Tiffany Young has done everything in K-pop. Building a musical from scratch still scares her

Over nearly two decades, Tiffany Young has performed as a member of Girls' Generation, its sub-unit TaeTiSeo, and as a soloist. She has mastered the three-minute pop stage and made her own music. In 2011, she made her foray into musical theater with "Fame," then established herself as a stage actor, appearing in "Chicago" for two seasons in 2021 and 2024. But stepping into an original production made her nervous, she said during an interview on Tuesday. That production is "Yumi's Cells," a new m

2026-07-25 16:00:00:00

Korea creates W150b fund to finance big-budget K-content

South Korea is launching a 150 billion won ($101 million) content fund to finance large-scale culture projects — a capacity its existing, smaller culture funds have lacked. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Financial Services Commission on Wednesday opened applications for managers to run the K-Culture Value-up Fund, which will invest across the K-culture industry and in AI-driven content and technology. The fund will draw 50 billion won in government money from the Culture M

2026-07-22 15:15:45:00

World-class festivals, orchestras, soloists fill Seoul's concert halls in H2

Seoul's classical calendar for the second half of the year begins in earnest with the 2026 Seoul Arts Center's International Music Festival, which runs Aug. 18 to 23 at the Seoul Arts Center under the theme "Pack Your Summer with Classics." Conductor Lee Seungwon and the SAC Festival Orchestra bookend the six-day event, opening with an all-Ravel program alongside pianist Kevin Chen — who drew wide attention at the 2025 Chopin Competition — and closing with an all-Shostakovich night featuring cel

2026-07-21 14:36:56:00

In year after World Heritage listing, Ulsan's ancient petroglyphs spent 37 days underwater

The ancient Petroglyphs along Ulsan's Bangucheon Stream, which marked one year as an officially listed UNESCO World Heritage Site on July 12, face unresolved conservation problems, a government report has found. The National Treasure Bangudae Petroglyphs in Daegok-ri, Ulju, were submerged for more than a month last summer, while the nearby Cheonjeon-ri Inscriptions and Petroglyphs, also a National Treasure, were found to be at risk of damage from weathering, according to the "2025 Monitoring Rep

2026-07-17 16:48:37:00

Music in PyeongChang cancels cellist Pagano's performances amid post-competition tour dispute

Music in PyeongChang announced on Thursday that Italian cellist Ettore Pagano, who had been scheduled to perform in the festival on July 30 and 31, may not be joining as planned, adding that affected ticket holders will be offered refunds. According to the Korean festival, it concluded a formal engagement contract with Pagano on April 13 for the two concerts. Pagano subsequently won First Prize in the cello category of the Queen Elisabeth Competition on May 30. The dispute arose days later. The

2026-07-17 14:16:49:00

17 UNESCO sites that tell Korea's story

Between 1995 and 2025, the Republic of Korea inscribed 17 sites to the UNESCO World Heritage List — 15 cultural and two natural. Together they span the arc of the Korean story: prehistoric rock art and Bronze Age dolmen fields; the confederacies and three kingdoms of antiquity; the Buddhist golden age of Silla; the palaces, tombs, fortresses, villages, academies and monasteries of the Joseon court; and, in Jeju’s lava tubes and the "getbol" tidal flats, landscapes of global natural importance. E

2026-07-17 10:03:03:00

National Museum of Korea on track for record-breaking year

The National Museum of Korea welcomed a surge in visitors in the first half of 2026, with numbers climbing 39.7 percent compared with the same period last year. It marks the first time that half-year attendance has surpassed 3 million since the museum opened in 1945. The six-month figure even exceeds the museum's total attendance for all of 2024, which stood at 3.78 million visitors. The rise was especially pronounced among international visitors, whose January-June numbers jumped 68.8 percent f

2026-07-15 14:05:32:00

Seoul musical stages bet on names audiences already love

Seoul's musical season is betting on the familiar. Three of the summer's most anticipated shows are built on titles audiences already love: a record-breaking webtoon, a Grammy winner's Broadway hit and one of the most beloved animated films ever made. The bet is draw first-timers with the well-known names, then win them over with something the original never had: a live stage. The most homegrown of the three is a new Korean musical drawn from "Yumi's Cells" by Lee Dong-gun, which has amassed 3.5

2026-07-14 06:30:00:00

Wagner's Ring comes to Korea, condensed

“Der Ring des Nibelungen” or “The Ring of the Nibelung” in English, is opera at its most colossal: a four-evening cycle spanning fifteen to sixteen hours, written entirely by Richard Wagner himself over twenty-six years. Drawing on Norse myth and the medieval Nibelungenlied, it traces a world's rise and ruin through a cursed ring of power, sung over an orchestra of nearly a hundred players and stitched together by some two hundred leitmotifs. Wagner even built his own theater at Bayreuth to hous

2026-07-12 16:08:51:00

In Shenzhen, the surprise isn't the tech — it's the green

Korea Herald correspondent SHENZHEN, China — The green and the hardware are not opposites in Shenzhen; they run on the same logic. The city that manufactures the world's gadgets is now manufacturing its image as a green one — and, increasingly, turning that green into a business. The first thing a visitor notices in Shenzhen may be the green license plates — reserved for electric vehicles — on car after car after car. To someone arriving from another Chinese city like Beijing, the number of elec

2026-07-11 16:00:00:00