Kang Heon (강헌)

Kang Heon died on the afternoon of 20 October 2026, aged 64. Where he died has not been reported, and the specific cause was not made public. He was serving as chairman of the Korea Arts and Culture Education Service at the time. Yonhap News Agency, The Hankyoreh, Seoul Economic Daily, Maeil Business, Korea Economic Daily and Asia Economy all reported his death that evening.

Im Jin-mo, his fellow critic, recalled that Kang had caused a sensation with his elegant writing from the early 1990s and that the two had worked as a duo for years. A mortuary was set up in Room 2 of the Seoul St. Mary's Hospital funeral hall in Seoul, opening at 9am on 21 October 2026. The date of the funeral procession and the place of burial had not been announced at the time of writing.

Kang Heon was born in Busan, South Korea, in 1962. His exact date of birth has not been made public. He went to Busan Sadae Buseok High School, the high school attached to the teachers' college in Busan, and then moved to Seoul for university. He has said he went into literature because he wanted to be a novelist.

Looking back on his student years, he said university life "wasn't much fun." Most people around him in the Korean literature department were student activists, but he was not one of them. He remembered arguing with committed classmates and telling them that if they were still activists ten years later he would respect them, but that for now it looked to him as if they were playing at being revolutionaries.

Kang graduated from the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Seoul National University. He then studied musicology and music theory at the university's Graduate School of Music. His master's thesis was a study of music criticism during the Japanese colonial period and the US military government period, and it shaped his lifelong habit of reading music through history. Korean Wikipedia also lists a master's degree from the graduate Korean literature program at Seoul National University.

Film and the fight against censorship. After graduate school Kang joined Jangsangotmae, the independent film collective, and became its representative. The group made Oh! Dreamland (1989), The Night Before the Strike (1990) and Opening the Closed School Gate. Because the films bypassed state pre-screening, Kang was prosecuted for breaching the pre-review clause of the Film Act. He won at the Constitutional Court after a constitutional referral, and went on to campaign for the abolition of the Public Performance Ethics Committee, which vetted films and records. His activism also led him into the Korean People's Artists Federation (Minyechong) and onto the executive committee of a national democratic alliance. With Kim In-su and Seo Woo-sik he co-founded the commercial film company Free Cinema, planned and wrote Jungle Story, and wrote the screenplay for When Adam Opens His Eyes. Jungle Story flopped at the box office, and after that he turned mainly to music.

Music criticism. A younger colleague asked him to write about the singer Kim Hyun-sik, and his 1991 essay, subtitled From Acoustic Guitar to the Blue Note, launched about 25 years of writing on Korean popular music. Through the 1990s he contributed to most of the national dailies, weeklies and monthlies, and was paired with Im Jin-mo in the saying "Kang Heon for Korean pop, Im Jin-mo for international pop." He headed the Korea Popular Music Research Institute and taught popular music history for about two decades at Hongik University, Sungkonghoe University, Dankook University (Graduate School of Popular Culture) and Sungkyunkwan University (interdisciplinary program in art studies).

Magazines, stage and records. With longtime colleagues he made the cultural quarterlies Yegam, Sangsang and Review. He was general director of the concert Freedom celebrating the end of censorship, of the Folk 30th Anniversary Festival, of tribute albums and concerts for Deulgukhwa and for The Dawn of Labor, and of Requiem for Roh Moo-hyun. He wrote the books for the musicals Cheonbyeon Salon and Cheonbyeon Cabaret, wrote and directed the one-person musical The Princess Cannot Sleep, and with Noraereul Chatneun Saramdeul planned stage works including The Unending Song. He also wrote the SBS television drama The Third Theater.

Myeongri. After his near-fatal illness he studied myeongri for more than a decade. He taught the Kang Heon's Leftist Myeongri lecture series at Bunker1 in Daehangno for about three years, ran a long-running podcast and online courses through the Chulgongso (K-Fortune) platform, and appeared on programmes such as EBS and CJ ENM's Eojjeoda Eoreun (Accidental Adult) to talk about it.

Cultural administration. Gyeonggi Province appointed him the seventh president and CEO of the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation on 28 December 2018. He was reappointed in December 2020 for a term to 27 December 2022, and served as the fifth chairman of the Korea Association of Regional Cultural Foundations. He resigned in 2022. On 22 December 2025 he became non-standing chairman of the Korea Arts and Culture Education Service, with a term to December 2028.

