Kang Heon, the celebrated South Korean pop music critic immortalized in the famous saying “for Korean music, Kang Heon; for pop, Lim Jin-mo,” has died at the age of 64.
According to reports by MyDaily reporter Kim Ha-young and Yonhap News Agency on October 20, Kang — the chairman of the Korea Arts & Culture Education Service — died on the afternoon of October 20. The exact cause of death was not disclosed.
Born in Busan in 1962, Kang graduated from Seoul National University’s Department of Korean Language and Literature and studied music theory in its graduate school. Originally dreaming of becoming a novelist, he began his career in film, working with the 1980s independent film collective Jangsangotmae on “Oh! Land of Dreams,” “The Night Before the Strike,” and “Opening the Closed School Gates,” later writing screenplays for the commercial films “When Adam Opened His Eyes” and “Jungle Story” as well as the TV drama “The Third Theater.”
He entered music criticism in the early 1990s after writing “On Kim Hyun-sik: From Acoustic Guitar to Blue Note” about the late singer Kim Hyun-sik at a junior’s request. Kang became known for interpreting music through social and historical contexts rather than treating it as mere genre or trend, in an elegant prose style. He helped found the cultural magazines Yegam, Sangsang, and Review, and taught pop music history for about 20 years at Hongik, Sungkonghoe, Dankook, and Sungkyunkwan universities.
Fellow critic Lim Jin-mo remembered him, saying his elegant writing “caused a sensation in music criticism from the early 1990s,” and recalled, “At the time, there was a saying, ‘For Korean music, Kang Heon; for pop, Lim Jin-mo’ — we worked together for a long time.”
Kang also planned and produced concerts such as “Freedom” and the Folk 30th Anniversary Festival, along with music plays including “The Never-Ending Song,” “Cheonbyeon Salon,” and “Cheonbyeon Cabaret.” He previously served as CEO of the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation and president of the Korea Metropolitan Cultural Foundation Association, and was appointed chairman of the Korea Arts & Culture Education Service last December. His books include “The Moment of Subversion and Reversal” (2015) and “Kang Heon’s History of Korean Popular Culture” (2016). At age 42, he survived a torn aorta that left him in a coma for 23 days, an experience that later led him to study Myeongri fortune-telling and publish books on it.
Funeral arrangements were not disclosed in the report. Kang is remembered as a critic who broadened the horizons of Korean pop music criticism, tracing the genre’s history through the society that shaped it.
