Lee Hyeon-Joo ( 이현주 )



I normally write about artists and artwork that I come across, but I had to make an exception today.  I came across this fantastic picture of a Korean bodybuilder over at a blog entry at Shinjuku no Kinniku.   He had a link to 2 videos featuring this bodybuilder, contestant routines and a posedown video, both taken by Bodyfor.tv.  The footage is from the 2009 Mr. & Ms. Korea contest that took place in June.   I dug around a bit and found a nice blog post with some more information about the bodybuilder.  Her Korean name is 이현주, which using Hong's Hangul Conversion Tool transliterates using MCT to I Hyeon Ju (using the asian convention of last name coming first).  I think her name would probably be translated as Lee Hyeon-Joo, and I find some other people with similar names using this spelling convention. She placed 2nd in the +55kg women's category, but she's first in my book.  Some of the other competitors are also very cute, and it seems that bodybuilding in Korea is improving quite a bit.

I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't do thorough research into this incredible lady.  One of the better sources for Bodybuilding in Korea is the Friend Silver Blog.  Sure enough, he had many great pictures of this competition, and you can find the +55kg competitors in these two galleries: Gallery 1 Gallery 2.  Just click on the button in the bottom right hand corner of the image to launch a slideshow where you can get the larger versions of the images. Here's a few of my favorites of Lee Hyeon-Joo from there:



You can also find more pics of Lee Hyeon-Joo from other blog entries from nicenet's blog, and there are some more of her in a contest report from tistory.com.



She's come a long way since 2006, where I managed to find a video of her at an earlier competition:



Hopefully we'll see Lee Hyeon-Joo continue to train and win the competition next year!  The winner of the +55kg division was Hwang I-Nyeong ( 황인영 ). The women's overall winner of the contest was the winner of the 49kg-class Park Gyun-Jeong ( 박윤정 ).  Pictures of all the bodybuilding women's division winners can be found at this nicenet blog post. In a related story, The Chosun Ilbo ( English Edition ) reports another favorite of mine, Park Soo-Hee was the winner of the Body Fitness category of the 2009 contest.  I'm sad because she decided to go from Bodybuilding to Fitness, but her physique is probably better suited to Fitness.  She placed third in 2007 in the 49kg bodybuilding category.  Here's some pics from left to right of the +55kg, -49kg, and Fitness winners:



I think it's cool that Lee Hyeon-Joo shares the same last name as me, though I understand it's a pretty common one for Koreans.  Still, it gives me one more reason to like her, not that I needed one.  It's hard to believe the difference in muscle mass between her in 2006 and now in 2009.  I'm guessing she didn't place higher because she looked like she was still not as defined as the winner of the class or the overall winner.  I'm hoping I can find more pictures of her competing at future events.  I've spent some time trying to learn a little Korean to find more material on Lee Hyeon-Joo.  If you know some Korean or have some other sources of material, please drop me a line.  As always, thanks for reading.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I came across some more pics of her over at Tetsumi's Salon, a good forum for asian female bodybuilder fans. Here are those pics:



Edit: Found another pair of pics of this amazing bodybuilder over at Gooddak.com:




Edit: But wait, there's more! Lee Hyeon-Joo recently took first place at the Mr YMCA contest in the +52kg women's division!  And as usual, Friend Silver has been kind enough to post some awesome photos in his blog.  Here are some of my favorite pictures from his site (see Blog Entry 1, Blog Entry 2, Slide show 1, Slide show 2, Slide show 3 ):



On a related note, Seo Seung-Ah ( see slide show ) took the -52kg division at the same contest.  My friend ~ayanamifan will be glad to hear that. He's a fan of hers and was inspired to draw a few beautiful pictures of her: