UNSRC Korean Cultural Society

KOREA HERALD

“Haeundae”

The year 2009 will be remembered as a fresh start for the Korean film industry as local movies fared better than expected, with talented filmmakers producing one notable work after another, in a way that staved off attacks from big-budget Hollywood blockbusters.

The first and foremost winner of the 2009 domestic film market is “Haeundae,” a disaster film that sold a whopping 11.5 million tickets, topping the box-office chart. The film, released on 534 screens on July 22, portrays a fictional tsunami that virtually destroys the country’s biggest beach in the southeastern port city of Busan.

Director Youn Je-kyoon signed on top-rated actors Sul Kyung-gu, Ha Ji-won, Park Joong-hoon and Uhm Jung-hwa for his film rich in computer-generated graphics, outsmarting many Hollywood blockbusters, proving the potential of a local film in the intensifying box office competition.

“Haeundae” also became the fifth Korean movie ever to reach the 10 million milestone, following in the footsteps of “The Host,” “The King and the Clown,” “Taegukgi,” “Silmido.”

In fact, seven of the top 10 grossing films this year were locally made, leading to a significant increase in the number of moviegoers who opted to watch Korean movies to 70.59 million, or 51.2 percent of the total viewership. The figure for the market share of Korean movies marks a jump from 41.6 percent in 2008.

Another high-profile box-office star was “Take-Off,” an inspirational and heart-warming tale about a rag-tag group of misfits who form the Korean National Ski-Jump team. Director Kim Yong-hwa’s film, loosely based on the true story of local ski jumpers who struggle amid national indifference toward the sport, sold 8.44 million tickets.

Independent films also attracted keen attention this year, particularly due to the success of the moving documentary “Old Partner (Weonangsori).” The film, directed by Lee Chung-ryul, focuses on a decades-long relationship between an ox and an old farmer. It was first released in just seven theaters, but the number shot up to 250 in the following months, responding to an enthusiastic reception from local audiences. It eventually earned 19 billion won ($16,000), a 95-fold return on production costs — a record that inspired many indie filmmakers. The documentary also won several honors including an award at the annual Silverdocs Documentary Festival in Washington D.C., becoming the first Korean indie film to be honored at the event.

Another noticeable trend was more Hollywood stars visiting Korea and more Korean actors attempting to break into the world stage. Back in January, Tom Cruise visited Seoul and participated in a hand printing and red carpet event ahead of the release of his latest flick, “Valkyrie.” In April, Hugh Jackman promoted “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” to Korean fans along with co-star Daniel Henney.

Several Korean stars played roles for Hollywood films this year. “My Sassy Girl” heroine Jun Ji-hyun came back to the silver screen, playing the title character for “Blood: The Last Vampire.” Jun is an A-list actress in Korea has a high profile throughout Asia thanks to the enormous success of “My Sassy Girl,” a romantic comedy that helped fuel the “Korean Wave.” As with her previous roles, however, “Blood” did not produce satisfactory results at the box office at home or overseas.

Korean pop sensation Rain starred in “Ninja Assassin,” a film written specifically for the 28-year-old Asian superstar and produced by the Wachowski Brothers. Directed by James McTiegue, the film stars Rain as Raizo, one of the world’s deadliest assassins. But its box-office performance did not meet expectations.

In contrast, Lee Byung-hun, solidified his position as an actor who could team up with Hollywood cast members. He played one of the main characters in “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” together with Channing Tatum and Sienna Miller. Directed by Stephen Sommers and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the film earned $150 million in the U.S. market alone, helping highlight the charm of Lee as an emerging Asian actor who can play other major roles in Hollywood flicks, including the sequel to “G.I. Joe.”

Meanwhile, veteran Korean actress Kim Hye-ja showcased her seasoned performance in “Mother,” directed by Bong Joon-ho. Kim was named best actress of the year at the third Asia Pacific Screen Awards for her role in the mystery thriller that was invited to the Cannes International Film Festival. The film, which centers around a murder case and obsessive maternal love, has been sold to 12 countries including Japan and the United States.

Director Park Chan-wook also strengthened his international reputation again by grabbing the jury prize at the Cannes International Film Festival for vampire thriller “Thirst.” Despite the conflicting opinions, Park went on to become the first Korean filmmaker to receive two awards in Cannes. Park previously won the festival’s second-place honor with “Oldboy” in 2004.