Kang's art name (ho) was Uibak, a self-mocking shortening of a Korean phrase meaning "weak-willed." According to Korean Wikipedia he was divorced twice. The names of his former spouses and any children have not been made public.

In March 2003 a 70 centimetre tear in his aorta nearly killed him. Doctors put his chance of dying at 98 percent. Reports say he spent 23 days in a coma, and when he woke he was told he might have two years to live. He stopped drinking the soju he had enjoyed all his life. He later ran a wine bar, where reading guests' fortunes for fun grew into his second career in myeongri.

One of his closest friendships was with the rock musician Shin Hae-chul. They met near Hongik University in the early summer of 1994 after an interview, and they stayed close for twenty years until Shin's death in 2014. Kang called him "a younger brother closer than my own younger brother."

Kang believed popular music could not be understood apart from the politics, society and generational feelings that produced it. He treated rock, folk, trot, jazz and classical music as serious subjects for scholarship and public debate. He was frank about his own blind spots. In a 2015 interview he said he had idealised the music of the 1980s and undervalued that of the 1990s. He was critical of the winner-takes-all structure of the modern Korean music industry and worried that newcomers who held on to their musical convictions found it hard to survive.

He argued that myeongri was not fortune-telling or a trick for predicting the future. To him it was a branch of East Asian learning, which had once been a subject in the Joseon state examinations, and a navigation tool for understanding oneself. He wanted to move it "from the back room to the public square," and his slogan was that he dreamed of turning everyone into a myeongri scholar. As a cultural administrator he said arts policy should start from the understanding that art is a public good.

Obituaries described Kang as one of the critics who widened Korean popular music criticism in the 1990s. He helped move writing about Korean pop out of the entertainment pages and into the language of history and social criticism. His Kim Hyun-sik essay, his writing on Seo Taiji, Shin Hae-chul and the indie scene, and his books Moments of Subversion and Reversal and A History of Korean Popular Culture by Kang Heon are still points of reference for later critics. As head of Jangsangotmae he was part of the legal and political fight that ended the pre-screening censorship of films and records in South Korea. His myeongri books and lectures brought a traditional discipline to a new, younger and more questioning readership.

Selected books (Korean titles translated): - Moments of Subversion and Reversal (전복과 반전의 순간), 2015, with a second volume later - Myeongri: Reading Destiny (명리: 운명을 읽다), Dolbegae, 14 December 2015 - A History of Korean Popular Culture by Kang Heon (강헌의 한국대중문화사), vols. 1 and 2, Ibom, November 2016 - Myeongri: Tuning Destiny, Advanced Edition (명리: 운명을 조율하다), Dolbegae, 30 December 2016 - Shin Hae-chul: In Memory of 申海澈 1968-2014, Dolbegae, 30 March 2018 - Noraereul Chatneun Saramdeul: Here and Now (노래를 찾는 사람들 지금 여기에서), with Kang Min-seok

Film and television: production with Jangsangotmae on Oh! Dreamland (1989), The Night Before the Strike (1990) and Opening the Closed School Gate; screenplays for When Adam Opens His Eyes and Jungle Story; scripts for the SBS drama The Third Theater.

Stage and records: Freedom (concert marking the end of censorship), the Folk 30th Anniversary Festival, Deulgukhwa and The Dawn of Labor tribute albums and concerts, Requiem for Roh Moo-hyun, the musicals Cheonbyeon Salon and Cheonbyeon Cabaret, and the one-person musical The Princess Cannot Sleep.

Lectures and broadcasts: Kang Heon's Leftist Myeongri (Bunker1), Kang Heon's Radio Leftist Myeongri podcast, the Moments of Subversion and Reversal video lecture series, EBS Chodaeseok, and CJ ENM's Eojjeoda Eoreun.

In August 2022 Kang handed in his resignation as president of the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, about four months before his term was due to end. The foundation's labour union said it had received several reports in the first half of 2022 that he had verbally abused and harassed staff, and argued that he should not avoid responsibility by resigning. Kang said he had no separate position to state on the harassment claims, and that he was resigning for health reasons that had nothing to do with them. Governor Kim Dong-yeon accepted the resignation and Kang formally left on 6 September 2022. The foundation said internal rules prevented it from disclosing any disciplinary outcome.