Fists and flying kicks: 10 K-drama martial arts shows to stream now
A former mercenary turned bodyguard, Kim Je-ha (Ji Chang-wook) becomes embroiled in the dark underbelly of Korean politics when he's hired to protect the illegitimate daughter of a presidential candidate. Ji Chang-wook delivers heart-stopping action sequences, blending Krav Maga-style close combat with cinematic flair. You'll want to replay the staircase fight scene. It's a masterclass in choreographed chaos. 3. 'Fight for My Way' (2017)
Go Dong-man (Park Seo-joon) was once a promising taekwondo champ, but now he sells pest control. It's not the usual premise for a martial arts K-drama, but wait for it. Dong-man's desire to prove himself simmers beneath his laid-back exterior. When he returns to the MMA ring, he's forced to confront his past and fight for a future that's entirely his. Park Seo-joon plays Dong-man with a perfect mix of charm and bruised pride, making this coming-of-age martial arts K-drama both grounded and empowering.
See more: From Bit to Big Time: The K-drama roles that launched Korea's biggest stars 4. 'Arthdal Chronicles' (2019)
Set in a fictional prehistoric land, Arthdal Chronicles follows Eun-seom (Song Joong-ki), a half-human warrior destined to challenge a corrupt empire. While not strictly a martial arts drama, the hand-to-hand combat scenes and military training sequences are intense, with Song Joong-ki showcasing agility and sword skills in elaborate battle choreography that leans into the epic. Who knew tribal warfare could be so fascinating? 5. 'My Name' (2021)
After witnessing her father's murder, Ji-woo (Han So-hee) infiltrates a crime syndicate—and later, the police force—to seek vengeance. Han So-hee undergoes a complete physical transformation here, channelling rage and training into relentless fight sequences. From basement brawls to bathroom beatdowns, the choreography here, unlike other martial arts K-drama shows on this list, is savage, realistic and fuelled by grief. 6. 'Six Flying Dragons' (2015)
This martial arts K-drama is where political intrigue meets blade-heavy combat brilliance. It's a riveting prequel to Tree with Deep Roots , which features Lee Bang-won (Yoo Ah-in), a real-life historical figure and future king, whose rise is marked by rebellion and, yes, lethal swordsmanship. From philosophical duels to full-scale battle choreography, this series redefines what martial arts looks like in a period drama. It's equal parts poetic, precise and unflinchingly brutal. 7. 'The King's Face' (2014)
Prince Gwanghae (Seo In-guk) is a royal born with an unlucky face and remarkable instincts. The drama blends face-reading mysticism with palace scheming and, interestingly enough, intense martial training. Here, sword fighting isn't just for defence; it's an art form. Expect showdowns in moonlit courtyards and emotionally charged duels between crown contenders. 8. 'Kingdom' (2019–2020)
Not your typical historical drama, Kingdom has Crown Prince Lee Chang (Ju Ji-hoon) slicing his way through an undead outbreak with the elegance of a seasoned swordsman. Between dodging political enemies and flesh-eating ghouls, Lee Chang proves that sword fighting is a survival tool as well as a royal birthright. The series is visually lush and choreographically sharp, with every swing having high stakes.
Don't miss: 'Kingdom: Ashin of the North': 9 details you shouldn't miss 9. 'The Slave Hunters' / 'Chuno' (2010)
Looking for gritty manhunts with acrobatic sword-and-fist showdowns? Lee Dae-gil (Jang Hyuk) is a slave hunter with a tragic past and lightning-fast reflexes. Chuno is famous for its dynamic fight scenes: hand-to-hand combat, knife fights and high-stakes sword duels that use real martial arts techniques, enhanced by dusty chase sequences and muscular performances. Think martial arts, but with emotional baggage and wild ponytails. 10. 'Iljimae' (2008)
Lee Joon-gi dazzles as Iljimae , a masked vigilante who leaps across rooftops and slices through injustice with balletic grace. Inspired by classic martial arts tales, the drama, which feels like Robin Hood learns wuxia, leans heavily on sword techniques, stealth training and hand-to-hand combat that would make any martial arts hero proud. Bonus: Lee Joon-gi performed many of his stunts.
