Festivals
- August is the month of the Edinburgh Festival, and there’s plenty of high-quality Korean performances in both the main festival and the fringe.
- August is also the month of the annual open air Korean Festival at Kingston’s Fairfield Recreation Ground – 13th August, 11am-late afternoon.
Visual Arts and exhibitions
Exhibitions that continue throughout August are
- The V&A’s contemporary Korean ceramics exhibition
- Haegue Yang’s solo show in Oxford
- A Room at the KCC
- Hada Contemporary’s Summer Exhibition at Albemarle Gallery
- And further afield there’s the Lee Ufan retrospective at the New York Guggenheim, amazing buncheong ceramics at the Met and Lee Yong-baek in the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Other exhibitions still on are
- The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (till 15 August) where you can see Daehun Kwon’s award-winning sculpture and a work by Hayoung Kim
- The Great Outdoors at James Freeman Gallery (till 5 August) which includes several works by Luca Sangjun Kim
- Dream Whispers at Mokspace, until 10 August
And opening this month at the Bodleian Library in Oxford is Korean Treasures: Rare Books, Manuscripts and Artefacts in the Bodleian Libraries: from 26 August.
Film
- You will still be able to catch Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry in a movie theatre somewhere near you.
- The KCC’s films this month mark the country’s troubled relationship with Japan in the first half of the 20th Century: Hurrah for Freedom (1946) on 11 August and The Murmuring on 25 August
Music
- Sooeun Kwak and the La-on G Gayageum Ensemble perform at the KCC on 3 August
Meet-ups and gatherings
- The Korean Artists Association UK has an open meeting at the KCC 6 August, 2-4:40pm. There will be presentations by two members 김현준 (Hyun Jun Kim – Architect) and 김영신 (Young-Shin Kim – Bookbinder). All are welcome, though it would be nice if you could let them know in advance at [email protected]
- I’m afraid I can’t keep up with the energetic programmes of the KPop Team and the Korean language meetup group. At the time of writing the former has a G Dragon & TOP Giveaway Special on 20 August at Lightbox while the latter has a speed-dating style conversation get-together on 3 August.