View Of The Arts

PJ, Chanyeon and Jiseok have spent the past two years doing something no one before them had done in K-pop. As Big Ocean, the industry’s first hard-of-hearing idol group, they have had to find their own ways of singing, dancing, staying in time and performing while experiencing sound differently, but their hearing was never supposed to be the only interesting thing about them.

The 13th edition of the K-Music Festival opened in London on 28 September 2026 with a night that showed just how difficult contemporary Korean music can be to put into one box. Held at EartH Theatre in East London and curated by the Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK), the opening night brought together artists with very different sounds and approaches, but that was exactly what made the evening work.

For ALAMAT, taking their music outside the Philippines has never meant changing who they are to make themselves easier for an international audience to understand, because the Filipino languages, sounds, stories and traditions in their work are not something they add for effect; they are simply part of who the group is.

When A.C.E debuted with CACTUS in 2017, WOW began a journey that would see him spend the next several years performing, making music and growing alongside the other four members. Since then, the group have moved through different sounds and concepts, never really staying in one place for too long, while WOW has built much of his career as part of the group. Now, with his first solo single LOW, he can show what happens when the music is entirely his own.

Twenty years is a long time in pop music and it is surely an eternity in K-pop. When BIGBANG debuted in 2006, the industry they entered looked very different from the one that now fills stadiums thousands of miles away from Seoul. Social media had not yet become the engine through which Korean music travels internationally, streaming had not rewritten listening habits and the idea of a K-pop act taking over one of London’s largest stadiums would have sounded extraordinarily ambitious.

Nearly twenty years into coldrain’s career, Masato is thinking about imperfection. Not how to eliminate it, hide it or polish it until nobody can see where the rough edges used to be, but whether those rough edges might be among the most important things we have left.

Nearly twenty years into their career, coldrain have watched the music industry transform around them. Streaming changed how we listen, social media gave artists new ways to reach audiences, and now AI can write songs, imitate voices and create music in seconds. For five musicians whose work depends so heavily on real people playing, touring and performing together, it is hardly surprising that they have something to say about where all of this is taking us.

Women have always been part of the machinery that keeps the entertainment industry moving, but increasingly they are the ones deciding how that machinery should work. Behind concerts, festivals, tours and international productions are women working as promoters, producers, strategists, publicists and company founders, often managing the less visible side of the business: negotiations, budgets, logistics, artist relationships and the difficult task of understanding what audiences actually want.

Films with very little dialogue can be incredibly powerful because, when words disappear, a filmmaker must trust the images, the actors, sound and silence to tell us what the characters cannot or will not say, and when that works, a room can reveal more than pages of conversation.

Marlene Emilie Lyngstad’s CUTE is hard to watch. Premiering in the New Directors section at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, it takes on one of the most disturbing subjects imaginable without trying to soften it for the audience. What surprised me most, however, is how much of the story is really about loneliness, shame and the desperate need to be close to another person, even when that need takes the characters somewhere very dark.