The Korea Times

Lee Hee-moon: shaman of Seoul

Many find gugak difficult to enjoy. Hard to understand. It feels slow and opaque. Perhaps we are too modern for it. Or perhaps we’ve grown used to music that does most of the work for us. But, if you are searching for something that is Korean, something that sings to the soul of this nation, the wrinkles and warts of this culture, you needn’t look much further. For Koreans love singing. And the song of the people is, quite literally, "minyo." This week I was invited to a spell-binding event. Part concert, part ritual, part cultural cosplay. A performance by famed singer Lee Hee-moon at the National Theatre of Korea. He began in the shadows. A dark staged flanked by six musicians dressed in all white revealed a hint of a silhouette. There, at the back, you could just make out what seemed like a towering figure. A gat adorned the head. The sleeves hung low. The shoes high. It was inhuman almost. Made all the more indescribable by the voice that emanated from the darkness. We stared into the abyss looking for the source of the sound. It almost felt like it was coming from the past. Tha

Apr 18, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

The K-pop streaming illusion

Little in K-pop feels organic anymore. Everyone involved seems to know this at some level. We all know the numbers are fake. The fans, the media, the labels all know. And yet most participate in an elaborate, mutually sustained fiction that the numbers mean what numbers used to mean. This helps explain the exhaustion. An ambient fatigue reacting to the K-pop world. The YouTube view in K-pop is more a unit of work than cultural influence. It’s thousands (tens of thousands?) of highly coordinated individuals carrying out a gamified task loop that begins to resemble something closer to the autistic behavior patterns you see on Geometry Dash than actual music appreciation. And what emerges is a peculiar inversion: the metrics that are supposed to measure enthusiasm instead become the object of enthusiasm. The music (which was once ostensibly the point) recedes into the background, functioning almost as a pretext for the real activity, which is accumulation. Gamification. Fans will of course loudly proclaim their streaming totals while simultaneously exchanging instructions (“don’t us

Apr 11, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

The philosophy of BTS’ silence

There has been outrageous progress in the world over the last century or so. We have, with varying degrees of success and much-needed sensitivity, expanded the franchise of education to women and political agency to the formerly disenfranchised; we have developed a certain delicacy regarding the recognition of diverse groups. Technology is a glowing, 6-inch rectangle that lives in our pockets, granting us instant access to the grand works of civilization and the ability to capture our most precious moments with a resolution that far exceeds the actual quality of the memories themselves. And yet, there is a sense that in the process of acquiring everything, we have misplaced the one thing that wasn’t a thing at all: Silence. For those who have grown up with the internet in their hands and airpods permanently in their ears, it’s perhaps hard to understand how life used to be. Our permanent connection to the digital world means that we are never without entertainment, reels, music, tweets and other tidbits of titillation designed specifically to ensure that not a single millisecond o

Apr 4, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

The bloody brilliance of Park Chan-wook’s 'JSA'

Park Chan-wook is a genius. But more than being a master technician, he is also easily one of the most ballsy artists Korea has ever produced. Throughout a career that’s as bloody as it is beautiful, he’s tackled the "Big No-Nos": incest, religious mania, scorched-earth revenge, lesbianism, colonialism, North Korea, suicide and the soul-crushing weight of capitalism. He doesn’t pander to the masses, and he sure as hell doesn’t bow to the media. While other people are busy making "content" for the lowest common denominator, and we’re told to reflect on the supposed depth of a K-pop performance, Park has been busy expanding the culture. Listen to him speak on his first major movie, “Joint Security Area”: “Even when I make movies that delve into the internal mind of individual characters, I always think about that character’s relationship with the society they belong to and how they interact with others. I believe that is the most important duty of art.” And thus when this movie was released in 2000, it presented us with a psychological treatment of what goes on in the

Mar 28, 2026By David A. Tizzard

The bloody brilliance of Park Chan-wook’s 'JSA'

Opinion

Becoming Korean at the cinema

I was late to watching “The King’s Warden.” But I finally cleared some time in my schedule and headed to the cinema with my wife to watch Korea’s latest “cheonman yeonghwa” — a domestic title that surpasses 10 million ticket sales, which basically means that one in five people here have seen the movie. The list of the biggest selling movies here is quite surprising if you view it through an international lens. Most people, for example, will think of Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 hit “Parasite,” and yet that barely scraped past the 10 million mark and currently sits at 23rd on the overall list. Instead, the top five comprises “The Admiral: Roaring Currents” (2014), “Extreme Job” (2019), “The King’s Warden,” “Along With The Gods: The Two Worlds” (2017) and “Ode to My Father” (2014). Globally popular actors like Lee Byung-hyun are also surpassed by domestic heroes like Hwang Jung-min and Ryu Seung-ryong. What’s interesting about the biggest selling movies here is that none of them try to appeal to an international audience. They aren’t designed with glo

