One Korean magician walked onto America's Got Talent alone in 2022 and reached the final. Four years later, he returned at the center of ten Korean magicians—and the group received not one but two Golden Buzzers in the same season.

That magician is Yu Hojin (유호진). International magic audiences knew him as a world champion long before Korean television made him a household name. His route from FISM champion to SBS's The Magic Star, and then back to AGT as the leader of Hundred Fingers, explains why his 2026 success is more than a sudden viral moment.

There is one important correction to headlines and social posts: after the second Golden Buzzer on August 18, 2026, Hundred Fingers did not merely reach the semifinal. The live-show buzzer sent the team directly to the AGT Season 21 final.

Yu Hojin's career in one timeline

YearStageWhat happened
2012FISM World Championship of MagicWon first prize in manipulation and the stage Grand Prix
2013 onwardThe IllusionistsToured major international venues, including Broadway and the West End
2022America's Got Talent Season 17Entered as a solo magician, reached the semifinal, then advanced to the final
2024SBS The Magic StarWon Korea's global magic survival competition
2026AGT Season 21 auditionReturned as leader of Hundred Fingers; team received Howie Mandel's Golden Buzzer
August 18, 2026AGT live quarterfinalReceived a second Golden Buzzer from Mandel and advanced directly to the final

The timeline also clears up two claims that are easy to mix together. Yu personally reached the AGT semifinal and final in 2022. The double-Golden-Buzzer act in 2026 is Hundred Fingers, a team he created and leads.

Before television, Yu Hojin changed stage manipulation

Yu's specialty is manipulation magic: producing, vanishing, transforming, and controlling small objects such as cards with extreme precision. The technical skill is easy to admire, but speed alone was never his final goal.

In a 2024 interview after The Magic Star, Yu described manipulation as a stage-magic category built on highly developed hand technique. He said the prevailing style when he entered FISM emphasized speed, while he deliberately slowed his card work so the magical effect—not only the dexterity—was easier to see.

Cards in his act therefore do not simply appear as proof of technique; pacing and visual clarity are part of the method. That approach led to his breakthrough at the 2012 FISM World Championship of Magic in Blackpool. Contemporary SBS coverage reported that he won the manipulation category and then the stage Grand Prix, becoming the first Asian recipient of the overall honor.

The title opened international doors. Yu joined The Illusionists, performing on large stages around the world, including Broadway and London's West End. By the time American television viewers first encountered him, he was not an unknown amateur looking for a first booking. He was an established theater magician choosing to enter a television competition.

AGT 2022: the solo act that grew after Simon said no

Yu auditioned for America's Got Talent Season 17 with an intimate feather act. A white feather appeared, floated, multiplied, and vanished inside a spare frame. Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum, and Sofia Vergara voted yes. Simon Cowell voted no.

Cowell's objection became part of the season's story. He admired Yu's skill but wanted the presentation to become bigger. Yu later returned for the live semifinal with an act about imagination, using paper, drawings, cards, and objects that seemed to escape from a sketchbook. All four judges stood. Cowell admitted that his first judgment had been wrong.

America's vote advanced Yu from the semifinal into the Season 17 final. He did not win the season, but the journey established a useful creative tension: his strength was delicate, close visual poetry, while AGT rewards ideas that read instantly across a large theater and television screen.

That tension matters because Hundred Fingers would later look like Yu's answer. The team preserved sleight of hand while multiplying its scale.

Why Yu Hojin entered SBS The Magic Star

In 2024, SBS launched The Magic Star, described by the network as Korea's first global magic audition program. The field included Korean and international performers, from close-up specialists to large-scale illusionists. Yu entered even though his FISM title, touring career, and AGT final already placed him among the competition's most credentialed names.

His reason was not lack of work abroad. In a later Korean interview, Yu described a long-standing desire to perform for a broader audience at home. International magic fans knew him, but many ordinary Korean viewers did not. A prime-time SBS competition could close that gap.

The program also forced him to keep rebuilding. In the first round he faced Taiwanese magician Eric Chien, another FISM Grand Prix winner, in what SBS promoted as a “group of death.” Later performances expanded Yu's familiar themes of paper, memory, and imagination without abandoning his restrained style.

Yu ultimately won The Magic Star. SBS subsequently identified him as the program's winner when announcing management agreements and the show's national tour. The victory changed his position in Korea: the magician who had been “more famous overseas” became recognizable to domestic television viewers.

This is why the show belongs in his AGT story. The Magic Star did not discover his technical ability. It proved that his quiet theatrical language could survive a weekly Korean entertainment format—and win.

