Daejeon Creative Center, run by Daejeon Museum of Art, is the right place to be if you want to travel 60 years back in time. Initially built in 1958 as a quality inspection center for agricultural products, the building where the creative center is located was designated a National Registered Cultural Heritage of Korea in 2004.
Inside the building, film posters of 1950s movies such as “Ben-Hur” (1959) and “Some Like It Hot” (1959) are framed and hung on the walls as part of an ongoing exhibition titled “The Face of Cinema, Arts on the Street.”
The vintage film posters will indeed evoke feelings of nostalgia for film maniacs from the 1950s. But for the younger generation, the posters might look like props from some period drama series.
Fifty-seven foreign film posters printed between the 1950s and 60s are on display at the exhibition that runs through Aug. 27. All these posters are from the collection of Lee Jin-weon, a professor of Korean traditional art theory at Korea National University of Arts.
Surprisingly enough, Lee’s major is not film but musicology. You can find a video clip of Lee explaining Korean ancient music at the National Museum of Korea’s ongoing exhibition “Companions on the Eternal Journey: Earthenware Figurines and Vessels from Ancient Korea.”
What made Lee, a professor of traditional Korean music, turn into an ardent collector of vintage film posters?
“I’ve been collecting phonograph records for my research and a lot of them were movie soundtracks. So I began collecting vinyl records of these soundtracks. I wanted to organize [what I knew and had] so I wrote a book titled ‘Study on the History of Korean Film Music’ in 2007. After publishing the book, I became more interested in films. Most of the soundtrack albums use film posters for their album covers and this interested me.