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Jenna Ortega is a Style Icon in the Making: Here are Her 13 Best Looks to Date
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EVN Report
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ARTINERARY: August 2025
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While the long-brewing 'existential' confrontation between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Government was only a matter of time, its timing, and more so, its form, has left everyone gasping in disbelief at the crude machoism of it all—from 'priestly' terrorist plots and masked FBI-style raids on the Mother See to jaw-dropping penis semantics. What's most disturbing, I think, is not so much the open display of the profound rift between the Church and the State, but the face-to-face encounter with the nefarious essence of our society's toxic machoism—the beloved linchpin of Armenian patriarchy. Well, this is what you get for not allowing people any means of collective cultural release – something that the Catholics, Protestants and the Buddhists have regulated so well with their carnivals and fetes that let people mock all forms of authority and morality for a day or two and then go back to more civil forms of obedience or disobedience. 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Though not exactly diverting in their morose dissection of post-war nihilism and angst, Jansem's figurative, social-realist paintings spoke to a public that was tired of all the elitist and obtuse abstract and conceptual art that was being promoted by the art establishment. Branded a 'miserabilist'—a major movement in French and European art of the 1940s-1960s—this first generation descendant of the Armenian Genocide wanted nothing more than to speak directly and clearly about the core human values he deemed to be threatened by unmitigated progress and modernization. As his popularity rose from the mid-1960s onwards, Jansem's work mellowed, becoming more allegorical and palatable for a broad international audience that lined up to buy his distinctively ethereal images of melancholic female models and dancers, still-lifes and urban landscapes. 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ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: DESTINATION UNKNOWN When the first Armenian-operated photography studio opened in Constantinople in 1858, few could have predicted the degree to which the Armenians would come to populate this field throughout the next century, or the degree to which the medium would be disregarded by the Armenian cultural establishment thereafter. It was only last month that the National Gallery of Armenia (NGA) finally launched a permanent exhibition space dedicated to photography and new media—the first ever institutional platform of its kind in the country's history. While modest in size, this room marks a momentous shift in the reassessment of the medium as both an art form and a key conduit of visual culture. While the Gallery's own photography collection is still being formed, the inaugural exhibition of the dedicated hall hints at a distinctive direction. Organized in collaboration with the Golden Apricot Film Festival, the show presents a single series of 28 black and white photographs by the legendary master of Iranian cinema, Abbas Kiarostami. Renowned for his hauntingly languid, brilliantly structured films, Kiarostami was also an obsessive photographer, whose long-gestating series on deceptively simple subjects like roads, trees and rain, parallel his cinematic investigations into the essence of nature, human connection and belonging. ' Abbas Kiarostami: Destination Unknown ' presents only the filmmaker's photographs depicting various roads, which he shot while scouring film locations in Iran's provinces. Strikingly beautiful in their graphical sharpness and asceticism, the photographs work best as a sequence of tonal and metaphorical shifts that gradually expands beyond its prosaic subject matter into a transcendental meditation on the sublime power of nature and the infinity of time. The decision to begin the Gallery's photo-exhibition program with a show dedicated to a non-Armenian master from Iran, who was best known for his work in a different art form, suggests a trans-disciplinary, regionally-focused and internationally-orientated strategy. This is essential if the NGA's objective is to position Armenia as an important base for rethinking and reframing the global histories of photography. Exhibition: ' Abbas Kiarostami: Destination Unknown ' Where: National Gallery of Armenia Republic Square, Yerevan Dates: July 15-September 15 MASK: IMAGE AND CONCEPT In a welcome development, transdisciplinary (and transcultural) approaches have also been flickering in the thematic shows organized by the Museum of Russian Art. Their latest show dedicated to the Mask brings the colorful ethnographic still-lifes by sister-painters Mariam and Yeranuhi Aslamazyan together with African ceremonial masks from the collection of the Ethnography Museum of Armenia. The exhibition theme presents a fascinating opportunity to explore the way the 'primitive' mask has been perceived in Armenian visual art—a symbolic device popularized way back in the 1910s by Martiros Saryan—and how it has come to embody our cultural ideas of otherness (especially since Armenians themselves do not have a significant tradition of making or wearing masks). Using the Aslamazyan sisters for this purpose is more than apt: the sisters travelled extensively in Africa and South-East Asia, eventually painting dozens of exuberantly colorful and unabashedly ethno-exotic still-lives that are aesthetically complex echoes of the Soviet imperial ambitions towards the Global South. Judging from the exhibition's promo text, however, the curator and the organizers have no intention in taking a critical or, God forbid, decolonial stance at these issues, focusing instead on the mask as a 'symbol of faith, memory, morality and family values…' This non-committal attitude aside, the show is a rare