Happy New Year – and congratulations to Jim Hoare, awarded an OBE in the New Years Honours list for “services to UK interests in the Korean Peninsula”.
As is often the case January is a fairly slow month for events:
Exhibitions
- Closing imminently are:
- Haegue Yang’s Leap Year, at the Hayward Gallery (till 5 Jan)
- Hello, Delight! – Korean Culture Reimagined by AI, in Borough Market (till 7 Jan)
- Still open:
- K-Women: Celebrating Korean Female Artists, in Kingston Museum
- Bestselling and Beloved: Korean Literary Treasures, at the KCC
- Mire Lee’s Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern
- Knitted together: the Korean lives and legacies of Richard and Joan Rutt in Durham’s Oriental Museum
- Coming soon at Han Collection
- A ceramics exhibition by Kim Dong-baik (10 – 30 Jan)
Talks and seminars
- Grace Koh (SOAS) talks at the KCC on 16 January on Curating Korean Literature in Cross-Cultural Contexts
- SOAS hosts a half-day workshop on 25 January: Collecting Korea — Explorations of Korean Collections in the UK and their continued relevance
Live music
- P1Harmony play the Troxy on 13 Jan
- ATEEZ perform in London’s o2 (27-28 Jan) and Manchester’s AO Arena (30 Jan)
- Lee YoungJi performs at the Clapham Grand on 30 Jan
- In Brighton, Juhyeon Yu and Stephen Kang perform Korean folk fusion music at the Brunswick, 25 Jan
- If you check the Wigmore Hall website on 21 Jan you might, if priority members have not bought them all up, find tickets for Yunchan Lim’s Goldberg Variations recitals on 7/8 April.
Books expected
- You might be able to get a large-format paperback of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part (tr Emily Yae Won) towards the end of January, but the main publication date is 6 Feb
- Pyun Hye-young’s To the Kennels, and other stories (tr Sora Kim-Russelland Heinz Insu Fenkl) is out on 16 Jan
- Critically Capitalist: The Spirit of Asset Capitalism in South Korea by Bohyeong Kim is published by University of Michigan Press on 15 Jan