Kang Heon, veteran Korea pop critic and KACES chair, dies at 64

Kang Heon, chair of the Korea Art & Culture Education Service (KACES) and a pop music critic active in the 1990s, has died. He was 64.

According to the cultural community on the 20th, Kang died that afternoon. The specific cause was not disclosed.

Born in 1962 in Busan, he entered Seoul National University’s Department of Korean Language and Literature with dreams of becoming a novelist. He later studied music theory in the graduate school at the same university.

He first worked in film. In the independent film collective Jangsangotmae, he took part in producing Oh! Dream Nation, The Night Before the Strike, and Opening the Closed School Gates. He also wrote the screenplays for the commercial films When Adam Opens His Eyes and Jungle Story, and the script for the TV drama The Third Theater.

He made his name as a pop music critic when he wrote a review of singer Kim Hyun-sik at a junior’s request. From the early 1990s, he contributed music criticism to various outlets and was active in the field of popular music criticism.

With colleagues, he launched cultural quarterlies including Yegam, Imagination, and Review, and he taught the history of popular music for 20 years at Hongik University, Sungkonghoe University, Dankook University, and Sungkyunkwan University. He also produced concerts such as Freedom and the Folk 30th Anniversary Festival, as well as music dramas including The Song That Never Ends, Riverside Salon, Riverside Cabaret, and The Princess Cannot Sleep.

He continued writing as well. He published Moments of Subversion and Reversal in 2015 and Kang Heon’s History of Korean Popular Culture in 2016, examining changes in music and popular culture in social and historical context. At 42, he suffered an aortic dissection and was in a coma for 23 days before recovering; afterward, he studied four pillars (saju) and published Myungri: Reading Fate in 2015.

He served as CEO of the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation from 2018 to 2022 and was also the fifth president of the Korea Association of Regional Culture Foundations. In December last year, he was appointed chair of the Korea Art & Culture Education Service (KACES).

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