Film & DVD:
- HKL / Premier Asia releases City of Violence on UK DVD on 24 September
- This year’s hot film, Secret Sunshine, gets a Korean DVD release on 20 September while Park Jin-pyo (of You are my Sunshine) sees his Voice of a Murderer issued on DVD a couple of days later.
Social:
- The Anglo-Korean Society Chuseok dinner is on 20 September at Young Bean in the Barbican.
- The Korean Language meet-up group gets together on 22 September.
Academic / discussions
- The Korea Discussion Group meets at Chatham House at lunchtime on 5 September. Ambassador Paul Beijer will talk on a Swedish diplomat’s take on North Korea since 2001
- Extracts from the BBC documentary “Access to Evil” will be shown, followed by a discussion, on 20 September on the eastern outskirts of the City.
- The Korean Studies graduate student convention (www.ksgsc.org), due to take place in Edinburgh on 20-22 September has been pushed back to 24-26 October.
Performances & Festivals:
- Dulsori will be playing at Mayor Ken’s Thames Festival, on 16 September at 4pm. There will in fact be a Korean Village situated somewhere between Ken’s building and Tower Bridge, with activities such as lantern-making. A big thank-you to Rowan Pease for letting me know about this (and she only knew about it because she took the Dulsori drumming classes at SOAS this year). The event would otherwise have been shrouded in the all-too-frequent Korean veil of secrecy until a couple of days beforehand.
- Chuseok at the British Museum: for those who miss the Thames Festival, some of the participants including Dulsori will be doing repeat performances a week later: the forecourt of the British Museum will resound to the sound of Samulnori on 22 September sometime between 12 and 6pm. Full details here.
- I hear that The Ballerina who loves B-Boyz, the hit show from the Edinburgh Fringe, in going on tour. It plays at the Arundel Festival Fringe, 10-15 September, and London’s Cochrane Theatre from 23 September, according to Koreaspot.com. It’s not on the Cochrane’s website at the moment and I’m attempting alternative verification procedures. Update 18 September: I just managed to get through to the Cochrane. The show is not coming to that theatre. They have no information as to whether an alternative venue is planned.
- Just into October (on the 4th), pianist Ji-Yeoun You performs Schubert, Ravel, and Liszt at the Lancaster Hall Hotel London W2. More details to follow.
Last chance:
- Artists, Art and Culture of North Korea officially closes on 3 September, but it will in fact linger on for an additional week or so. They received new stock of propaganda posters earlier this week. In addition, the North Korean theme will be extended back in time to include some pre-division work: for a week only, from 3 September, there will be some Choson dynasty porcelain on display (and for sale).
And while on the subject of Choson dynasty porcelain, the British Museum’s Korean Moon Jar will be on prominent display in Room 3, the entrance to the museum, from 20 September.
Other exhibitions:
- Eo-Ulim / In Harmony, an exhibition of young Korean artists working in London will be showing in North Finchley, from 13 to 19 September.
- More DPRK art from Korea Paekho Trading Corporation on display at the DPRK embassy, 21/22 September.
- Two Korean photographers Seung Woo Back and Hyung-Geun Park participate in Abandoned Protocol at Ritter / Zamet near the Globe Theatre on the South Bank, 7-29 September.
Further afield
- Francesca Cho participates in the group exhibition Rags in the Wind at the University of Graz Botanical Gardens from 15 September.
And further ahead…
- Make sure you’re in London in early November for the Korean Film Festival at the Barbican, 2-8 November. More details to come soon. The festival will tour to Warwick and Oxford thereafter.
Let me know what I’ve missed.