The Korea Times

Debate over moving Nat'l University of Arts reignites before local elections

A debate over the possible relocation of the Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts) has reignited ahead of the June 3 local elections, pitting lawmakers’ regional development plans against students, faculty and art professionals who warn the move would undermine Korea’s cultural competitiveness. On April 22, 11 lawmakers from the Democratic Part of Korea (DPK), led by Rep. Jeong Jun-ho, submitted a bill to relocate K-Arts from Seoul to Gwangju, around 300 kilometers south of Seoul, and establish a graduate school that would grant master’s and doctoral degrees — a long-standing demand from the institution. The bill’s sponsors argued that the move would address the concentration of cultural infrastructure in Seoul and help stem the exodus of young regional artists to the capital, citing Gwangju’s cultural assets, which include the Gwangju Biennale and National Asian Culture Center. Spearheaded by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the university opened in 1992 in Seoul and currently has 4,804 students enrolled as well as 425 faculty members. The proposal received

May 3, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

Debate over moving Nat'l University of Arts reignites before local elections

Arts & Theater

‘Inside Other Spaces’ to reexamine trailblazing women artists across decades

Between 1956 and 1976, being a woman artist was difficult almost everywhere. The postwar art world left women little room to educate themselves and build careers, pressures that ended up helping fuel the rise of the feminist movement. An upcoming exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul will shine a light on these sidelined artists by reconstructing the immersive “environments” in which they once worked and experimented. Titled “Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists, 1956-1976,” the exhibition traces two decades in which women around the world built room-scale works that viewers could enter and experience with their bodies. The project was first presented in 2023 at MUDEC in Milan and later traveled to Haus der Kunst in Munich, MAXXI in Rome and M+ in Hong Kong in their own versions before coming to Seoul. Curators Andrea Lissoni and Marina Pugliese researched 11 artists, largely from regions and countries that curators said have been underrepresented in canonical Western art histories. Their environments, often made from light, sound, plastic and foam, anticip

Apr 30, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

‘Inside Other Spaces’ to reexamine trailblazing women artists across decades

Travel & Food

Seoul's most surreal subway station: unknown story of Noksapyeong Station

The notes of Chopin’s Nocturne drifted up through the deep underground air inside Noksapyeong Station in Seoul on Monday afternoon this week, echoing off curved walls and bouncing against translucent glass banisters. A commuter sat at an upright piano in the concourse — one of the station’s cultural fixtures — and for a few unannounced minutes, the cavernous hall felt less like a subway station and more like a dream that missed its exit. That is precisely the effect Noksapyeong Station tends to have on people. Even after 25 years of operation, Seoul Metro Line 6’s most architecturally audacious station can still make passengers pause mid-escalator, compelled to look up, down or sideways, at a structure that seems more like a science-fiction film set than a city subway system. In a sense, it was built for a world that never quite materialized. Station with grand ambitions When Seoul began constructing its sixth metro line in the mid-1990s, planners had a reason to dream big around the Noksapyeong area. Officials were considering relocating City Hall to the site of the current Yo

Apr 29, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

Seoul's most surreal subway station: unknown story of Noksapyeong Station

Books

Korea to launch graduate school for literary translation by 2027

Korea plans to open a new graduate school dedicated to literary translation by September 2027, creating a key engine for promoting Korean literature and cultural content globally, the state-run Literature Translation Institute (LTI) Korea announced, Tuesday. LTI Korea President Chon Soo-young said the institute is seeking to “evolve the existing Translation Academy into a regular master’s degree program” to train not only literary translators but also experts in promoting and planning Korean cultural content. “Through the graduate school, we aim to nurture high-level translation professionals who will lead global cultural exchanges in the digital transformation era,” she said at a press briefing marking the launch of a preparatory committee for the school. The new school, which will be based out of LTI Korea’s building in Seoul’s Samseong-dong, will offer a master’s program in Korean literary and cultural content translation with seven language tracks — English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Russian — focusing on translating from Korean into other la

Apr 28, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

Korea to launch graduate school for literary translation by 2027

Arts & Theater

Korea National Opera reimagines ‘Werther’ through new lens

On Thursday, the Korea National Opera staged one of literature's most famous tragedies as a cinematic meditation, pairing soaring vocals with images from film and ballet to explore love, duty, sincerity and death in contemporary Korea. Based on Goethe’s 18th-century novel “The Sorrow of Young Werther,” the four-act French opera "Werther" premiered in Vienna in 1892 before being staged in Paris the following year. The work is considered composer Jules Massenet’s best and most famous work, finely wrought with a psychologically insightful score. In Seoul, the company has refocused the opera through the often-overlooked perspective of Charlotte, casting a mezzo-soprano in the role and emphasizing the conflict the character feels as she is torn between passion and responsibility. Thursday's performance also stood out for its unique production, acting as the opera debut for Park Jong-won, the veteran filmmaker behind titles such as “Guro Arirang” (1989) and “Our Twisted Hero” (1992). In a recent interview with The Korea Times, Park said he structured “Werther” with what he

Apr 24, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

Korea National Opera reimagines ‘Werther’ through new lens

Arts & Theater

'Visit Palestine' poster show connects Gaza and Seoul

Posters that once traveled quietly between activists, student groups and solidarity networks are now on the walls of a small gallery in Seoul, inviting visitors to a place many may never see in person: Palestine. “Visit Palestine: Seoul Edition,” the local edition of the traveling Visit Palestine Poster Project, is on view at Faces, an exhibition space in Yeonnam-dong, through May 4, after an earlier run at CORD in central Seoul from April 1-18. The show presents 16 posters produced in or for Palestine over the past six decades, selected for how they illuminate its political history while drawing visual connections through symbols and typography in historically resonant imagery. The project began in Tokyo in June 2021, when Indonesian-born cafe owner Andhika Faisal came across a collection of Palestinian solidarity posters in a secondhand shop. The exhibition first opened in May 2022 and has since toured to more than 20 venues in 15 Japanese cities before traveling to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia and now Korea. The title of the exhibition references a 1936 tourism poster produced by

