WHAPUNG CO.
Whapung Industrial Co., Ltd. (화풍흥업주식회사) was the Korean film production company founded by filmmaker Chung Chang-wha in 1978 following his return from Hong Kong.
Today, the name Whapung is little known outside Korea. Yet behind it lies a remarkable chapter in the career of one of the first Korean filmmakers to achieve major international recognition — and a body of Korean cinema that has remained largely inaccessible to international audiences for decades.
The thirteen films presented in The Whapung Collection, produced between 1979 and 1985, belong to this little-known period of Chung Chang-wha’s career: the years in which the celebrated director of King Boxer returned to South Korea and reinvented himself as a producer.
FROM HONG KONG BACK TO KOREA
By the late 1970s, Chung Chang-wha had spent a significant part of his career working in Hong Kong, where he had established an international reputation through films made for Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest.
His Hong Kong period included Temptress of a Thousand Faces (1969), King Boxer (1972) — released internationally as Five Fingers of Death — and Broken Oath (1977). His work helped establish him as one of the important figures in the development and international circulation of Asian action cinema.
After completing his Hong Kong period, Chung returned to South Korea. Rather than simply resuming his earlier career as a director, he embarked upon something different: building his own production company.
THE BIRTH OF WHAPUNG
In 1978, Chung Chang-wha established Whapung Heungup (화풍흥업 / 和豊興業) in South Korea.
Chung brought back with him not only his experience as a filmmaker, but also the production methods he had encountered during his years in Hong Kong. His ambition was to create a dynamic production structure capable of developing films efficiently while training a new generation of film workers.
As Chung later recalled, he acquired a warehouse in Incheon and converted it into a working film facility. He also acquired camera equipment and recruited young people — including film students — whom he trained directly through production.
It represented a major transformation in his career. After decades behind the camera, Chung increasingly exchanged the role of director for that of producer, mentor and studio head.
MAKING FILMS IN A CHANGING SOUTH KOREA
Whapung emerged during a particularly complex period in South Korean history and in the development of its film industry.
At the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, filmmakers operated within a heavily regulated production system. Government controls and censorship placed significant restrictions on what could be produced and how films could reach audiences.
Chung’s experience in the comparatively fast-moving Hong Kong film industry inevitably contrasted with these conditions. His ambition to apply some of the working methods he had encountered abroad therefore had to coexist with the economic, administrative and cultural realities of Korean filmmaking at the time.
Rather than viewing the Whapung films simply as isolated commercial productions, they can consequently be seen as products of a period of transition — both in South Korean cinema and in Chung Chang-wha’s own career.
BEYOND MARTIAL ARTS
For international audiences, Chung Chang-wha’s name remains inseparable from martial arts cinema. The films produced by Whapung reveal a considerably broader picture.
The company worked across a wide range of genres: contemporary drama, romance, youth films, melodrama, historical drama, martial arts and more adult-oriented productions.
Films such as A College Woman’s Confession (1979), Colorful Woman (1980), With Passion and Heat (1981), Shaolin Bridal Room (1982), The Swamp of the Firebird (1983), Hong Byung-mae (1984) and Riding the Moonlight (1985) illustrate the striking diversity of the company’s output.
Taken together, these productions also provide glimpses of a rapidly changing Korean society: relationships between generations, changing representations of women, youth culture, family structures, sexuality, tradition and modernity all recur across the films in very different forms.
A FORGOTTEN CHAPTER OF KOREAN CINEMA
Despite Chung Chang-wha’s international reputation, the films he produced through Whapung have remained largely unknown outside South Korea.
For decades, many of these titles were extremely difficult to see internationally. Their disappearance from circulation created a curious historical gap: audiences familiar with Chung’s celebrated Hong Kong films often knew very little about the substantial period of his career that followed his return to Korea.
The Whapung Collection seeks to help fill that gap.
Thirteen films produced between 1979 and 1985 are now at the centre of a long-term programme of preservation, 4K restoration and international rediscovery undertaken by Karmax-910 and Frédéric Ambroisine, in cooperation with Korean archival and industry partners.
More than a collection of individual titles, these films allow an overlooked production company, an underexplored period of Korean cinema and a little-known chapter in the career of Chung Chang-wha to be seen again.
THE WHAPUNG COLLECTION
13 Korean films. 1979–1985.
Preserved, restored and returning to international screens.