The flashback resumes with Yu-bong teaching the young Dong-ho and Song-hwa the verses to Jindo Arirang.

Dong-ho does not exhibit the same singing talent as Song-hwa, so Yu-bong begins to train him as a pansori gosu to accompany her.

While traveling, they meet Yu-bong's friend Nak-san, a street artist calligrapher, who believes that Korean folk music is no longer a means to make a living as people turn to Western and Japanese songs instead and offers to take Song-hwa in.

The flashback ends and in the present, Dong-ho travels to Osu, North Jeolla Province, where he finds out from a gisaeng that Song-hwa left their establishment three years ago but had been waiting for him.

Time passes and the frail, sick Yu-bong admits to Song-hwa that he was responsible for blinding her and tells her that he can now hear sorrow in her voice, but that she must transcend it instead of being buried in it to achieve true greatness.

Years later, Nak-san, also impoverished as his works have fallen out of fashion, passes by an inn and recognizes Song-hwa's singing.

Reluctant, the innkeeper jokes that he is back to being a widower and asks Song-hwa to give him her address after she finds her next location.

Nevertheless, it ended up breaking box-office records and became the first Korean film to draw over a million viewers in Seoul alone.

Seopyonnje also found its way to screens at art theatres and college campuses in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

[3] Due to the success of Seopyonje, Director Im Kwon-taek also used pansori as a narrative tool in his later films Chunhyang (2000), based on the popular Korean story Chunhyangga, and Beyond the Years (2007), an informal sequel to Seopyeonje.

[5][1] Choi Chung-moo examined the film's politics of gender and body, reading Yu-bong's violence towards Song-hwa and Dong-ho as well as the alluded incest and rape of Yu-bong towards Song-hwa as response to the "deprivation of national identity and loss of masculinity by inflicting violence on colonized indigenous woman or onto the emasculated self".