Korean Culture Explained: Life, History, Music & Language | NowHitz · 20

In 1925, Kim published Azaleas, the only poetry collection released during his lifetime. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture highlights how his work developed folk-like rhythm and everyday Korean feeling into a modern poetic language. Rather than relying on elaborate vocabulary, he deepened emotion through speech-like repetition.

In “Sanyuhwa,” flowers bloom and fall through recurring phrases and small variations. Nature keeps moving while the human feeling around it becomes quieter. The poem creates more space by saying less.

That is why Sowol can still feel immediate more than a century later. His poems suggest that memorable language does not have to be complicated—and that the rhythm of Korean itself can carry emotion.

Sometimes the words that last the longest begin with the simplest rhythm.

Kim worked in Seoul, Paris and New York. Yet mountains, moons, plum blossoms and white porcelain—forms rooted in his memories of Korea—never disappeared. With distance, they became more abstract, eventually turning into rhythms of color and dots.

Distance does not always make a memory fade. Sometimes leaving a familiar view helps its lasting colors and forms become clearer. Across Kim Whanki’s work, recognizable subjects give way to abstraction, but their connection to a remembered world continues in another form.

Seeing Kim Whanki, then, is not simply about identifying ‘Korean motifs.’ His Korean-ness also lived in the process of looking again from afar and rebuilding familiar memories through his own structure and color.

Leaving can be another way of seeing what was familiar in a language of your own.

The title poem opens with separation from a beloved. Yet the collection does not remain inside loss. Its larger movement passes through sorrow and pain toward hope and the possibility of meeting again.

At the center is “nim,” a word that refuses a single referent. Literary sources note that it can be read as a beloved, the nation, truth or the Buddha. That openness allows love poetry, historical experience and Buddhist thought to occupy the same language.

A century later, that openness is what NowHitz returns to. Because the poem does not close itself around one answer, silence can read less like absence and more like a space in which meaning and relationship are rebuilt after loss.

When the lost beloved is not given only one name, silence keeps speaking.

Nearly a century ago, Na Hye-sok left Korea in 1927 and returned in 1929. She studied painting and visited museums during her time in Paris, but her writing was never only a list of landmarks. She watched faces at the dinner table, elderly readers in libraries and the small habits by which people judged one another.

Landmark names are only one part of remembering a city. Readers in a library, a conversation over a meal or the places people choose to rest can reveal something of its everyday life. The depth of a journey need not correspond to the number of places visited.

Technology can choose a faster route and surface places that fit our tastes. It cannot decide which moment will stay with us. Once the destination is chosen, perhaps the more useful question is what we will not walk past without looking.

A route can be recommended. Attention cannot be outsourced.

The film itself no longer survives, but the song does. The ongoing exhibition “Again, Arirang” brings together early recordings, SP records, lyric books and regional versions of Arirang—traces of a song that kept finding new voices instead of staying inside one era.

Arirang was never fixed to one definitive set of lyrics. Korea’s National Heritage Portal describes its open form as one of its defining features: the words can change, and people can keep making and singing new verses.

A century, then, feels less like a number sealed inside a display case and more like a refrain passed from one generation to the next. Perhaps a tradition stays alive not because it remains unchanged, but because every era can still find room inside it.

On October 1, a hundred-year-old song will not simply be commemorated. It will be sung again.

Her body did not simply wait for her in the years between. She dislocated her right shoulder at the Paris 2024 Olympics, then injured her Achilles tendon during rehabilitation. Behind a vault that lasts only seconds were months of recovery and repeated training that no scoreboard can show.

A results sheet records the score, not every day it took to return. Recovery is rarely a straight line: it includes checking what the body can manage and learning familiar movements again. The shorter the performance, the more there is outside the frame to consider.

Yeo already has a vault element carrying her name in the FIG Code of Points. But this medal brings something quieter to mind: the time it took to come back after injury. A vault is over in seconds. Reaching those seconds again took much longer.

A robot marathon sounds like a story about speed. The team spent much of its effort on a different question: how much longer the robot could keep moving. They made the legs lighter, cut losses in the motors and drive electronics, and trained the gait to reduce slipping and the impact of each footfall.

Translating a technical record into everyday questions changes what stands out. How long can a machine work on one charge? Could it keep operating somewhere difficult for people to reach? These questions put sustained reliability ahead of a striking moment of performance.

RAIBO2 leaves a similar question behind. Not simply how fast a robot can run, but how long it can keep moving—and how far it might go in a person’s place. The next chapter of technology may become visible in daily life before it appears on a record board.

Every holiday brings back familiar scenes: someone running for a platform with a gift box, someone buying coffee at a highway rest stop, someone answering a call that asks, “Where are you now?” Traffic slows. Arrival times slip. But the direction stays the same: toward someone who is waiting.

A long journey gives us time to think about what we will say on arrival. The same holiday can mean a reunion after months apart or a chance to ask how someone has really been. At the end of the trip, a person matters more than a destination.

Perhaps a holiday begins before the date on the calendar. It begins when you leave home to see someone.

The timing is echoed at the Seoul Museum of Craft Art, where Equinox: Autumn Equinox_Spring Equinox opens today. The exhibition follows designer Jang Eung-bok’s transformation of motifs found in Korean traditional culture into textiles, furniture and lived space, bringing different materials and techniques into a shared order.

A season rarely changes all at once. The hours of light shift, the air cools and familiar colors deepen. Often we notice the change only after it has already begun, through details too small to announce themselves.

Balance may not mean making everything equal. It may be the work of letting different things find their right place beside one another. Today, instead of asking what else needs to be added, it may be worth noticing which distances in our lives need a small adjustment.