Apr 23, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

'Visit Palestine' poster show connects Gaza and Seoul

Arts & Theater

Korea’s ‘painter of light’ finally gets national spotlight

CHEONGJU, North Chungcheong Province — Painter Bang Hai Ja, long celebrated in France as a visionary “painter of light,” is finally receiving a large-scale institutional exhibition in Korea that aims to move her work from the realm of mystical cult favorite into the country’s modern art history. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) will open “Bang Hai Ja: Sowing Light Across Heaven and Earth” at its Cheongju venue on Friday, marking the 140th anniversary of diplomatic ties between Korea and France. The retrospective, the first dedicated to Bang at a Korean national museum, brings together 67 works and about 100 archival materials spanning from her early experiments in the 1960s to the meditative light-filled abstract paintings of her later years. More than half of the works are loans from major French institutions including Centre Pompidou and Musee Cernuschi in Paris, with many being shown in Korea for the first time. “Previous exhibitions (in Korea) were mostly organized while the artist was alive, so there were limits to what would be shown,” curat

Apr 23, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

Korea’s ‘painter of light’ finally gets national spotlight

Trends

Seoul’s viral quadricycle band turns landmarks into rolling concert venues

On a bright spring afternoon at Yeouido Hangang Park in Seoul, a strange vehicle glided past: a four-wheeled bicycle stacked with people playing drums, saxophone, guitar and melodica, pushed from behind. All the band members were dressed in red caps and colorful sashes. As the band played a breezy Korean pop ballad from its moving stage, people raised their phones and shouted, “This makes me so happy!” and “They’re so cute!” The group is Dongmi Bicycle Club, an indie band turning some of Korea’s most familiar songs into a rolling street parade and reinventing what busking looks like in Seoul. Video clips of the band weaving through Seoul's landmarks and busy markets have gone viral on social media in recent weeks, with fans calling them “the hottest people right now” and begging them to visit their hometowns across the country, from Daegu to Jeju. From jazz trio to rolling parade Dongmi Bicycle Club started with saxophonist Shin Choi-go-young-jin, drummer Lee Sung-min and melodica player Won Chung-yeon. They met as students at Seoul Music High School in the early 2010s.

Apr 22, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

Seoul’s viral quadricycle band turns landmarks into rolling concert venues

Books

Han Kang leads Korea's bestseller boom while adult reading rates halve

Nobel laureate Han Kang’s novels top Korea’s bestseller rankings for the past decade, even as the country’s reading rates hit historic lows, according to new data compiled ahead of World Book and Copyright Day. Kyobo Book Centre said Sunday that Han's “The Vegetarian” and “Human Acts” ranked first and second, respectively, in its cumulative bestseller list covering April 17, 2016 to April 16, 2026, across online and offline channels. The period was chosen to mark the 10 years since “The Vegetarian” won the International Booker Prize in May 2016, the first time a Korean-language novel received the award. “The Vegetarian,” first published in Korean in 2007 and translated into English under the same title, gained renewed attention after the prize and went on to spend 12 consecutive weeks at the top of Kyobo’s weekly overall bestseller chart, becoming the chain’s bestselling book of 2016. Han’s 2014 novel “Human Acts,” about the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement, saw a surge in sales after the author became the first Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize i

Apr 19, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

Han Kang leads Korea's bestseller boom while adult reading rates halve

Music

Korean National Symphony Orchestra to amplify blockbuster soundtracks at Seoul Arts Center

The Korean National Symphony Orchestra (KNSO) will bring Hollywood to the concert hall with a new film music program that immerses audiences in some of the most iconic blockbuster scores of the 21st century. The orchestra’s “Hollywood Blockbusters” concert will run May 1 and 2 at Seoul Arts Center’s Concert Hall, pairing symphonic sound with large-scale media art visuals. Led by British-based conductor Anthony Gabriele, a specialist in film music concerts, the program centers on Hans Zimmer, the German composer widely credited with redefining today’s blockbuster sound. While John Williams is often associated with the golden age of Hollywood scores, Zimmer pushed the genre forward by fusing traditional orchestral writing with electronic elements and propulsive rhythms in collaborations with directors such as Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott. The evening will open with Zimmer’s music, featuring a suite from “The Dark Knight” and selections from “Inception,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Kung Fu Panda,” “The Da Vinci Code,” “Wonder Woman,” “The Lion King” and

Apr 19, 2026By Lee Hae-rin

Lee Hae-rin

Read more

Debate over moving Nat'l University of Arts reignites before local elections

‘Inside Other Spaces’ to reexamine trailblazing women artists across decades

Seoul's most surreal subway station: unknown story of Noksapyeong Station

Korea to launch graduate school for literary translation by 2027

Korea National Opera reimagines ‘Werther’ through new lens

'Visit Palestine' poster show connects Gaza and Seoul

Korea’s ‘painter of light’ finally gets national spotlight

Seoul’s viral quadricycle band turns landmarks into rolling concert venues

Han Kang leads Korea's bestseller boom while adult reading rates halve

Korean National Symphony Orchestra to amplify blockbuster soundtracks at Seoul Arts Center

Top 5 stories