What is Hundred Fingers?

Hundred Fingers (헌드레드 핑거스) is a project team of ten South Korean magicians led by Yu Hojin. Its name turns the basic instrument of sleight of hand—the magician's fingers—into a statement of scale: ten performers, one hundred fingers, one coordinated act.

Korean reports identify the members as Yu Hojin, Kim Hosan, Kim Dohyun, Kim Jihho, Yoon Jeseop, Kim Cheolgyu, Choi Junhyeong, Yeon Munhyeong, Kim Hansoo, and Lee Hyunyong. The group combines individual manipulation technique with dance-like blocking, synchronized reveals, costume changes, and large visual patterns.

This is not simply Yu with nine assistants. The premise depends on many trained hands performing as one body. A move that would be a single production in a solo act can travel across a line of performers, repeat in canon, or fill the stage. It resembles the coordination behind K-pop dance challenges and performance teams: individual precision matters, but the audience remembers the collective image.

The first Golden Buzzer: a Korean magic supergroup arrives

Hundred Fingers auditioned for AGT Season 21 in June 2026. The team presented rapid, synchronized visual magic using paper, cards, clothing, and repeated transformations. The scale directly addressed the criticism Yu had heard four years earlier: go bigger.

Howie Mandel pressed the Golden Buzzer, advancing the team beyond the ordinary audition route to the live rounds. Korean coverage treated it as a first major AGT triumph for an all-Korean magic team. For Yu, it also completed a narrative loop. He had returned to the same program not by enlarging one prop, but by building an ensemble.

Calling it “Yu Hojin's Golden Buzzer” is understandable shorthand, but incomplete. The official act is Hundred Fingers. The achievement belongs to the ten-member team.

The second Golden Buzzer—and why it skipped the semifinal

On August 18, Hundred Fingers appeared in the first live quarterfinal. Reports of the performance describe a more theatrical act incorporating fans, masks, fire effects, choreography, and coordinated sleight of hand. Yu said the group had rehearsed 15 hours a day, six days a week.

Mandel reacted before the result could go to a public vote. He climbed across the judges' desk to hit the live Golden Buzzer, accidentally triggering his red buzzer in the process. He called the routine a million-dollar performance and said it already felt like a final act.

The rules make the result important. In each quarterfinal, America's vote sends three acts to the semifinal, while that week's judge controls a live Golden Buzzer that sends one act straight to the final. Hundred Fingers therefore bypassed both the normal quarterfinal vote and the semifinal.

So the clean version is:

  1. First Golden Buzzer: audition to live shows.
  2. Second Golden Buzzer: quarterfinal directly to the Season 21 final.

The team did not receive two buzzers for repeating the same trick. The second came after it expanded the visual scale and demonstrated a live-show version of its idea.

Why Hundred Fingers feels like K-performance, not only magic

Hundred Fingers arrives at a moment when global audiences already recognize certain features of Korean stage production: long rehearsal periods, synchronized movement, clean visual formations, rapid transitions, and an emphasis on the group picture. Those traits do not belong exclusively to K-pop, but K-pop has taught international viewers how to read them.

The team's magic gains power from the same relationship between detail and formation. A card vanish must work at the level of one hand. Ten bodies must also land in the right positions for the television camera. The result moves between close manipulation and choreography.

There is also a familiar comeback structure. Yu took Cowell's 2022 demand for a bigger act, won a Korean television contest without abandoning his identity, then returned with a team designed around scale. Like the Korean concert culture described in our guide to ttechang, or mass singing, the emotional impact comes from many people executing one shared idea.

That does not make Hundred Fingers a K-pop group. It makes the team legible within a broader Korean performance ecosystem where rehearsal, precision, storytelling, and collective execution travel well across borders.

What happens next?

As of August 25, 2026, Hundred Fingers has secured a place in the AGT Season 21 final. The season is still in progress, so claims that the team won AGT would be premature. Its final placement will depend on the remaining live competition and voting format.

Whatever happens in the final, Yu Hojin has already completed three different audition stories. He was the respected world champion who accepted a no and reached an American final. He was the internationally famous magician who returned home and won SBS's The Magic Star. Then he became the leader who turned ten Korean specialists into the first act of his career large enough to earn two AGT Golden Buzzers in one season.

The secret is not that Yu suddenly learned how to make magic bigger. It is that he found a way to scale it without losing the careful sense of wonder that made his work distinct in the first place.

Sources