Here's Why Every Trot Fan Is Heading to Imsil This May

A scenic festival ground in South Korea's Jeonbuk Province is about to become the most talked-about stage in Korean trot this spring — and the surprise is not the roses, though there will be 22,000 of them. The 2026 Imsil Rose Festival, making its debut run from May 28 to 31 at the Imsil Cheese Theme Park, has assembled one of the most electrifying trot lineups fans have seen gather at a single event in years: Kim Da-hyun, Lee Chan-won, Son Tae-jin, Jeon Yu-jin, and Shin Yu, all performing together at the festival's opening concert on May 29.

For casual observers, the names might sound like a who's who from a trot music awards show. For devoted fans of the genre, the lineup reads like something lifted directly from a fan fantasy poll. The fact that it is happening at what is essentially a brand-new regional festival has only added to the sense that something special is unfolding in a corner of Korea most travelers have not yet discovered.

A Rose Garden Unlike Anything Else in Korea

The 2026 Imsil Rose Festival is not just another seasonal event. Set inside the Imsil Cheese Theme Park's dedicated rose garden — a sprawling 66,000-square-meter space planted with more than 22,000 rose bushes representing over 150 varieties — the festival grounds are designed to transport visitors somewhere between a European botanical garden and a Korean countryside dream. The late-May timing is deliberate: by the final week of the month, the roses are at their absolute peak, creating a wall-to-wall spectacle of color and fragrance that festival organizers are betting will become one of the region's signature attractions.

The Imsil Cheese Theme Park, which has long been one of Jeonbuk's quietly beloved tourist destinations thanks to its hands-on cheese-making experiences, mountain goat farm, and scenic grounds, now adds the rose garden as a major new draw. The combination of the two — artisan food culture and floral spectacle — is exactly the kind of layered experience that has made regional Korean festivals increasingly competitive with the big-city attractions that once dominated domestic tourism.

Beyond the garden itself, the four-day program is impressively full. The "Rose Parade" sends performers and participants through the grounds in floral procession, while the "Rose Street Art Show" transforms the pathways into informal galleries. Couples can take part in the heartfelt "Imsil N Propose Day" event, and families with younger children will find plenty at the "Secret Juju & Tobot" pop-up store and the hands-on "Rose Village" activity zone. Limited-edition festival food — rose ice cream, rose bread, and a rose-concept craft beer from the on-site "Imsil N Beer Factory" — rounds out what promises to be an immersive sensory experience from start to finish.

Five Artists, One Stage: The Lineup Fans Are Talking About

The May 29 opening concert is where anticipation has really peaked. Each of the five performers brings something distinct, and together they form a lineup that covers nearly the full spectrum of what contemporary Korean trot looks and sounds like.

Kim Da-hyun is the artist whose name has been generating the most online conversation in the weeks leading up to the announcement. Still in her teens, Kim has become one of the most compelling young voices in Korean trot — not just for her age, but for the way she performs. Her stage presence is frequently described by audiences and critics alike as explosive far beyond what her slight frame would suggest, and her defining musical trait is a seamless fusion of traditional Korean gugak (classical music) and contemporary trot that gives her performances an emotional dimension that feels genuinely unexpected. The genre blending has earned her comparisons to artists who took years longer to develop similar range. In a nationwide female trot singer vote conducted in April 2026, Kim ranked second with 27,500 votes, and she has racked up competition wins including first place in the Korea vs. Japan Trot contest and a runner-up finish at the Voice of Trot competition.

Lee Chan-won enters the Imsil stage as one of the busiest and most decorated trot artists in the country. In 2025 alone, he swept four awards at the Korea Grand Music Awards — Best Adult Contemporary, Trend of the Year, Best Artist Top 10, and Popularity Award — and capped the year by serving as one of the main MCs for the 33rd Hanteo Music Awards, one of Korea's most-watched music ceremony broadcasts. His October 2025 album "Brilliant" drew immediate attention, and the subsequent nationwide "Changa: A Brilliant Day" concert tour, which launched in December, demonstrated that his fanbase extends well beyond the streaming charts.

