Yeungnam University Museum opens traveling exhibition on animals in ancient Korean life

Yeungnam University Museum announced Monday it has been selected for "Museum Eum," a Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism program supporting traveling exhibitions and tourism-linked programs, and will host a special exhibition titled "Animals Around Us."

The exhibition opened to the public Friday with an opening ceremony and runs alongside two educational programs for local children and youth: "Animal Stories of the Apdok Kingdom Through Bones" and "Animals in Artifacts, Reborn Through AI."

Museum Eum is a government-backed initiative aimed at spreading cultural and arts opportunities — long concentrated in Greater Seoul and major cities — to regional communities, and at building a sustainable local cultural ecosystem through content that links exhibitions with tourism and local resources.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism hosts the program and the Korean Museum Association organizes it, supporting regional touring of outstanding exhibitions and the operation of tourism-linked programs.

The special exhibition draws on the museum's extensive artifact collection and years of accumulated research on animal remains, and is organized into two main sessions.

The first, "Animals as Vessels of Earnest Wishes," examines the diverse animal symbols that people of the past inscribed on artifacts.

The second session, "Animals as the Finest Feast and Sacrificial Offerings," forms the heart of the exhibition. It offers the first in-depth presentation of the many animal remains unearthed during excavations of the Imdang-dong and Joyeong-dong tomb complexes in Gyeongsan in the 1980s.

"Animals Around Us" runs at Yeungnam University Museum in Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang Province, through Oct. 2, before traveling to the National Pukyong University Museum in Nam-gu, Busan, where it will be on view from Oct. 19 through Nov. 27.

Lee Eun-jeong, director of Yeungnam University Museum, said she hopes the exhibition gives visitors "a meaningful opportunity to look into the hearts of the people who lived on this land long ago, and to think again, deeply, about the animals around us today."