Twin highlights this month: BTS’s comeback and Yunchan Lim opening the Proms. Tickets for both are like gold dust.
Exhibitions
- The KCCUK’s summer exhibition, Korean Traditional Painting in Alter-age: Pure and Hybrid, is on all month. Look out for special events associated with the exhibition.
- Experience Young Huh’s maximalist minhwa interior design style at WOWHouse in Chelsea Harbour until 2 July
Live performance
– K-pop
- The KC KOLLECTIVE perform at Evolutionary Arts Hackney, 3 July
- The CNBLUE “3LOGY” tour comes to the Troxy, 5 July
- The long-awaited BTS Arirang comeback tour is at Tottenham Hotspur stadium, 6 – 7 July
- Kang Yuchan x From20 “Body Talk” tour comes to Islington’s Assembly Hall, 23 July
– Classical
- Yunchan Lim (piano) plays the Ravel concerto at the opening night of the BBC Proms, 17 July
- Sueye Park (violin) plays the Sibelius concerto at the Proms, 21 July
– Performance art
- Youngsook Choi and Jaelee Kim perform in Scales of Breathing – Score for Interspecies Collaboration in Bethnal Green, 15 July
Talks
- The UK’s ambassadors to the two Koreas give an update on current issues on the Peninsula in an event hosted by the British Korean Society at SOAS on 2 July
Books expected
Fiction in translation
- The Heart of the Nhaga (The Bird that Drinks Tears vol 1), by Lee Young-do tr Anton Hur pub Harper Voyager
- The Seoul Letter Shop, by Baek Seungyeon tr Clare Richards pub Fourth Estate
- Hello Baby, by Kim Eui-kyung tr Sora Kim-Russell pub Fourth Estate
- Plant Lady, by Minyoung Kang tr Shanna Tan pub Doubleday
Non-fiction / academic
- South Korea’s Soft Power: The Korean Wave, by Sooho Song and Uk Heo pub Cambridge University Press
- Privileged but Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness, by Jieun Baek pub Yale
- Black Market Intimacies: The Transpacific Sexual Economy of the Korean War, by Jeongmin Kim pub Stanford University Press
- Profits of Queerness: Media, Medicine, and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea, 1950–1980, by Todd A. Henry pub University of Hawai’i Press