The Korea Times

Hyun Bin is outrageously handsome

I love Korean history. And I really love it when Korean film, drama, and literature stop trying to polish it and instead let it bleed. I love post-liberation Korea: the mess of it, the brutality, the improvisation, the uneasy marriage of capitalism and authoritarianism. This period is one of the best narrative sources in modern cinema and art. What I don’t love are those saccharine Joseon fantasies where everyone looks like they just stepped out of a skincare commercial, the women styled with twenty-first-century makeup techniques, the men built like personal trainers, and the past rendered as a kind of nationalist mood board. Too much of that stuff feels less like history and more like branding. No! Give me curfews. Give me dictatorship. Give me the sound of forbidden music bleeding out of cheap radios under military rule. Give me sex, fear, ambition, corruption, and the kind of loud, boisterous energy that only exists when people are surviving under pressure. These things happened right here, on these streets, to the woman rolling my kimbap, to my father-in-law, to my wife when sh

Jan 24, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Learning Korea Without Korean

More than once I’ve walked up to a counter in a coffee shop and seen the two people working there silently and almost imperceptibly shift places. The one working the counter shifts her glance backwards; the one pouring milk into a jug slides silently forward into place and replaces her at the checkout, smiling nervously. They have switched spots based on who is better adapted at speaking English. All of this happens so fast that it barely announces itself as a decision at all, and I am sure there are people for whom it happens regularly and yet goes completely unnoticed, like a familiar tune playing just under the volume of conscious attention. I smile, keep my eyes relatively low, and order in Korean. This usually causes a flicker of surprise, but nothing more. And then I ask a question. I make a small comment about the weather. And only then does it become clear that the little dance they performed so efficiently was, at least this time, unnecessary. It is worth saying that this experience does not unfold in the same way for everyone. Someone who appears Korean, or simply Asian, w

Jan 17, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Five reasons I stayed in Seoul

“Seoul is vast. … And yet, vast as it is, once three million seven hundred thousand people actually try to live in it, it proves no easy place to breathe. Everywhere you go, wherever you arrive, it is packed — stuffed to the seams. Houses keep creeping farther out toward the suburbs, yet year after year they are never enough. There are no jobs. People grow sharp-tongued and sly, the authorities groan under a torrent of abuse, and the newspapers do nothing but scream at the top of their lungs.” Written in 1976, Lee Ho-cheol’s “Seoul Is Full” offers an unsettling portrait of Korea’s capital: overwhelming in scale, overpopulated to the point of psychic compression, and structurally incapable of supplying enough work or shelter for the bodies it contains. Nearly half a century on, the city’s basic conditions appear to have been normalized. Those of us who have succeeded in becoming Seoulites are, to a certain extent, sympathizers and accomplices in this outrageous transformation. And yet, the attraction remains strong. We want to be in Seoul. Want to walk its streets. Sit

Jan 10, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

On the misuse of 4B feminism to explain Korea

I recently gave a group of 11 young women the opportunity to speak at the Royal Asiatic Society. For months they prepared their topics, posters, and digital content, filled with nervous excitement that they would be talking to professors, diplomats, and members of society about the real issues that affected their lives. They spoke of outrageous beauty standards; they said that parents did not always understand their hobbies and the career paths they chose; they revealed what it was like dating foreign guys. And they did all this with passion and enthusiasm. Taking the freedom afforded them and demonstrating true courage to show the world who they really were and what they actually thought. The talk that night received a great ovation. People whooped with excitement. They clasped their hands, offering gratitude and praise. Thanks to technology, the talk given in downtown Seoul was examined in Polish lecture halls and Italian media offices. A great success. It was only afterward, while reading the analyses and reports that followed, that I felt the dull recognition of something that had

Jan 3, 2026By David A. Tizzard

On the misuse of 4B feminism to explain Korea

Opinion

Why letting teachers afford homes is still called communism

Every Korean president promises change. They use lofty words like revolution. They promise that everything that happened in the past would simply be a footnote to what is about to take place. People hold their breath. “It’s about to start,” they think. The struggle, the war, the division, the colonialism. Everything will now be solved and the country will become a place for the people. Having sacrificed more than one could possibly imagine, after enduring hardships so outrageous they make you baulk, having democratically chosen a leader, the time has come. The destiny fulfilled. And then… And then. Plus ca change. I remember when President Moon Jae-in’s administration sent me a special gift set upon entering office. It was a wonderfully ornate set of drinking glasses and traditional Korean liquor. My family looked at me askance. “Wow,” they thought. From the Blue House? To you? The guy that sits around reading books and drinking? It was a lovely gesture and I am thankful for it. However, it didn’t stop me writing about issues that troubled him (these generally revolved

Dec 27, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Why letting teachers afford homes is still called communism

Opinion

Do you have a K-face?

