Seoul - Fans and friends yesterday expressed shock at the death of a South Korean supermodel who was found hanged in her central Paris apartment last week.

Ms Daul Kim's friends paid tribute to the rising star, following reports of the 20-year-old's apparent suicide last Thursday.

Mr Ahn Seong Jin, a photographer who had often worked with Ms Kim, said she was full of ideas and creativity.

'She was able to make various looks and postures on catwalks that can hardly be matched by others,' he was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse.

The 1.78m supermodel made her fashion week debut for Chanel, Dries Van Noten and Maison Martin Margiela in 2007 and recently appeared in a commercial for Christopher Kane's Topshop line.

She was born in Seoul and lived in Malaysia before moving to Singapore with her family at the age of seven.

But behind the glitz and glamour of the runway, Ms Kim cut an insecure, lonely and depressed figure who never felt a sense of belonging.

In an interview with British fashion and lifestyle magazine i-D published in July last year, she said she was talent-spotted in Singapore when she was 13. She quit school two years later and returned to South Korea to focus on her fledging career.

'I didn't fit in. The other girls were really bitchy. It was like something out of Mean Girls,' she told i-D magazine.

But because she could barely speak Korean and had no friends there, she had a hard time fitting in back home.

'On moving back to Korea from Singapore, I had nothing,' she recalled.

Then came her big break at the age of 16, when she modelled for Martin Margiela. The following year, while still in her first season, she was called up by Chanel.

She made occasional references to her time in Singapore on her blog 'I Like To Fork Myself', named after her obsession with collecting forks.

In a post dated July 12 this year, she talked about how she would skip school when she was 14 or 15 and spend time drawing at a 'famous cinematographer' neighbour's house.

In another entry dated June 29 last year, she wrote that 'I always saw ah bengs', whom she referred to as 'cheap/tacky but somehow you are so drawn to', and posted a few YouTube clips from Royston Tan's Ah Beng-themed movie 15.

Her tendency to feel depressed started as early as her time in Singapore, according to her blog.

In the July 12 post, she mentioned that her cinematographer neighbour would tell her things like 'I'm not really depressed, I'm just pretending so that I could skip school'.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.