BTS sweeps awards, Hyun Bin’s K-Drama feud flares up and Han So-Hee talks heartbreak: This week in K-Entertainment
BTS dominates awards as K-drama rivalries and heartbreak confessions heat up
This week in K-entertainment, the awards season machine kept churning, Jennie went full art-house, and Korean television served up two dramas built entirely on tension between two estranged friends.
BTS adds to the trophy case
The K-World Dream Awards, the show that started back in 2017 as the Soribada Best K-Music Awards, celebrated its tenth anniversary on August 27 at KINTEX, with Jun Hyun Moo and Jang Do Yeon running the show.
ATEEZ walked away as the night’s biggest winner, pulling in four trophies including Best Artist and the fan-voted Popularity Award. LE SSERAFIM wasn’t far behind with three wins of its own, also including a Best Artist nod, while RIIZE collected three trophies across categories. BTS claimed the night’s biggest prize: Artist of the Year, on top of two additional wins.
The ceremony’s sprawling list of categories also spread the love around emerging acts, CORTIS, AND2BLE, and ALPHA DRIVE ONE split the Super Rookie Award, while veterans like AKMU, IVE, aespa, and BLACKPINK picked up recognition in the Digital and Album categories.
Song Kang’s new K-Drama
tvN’s upcoming arts-school drama Four Hands, Two Sonatas released new stills previewing just how rough things get for its lead. The series follows two piano students navigating friendship, rivalry, as they grow from teenagers into professional musicians.
Song Kang plays Kang Pio, a piano prodigy from an artistic family who’s already being talked about as his school’s next big talent. This early recognition doesn’t win him many friends, and the new stills show him cornered at lunch by classmates looking to knock him down a peg. Enter childhood friend Hong Jae In, played by Jang Gyuri, who steps in without hesitation to shut the confrontation down.
Hyun Bin and Jung Woo Sung circle each other again
Disney+’s Made in Korea 2 released new stills that lay out just how tangled its central rivalry has become. The first season followed power-hungry Baek Ki Tae (Hyun Bin) against prosecutor Jang Geon Young (Jung Woo Sung), a battle set against the upheaval of the 1970s. Season two picks up nine years later: Baek Ki Tae is now at the height of his power, Jang Geon Young has spent the intervening years plotting a comeback, and Baek Ki Tae’s younger brother Baek Ki Hyun (Woo Do Hwan) is carving his own, very different path toward influence.
The new images capture the frost between the two old adversaries, along with the uneasy standoff between the two brothers. Hyun Bin described his character’s relationship with his sibling as one where obedience curdles into obstruction, while Woo Do Hwan framed his character’s choices as ones he could imagine making himself, given the same pressures. Another still hints at an unlikely alliance forming between Jang Geon Young and Baek Ki Hyun — two men sizing each other up, neither fully trusting the other.
Han So Hee talks about love
Han So Hee used her August 28 appearance on Lee Young Ji’s YouTube talk show No Prepare to open up about dating, self-worth, and how she handles heartbreak.
She described a shift in what she looks for in a partner, saying she now gravitates toward people with steady, grounded personalities while putting in the work to build that same stability within herself, on the theory that inner steadiness tends to attract the same in others. She was equally direct about emotional independence, making the case that a relationship starts to fall apart the moment one partner becomes more than half of the other’s entire world.
On the subject of conflict and breakups specifically, Han So Hee said she leans on straightforward communication to work through hurt feelings rather than letting emotions take over, and tries to reframe breakups as something other than abandonment.
Her philosophy: Fill emotional gaps through self-love and personal happiness rather than clinging to a relationship that isn’t working. It’s a grounded take, and one that lands with extra weight given her widely covered 2024 breakup with actor Ryu Jun Yeol.
Jennie’s fairytale
Over on the visual side of things, BLACKPINK’s Jennie dropped the music video for “FALLEN ANGEL” on August 28, and it’s a swing toward pure narrative artistry. The video wraps her single’s title track in a fictionalized, almost storybook telling of a fallen angel.
The rollout came bundled with the release of both digital and physical versions of the FALLEN ANGEL single album. Streaming fans get three tracks — the title song plus HEAVEN and Less Than a Lover, while anyone picking up the physical copy gets three bonus cuts exclusive to that format: Sweettooth, Lockitdown, and Face.
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