Cheonan K-Culture Expo in full swing with thousands of visitors

Performers pose during the Hanbok Fashion Show event for the Cheonan K-Culture Expo 2025 with MyK FESTA in the South Chungcheong provincial city, Thursday. Courtesy of Cheonan City

CHEONAN — The Cheonan K-Culture Expo 2025 with MyK FESTA is in full swing with thousands of visitors as it celebrates the global attention to Korean culture.

Held at the Independence Hall of Korea in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province, it is a five-day event running from Wednesday through Sunday under the theme of “Global K-Culture in Full Bloom,” offering a dynamic combination of music, fashion, food, beauty and education.

Attracting tens of thousands of visitors, the opening ceremony was a major highlight, featuring high-profile performances by pop stars such as Sung Si-kyung, Lee Mu-jin, H1-Key and BEATPELLA HOUSE.

“The expo boasts the country’s status as a global powerhouse in culture,” South Chungcheong Province Governor Kim Tae-heum said during the opening ceremony for the event, Wednesday.

For this year’s event, the city has decided to expand its previous five exhibition halls to seven. All the exhibition halls feature AI, AR, interactive content and extended reality (XR) to strengthen visitors’ experience in immersion. They showcase digital content related to food, webtoons, beauty and Hangeul (the Korean alphabet) as well as visual and game content.

In the beauty content exhibition hall, visitors can experience personalized cosmetic products tailored to their skin type using AI technology. In the hall for visual content, visitors can produce a movie using interactive technologies.

The game hall offers an AR gaming zone using AI and XR technologies, as well as a board game zone and an experience booth for indie games and 3D character modeling. Visitors can also participate in webtoon creation at the webtoon exhibition hall while the Hangeul hall introduces the history and beauty of the Korean alphabet during the five-day event.

In addition to the opening ceremony, it offers a variety of performances that people of all ages can enjoy. It features an original soundtrack music show, a retro music performance for older adults and a live broadcast of the radio show “Wendy’s Young Street.” The musical “Catch! Teenieping” is also being performed for children.

For visitors’ convenience, free shuttle service is being provided from major transportation hubs like Cheonan-Asan Station.

“Cheonan is a city with great cultural heritage,” acting Cheonan City Mayor Kim Seok-pil said. “We will do our best to make the city Korea’s cultural hub.”

Acting Cheonan Mayor Kim Seok-pil speaks during an opening ceremony for the Cheonan K-Culture Expo 2025 with MyK FESTA in the South Chungcheong provincial city, Wednesday. Courtesy of Cheonan City