Mar 22, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

This is why Korea works

It’s not often that I can’t make it to a lecture or public speaking event. I’m apparently one of those people whose daily planners resemble a game of high-stakes Tetris played at double speed. But earlier this week, I was forced to cancel all my appointments for the day and drive myself to hospital. Something wasn’t right with me. I wasn’t sure what it was. Google or Chat GPT was only likely to tell me I had some kind of rare terminal space-rot. So, I dragged myself to the local hospital. I arrived at 9 a.m., to find everything already in full swing. I brought a phone charger and book with me because I half expected I might be in for a long stay. Not because of the hospital waiting time, though that was certainly a possibility, but I also feared I might become a permanent resident of a sterilized white room. I collected my ticket from the machine and waited to be seen by the two young ladies operating the reception. Both were chatting away to elderly Korean patients. It only took about 5 minutes before they called my number and asked what was wrong with me. I described my sym

Mar 14, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

From cigarettes to baseball

When I first arrived in Korea some two decades ago, the Miracle on the Han River was still an exhausting exercise in Confucian patriarchy. A kind of systemic "No" directed at anything female that dared to deviate from a very narrow, very silent path. Not just in the systemic way academics like to talk about, but in the day-to-day life people experience. I remember standing in Gwanghwamun with Yujin, the summer sun bouncing off Admiral Lee Sun-sin with oppressive clarity, smoking cigarettes. That in itself was a transgressive act for a woman at the time. Holding hands in public with foreigners was also apparently dangerous. She told me, with a flat, terrifyingly pragmatic sort of dread, smoke coming out of her nose: "If anyone looks at us, just keep speaking English. Tell them I’m Japanese." The implication being that a Korea woman smoking in the public square, particularly with a foreigner, was an invitation for some self-appointed guardian of the national morality to berate, threaten, or physically assault. I didn’t want to believe her at first but I caught her tone and quickly u

Mar 7, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

From Spitting to Shaming: The K-Social Code

Korea 2026 is not just Korea of the early 2000s with taller buildings, faster internet, AI everywhere, more Dubai chocolate, and increasingly outrageous beauty standards. It is that, of course. But alongside all the hardware upgrades, there has also been a change in culture and civic behavior. My early adventures in Korea were an attack on the senses. And not in the way it is today for millions of people shopping in Olive Young, drinking fancy Americanos, and vibing by the Han River with a wide range of foreign booze and biscuits. At the turn of the millennium, the place smelled a lot different. The garlic poured out of the ajjoshis on the subway in the morning. Kimchi got into every nook and cranny. Soju was an ever-present, giving the city an almost ethereal ethanol bath. It was still common to find bondaegi on most corners. And if you’ve never turned a corner and got a blast of hot silkworm cooking in a street vendor’s pot, have you ever really lived in Korea? But it wasn’t just the smells. It was also the noise. I was constantly looking behind me as people hocked up half thei

Feb 28, 2026By David A. Tizzard

From Spitting to Shaming: The K-Social Code

Opinion

Namdaemun after Namaste

I spend most of my days speaking and writing about South Korea. Culture, politics, music, art, people, philosophy, and food. When you go so deep into any subject, it’s possible to unconsciously adopt a form of tunnel vision that prevents you seeing anything else. The Korean expression for this is “u-mul an gae-gu-ri” — the frog in a well. It describes someone who mistakes the limits of their environment for the limits of the world. The idiom originates from a Daoist fable in which a frog living in a well invites a turtle to see his amazing home, only to then be dumbfounded when the turtle describes the vastness of the ocean. I try to travel as much as I can, particularly to give my young children cultural experiences beyond the classroom. Unsurprisingly, my trips to various countries have also changed my views on the country I’ve called home for the past 20+ years. Six months ago, Singapore reminded me that Korea isn’t as clean and safe as it could be. That multiculturalism and diversity is possible in an East Asian context. And that lookism and fashion doesn’t need to d

Feb 21, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

The meat envelope and the machine: Notes on the ontological honesty of PLAVE

I used to think virtual idols were a gimmick. A kind of high-gloss, dancing Tamagotchi. The kind of thing you point at and say “Ah yes, late-stage capitalism,” before moving on to something with a pulse. Then, faced with more Hallyu lectures to teach and articles to write, I started to do some research and explore PLAVE. PLAVE is a five-member virtual K-pop group. They don’t have physical bodies. They chart. They sell hundreds of thousands of albums. They win music shows. They have fans who cry, laugh and argue. This is usually where the ontological panic sets in for the uninitiated. How can people feel this way about something that isn't real? But that question assumes a definition of "reality" that hasn't been updated since the mid-20th century. It assumes reality begins and ends with the meat-envelope of the human body. I’ll admit my own bias here. I grew up in the long shadow of rock ideology and the belief that authenticity lives in sweat, drugs, mistakes, egos the size of mountains and lungs running out of air on stage. Even Bowie, patron saint of artifice, still had a bod

Feb 1, 2026By David A. Tizzard

David A. Tizzard

Read more

Lee Hee-moon: shaman of Seoul

The K-pop streaming illusion

The philosophy of BTS’ silence

The bloody brilliance of Park Chan-wook’s 'JSA'

Becoming Korean at the cinema

This is why Korea works

From cigarettes to baseball

From Spitting to Shaming: The K-Social Code

Namdaemun after Namaste

The meat envelope and the machine: Notes on the ontological honesty of PLAVE

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