Korean Culture Explained: Life, History, Music & Language | NowHitz · 21

We recognise people through what we share: a place we visited, a familiar voice, an old joke. Yet when someone remembers differently, the life they have lived does not become any less real.

A person cannot be reduced to the response they can give at this moment. Sharing a familiar routine without rushing an answer shifts the question from how much someone remembers to how we can remain present with them.

Ask how someone is. Leave room for an answer. Sit together without rushing. And remember to ask the people caring for them how they are, too. Kindness need not be a grand promise. It can begin with a small act that says: you do not have to be here alone.

Seoul Street Arts Festival 2026 enters its final day. From 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., street theatre, dance, circus and participatory works unfold along routes people usually walk without thinking twice. Across the two-day festival, 20 works are presented in 62 performances.

A route does not have to be newly built to feel different. An unfamiliar sound or a longer pause can add a new memory to a place we usually pass without noticing. The setting may stay the same while our experience changes.

The Han River can feel that way today. A performance appears in the middle of an ordinary walk, we stop for a moment, and a Seoul we thought we knew looks slightly different. A new scene does not always have to be far away.

Young people are often described in one word: potential. It sounds generous, but it can quickly become pressure to prove something. What have you achieved already? Where are you heading? The questions can arrive before the person has had time to become.

Potential is difficult to see when everyone is measured against the same deadline. Someone still choosing a direction may need another chance to try, and time for that effort to take shape, more than an immediate verdict.

So today, being unfinished does not have to mean being behind. Not knowing yet can simply mean the story is still open.

The 2026 Seoripul Music Festival opens today, with classical music, jazz and K-pop spilling into the street. At yesterday’s pre-festival event, an orchestra and a fashion show shared the outdoor plaza at Seoul Arts Center.

Culture often becomes more accessible through small changes rather than grand declarations: music within earshot on the way home, or a performance we can stop and watch. What matters is making room for art inside an ordinary day.

A city where you can hear music without a ticket, stop for a moment, and share an unfamiliar scene with strangers. Perhaps that is where culture begins to feel close.

Around 200 performances and festivals across the city are coming together under one name: Seoul Autumn Festa.

The stage is not confined to a theater. The Han River, the parks, even the streets we walk every day become part of it.

Perhaps discovering something new does not always mean travelling far. Sometimes it simply means seeing a familiar place in a slightly different light.

The Seoul we walk through today is already becoming the Seoul that comes next.

Seoul Autumn Festa 2026 begins on September 18. Art steps out of its venues and into the riverside, the streets and the paths we walk every day. The opening takes place this evening at Ttukseom Hangang Park, with performances and festivals continuing across the city until November 29.

Perhaps a good city is not the one with the most sights to see, but the one that lets us discover something on an ordinary walk.

Slow down on a familiar street, and a different scene comes into view.

A place in Korean culture

In Korea, Nam June Paik is one of the figures who symbolize Korean modern art entering a global art conversation. Long before screens and networks became everyday life, he treated television and video as artistic materials and helped open the field now known as media art. He is remembered not simply as a Korean artist who succeeded abroad, but as a creator who turned new technology into a new cultural language.

What else to know

His work still resonates because radical ideas were often paired with humor and play. Decades before daily life became screen-based, Paik was already asking how images, networks and technology might change the way people communicate. His instinct to turn unfamiliar technology into something expressive is one reason his work continues to feel current in Korea.

The story behind it

Paik’s way of seeing familiar media afresh resonates with a city turning everyday streets into a stage. Art can be an environment we help shape, not simply something we look at from a distance.

A place in Korean culture

In Korea, Na Tae-joo is known for finding poetry in small, ordinary moments rather than in grand language. “Wildflower” in particular has been read across generations, offering a simple invitation to look at people and things with patience and care. His long career as an elementary-school teacher also fits naturally with the attentive, everyday gaze that runs through his writing.

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Readers return to his poems because they ask very little before they begin to mean something. The language is plain, but the feeling lingers: look more closely, stay a little longer, and the ordinary can become precious. That makes his lines easy to remember when someone needs comfort—or when words are needed for someone else.

The story behind it

Walking slowly lets us notice new scenes on familiar streets. The poet’s patient attention to a small wildflower offers a way of looking at Seoul afresh today.

A place in Korean culture

Arirang remains a symbolic work in Korean film history; the Korean Film Archive has made its centenary the focus of scholarly programs on the past and future of Korean cinema. The film also helped bring its theme song, Arirang, to a much wider public.

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Na Un-gyu matters again today because the loss of the film print did not erase the work’s presence. Surviving stills and records, together with a song that people continue to sing, show how a film can keep meeting new audiences a century later.

The story behind it

2026 marks 100 years since Arirang was first shown. Ahead of the exact centenary on October 1, the Seoul Museum of Korean Folk Music is taking registrations today for a program that revisits both the film and the folk song through listening and communal singing.

A place in Korean culture

Rather than simply depicting familiar Korean motifs, Kim rebuilt them through color, structure and rhythm. His work became one of the key ways Korean abstraction entered a broader international conversation.

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From afar, his paintings can feel like fields of color and rhythm; up close, they reveal countless marks and repeated gestures. That shift between distance and intimacy is one reason audiences continue to return to his work.

The story behind it

In 2026, exhibitions at the Whanki Museum and works in the MMCA collection offer a chance to revisit the arc from his early abstractions to the all-over dot paintings of his New York years. Dear Now returns to the Korean memories that became more distilled with distance.

A place in Korean culture

Kim Sowol is a central figure in modern Korean lyric poetry. He transformed folk-like rhythm and everyday Korean speech into modern verse, making poems such as “Azaleas,” “Sanyuhwa” and “Invocation of the Spirit” enduring reference points in Korean literary culture.

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His poems often stay with readers because sound comes before explanation. Short phrases, repeated endings and song-like pacing make the feeling return even when only a few lines are remembered.

The story behind it

More than a century after Azaleas appeared in 1925, many of Kim Sowol’s poems are remembered almost as spoken rhythm before they are analyzed as literature. Dear Now returns to the repetitions of “Sanyuhwa” to ask why some Korean words remain in the mouth for generations.

A place in Korean culture

Yun is widely read in Korean modern poetry for restrained, reflective writing shaped by images such as stars, roads and the sky. His poems continue to connect private self-examination with the historical reality of his time.

What else to know

His language is accessible without being slight. The quiet act of looking inward, and of seeing familiar scenery differently, gives his poems a lasting immediacy for contemporary readers.

The story behind it

“A New Road” and “The Night I Count the Stars” both invite a second look at familiar roads and changing skies. NowHitz connects Yun’s gaze to the city and the season today, looking for change already beginning inside scenes we thought we knew.