Jang Yeong-seon

Jang Yeong-seon (장영선), also credited as Jang Young-seon, is a South Korean director and screenwriter. Jang’s work spans more than a decade, and almost all of it is boys’ love made at short length.

The earliest credit is the 2012 film Nabang Spark (나방스파크). The boys’ love filmography opens three years later with the short A Naked Boy (아직 끝나지 않았다, 2015), written and directed by Jang. Five more short films followed, all of them boys’ love: My Eleventh Brother (형이 돌아왔다, 2016), The Four Vampires (4인의 뱀파이어, 2018, fourteen minutes), Private Lessons (보충수업, 2020, twenty-four minutes), Fingers After (첫날밤과 손가락, June 2021, ten minutes) and Please Tell Me So (말해줘, 2021). Jang also directed The Confidential Coffee Brake (두 교수의 은밀한 만남) in 2021.

Two of the short films have premises that are easy to describe. The Four Vampires follows four vampires who are tired of living and look for a way to die. Private Lessons is built around Yeong-il, Jae-hyun and a poetry lecture that Jae-hyun has no interest in but does not want to miss.

The move to serial work came with Love Class (수업중입니다), the South Korean BL franchise carried by Viki and wavve. Episodes run roughly fifteen to twenty-five minutes.

For anyone starting with Jang’s work, I would go by running time. Fingers After takes ten minutes, so it is the quickest way to see how Jang handles a scene, and The Four Vampires at fourteen minutes is the next step up. Private Lessons at twenty-four minutes gives the most room to settle into a pair of characters. After those, Love Class Season 2 shows the same instinct for compact storytelling spread across ten episodes.

The premises also make a good guide to what to watch first. If you like a sharp idea that is easy to explain, The Four Vampires offers four vampires who want a way to die. If you prefer a quieter setup between two people, Private Lessons offers Yeong-il, Jae-hyun and a poetry lecture that one of them attends for reasons other than poetry.

The span from 2012 to 2023 helps in choosing where to enter. Nabang Spark is the earliest credit and A Naked Boy opens the boys’ love titles in 2015. Love Class belongs to the later years, with Jang directing the second season. I would treat the 2021 releases as a cluster, since Fingers After, Please Tell Me So and The Confidential Coffee Brake all arrived that year, and watching them back to back shows how much ground a single year of Jang’s work covers.