Sib Pal Gi Association


The Sib Pal Gi Association is a Korean martial arts association established in 1981 under the leadership of Kim Kwang-Seok.
Sib Pal Ki is a Korean term for "martial arts", either Chinese martial arts or Korean martial arts.
Kim Kwang-Seok had opened a martial arts school in 1969, having studied martial arts during the late 1950s to middle 1960s under Choi sang-chul, Korean Kungfu master.
In 1986 Korean folklorist Sim U-seong worked together with Kim Kwang-Seok to compare his style with the historical Muyedobotongji or "Comprehensive Illustrated Manual of Martial Arts" of 1790. In the same year, the first public performance of Sib Pal Gi took place at the Batanggol Small Theater in Seoul.
[In 2001, students of Kim Kwang Seok founded the Sib Pal Gi Preservation Society, dedicated to staging public performances and disseminating public awareness of Korean martial arts in the South Korean public.
It is not clear to which extent the Sib Pal Gi system taught by Kim Kwang-Seok corresponds to the historical 18th-century Korean systems and to which extent the system reflects more modern influence of Chinese martial arts; but the emphasis of Sib Pal Gi in Korea is that of being a "native" system in the sense of avoiding the modern Japanese martial arts which had become mainstream under the Japanese occupation of Korea during the first half of the 20th century.
The term Sip Pal Gi in modern Korean martial arts has come to identify four separate activities.