Kim Dong-ryul

Kim Dong-ryul (March 15, 1974) is a South Korean singer-songwriter from Seoul who rose to fame as one half of the duo Exhibition in the early 90s. After winning a song festival at college in 1993, the pair went on to crack the domestic Top 10 with their studio debut An Essay of Memory (1994), and released two more albums before going their separate ways in 1997. That same year, he also formed the funk group Carnival and released an eponymous album that won a Golden Disc Award. In 1998, Kim Dong-ryul issued his first full-length, the piano-based Shadow of Forgetfulness, which climbed to Number 5 on the Gaon charts and elicited numerous praises from critics. During his stint studying film scoring at the Berklee College of Music in 1999, he began incorporating elements from Korean traditional music into his sentimental pop balladry, something that became very evident on his next couple of albums—2000’s Hope and 2001’s Homecoming. A more varied affair, 2004’s Outpouring saw the light shortly after his graduation from Berklee and found him experimenting with new genres such as bossa-nova, samba, and pop-opera. Subsequently, Kim Dong-ryul dabbled in TV and radio before scoring his first Number 1 album with 2008’s Monologue, a blockbuster of an album that was presented at three sold-out live shows. In 2011, his first Christmas EP KimdongrYULE snatched the top spot in South Korea, mainly thanks to the track “It’s Christmas.” Following a series of live albums and a three-year hiatus, Kim Dong-ryul returned in 2018 with the EP Reply, which climbed to Number 6 on the Gaon Albums Chart.

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