Gwangju's Representative 'Chueok's Chungjang Festival' Abruptly Canceled

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Park Seon-gang] Dong-gu, Gwangju Metropolitan City (Mayor Im Taek) announced on the 1st that it will abruptly cancel the '17th Nostalgic Chungjang Festival,' which was scheduled to be held from the 14th to the 18th of next month, considering the prevention of COVID-19 spread and the safety of visitors.

Originally, the Chungjang Festival Committee (Chairman Kim Hyung-joo) planned to move away from the existing large-scale, crowd-concentrated festival held in areas such as Chungjang-ro, Geumnam-ro, Art Street, and the National Asia Culture Center, and instead hold the festival in a hybrid online and offline format with ▲expanded non-face-to-face exhibition programs ▲small-scale events ▲new online participation events ▲programs structured according to social distancing levels to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection.

However, due to the recent spread of 'n-th infection' and the issuance of an administrative order expanding the ban on gatherings equivalent to social distancing level 3, the Chungjang Festival Committee faced a serious situation and decided to cancel the festival after careful consideration of ▲difficulties in festival promotion ▲limitations of participation in an online festival ▲and the safety and lives of residents.

Instead, Dong-gu plans to accelerate the development of new festival content for next year and actively consult with Gwangju City on measures to boost the morale of local cultural artists struggling due to COVID-19 and on programs involving local cultural artists for community healing.

Mayor Im Taek of Dong-gu said, "It is very regrettable that the traditional Chungjang Festival, which attracted more than one million visitors every year, has to be inevitably canceled this year due to COVID-19," and added, "Next year, we will prepare a renewed Chungjang Festival with more diverse and distinctive content development."

Meanwhile, since its first event in 2004, the Nostalgic Chungjang Festival has been selected as an excellent festival five times, a best festival four times, and a cultural tourism festival by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism from 2020 to 2021, making it a cultural tourism festival for over ten years.

Last year, despite the occurrence of Typhoon Mitak, it established itself as Korea's representative retro urban cultural arts festival with 1.12 million visitors (visitor big data from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism).

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.