Exhibitions “Paulo Robersi: Photographs”: A retrospective exhibition on Italian photographer Paulo Robersi is underway at 10 CORSO COMO. Robersi is referred to as currently one of the three best fashion photographers in the world along with Steven Meisel and Peter Lindbergh. The exhibition runs through May 8 at 10 CORSO COMO SEOUL in Cheongdam-dong, southern Seoul. Admission is free. Minors are ...

Open spaces host city dance events to celebrate World Dance Day This is the official occasion for dancing all night long. International Dance Council, International Theater Institute and UNESCO designated April 29 as International Dance Day in 1982 in honor of Jean-Georges Noverre, the founder of Ballet d’Action, or narrative ballet. April 29 was his birthday. Following the goal of the day ― t...

Top pizza, liquor and snack houses turn to art marketing Your eyes might be dazzled before your mouth starts to water the next time you go to a pizza place. The seven-story Mr. Pizza building which opened in Bangbae-dong, southern Seoul, last week is part art gallery, packed with eye-catching artworks. Mr. Pizza, which currently tops the local pizza market, renovated the building into a kind o...

Fashion photographers Juergen Teller and Paolo Roversi showcase portraits of cut-throat fashion industry What Anna Wintour’s assistants have to go through is only a fraction of the merciless battles in the uber-competitive world of fashion. Two fashion photographers who managed to survive and even receive praise for their successful campaigns are to reveal the inside of the most glamorous and c...

The Korea National Opera Company is to perform opera “Les Dialogues des Carmelites” by 20th-century French composer Francis Poulenc in Seoul in May, the first performance of the opera in Asia. First premiered in Paris and Milan in 1957, the opera is based on historical events which took place at a monastery of Carmelite nuns in Compiegne during the French Revolution. “This piece takes us to the...

The Seoul Metropolitan Opera Company’s first production of “Tosca,” one of the most frequently performed operas among Puccini’s works, reveals the beauty of the Italian composer’s best-known lyrical aria through the singers’ vocal ability, acting and the orchestra’s following of veteran conductor Mark Gibson. During a press rehearsal Tuesday prior to April 21-24, soprano Kim Eun-joo in the role ...

Korean artists to take center stage at annual culture festival It is an annual festival in Edinburgh that draws hundreds of thousands of people for three weeks of music, dance, theater and opera in August. This year the world’s biggest cultural fest will seek to build a bridge between Asia and Europe by featuring artists from Korea, China and Japan, according to the organizer. The staging of t...

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) ― Amid a burst of fireworks and a haze of smoke, a burly showman in a white sequined suit and gold lame cape appears with a flourish. Over the next 45 minutes, he appears to make a Pyongyang bus levitate and wriggles free from a box sent crashing to the stage through a ring of fire. This is magic North Korean-style performed in a show touted as the country’s biggest e...

Singer Yoo’s musical invited to open the Shanghai International Children’s Theater Festival Singer Yoo Yeol did not really know that he would become a CEO of a musical company devoted to children until several years ago. However, since he established Yoo Yeol Company in 2006 to produce the children’s musical “The Bremen’s band,” the 50-year-old has drawn nearer and nearer to the thought that he...

The architect-in-charge of the highly anticipated Seoul branch of the National Museum of Contemporary Art has admitted it will be smaller in size than had been originally planned. The museum is scheduled to open at the former Defense Security Command complex site, known as “Gimusa,” in central Seoul in 2013. “We are trying to find ways to secure as much space as possible underground that does no...

Sandy Harris has long enjoyed laid-back conversations about literature with the other members of her book club. Lately, though, technology is complicating the routine: “We’re definitely divided into the Kindle people and the not Kindle people,” Harris says, alluding to Amazon’s popular digital reading device. Welcome to the changing landscape of book clubs, those ubiquitous living-room forums wh...

ROME (AFP) ― It’s safe to say that the Emperor Nero ― the subject of a major new exhibition and archaeology trail that opened in the Roman Forum this week ― has always had something of an image problem. He has gone down in the history books as the man who had his domineering mother Agrippina killed, kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death and ― as legend would have it ― played his lyre on a hi...

Despite lackluster imperial porcelain sales, Hong Kong auction sets new record HONG KONG (AFP) ―Sotheby’s said Saturday it sold a record HK$3.49 billion ($447 million) worth of Asian and Chinese art, fine wines, watches and jewels at its eight-day Hong Kong auction. The auction house offered 3,600 lots in eight categories in what its Asia CEO Kevin Ching described as the “most successful Hong K...

While political elites enjoy chef-made Italian pizza in the only pizza restaurant in North Korea, citizens of Pyongyang are learning through a DVD how to make pizza with tofu instead of cheese. London-based designer Kim Hwang is the man behind the tofu pizza DVD. He decided to teach North Koreans how to make pizza when he found out about the hypocrisy of the pizzeria that opened in Pyongyang dur...

ROME (AP) ― Italian researchers said Tuesday they will dig up bones in a Florence convent to try to identify the remains of a Renaissance woman long believed to be the model for the “Mona Lisa.” If successful, the research might help ascertain the identity of the woman depicted in Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece ― a mystery that has puzzled scholars and art lovers for centuries and generated cou...