Son Tae-jin brings the gravitas of an established headliner. A singer known for the warmth and precision of his voice, Son won the Best Adult Contemporary award at the 33rd Hanteo Music Awards and spent much of 2025 on the road with his "It's Son Time" national tour, taking him through Seoul, Daegu, Busan, Yongin, and beyond. At Imsil, he will have the rare opportunity to perform in an open-air garden setting rather than an arena — a format that suits his style of intimate, emotion-forward delivery particularly well.

Jeon Yu-jin has made 2026 one of her strongest years yet. She was chosen to host the K-Trot Grand Awards ceremony in April, a role that underscored her position as one of the genre's most recognizable and respected figures, and she won the K-Trot Popular Singer award in the female category at the same event. She has also kept up an active release schedule, dropping two digital singles — "If Only In My Dreams" and "Gayo Gayo" — in the months leading up to the festival.

Shin Yu completes the five-act bill with the kind of easy crowd connection that comes from years of experience. His special New Year concert in March 2026 sold well, and his recent appearance on "The Trot Show" in April reminded audiences of his ability to move effortlessly between big performance moments and the warmer, storytelling side of the genre. He is particularly beloved by audiences who grew up with trot, making him a crucial bridge between the veteran listeners and the younger fans that Kim Da-hyun and Lee Chan-won have brought into the fold.

More Concerts, More Stars Through the Weekend

The five-artist opening is only the first chapter of the Imsil Rose Festival's performance program. On May 30, the atmosphere shifts to something considerably more classical: the "Rose Music Concert" brings together acclaimed musical theater actors Kim So-hyun and Son Jun-ho — a married couple who have become two of Korea's most beloved stage performers — alongside a full symphony orchestra. The juxtaposition of live orchestral music and a blooming rose garden backdrop is expected to be one of the most visually and sonically striking performances anywhere in Korea this spring.

The entertainment lineup also includes a live radio broadcast event featuring Shim Su-bong, the legendary singer most famous for her song "A Million Roses" — a choice that feels almost too perfectly themed for a rose festival. She is joined on the broadcast stage by performers Beomjin and Punch. The fact that a first-year festival has managed to secure a lineup of this scale and caliber at every level — trot stars, classical orchestras, legendary veterans — speaks to both the ambition of Imsil County and the growing recognition that regional festivals can compete with urban events when the programming is compelling enough.

What the Imsil Lineup Reveals About K-Trot in 2026

The five-artist bill at Imsil is more than just a great concert announcement. It is, in miniature, a portrait of what Korean trot has become. The genre spent decades as something associated almost exclusively with older audiences — the soundtrack of the generation that grew up with it, not the generation currently setting cultural trends. That started to shift in the early 2020s, when competition programs on TV Chosun began introducing younger artists and attracting younger viewers, and the shift has continued to accelerate.

The Imsil lineup captures all three phases of that evolution in one concert. Shin Yu and Son Tae-jin represent the genre's solid, tested foundation — artists who have built loyal audiences through years of consistent quality and whose presence at a festival is itself a signal of prestige. Lee Chan-won and Jeon Yu-jin occupy the middle ground, blending traditional trot sensibility with the kind of media savvy and cross-platform presence that characterizes the current generation of Korean entertainers. And Kim Da-hyun sits at the frontier — the artist who is still actively redefining what trot can sound like, and who has built an enormous following precisely by refusing to stay within the genre's established limits.

Putting all five on a single stage in a rose garden in Jeonbuk Province is, in its own way, a statement about where trot is headed: outward, open-air, across generations, and fully confident that it has something to offer audiences who may have never thought of themselves as trot fans before. The 2026 Imsil Rose Festival runs May 28 through 31 at the Imsil Cheese Theme Park in Imsil County, Jeonbuk Province, South Korea. The opening concert takes place on May 29.