chance to see these stunning examples of African folk art in Armenia. Exhibition: 'Mask: Image and Concept' Where: Museum of Russian Art 38 Isahakyan St., Yerevan Dates: August 1-September 24 HAO KEPING: MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS OF CHINA Exhibitions focused on distant cultures are a rarity in Armenia. So when not one, but three events simultaneously spotlight contexts far beyond our immediate region, it feels like a subtle shift in the cultural tide—even if some arrive neatly packaged as instruments of soft power from authoritarian states like China. One such exhibition, hosted by the Yerevan History Museum, comes courtesy of the Ningbo Museum—one of the more recent behemoths born of China's museum-building boom. Titled ' Mountains and Rivers of China ', the show is dedicated to the celebrated printmaker Shao Keping and delivers precisely what its name suggests: graceful woodblock prints of China's awe-inspiring natural landscapes, rendered by one of the foremost figures of Chinese socialist-realist art. Born in Ningbo in 1916, Shao Keping rose to prominence soon after the founding of the People's Republic, becoming a key figure in both color printmaking and propaganda poster design. While this exhibition steers clear of the usual imagery of jubilant tractor drivers and heroic coal miners, Keping's idyllic vistas—merging traditional Chinese aesthetics with European realism and Soviet-style neo-classicism—are no less ideologically driven. Rooted in nationalist sentiment and the utopian vision of early Communism, these bucolic landscapes construct a vision of China as a harmonious promised land—conspicuously scrubbed of poverty, labor exploitation, repression, or looming ecological disasters. That absence is precisely what makes the exhibition so compelling: it serves as telling evidence of the nefarious outcomes from the forced union between the arts and the state. Exhibition: ' Mountains and Rivers of China ' Where: Yerevan History Museum 1/1 Argishti St., Yerevan Dates: July 31-September 24 TRADITIONAL HEBEI PAINTING We're going to pretend that this year's surge of Chinese-themed events in Armenia stem purely from a mutual desire to deepen cultural ties. Regardless of the motives, it's a pleasure to encounter the utterly charming art of nianhua (New Year pictures) and nèihuà (inside-painted) bottles from China's historic Hebei province. These forms of traditional folk art remain hugely popular in contemporary China, but visitors to the Martiros Saryan Museum now have the rare opportunity to view precious historical examples on loan from the Hebei Province Museum. The nianhua —essentially early precursors to postcards—are woodblock prints typically depicting deities, symbolic motifs, or zodiac figures associated with the Chinese New Year. Ranging from simple, almost naïve imagery to intricately composed narrative scenes with political and satirical subtexts, these ephemeral prints offer a vivid window into the richness of everyday visual culture in China. Equally captivating are the scented glass bottles painted from the inside with astonishingly fine landscape scenes. Too refined to be dismissed as mere souvenirs, these objects embody the remarkable craftsmanship and attentiveness that reveal much about the specifically Chinese attitudes toward the symbolic importance of objects of material culture and the role of art as a vital means of communication. The choice of the Martiros Saryan Museum as host is particularly fitting. Saryan, the master of Armenian modernist painting, had an enduring fascination with traditional Chinese art, which he also collected. This exhibition may well prompt a long-overdue reassessment of that largely overlooked cultural connection. PERSONAL SPACE: A COLLECTOR'S VIEW Closer to the home front, the Nikoghosyan Foundation is presenting an exhibition featuring works by the so-called 'Bielutin' group of painters from Russia—a loose network of underground artists who challenged the official Soviet art establishment with a scandalous 1962 exhibition at Manezh in Moscow. The group's figurehead, Ely Bielutin founded an independent school and a movement that he termed as 'New Reality'– a conceptually and stylistically hybrid framework inspired by early Soviet avant-garde and the European expressionists. The more talented exponents of the group, like Irina Zakharova, Vladimir Tryamkin and Vera Preobrazhenskaya, were instrumental in cementing the non-conformist scene as the most intellectually and creatively dynamic part of Soviet art. Drawn from the massive collection of late, Moscow-based collector Samvel Hovhannisyan and his wife Karina Kazanjian, the show provides a tantalizing glimpse into the exuberantly experimental milieu of these dissident artists. The exhibition has no scholarly ambitions as it also mixes-in an eclectic range of works by Armenian artists—from famous names like Yervand Kochar and Rudolf Khachatryan to a number of forgotten figures from the 1980s and 1990s. The result is a strange, but captivating potpourri that, first of all, reflects the obsessive drive and broadly-inclusive tastes behind one of the greatest Armenian private art collections ever assembled. THE MANUSCRIPT MYSTERY OF NATURE CREATIVITY Matenadaran's current show presents yet another slice of medieval ecclesiastical visual culture, this time focusing on creationist representations of nature in Armenian manuscripts, complemented by examples of Arabic and Persian illuminated art. That's all well and good, but beyond this broad thematic framework, the exhibition lacks a clear conceptual or critical anchor. It's difficult to gauge, for instance, whether medieval Armenian artists developed distinctly local iconographic, symbolic, or aesthetic modes for depicting the six days of creation and natural phenomena, or whether they simply followed existing regional traditions of ornamentation and illustration. Still, the inclusion of several rarely exhibited manuscripts, intricate silver bindings, and other book-related artifacts showcasing a variety of stylistic