Cultural activities grew steadily in 2024, data from Arts Council Korea showed Friday.
The total number of different concerts, exhibitions, performances and other cultural endeavors registered with the council, also known as ARKO, reached 62,442, up 4.7 percent compared to the previous year.
The figures count tours and show runs as one endeavor, so the 30,273 endeavors in the performing arts sector includes 145,543 performances.
ARKO covers fine arts, but not pop culture such as K-pop, movies and video games. Among genres covered by the council — Korean traditional music, western music, theater, dance, and mixed genres — all showed year-on-year growth.
Activities were recorded as 30,273 in performing arts, 17,145 in visual arts and 15,024 cases in literature.
Classical music accounted for 48.8 percent of registered shows, with 14,760, followed by theater works with 9,316, and mixed genres with 2,473.
Premieres accounted for 883 performing arts endeavors. This is 2.9 percent of the total, but they represented 5.6 percent of the total number of performances, at 8,212.
The average number of performances per new work increased from 7 in 2023 to 9.3 times in 2024, indicating more active staging of new work.
In the visual arts sector, there was a tendency toward solo exhibitions, the number of which rose 874 cases to 9,817 from 2023. The number of group exhibitions fell 220 to 7,328.
The average length of an exhibition decreased 4.4 percent over the same period to 25.6 days, though the length of solo exhibitions rose slightly, to 23.3 days. Painting was the most actively exhibited visual arts genre, with 9,644 exhibitions in 2024, up 6.9 percent.
The total number of shows and exhibitions equate to 93 per 100,000 people in 2024, an increase of 5.1 from 2023.
The literature sector recorded 12,699 domestic book publications and 2,325 translations of foreign works. While the number of domestic publications increased, translations declined.
Print books accounted for 75.9 percent of the total for domestic publications and 65.7 percent of translated books in 2024.
Novels were the most frequently published genre in both categories, though poetry was almost as strong in the domestic sector. Among domestic books, 4,487 were novels, 4,411 were poetry and 3,421 were categorized as essays and prose.
By quarter, total activities grew stronger as the year progressed, with 7,403 endeavors in the first quarter, 13,219 in the second quarter, 13,225 in the third quarter and 16,144 in the fourth quarter.
The Survey on Cultural and Arts Activities, published since 1976, analyzes the number, frequency, and trends of domestic cultural and arts activities by field, genre, region, and period, thereby presenting the volume of cultural and artistic activity and the flow of professional arts in Korea.
gypark@heraldcorp.com
