Nicknamed the “girl on a steed” by South Koreans after her most popular song, Hyon Song Wol was greeted with a media frenzy that South Korea usually reserves for one of its own K-pop stars.
Nicknamed the “girl on a steed” by South Koreans after her most popular song, Hyon Song Wol was greeted with a media frenzy that South Korea usually reserves for one of its own K-pop stars.
SEOUL, South Korea — Barbed-wire steel gates on the heavily fortified border between North and South Korea swung open for the first time in two years Sunday, allowing in an advance team of officials from the North, led by one of its most celebrated singers, to help plan for next month’s Winter Olympics.
The visit by the seven-member North Korean delegation has been heralded as a thawing of tensions after a series of missile and nuclear tests by the North. The group will spend two days in South Korea to help prepare for cultural performances by North Korean singers, dancers and pop-orchestra musicians during the Winter Olympics, which will be held in the South Korean mountain town of Pyeongchang.
In South Korean media, it was the North Korean singer, Hyon Song Wol, who stole the show. Nicknamed the “girl on a steed” by South Koreans after her most popular song, Hyon was greeted with a media frenzy that South Korea usually reserves for one of its own K-pop stars.
The agreement between North and South Korea to field a unified women’s ice- hockey team at February’s Winter Olympics has triggered a debate in South Korea. The South Korean team’s Canadian coach, Sarah Murray, has expressed concerns over chemistry.
“Adding somebody so close to the Olympics is a little bit dangerous just for team chemistry because the girls have been together for so long,” she said last week. Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon was forced to apologize after saying that the South Korean women’s hockey team was out of “medal range” anyway while defending the government’s decision to create the unified team.
The Associated Press
South Korean television crews tagged along, feeding live broadcasts, as a bus carrying Hyon’s delegation and a police escort sped down the inter-Korean highway linking the two nations, which was temporarily reopened for their visit.
They arrived at the main railway station in Seoul, the South Korean capital, where they faced throngs of photojournalists. Passers-by and gawkers with smartphones also struggled to get a shot of Hyon, who rose to pre-eminence on the propaganda-heavy North Korean pop- music scene with her No. 1 hit “A Girl in the Saddle of a Steed,” a song about a tireless, overachieving female factory worker.
Coverage of Hyon has not always been so fawning. Several years ago, South Korean media were rife with speculation that she had been machine-gunned to death at the orders of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, who was rumored to be her ex-lover.
