&Team caps biggest Asia tour with milestone Kspo Dome show

Four years after their debut, &Team arrived at Seoul’s Kspo Dome with a performance that showed just how far the nine-member group has come. The nine-member group wrapped up “Blaze the Way,” its largest Asia tour to date, with two encore concerts Saturday and Sunday at the venue in southern Seoul, bringing a five-month journey across 14 cities and 23 shows to a close. The tour drew some 230,000 concertgoers in total and included &Team’s first solo dome concert at Belluna Dome in Saitama, Japan,

NCT 127 proves its strength as five while awaiting full-group return

NCT 127 spent much of its 10th anniversary concert demonstrating just how strong the group’s identity is. At “The Redline,” held Friday through Sunday at KSPO Dome in southern Seoul, the group did not attempt to disguise the absence of Doyoung and Jungwoo, who are serving their mandatory military service. Instead, it reshaped familiar songs, redistributed parts and leaned on a decade of chemistry to prove that the group’s performance remains no less engaging despite its current five-member confi

‘The Cherry Orchard’ gets New York laughing

Korea Herald correspondent NEW YORK — “I went to New York. It was an amazing city. A perfect place to live as an alcoholic.” A burst of laughter rippled through the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The line comes from Song Do-young, the heroine of Simon Stone’s Korean-language adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” played by Jeon Do-yeon. Do-young is recalling the 10 years she spent in New York after the death of her son — a detail that, in this version, replaces Chekhov’s Paris. It was an

What survives when ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ crosses cultures and language?

There are some inevitable hurdles to bringing the Broadway musical "Hell's Kitchen" to the Seoul stage as a Korean-language production. Rooted in Alicia Keys’ music and her semi-autobiographical story of growing up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, the musical arrived in Seoul just two years after its Broadway opening as its first non-English-language licensed production. The Korean production, which opened July 24 at the GS Arts Center, offers an early test of what happens when a story so rooted in

'The Assassin(s)' turns a first lady's murder into Korea's best newsroom thriller yet

Don't let the title fool you: "The Assassin(s)" is no hitman picture. Director Hur Jin-ho's latest is the first Korean film set in the country's authoritarian past that puts the reporters who risked their lives going after the truth front and center. What you get is a well-made journalism procedural based on the 1974 shooting that killed then-first lady Yuk Young-soo, one that has every chance of joining the ranks of recent politically forthright period hits like "1987" and "12.12: The Day." Tha

‘We’ll still perform when we’re 88’: Big Bang vows to keep going

GOYANG, Gyeonggi Province — Big Bang kicked off its 20th anniversary world tour over the weekend with its first full-group concert in nearly nine years, signaling that the group's next chapter has only just begun. “XX: Cosmos,” held from Friday to Sunday at Goyang Stadium, drew more than 100,000 fans over three days. Toward the end of Sunday’s show, the members hinted that more music would be on the way after “Biiig,” the digital single released on the group's anniversary, Aug. 19. Daesung raise

Georg Baselitz's unplanned farewell

Visitors expecting Georg Baselitz's famous upside-down figures at his first Korean museum retrospective are greeted instead by a picture of cattle, hung front and center right upon entering the galleries. In it, two cows stand in a green pasture. A clean horizontal cut runs through the canvas, and the halves sit out of register, so that muzzles and shoulders no longer align. The picture hangs right side up, yet it manages to unsettle all the same. "Two Cows Divided I" (1966), the oldest work in

Le Sserafim returns as quintet with ‘Pureflow’ tour opener

INCHEON — Le Sserafim opened its second world tour over the weekend with a concert that felt defined less by spectacle than by relief, gratitude and the visible joy of standing together as five once again. Held Saturday and Sunday at Inspire Arena in Incheon, “Pureflow” marked the group’s first world tour since “Easy Crazy Hot,” which began at the same venue in April 2025. The shows also carried significance as it was leader Chaewon’s first performance after suspending her activities in May due

'Hope' is the weirdest blockbuster money can buy

"Hope" is a shock-and-awe monster rampage stretched to a monstrous 160-minute runtime, and that might be all you could ask for. The set pieces are stunning: vehicles and debris flung around like toys, torrents of gunfire raking creatures that simply will not die, storefronts ripped open and streets buried in rubble, all captured in tracking shots so fluid it's hard to say how anyone pulled them off. The monsters themselves are nothing special to look at — imagine "Attack on Titan" by way of "Res

Babymonster launches 2nd world tour with rock festival intensity

Babymonster turned the stage of Jamsil Indoor Stadium into a full-fledged dance party over the weekend, opening its second world tour with the kind of powerful live vocals and high-intensity performance the group has become known for. The group kicked off its world tour, "Choom," with three shows in Songpa-gu, southern Seoul, from June 26-28. Spanning 18 cities and 29 shows so far, the tour will reach five continents — including first-ever stops in Oceania, Europe and South America — with more d

Biggest-ever Seoul concerts just the beginning for TWS

Boy group TWS took another major step in its rise as one of K-pop’s leading fifth-generation boy groups, holding its first solo concert at Kspo Dome just over two years after its debut. The six-member group held its “24/7:For:You” concert on Saturday and Sunday at Kspo Dome in Songpa-gu, southern Seoul, drawing a combined audience of 18,000 across two sold-out shows. The concerts marked TWS’ largest solo performances to date and the opening stop of the group’s first Asia tour. For many K-pop act

In Lim Yunchan's Mozart, the left hand carries the feeling

Pianist Lim Yunchan closed a five-concert, all-Mozart tour of Japan and Korea at Lotte Concert Hall on Monday, alongside Camerata Salzburg under Masato Suzuki. The collaboration was Lim's own idea. The 22-year-old, who in 2022 became the youngest winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, proposed the series to Camerata Salzburg, the ensemble long resident at the Salzburg Festival and Mozart Week, on a single condition: that the music be all Mozart. The program paired two concert

BTS marks 13th anniversary with emotional Busan homecoming

BUSAN — BTS wrapped up a two-day concert in Busan on Saturday that felt less like another stop on its ongoing “Arirang” world tour and more like a homecoming years in the making. The second and final night, held at Busan Asiad Main Stadium on the group’s 13th debut anniversary, June 13, drew approximately 110,000 fans. The sold-out two-day run attracted a combined audience of about 220,000. The concerts marked BTS’ first return to Busan since 2022’s “Yet To Come in Busan,” a performance remember

Arirang' without its melody? 'Ballet Arirang' finds answer in spirit

When BTS chose "Arirang" as an album title and wove the familiar refrain — "Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo" — into its music, the move sparked widespread discussion about meaning, identity and cultural heritage. "Ballet Arirang," presented at the Seoul Arts Center's CJ Towol Theater over the weekend, approached the iconic folk song from a different angle. Although the title invoked Korea's most familiar melody, not a single note of "Arirang" was heard during the performance. Instead, the production s

Korea's beloved sci-fi story is hitting the screen. Is the animation up to it?

"Pilgrims" is built on the two things Korean cinema just can't seem to pull off. On paper, that's a recipe for disaster; on screen, it gets about halfway to proving otherwise. Start with the sci-fi problem. Koreans have proven time and again they can do period epics, gangster pictures, zombie thrillers — you name it — but science and speculative fiction remains the white whale. Homegrown titles of the past few years, from the lavishly mounted "Space Sweepers" to the 28-billion-won belly-flop "Th