Lee Hyeong-min

Lee Hyeong-min is a South Korean television director whose credited work includes KBS2 melodramas and later JTBC and KBS fantasy-romance series. One of his best-known early directing credits is KBS2’s 2004 drama Sorry, I Love You, written by Lee Kyung-hee and led by So Ji-sub and Im Soo-jung. The 16-episode series follows Cha Moo-hyuk, a Korean adoptee living in Australia, who returns to Korea after a shooting leaves him with a fatal condition. There he becomes entangled with Song Eun-chae, a stylist devoted to pop singer Choi Yoon. The production’s painful family-reunion story and tragic ending made it a defining melodrama.

Lee directed The Snow Queen for KBS2 in 2006. The drama reunited Hyun Bin with a leading role after My Lovely Sam Soon and paired him with Sung Yu-ri. Hyun Bin plays Han Tae-woong, a former mathematical prodigy who later works as a boxer under another name; Sung plays Kim Bo-ra, the wealthy but seriously ill young woman he encounters. Its title invokes Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, while the television narrative develops through the characters’ connection to Tae-woong’s deceased childhood friend. The series ran for sixteen episodes and was written by Kim Eun-hee and Yoon Eun-kyung, behind Winter Sonata.

In 2017, Lee directed Strong Woman Do Bong-soon, a sixteen-episode JTBC series written by Baek Mi-kyung. Park Bo-young plays Do Bong-soon, whose extraordinary physical strength is inherited through the women in her family. Park Hyung-sik appears as Ahn Min-hyuk, the young chief executive of the game company Ainsoft, who hires Bong-soon as his bodyguard after receiving threats. Ji Soo plays detective In Guk-doo, Bong-soon’s longtime friend and first love. Alongside the central romance, the drama involves kidnappings in the Dobong district and Bong-soon’s eventual work on a video game. It became a cable-television hit, recording 9.668 percent for its episode.

Lee’s next Baek Mi-kyung collaboration, KBS2’s 2018 The Miracle We Met, used a body-and-identity premise rather than the superhero framing of Do Bong-soon. Kim Myung-min plays Song Hyun-chul, a bank employee who dies in a traffic accident. Through an error by a death angel, he returns to life in the body of another Song Hyun-chul, a restaurant owner. The situation binds him to two families: his original wife, Sun Hye-jin, played by Kim Hyun-joo, and the restaurant owner’s wife, Jo Yeon-hwa, played by Ra Mi-ran. The series ran for eighteen episodes from April to May 2018 on KBS2 that spring.