The list of finalists of this year’s Talk Talk Korea, a global online contest of Korea-related content made by people worldwide, has been released.
The Korean Culture and Information Service (KOCIS), an affiliate of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, on Nov. 30 named 160 content works spanning eight themes for the final round next month.
The creations will be ranked on Dec. 10 at the awards ceremony hosted by KOCIS at the Korea International Exhibition Center aka KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi-do Province.
Marking its ninth anniversary, Talk Talk Korea this year received 46,632 entries from 154 countries.
The event’s eight themes were Korea in the world (photography), drawing Korea (webtoons), stories about Korea (videos and essays), traditional games (videos), Hangeul calligraphy (handwriting and illustrations), travel (illustrations, photos and videos), TTK X Cravity (music video covers) and Korean music (short videos).
Many creative works including those describing the creators’ relationships with Korea and why they like Korean culture were submitted.
One finalist in the photography theme was Agnes Agi Paszabi from Hungary for her snapshot of a Hanbok-clad woman seemingly walking on top of the strings of a gayageum (zither) in Budapest. In webtoons, Tri Iva Fitriani from Indonesia was honored for her work recollecting her pleasant memories of watching Korean dramas with her grandparents.
In traditional games, Glenn Besorio Tiondo from the Philippines stood out for his video of Philippine children easily picking up and enjoying a variety of traditional Korean games, showing a heated response that transcended language and national borders.
Numerous entries of high-quality handwriting in the calligraphy category made judging them extremely difficult. For Korean music, many unique short videos were produced by youth who used a range of Korean musical genres like K-pop, trot and minyo (folk).
By continent, people in Asia (23,772) by far sent the most entries, followed by those in South America (8,141), North and Central America (5,648), Europe (5,591) and Africa (2,841). Vietnam sent the most submissions (6,423) of any country, followed by India (3,393), Indonesia (3,102), Mexico (2,111) and Pakistan (1,730).
Source: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism