Psy’s viral hit “Gangnam Style” made it into the U.S. iTunes top 10 chart, just about a week after the singer announced his contract deal with major American record label Island Def Jam Recordings.“It really is a big triumph that a Korean song has broken into the iTunes top 10 chart, which controls 80 percent of the online music market share in the U.S.,” said Psy’s local agency YG Entertainment.“It’s going to be difficult for any Korean artist to break Psy’s record (on iTunes’ chart).”The 34-ye

(YouTube)A chubby thirty-something with wacky dance moves, Park Jae-Sang falls far short of the prettified, teenage ideal embodied by the stars of South Korea's phenomenally successful K-pop industry.But Park, known as "Psy," has succeeded where the industry-manufactured girl and boy bands have tried and failed, making a huge splash on the mainstream U.S. music scene thanks to a viral video and a

Musicians with physical disabilities from Korea and the United Kingdom jointly held a series of concerts in London last week to celebrate the 2012 Paralympics, a Korean charity organization said on Wednesday.Under the title “Beautiful Concert, Beautiful World,” artists from the two countries expressed a message of hope for a world free of discrimination, through the universal language of music, it added.The two-day concert was held at different venues ― at London University’s Beveridge Hall on S

WASHINGTON (AFP) ― A box of bric-a-brac purchased for several dollars at a Virginia flea market contained an unlikely treasure: a painting by French Impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir.The canvas, which shows a scene along the Seine River titled “Paysage Bords de Seine,” is scheduled to be auctioned later this month by the Potomack Company, an auction house in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. It is expected to sell for between $75,000 and $100,000. The small oil painting

LONDON (AFP) ― An exhibition celebrating the Pre-Raphaelite movement that shook up the Victorian art world opened at London’s Tate Britain on Wednesday.“Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde” includes masterpieces by the group’s founders ― William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.The group formed in rebellion against the art establishment, and was inspired by the purity of early Renaissance painting and the natural world.The Tate exhibition features well-known painti

The 4th Korean International Documentary Film Festival to showcase 115 nonfiction films from 36 countriesThe annual Korean International Documentary Film Festival (DMZ Docs) kicks off this month, featuring a total of 115 nonfiction films from 36 countries.Celebrating the themes of peace, life and communication, the festival always takes place in Paju, a South Korean border city in Gyeonggi Province. The city is located near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea, a line re

South Korean film director Kim Ki-Duk said Tuesday he would stick to his maverick ways after winning the coveted Golden Lion prize at the Venice film festival for his anti-capitalist movie “Pieta.”“Pieta mirrors my philosophy ... I will continue to produce interesting and meaningful movies like this film,” Kim said.The eccentric director, long-treated as an outcast at home, won the top award in Venice for the film, which tells of a brutal loan shark who struggles for redemption after he meets a

 Up-and-coming band from KBS show ‘Top Band’ plans to perform in Japan, U.S.Rock band Gate Flowers, who finished in the No. 4 spot in the first season of the survival show “Top Band” on KBS, did not get a winning trophy, but they gained something bigger ― fans, the courage to carry on with their music career and their mentor Shin Dae-chul, a prominent figure in the country’s rock scene and the son of legendary guitarist Shin Joong-hyun.It was the four-member band’s honest but rough rock ‘n’ roll

Korean singer Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video drew more than 130 million views from 220 countries around the world in less than two months, recent data provided by YouTube showed on Tuesday.The number of views for the viral song’s music video in the United States topped the list with 19.36 million, followed by Korea and Thailand with 17.06 million and 8.97 million, respectively. Malaysia and Canada placed fourth and fifth with 6.79 million and 3.65 million views. The music video has also been

Korea National Ballet experiments with gayageum master Hwang Byung-ki to add ‘something Korean’ to the Western danceForget about tutus, Tchaikovsky and pas de deux ― the very first things that come to your mind when you think of ballet. Korea National Ballet, one of the major ballet troupes here, attempts to create something new and also Korean by featuring gayageum master Hwang Byung-ki this month. “I think Korean ballet has become one of the top class troupes in the world. And I thought it is