I was sitting in a hairdresser’s chair doing what one does in hairdresser’s chairs, which is to become briefly, helplessly reflective, staring at my own head from angles normally reserved for security camera footage, when a woman I had never met before walked past, stopped abruptly and did a double-take at my reflection. There was a pause. Then, with genuine delight, she smiled and said, “You have such a small face.” This was not flirtation. There was no reference to my hair, my age or any feature traditionally associated with human attractiveness in the West. It was simply an observational statement, delivered as though she had just confirmed a pleasing fact about the weather. This was also not the first time it had happened. Anyone who has taken photos with Korean students, colleagues or teammates will recognize the moment. You line up, the phone comes out, the camera flips, and suddenly everyone sees themselves on the screen next to you. There is a brief, silent calculation. Then realization. Faces are compared. Space is renegotiated. People begin to step backward. This is n

Dec 14, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Korea: A teenager with a PhD

There’s a certain kind of self-reinforcing, and surprisingly addictive narrative that forms around Korea whenever the global commentariat gets going. You’ve seen it. The greatest hits of online cynicism: Their gender attitudes are medieval; their exam system is inhumane; their culture manufactures emotionally constipated robots; everyone is depressed; beauty standards are dystopian; K-pop is fake; they’re all racist. Spend ten minutes among the disenchanted on Reddit and you’ll find people diagnosing Korea’s every flaw with the authority of late-night armchair psychiatrists, all while using the country as a kind of geopolitical emotional support animal. They drag it down so they can feel better about living in suburban Ohio or on the outskirts of Vancouver. Then head to YouTube, where creators who once loved the country suddenly discover that capitalism pays better if the thumbnail reads “I survived the MOST RACIST COUNTRY in the world” and their eyebrows are raised in that patented O-shaped shock we see everywhere on the platform. Bonus points if they have their finger

Dec 6, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

The walnut cake theory of Korean hospitality

There are days, most days, if I’m being honest, when Seoul feels less like a city and more like a high-speed assembly line I’ve accidentally stepped onto sideways. Everything moves with this synchronized, conveyor-belt urgency, and I’m the defective product drifting against the current. Cars don’t so much drive as lunge: sudden, angular movements that make me consider slamming my horn with righteous theatricality. I almost never do, because in Korea the horn is not so much a warning as a declaration of open hostilities. Doorways swallow people whole; nobody waits behind to hold anything open. Coffee cups — still upright, still warm — are abandoned on sidewalks like tiny exhausted soldiers who have fallen in battle. The whole landscape starts to feel like a collage of micro-indifferences, each one trivial and yet collectively forming this impression of a society in which everyone is pathologically sealed in their own sleek ergonomic capsule of self. Screens are part of the problem, obviously. We carry these glowing rectangles like secular rosaries, caressing them for spiritu

Nov 29, 2025By David A. Tizzard

The walnut cake theory of Korean hospitality

Opinion

Ben doesn’t exist: Rereading 'Burning' in the ruins of late capitalism

There’s a particular kind of filmgoer who claims “Burning” is slow. Or ambiguous. Or — God help us — boring. These are the same people who order a steak well-done and then complain it’s tough. What Lee Chang-dong has constructed in his 2018 mystery is not just a movie but rather a trapdoor into the subconscious of a society that pretends to be functioning while its young men quietly immolate from the inside out. Of course viewers love the clues: The cat named Boil. The pink suitcase. The watch. The greenhouse. The “aha!” moments that make them feel smart. Lee allows them to assemble the puzzle. But the ending doesn’t resolve the mystery; it tells you the mystery was the wrong question all along. The real mystery is Jeong-su himself. The extraordinary thing about "Burning" — and this is where Lee surpasses virtually every working director with perhaps the exception of Park Chan-wook — is that nothing in the frame is wasted. Even the negative space is meaningful. You don’t know this at first. You think the drawer-opening, the cow-feeding, the cigarette-lighting is

Nov 22, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Ben doesn’t exist: Rereading 'Burning' in the ruins of late capitalism

Opinion

Only beautiful, please: Korea’s new battle with bad press

There is something deliciously ironic in the sight of a government — let’s say, the government of the Republic of Korea — that once invited the world in for the selfie by the Han River, now issuing warnings about what voices may or may not be heard in its territory. More precisely, it was said by a member of the government this week that foreign content creators who post “derogatory commentary” about Korea may face entry bans. The country’s dignity is now apparently as fragile as a YouTube algorithm. Yes, it is understandable that Korea wants to clamp down on hate speech. The president also said that racially targeted, nationality-based denigration can no longer be tolerated when pointing towards the increased anti-Chinese sentiment the country is sadly witnessing. Thankfully, unlike his democratic party predecessor who used anti-Japanese sentiment to boost his own ratings, President Lee Jae Myung is playing a very straight bat in terms of international relations by trying to be friends with everyone. Giving U.S. President Donald Trump a gold crown, saying nice things abou

Nov 16, 2025By David A. Tizzard

David A. Tizzard

Read more

Hyun Bin is outrageously handsome

Learning Korea Without Korean

Five reasons I stayed in Seoul

On the misuse of 4B feminism to explain Korea

Why letting teachers afford homes is still called communism

Do you have a K-face?

Korea: A teenager with a PhD

The walnut cake theory of Korean hospitality

Ben doesn’t exist: Rereading 'Burning' in the ruins of late capitalism

Only beautiful, please: Korea’s new battle with bad press

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