Born in 1975, Yang Ikjune graduated from the Gongju University of Media Arts (now Korea University of Media Arts) in acting. After his military service, he filmed and played in a large number of short films and his acting was first noticed by the jury of the Mise-en-Scene Short Film Festival, which gave him a Jury Award for Acting for his performance in the short <Oooh You Make Me Sick> (2005). His first short, <Always Behind You> (2005) won the Audience Award at...More

Born in 1975, Yang Ikjune graduated from the Gongju University of Media Arts (now Korea University of Media Arts) in acting. After his military service, he filmed and played in a large number of short films and his acting was first noticed by the jury of the Mise-en-Scene Short Film Festival, which gave him a Jury Award for Acting for his performance in the short <Oooh You Make Me Sick> (2005). His first short, <Always Behind You> (2005) won the Audience Award at the Seoul Independent Film Festival. Yang became a star director in the independent filmmaking circle in one fell swoop with his feature film debut <Breathless> (2008), which swept across numerous international film festivals. <Breathless>, in which Yang also played the lead role, won the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Best Film award and Critics’ Prize at the Deauville Asian Film Festival. When it was released in Korea, the movie drew in 100,000 spectators, a rare accomplishment for an independent film. The film was also released in France and Japan to the critical acclaim from critics and filmmakers alike and performed better than expected at the box office. Yang built his acting career by appearing in numerous short films and features such as <Les Formidables> (2006), <Maundy Thursday> (2006), and <Looking For My Wife> (2010). In 2011, Yang directed the short film <Immature> with the support from Jeonju International Film Festival. The film depicted a subtle romance between a daring high school girl and a simple-minded 30-something man. Yang followed that up with <Shibata & Nagao>, another short film, co-produced with Japan, in 2012. Yang next starred in the Japan-Korea co-production <Our Homeland> in 2012 before leading the voice cast of Yeon Sangho’s sophomore animation <The Fake> in late 2013. He then starred in two critically acclaimed indie films, <A Quiet Dream> (2016) from Zhang Lu and <The Poet and The Boy> (2017) from Kim Yanghee. With the fantasy Netflix Original series <Hellbound>, in which he plays a detective, Yang reunited with director Yeon Sangho. Yang is also an acting teacher at the Korea University of Media Arts since 2020.Less