China-Korea cultural heritage documentary exchange event held in Seoul

A documentary screening and exchange event titled "From Fingertips to Pixels: Legacy, Composing a New Chronicle" was recently held at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, South Korea.

The event was guided by the China Cultural Center in Seoul and jointly organized by the Tsinghua University Research Center for Audiovisual Communication and the Graduate School of Digital Image & Contents at Dongguk University.

Through documentary screenings, exchanges, keynote speeches, and the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Tsinghua and Dongguk research centers, the event focused on the theme of "Recording and Transmitting Cultural Heritage in the AI Era", and established an academic cooperation platform for the two countries' universities in the fields of visual arts research, creation, and cultural heritage transmission.

Zhang Guanwei, deputy director of the China Cultural Center in Seoul, and Mu Lili, second secretary of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the Republic of Korea, attended the event.

Professor Lei Jianjun from the Tsinghua School of Journalism and Communication and Professor Yang Yun-ho, Dean of the Dongguk University Graduate School of Digital Image & Contents, delivered opening remarks on the event's content and significance.

Lei stated that the Tsinghua University Research Center for Audiovisual Communication, as a key initiative in Tsinghua's revitalization of liberal arts, has, since its establishment in 2001, been committed to protecting cultural heritage and engaging in international exchange through film, thereby facilitating mutual learning among civilizations. The Tsinghua team presented two projects: one on artifact restoration at the Palace Museum in Beijing, and another on cultural relic conservation at the Dunhuang Academy.

Lei also expressed hope that the films would help audiences understand how these two World Heritage Sites are protected and reveal the working conditions and inner world of the conservators.

Yang noted that the event would delve into the wisdom of cultural heritage transmission through the precious documentary cases from Tsinghua University and an innovative AI technology demonstration by Park Jin-ho, an associate professor at Dongguk University.

He stated that this event would serve as an opportunity to expand the prospects for cooperation between the two institutions from the field of cultural heritage documentation to broader academic and practical levels of China-Korea visual media exchange.

Prior to the screenings, a signing ceremony was held. Yang and Lei signed the agreement on behalf of their respective institutions, formally establishing future cooperation mechanisms in film education, work exhibitions, student exchanges and academic research. This collaboration will promote the visual media exchanges between Chinese and Korean universities, laying an important foundation for film education and cultural exchange between the two countries.

During the screening segment, Jin Yikun, director of Auld Lang Syne Dunhuang 172, provided a pre-screening introduction, sharing the films background, portraits of the subjects and behind-the-scenes stories of the cultural heritage restoration with the audience. After the screening, the director engaged in a Q&A and discussion with attendees. Questions addressed topics such as balancing "observation" with "non-interference" during long-term filming, and how to make humanities documentaries resonate in an era of short-form, fragmented content. The director shared his insights and philosophy of the filmmaking process.

That afternoon, director Ke Yongquan presented excerpts from the documentary A Century of Guardianship, produced for the Palace Museum's centenary. Director Ke shared that this was the first offline screening of the film since its release. The documentary focuses on stories of the Palace Museum's public access, protection, research and restoration, presenting both national memory and the stories of ordinary individuals. It narrates the century-long development of the Palace Museum, the stories of artifact restoration and the museum's conservators, and presents the temporal depth of the Palace's visual narrative. The director then answered questions from the audience in a lively and warm Q&A session.

Finally, Korean digital heritage expert Park presented AI-powered cultural heritage documentaries such as Buddha on the Silk Road: From Afghanistan's Bamiyan to Korea's Seokguram Grotto and The Path of Ashoka, exploring the visualization of cross-civilizational artistic flows and the reconstruction of historical trajectory maps.

This event not only deepened mutual trust and cooperation between Chinese and Korean universities and institutions, but also provided a new avenue for cross-cultural dialogue in the field of cultural heritage protection. Using documentary films as a bridge, the event facilitated a multi-party dialogue among cultural heritage restorers, filmmakers, digital technology researchers and the audience, where traditional craftsmanship and future technology converged.

Meanwhile, the "Interweaving Academia and Light: TsingYing Studio Special Art Salon" was held at the Dongguk University Culture Center. As an important extension of the China-Korea Cultural Heritage Forum, this academic screening salon was open to the public, attracting not only Dongguk University students and faculty, but also young creators and researchers from universities such as Sogang University and Hanyang University, forming a cross-institutional, multidisciplinary dialogue on visual media.

Lei delivered a special lecture titled "Documentary Production and Distribution within the University System". Based on the development history of the Tsinghua University Research Center for Audiovisual Communication, Lei reviewed the planning, initiation, creation, and distribution of representative works from The Year We Were Young, Forever Young, and The Great Learning, to the Palace Museum series Masters in the Forbidden City, and further to Auld Lang Syne Dunhuang 172, Masters in Ding Ware, and A Century of Guardianship.

He systematically outlined the evolution of Tsinghua's documentaries from campus life documentation and Chinese traditional cultural transmission, to international cooperation projects.

The second part of the salon was a screening session of student works, featuring selections from the Gen Z documentary practices of Tsingying Studio. Excerpts from three works by creators from the UK, Korea and Thailand were shown, covering topics spanning rural memory, transnational labor and urban homelessness research, presenting the era-specific reflections and visual expressions of young creators.

After the salon, a second screening of Auld Lang Syne Dunhuang 172 was held. Jin and cinematographer Liu Zhangbolong not only shared the background of the film, but also further discussed visual anthropology methods, ethical issues in long-term documentary filming and the significance of the first-ever full-cave restored facsimile of Cave 172 in art history and cultural heritage protection.

They engaged with the audience on questions about how they captured the details of the painters' hands and emotional changes on site, and the presentation of the intergenerational transmission of the Dunhuang Academy's cultural spirit in the film.