(insight@heraldm.com)

By Yang Sung-jin

News Clippings

JoongAng Daily

The girl’s remains were discovered miraculously intact inside a tomb that had already been visited by grave robbers, in Changnyeong County, South Gyeongsang.

The philosopher Voltaire once said, “His face bespoke his soul.” Due to an old European superstition, people believed physiognomy would allow them to read people’s fortunes through the bumps on their heads. And Eastern medicine practitioners think they can detect disease by examining the face.

The physical reconstruction of the 1,500-year-old remains of Gaya Girl first involved the physical excavation of her skeleton (1), followed by the reassembly of the bone fragments (2), and the replication and extrapolation of the bone structure (3). Then artists and scientists added layers of clay and other materials (4), to produce a final image of the ancient teenager (5). Provided by The Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage

We humans have a natural fascination with faces. So it’s no surprise that we’d wonder about the appearance of those who came before us. Last month, Korean scholars put a face - and body - on a 1,500-year-old set of human remains. The story made headlines across Korea.

Physical reconstruction based on ancient bones or mummies is not a new technology, but it was the first time it had been used in Korea.

Archaeologists say Korean soil is so rich that they rarely find a complete set of bones in a well-preserved state. Although Koreans didn’t artificially mummify their ancestors like Egyptians did, there have been more than 100 naturally preserved mummies discovered here. Still, none have been the subject of reconstruction.

This recent case was also the first in Korean scientific history to bring together so many experts in disparate fields - archaeology, forensic medicine, anatomy, genetics, chemistry and others - setting an ideal precedent for similar projects in the future.

They called her 22-01

The scientists who found her gave her the designation “22-01.”

After reassembling and replicating her bone structure, and adding some clay, silicon, hair and paint, they gave her a more human nickname, “Gaya Girl,” for the area from which she presumably came, the Gaya Confederacy (42-562). That was the name splashed across the news media.

The project transformed a skeleton in a pile into a real person.

“This whole project began with an interest in people,” Lee Seong-jun, the scientist at the Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage in Changwon, South Gyeongsang, who led the two-year project, recalled in a recent interview.

“We believed in approaching human bones not just as archaeological data, but as things that have traces of a human whose life and death could be relived through knowledge of both science and the liberal arts.”

Lee’s institute, located in the Gaya heartland, is devoted to that loose affiliation of ancient polities. Its archaeologists were carrying out regular restoration work on a group of tombs in Changnyeong County, South Gyeongsang when they made their remarkable discovery after a cold, initially disappointing day in December 2007.

“My first impression? I’d have to say pretty disturbing and regrettable,” said Lee Seong-jun, who was one of the first at the site. “There had been a grave robbery, so the tomb was awfully disturbed and not much was left.”

According to Lee, 99 percent of the larger mound-shaped graves in the Gyeongsang provinces have been robbed, including the tomb in which Gaya Girl was found, Tomb No. 15.

Nonetheless, archaeologists recovered dozens of relics, mostly pottery but also gold and jade jewelry as well as pieces of horse tack, leading them to believe the tomb belonged to a king, a noble or another powerful aristocrat in the region.

As Lee and his team delved deeper into the tomb from the opening the robbers had dug, they sifted through bone fragments scattered inside it, and there she was: an almost complete, untouched set of bones of a girl they would later estimate was around 16 years old, astounding the scientists on the scene.

That was when a bold idea stroke Lee.

“She’s survived 1,500 years. She’s even survived the robbery,” Lee said, referring to her with a respectful Korean word loosely translated as “lady.”

“I thought giving her a face and body would send a strong message to people.”

Lee had to work hard to convince people to back such a unique project requiring so many divergent special talents. It took him five months to convince the authorities at the state-run Cultural Heritage Administration to support him, to form an advisory committee and to win over the experts he needed.

Hard work, and a little imagination

One of those experts was Han Seung-ho, an anatomy professor at the Catholic University of Korea. In 2002, Han and his team at the university’s Catholic Medical Center reconstructed the face of Father Dae-gun (Andrea) Kim, who was the first priest and martyr in Korea, entrusted to them by Myeongdong Cathedral in central Seoul. They were also involved in the study of changes in Koreans’ average physical measurements in 2004 conducted by the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards.

But even for these veterans, the work involved several challenges.

