About Second Look Korea

A magazine built to notice things before anyone else does, written in English, for readers outside Korea who haven't met any of this yet.

Three strands run through every issue. Faces: profiles of people early enough in their careers (actors, athletes, musicians, other Korean talent) that almost nothing has been written about them in any language. Locations: real places tied to those stories, most of which never made it onto a map: a filming location, a hometown gym, a studio. Stage & Screen: a short, a feature, a play, a musical (budget or medium no object) that's screened or run once or twice and been reviewed almost nowhere.

They aren't three separate sections. A profile links to the work behind it, the work links to the place it happened, the place links back to the person. That web is the whole point: it's what a list of credits can't give you.

Why English

There is already good Korean-language writing about all of this. There is very little in English, and what exists tends to arrive years late, after someone has already become famous enough to be worth translating. We'd rather write it down first. Korean names are given in Revised Romanization with hangul alongside, and we explain the context a reader outside Korea would otherwise have to go and look up.

How we handle locations

We publish the neighbourhood, the bus line and the kind of walking it takes to find a place, not the street address. A rooftop that has stayed unremarkable for eleven years shouldn't become a stop on anyone's itinerary because of four seconds of screen time. Where a production or a resident has asked us to withhold something, we withhold it, and we say so on the page.

The state of things

Second Look Korea is a working title and is not yet finalized. The trademark position hasn't been settled. Everything currently on this site is sample copy: invented placeholder writing used to build and test the design. No piece here has been reported, fact-checked or legally cleared, and every page carrying it says so.

Subscribe and we'll tell you when there's something real to read, or get in touch if you're an actor, an athlete, a musician, a director or a location owner and would like to be written about.