'Visit Korean Heritage' campaign back with global promotion project

The Visit Korean Heritage campaign, which began last year, is back, and this time with some new global projects, according to its co-organizers the Cultural Heritage Administration and the Korea Cultural Heritage Foundation.

“We can sense people’s sentiment toward Korean culture changed recently through contents like BTS’ Daechwita, band Leenalchi’s Korea promotional videos and Minari,” Kim Hyun-mo, head of the Cultural Heritage Administration, said during a press conference Friday. “The ‘Visit Korean Culture’ campaign will further raise people’s interest in our traditional culture.”

For the campaign this year, the organizer highlighted that it has been working with Seo Kyung-duk, a professor at Sungshin Women’s University and a prominent figure in promoting Korea and its history worldwide.

According to the CHA, Seo organized short promotional videos about Korean cultural heritage, which started screening on billboards in five different countries -- US, UK, Thailand, Australia and Republic of South Africa -- for a month from June.

“Recently China has been claiming that hanbok is Chinese culture. It is not an overstatement to say that China is conducting its northeastern project,” Seo said. “Since the situation is like this, I decided to participate in the project because I thought it was necessary to inform the world about our culture through diverse measures.”

Seo claims China’s northeast project aims to make all history within the Chinese border into Chinese history.

When creating these promotional videos, Seo emphasized that he intentionally avoided including information about a controversies between Korea and China over Chinese claims to Korean cultural icons like kimchi and hanbok.

Seo added that he focused on creating videos that can naturally promote Korean culture including hanbok, hanok and Hangeul.

One of the special videos is “Korea in Fashion” which shows models wearing fashion designer Kim Young-jin’s hanbok, which were specially made with theme “flower and spring,” at Korea’s royal palaces.

Seo also talked about why he decided to use billboards in different cities to promote Korean cultures.

“From our experience, even when we post videos online later, the reactions were different when the videos say that it was released on a Times Square billboard in New York. It is symbolic. Along with this, we will use other different social networks from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter to even Tik Tok to promote our traditional culture online,” Seo said.

During the second half of this year, the CHA also will create a virtual space that resembles Korean Cultural Heritage sites with Naver Z’s avatar service app Zepeto to appeal to younger adults. It will allow the users with Naver Z’s avatars to tour and experience the space freely, according to the CHA.

Beginning from August, a digital promotion booth will be installed for three months at the Incheon International Airport to introduce 10 different cultural heritage sites that tourists coming into Korea can visit.

In addition to the seven special themed-routes that the campaign introduced in 2020, this year it will also present three new routes- Gwandong Korean Elegance Route, Prehistoric Landscape Route and Gaya Culture Route.

More details about the campaign and its programs will be provided on website www.cha.go.kr/visit.

By Song Seung-hyun (ssh@heraldcorp.com)