Kang Woo
BIOGRAPHY
Kang Woo (강우) is a South Korean director and screenwriter who has spent his entire recorded career making Boys’ Love. Every one of his six credited works is BL, and five of the six were produced by STRONGBERRY, the Seoul studio that has been making Korean BL continuously since 2017. On the evidence of the filmography, he is that studio’s house director.
He begins in October 2016 with I Don’t Care (아이돈케어), a fifteen-minute film about a man named Goh Su-mi who makes a queer film out of his own life and is met with cynicism for it, and who decides to carry himself with dignity anyway. It is a first work about the difficulty of making the work.
The following year came Long Time No See (롱타임노씨), which he directed and co-wrote, and which was released in two shapes on the same day, 23 November 2017: an eighty-minute film and a five-episode web series on NAVER TV. Two contract killers, working under the names Flying Dagger and Wild Dog, fall for each other while each hides what he does, and when the truth surfaces they end up running from their own employers. It was STRONGBERRY’s first production and it remains one of the few Korean BL titles built on an action premise rather than a campus or workplace one.
Three short films followed, all for STRONGBERRY with Matchbox: Some More (썸모어, 2018), twenty-seven minutes, in which a man worn out by the city breaks his leg on a long cycle ride and is taken in at a farmhouse; Secret Roommate (수상한 동거, 2020), twenty minutes, in which a couple have to pass themselves off as flatmates when a younger brother turns up unannounced; and Sweet Curse (달콤한 저주, 2021), thirty-one minutes, a ghost story that turns on jealousy between friends.
His most recent credit is Blossom Campus (블러썸 캠퍼스, 2024), a six-episode campus romance between a music student working part-time and a member of the taekwondo club, made by Matchbox with STRONGBERRY and released across YouTube, NAVER TV and Heavenly.
BLGLFlix editorial view
One correction to how his filmography usually gets described. Long Time No See is frequently filed as an action romance and separated from his BL work. It is a Boys’ Love film about two hitmen in love. It is the BL, and it is the most substantial thing he has made; splitting it off inverts the shape of the career.
That shape is unusual enough to state plainly. Six works, eight years, and not a single credit outside BL. Directors who work in this genre almost always have something else on the record, a commercial, a general-audience short, a music video. His filmography as TMDB holds it has nothing else at all. Care is needed here: an absence in a database is not proof of an absence in a life, and Korean short-form work is badly indexed. But what is documented is a career that has only ever been this.
The STRONGBERRY connection is the part that reframes him. Long Time No See in 2017 was that studio’s first title, and he directed and co-wrote it. He then made Some More, Secret Roommate and Sweet Curse for them, and returned in 2024 for Blossom Campus. That is the founding title and four more across eight years, which makes him about as close to an author figure as Korean BL has produced.
One structural detail worth carrying off this page. Long Time No See went out on 23 November 2017 as both an eighty-minute film and a five-episode series, the same story cut two ways on the same day. A 2026 Chinese BL, The Summer You Kissed Me, did exactly the same thing: a five-episode short-form release, then the same fifty-odd minutes as a feature. Nine years apart, two countries, no connection between them. The dual-format release is not a new invention, and catalogues built to hold one record per work keep tripping over it.
He is also, almost entirely, a short-form filmmaker. His runtimes are fifteen, twenty-seven, twenty and thirty-one minutes, plus one eighty-minute feature and one six-episode series. That is a body of work you could watch end to end in an afternoon, and it has still been enough to shape a national genre. Length and influence turn out not to be the same measurement.
PROFILE DETAILS
- Native Name
- 강우
- Real Name
- Kang Woo (강우)
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Gender
- Male
- Nationality
- Debut
- 2016 — I Don't Care (2016)
- Years Active
- 2016-present
- Languages
- Korean
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