approaches offers plenty of visual delight—despite the Institute's unfortunate persistence with musty, cabinet-of-curiosities-style displays. Exhibition: 'The Manuscript Mystery of Nature Creativity' Where: Matenadaran 53 Mashtots Ave., Yerevan Dates: Open from July 2 REFLECTIONS FROM THE MARGINS What's so fun about graduate art exhibitions? Trying to guess who'll be the next big thing, of course—or who most likely won't. Since 2007, the team at Focus NGO's Medialab Centre has been quietly nurturing a new generation of young art practitioners. It's a small but essential alternative education platform where students receive informal training in analogue photography, film and media studies, contemporary art, and—perhaps most crucially—critical thinking. This month, the center presents its latest group of graduates, whose works are organized around the theme of socio-political margins as spaces of resistance. With just seven participants, the exhibition is modest in scale and ambition. Yet the range of critical issues tackled—spanning unchecked urban development to the social stigma surrounding mental illness—offers a sharp and hopeful contrast to the kind of soul-crushing banality too often seen at state art school shows. And that alone is reason enough to support these emerging voices and keep an eye on their future paths. Exhibition: 'Reflections from the Margins' Where: NPAK 1/3 Buzand St., Yerevan Dates: August 8-August 15 PARUYR DAVTYAN. DAVTYAN PARUYR Chances are the name Paruyr Davtyan won't ring a bell for most people in Armenia. But among those in the know, it's linked to one of the most compelling mid-career contemporary artists to emerge from the post-Soviet space. Debuting on the Russian art scene in the early 2010s, the Gyumri-born, transdisciplinary artist quickly established himself as a leading figure within the tradition of Moscow Conceptualism—a politically charged, theory-driven avant-garde movement rooted in early 20th-century Dadaism. Now a fixture on major contemporary art platforms and biennales in Moscow, Davtyan is making his belated debut in his homeland , courtesy of the Cafesjian Centre for the Arts and curator Armen Yesayants. His ironically self-titled solo exhibition offers a clear entry point into his conceptually dense yet surprisingly palatable practice. While the founding figures of Moscow Conceptualism focused on dismantling ideological structures in the late Soviet era, Davtyan is more concerned with interrogating the nature of art itself. Does art possess an innate, immutable identity, or is it a shifting illusion shaped—and reshaped—by socio-historical forces? In exploring these questions, Davtyan's work becomes entirely intertextual and self-reflexive, drawing from and mischievously remixing a vast reservoir of art history that he seems to both gently parody and passionately revere. Although the methods of deconstructive pastiche he employs have become so institutionalized that he appears at times like a classicists of sorts, there's a genuine boldness and vitality in his witty, yet strangely poetic, subversions of canonical works like Monet's Water Lilies or Duchamp's Fountain . Compact but beautifully curated, the exhibition offers a strong overview of Davtyan's practice over the past decade—and is a must-see for anyone interested in the current intellectual trajectories of contemporary visual art. GYUMRI ART WEEK Now in its fourth edition, Gyumri Art Week has firmly established itself as the rightful successor to the short-lived but influential Gyumri Biennale. 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Because, the spaces and people through which we typically experience art deeply shape our perception of its meaning and relevance. Attending an event like this in a regional center such as Gyumri can expand—or even transform—your understanding of how art sustains and feeds the social fabric of everyday life. Festival: 'Gyumri Art Week- 4th Edition: Ecology & Environment' Where: Gyumri, Armenia Dates: August 8-August 17 See program DRIVE The summer blockbuster train is in full swing with the expected reboots and franchises like the latest 'Superman', 'Fantastic Four', 'Freaky Friday' and so on. Somewhere in between there will also be a movie with either Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt riding something fast and furious. It's a seemingly endless loop of tautological inanity that wears any semblance of meaning to naught with each, progressively more absurd cycle. So it's a real reprieve to find in the cracks of this grotesque hall of simulacra an authentic piece of film art, even if it was made some 15 years ago. Starring Ryan Gosling—one of the poster-boys of 21st century melancholia for all things analogue—Nicholas Winding Refn's incandescent 2011 thriller ' Drive ' (winner of best director prize at Cannes Film Festival) stands as one of the cinematic high points of the past two decades. A story about an enigmatic stunt driver who gets into a crime job that takes a disastrous turn, 'Drive' is a tense, almost mathematically designed narrative about an aloof loner who temporarily allows emotions to slip through his steely facade. Winding Refn's neon-soaked vision is steeped in nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s, with multiple references to films like 'Taxi Driver', 'The Conversation', 'Diva' and 'Blue Velvet'. But the Dutch director's cinephile obsessions do not prevent him from crafting a universe that is entirely his own—a neo-noir territory where every surface and glance is permeated by a haunting mixture of strangeness, ravishing beauty and lurid violence. It's the kind of flawlessly engineered mechanism that only gets better with age—like the iconic Chevy Impala that Gosling stylishly wheels into cinematic eternity. So, do yourself a favor, buy a ticket and unbuckle your seatbelt for this transcendent experience.
Tatler Asia
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G-Dragon to bring ‘Übermensch' exhibition to Hong Kong—here's what we know
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