[4] Kang was inspired to become an actress in elementary school after seeing Jung Sun-kyung play the titular character of the 1995 drama Jang Hui-bin.
[10] She was also cast in the series Golden Apple, but she left during production as she was set to appear in Special of My Life, a show planned to share its time slot.
[11] In the sitcom Rainbow Romance, the sixth installment of the Nonstop series, she played an immature college student majoring in dance, a subject which she had previous experience in.
[5] In 2006, Special of My Life aired, in which Kang starred as the younger sister of Myung Se-bin's character, though she did not appear in the first few episodes.
[12] Following Special of My Life, she starred alongside Yoon Eun-hye and Oh Man-seok as a country girl in the drama The Vineyard Man; for her part, she studied the Chungcheong dialect of Korean.