“The bones were in good shape considering they’re 1,500 years old, but as we tried to work on them many of them crumbled,” said Lee Uo-young, one of the members in Han’s team at Catholic University. The skull, for instance, broke to pieces in the lab. “For such bones, we had to employ several methods including 3-D reconstruction using the computer.”

A total of 157 bone samples were recovered from the tomb. Han’s team made replicas of 108 of them.

It was also difficult to nail down Gaya Girl’s outward appearance in some places, since bones don’t always tell the whole story.

“Things like the shape of the face can be figured out using bones, but some others, like the shape of the nose, for instance, cannot not be extrapolated from bones,” Han said.

“Also, the soft tissue is a determining factor in facial reconstruction, but we don’t have data on average soft tissue measurements during the Gaya period.”

To fill in these gaps, Han’s team had no choice but to use information on the soft tissue measurements of an average 16-year-old Korean girl of the present day.

That missing piece reflects how little Koreans know about the early history of the peninsula. With few actual records still extant about the era before the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392), historians must rely on dubious sources like “The History of the Three Kingdoms,” which purports to chronicle the Three Kingdoms Period (57 B.C. - A.D. 676) but was in fact mostly written in 1145, long after the period ended.

And even that tome covers state affairs almost exclusively, and Lee from the Gaya Institute laments, “We just don’t know how the average people lived in that era - what they wore, what they ate and the like.”

That’s why the physical reconstruction involved not just science but also a little imagination, experts say. Seasoned sculptor and artistic anatomy expert Kim Byeong-ha and the special makeup team that worked on the award-winning films “Thirst” and “Mother” took part in the reconstruction.

Of course, the big question is, “Is this what Gaya Girl really looked like?”

To this question, the experts can’t give an unqualified yes, but Lee still believes the work had value.

“We know that this reconstruction may not have been perfect. But we hoped to change the mind-set of Korean experts, that recovery of human remains and relics should be done so that we can reconstruct their lives and the era in which they lived,” Lee says.

So where is Gaya Girl now?

After being displayed at the National Palace Museum of Korea in Seoul and the Changnyeong Museum in Changnyeong, she’s now resting at the Gaya Institute for her next big “show,” which, according to Lee, has yet to be finalized.

By Kim Hyung-eun [hkim@joongang.co.kr]

News Clippings

KOREA TIMES
12-28-2009 17:45

An exhibition hall at the Royal Tomb Museum of the Joseon Dynasty, which opened on Dec. 24 in Gongneung-dong, northern Seoul. / Courtesy of Cultural Heritage Administration

By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter

The Royal Tomb Museum of the Joseon Dynasty has been unveiled, two years after construction began in 2007.

The museum, which is located inside the site of Taereung, the royal tomb of Queen Munjeong, consort to King Jungjong, was designed to help people gain a deeper understanding of the royal tombs and their historical significance.

The exhibition hall showcases the state funeral process, as well as the history and thoughts of the times as reflected in the tombs, rituals and period art.

The Cultural Heritage Administration said that the museum reproduces the entire process of the ancient funeral rites from the death of a king and the launch of the funeral preparation committee to the building of the memorial shrine, the new king’s accession to the throne and the burial of the body and the king’s belongings.

It also presents information on the structure of the royal tombs, changes in the tombs’ architecture, and the life of the tombs’ guards and officials who served at the rituals.

In accordance with geomancy, the tombs typically have their backs protected by a hill and face south toward the water. Alongside the burial area, the royal tombs feature a ceremonial area and an entrance. In addition to the burial mounds, associated buildings that are an integral part of the tombs include a T-shaped wooden shrine, a shed for stone carvings, a royal kitchen and a guards’ house, a red-spiked gate and the tomb keeper’s house. The grounds are adorned on the outside with a range of stone objects including figures of people and animals.

A group of 40 royal tombs from the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910) were registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site in the 33rd session of the World Heritage Committee (WHC) in Seville, Spain on June 26, becoming South Korea’s ninth UNESCO-designated treasure.

Spread throughout Seoul and Gyeonggi and Gangwon provinces, the Joseon royal tombs were meticulously preserved by court officials during the kingdom’s reign of 519 years. The royal tombs house 27 generations of the kingdom’s kings, queens and posthumously designated rulers.

chungay@koreatimes.co.kr

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