International cultural exchange is the activity of interchange in the cultural field pursuing mutual understanding and thus allowing the enrichment of respective cultures. The ultimate goal of interchange is to have each nation's cultural policy abso...
International cultural exchange is the activity of interchange in the cultural field pursuing mutual understanding and thus allowing the enrichment of respective cultures. The ultimate goal of interchange is to have each nation's cultural policy absorbed worldwide and to induce support for the movement which can uplift the image of the country.
Many countries in the world have strived to tear down the walls between nations through globalization and open-door policies but on the other hand, it is currently the most competitive era among countries with the advent of economic communities like the EU which recognizes the importance of and shows great activity of international cultural exchange.
Accordingly, this study aims to do a thorough research on the current status of Korea's international cultural exchange through related institutions such as the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Furthermore, Korean cultural centers which are affiliated organizations of the latter are scrutinized to study about various modes of activating Korea's international cultural exchange.
First of all, the status quo of the Korean cultural centers signals the problem of an isolated system lacking an integrated connection of policies within the institutions of cultural exchange. Therefore, a cultural event could be sponsored by several centers but the content would be similar and ineffective. To solve this problem, the Ministry in charge of the general activities of culture, sports and tourism should be the core body of the whole international cultural exchange programs and the related organizations should share the tasks and administer with flexibility so that a synergy effect could be brought about.
Korean cultural centers are affiliated organizations of the Ministry which play the essential role in the field of international cultural exchange. They act as the key post of the exchange since they directly execute the government's policy for international cultural exchange abroad.
The Korean cultural centers help uplift the image of Korea by promoting Korean culture and providing opportunities to experience the culture. The ultimate goal of upgraded image-making is possible through gathering positive feedbacks on Korea.
Therefore, this study focuses on the critical role of Korean cultural centers and their effective administration as the premise to activate international cultural exchange as much as possible. The attempts to solve problems rising within the centers have been presented in this .
The main problems are that the centers lack human resources and this leads to the unstable organization in terms of task sharing, thus leading to the less professionally organized exhibitions, performances and education. The financial aspect also shows a problem of mostly depending on national funds and that of allotting only around 30% of the total budget for businesses, which render new proposals difficult to be realized.
The programs of the centers should differ according to the locality but they are not characterized by the respective local features but follow similar programs. Each program lacks a consistent goal or theme thus turns out to be ineffective even though it is implemented with limited source and people.
This analyzes cases of foreign cultural centers based in Korea with the perspectives of these problems in order to propose a solution to animate international cultural exchange. First of all, a headquarter for all the Korean cultural centers should be set which would control them as a whole and secondly, in view of solving the lack of human resources while allowing deeper specialization, the recruiting system should be more open and flexible to use various pools of people thus the need to strengthen the specialized employees hired on the spot is emphasized.
Third idea is to finance the lack of fund; sponsorship of companies should be approached with art marketing methods for the company so as to provide them with opportunities to make profit through a new form of marketing. In other words, sponsorship should not just exist as a unilateral sponsoring. Fourth, every cultural center must draw up a localized strategy allowing effective administration, according to its location and special characters of the locality. Fifth, the center needs to active interchange with the local people inducing bilateral international cultural exchange.
The key to activate cultural exchange internationally is to confer an important role to the Korean cultural centers abroad. This has focused on this role as key post of cultural exchange within nations. This approach may have allowed only limited study results since there are numerous other ways of exchange such as in the private level. However, my wish through this study is to make notice of the importance of Korean cultural centers abroad which was not sufficiently researched on, as well as to discover further continued studies on this theme in the future.
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