s vampire universe” chosun.com. It’s a shrewd pairing ENHYPEN’s fandom has always leaned into world-building and lore, and a blockbuster sci-fi IP gives that instinct a cinema-scale canvas.

Google Gemini enters the stage. Rounding out the collaborations, MAMA is developing a new performance segment with Google’s Gemini AI, aimed at letting in-venue and worldwide livestream audiences experience a stage that isn’t bound by physical space the clearest literal expression of “Interstellar” on the entire bill.

Park Bo-gum Becomes MAMA’s First-Ever Ambassador

The format itself is getting a structural update. For the first time, MAMA is introducing an official ambassador role, and the inaugural pick is actor Park Bo-gum — who has hosted MAMA solo nearly every year since 2017, excluding his 2020–2021 military service. Rather than simply emceeing, Park will function as a storyteller connecting “Chapter One” (November 20, focused on fan-voted and rookie/solo/group awards) and “Chapter Two” (November 21, centered on genre-based and performance awards, including the newly introduced Best Song Top 10) into a single continuous narrative koreaherald.com.

Osaka Becomes the Stage: MAMA’s First Citywide Fan Festival

Arguably the biggest structural shift this year has nothing to do with who’s performing and everything to do with where the show’s footprint ends. For the first time, MAMA is staging a fan-participation festival the “MAMA Fan Festa” transforming Osaka landmarks including HEP FIVE, Dotonbori, Namba Station Plaza, and Midosuji Street into MAMA-branded spaces, running from November 9 through 21 m-en.yna.co.kr.

Programming includes nominated artists’ music playing on the HEP FIVE Ferris wheel, “Star Touch” video meet-and-greets, backstage cams, and red-carpet experiences. “This is a festival where fans don’t just watch the ceremony they become the main characters themselves,” said Park Chan-wook, head of the convention business division. “We’ve prepared it so fans can discover their own tastes and enjoy music throughout the city.”

It’s a notable bet: rather than treating the ceremony as the entire product, CJ ENM is stretching MAMA into a 13-day citywide experience closer to how music festivals like Coachella or Fuji Rock build week-long cultural footprints than how a traditional televised awards show typically operates.

The Scale: MAMA’s Biggest Single-City Lineup Ever

The sheer size of this year’s roster underscores how far MAMA has scaled since its 1999 origins. The confirmed lineup includes ALLDAY PROJECT, ALPHA DRIVE ONE, BABYMONSTER, CL, ENHYPEN, HEARTS2HEARTS, ILLIT, INI, Lapshot, Moadyssey, NCT WISH, RESCENE, TREASURE, &TEAM, BIGBANG, CORTIS, Hwasa, IVE, IZNA, KiiiKiii, KOYXEN, LE SSERAFIM, Nayeon, WOODZ, and ZEROBASEONE — reportedly the largest number of artists ever assembled in a single host city for the show koreaherald.com.

Presenters include Kim Yeon-koung, Kim Yoo-jung, Kim Jae-won, Kim Hee-sun, Monika, Moon Sang-min, Shunsuke Michieda, Seo In-young, Seol In-ah, Ong Seong-wu, Yoo In-na, Yoon Kyung-ho, Lee Da-hee, Lee Sang-yi, Lee Sung-kyung, Lee Sung-min, Lee Joon-ho, Lee Chae-min, Jang Keun-suk, Jang Hang-jun, Jo Yu-ri, Choi Dae-hoon, Kani, Heo Nam-joon, and Hwang Min-hyun.

Why This Matters

What’s striking about this year’s MAMA isn’t any single booking it’s the willingness to risk incoherence in service of a bigger idea. Pairing a 1995 rock duo with 2026 rookies, handing a stage to a fine artist best known for museum installations, and letting a boy band’s vampire lore collide with a Denis Villeneuve blockbuster could easily read as scattered. Instead, organizers are betting that K-pop’s current moment — where algorithmic discovery makes a decades-old song feel brand new and global fandoms erase geographic distance entirely means audiences are more equipped than ever to hold multiple eras and genres in their head at once.

“Over the past 27 years, we’ve continuously tried new things and taken on new challenges, and in that process we’ve also experienced countless trials and errors,” Shin said, closing the briefing. “No business succeeds 100% of the time. But I believe we should never stop taking on new challenges. We’re preparing with the mindset of a new employee starting from scratch every time, and we’ll work with our artists, fans, and partners to create the best awards show possible.”

Whether “A Music Interstellar” fully lands will depend on execution over two nights at Kyocera Dome. But as a statement of intent that a K-pop awards show in 2026 can be as expansive, hybrid, and unpredictable as the genre it celebrates MAMA has already made its point before a single performance airs.

The 2026 MAMA AWARDS will be held November 20–21 at Kyocera Dome Osaka, livestreamed globally via Mnet Plus and other major digital platforms.