Top Chinese actress Tang Wei has been secretly seeing award-winning Korean director Kim Tae-yong for a year - they met on the set of their 2009 English-language movie Late Autumn - but now their clandestine affair is out in the open.

Spilling the news is Korean women's magazine Woman Joongang, in a story published in their December issue says the magazine's publicist.

Though Kim, 43, and Tang Wei, 33, have known each other for a while, they only started getting close earlier this year and eventually fell in love, reported the magazine.

Tang Wei, who shot to stardom in Ang Lee's acclaimed 2007 movie Lust, Caution, has even bought land in Korea for a house, not far from where Kim lives.

Kim made his debut in 2000 with the hit horror movie Memento Mori and cemented himself as one of Korea's most talented new filmmakers with 2006's Family Ties, which won several film festival awards.

In the well-received Late Autumn, Tang Wei plays a prisoner who's granted temporary parole to visit a family in Seattle, Washington and along the way, she befriends a South Korean man who's on-the-run.