This paper defines the visual basic speech units, visemes and investigates various visual features of a lip for the effective Korean lipreading. First, we analyzed the visual characteristics of the Korean vowels from the database of the lip image sequences obtained from the multi-speakers, thereby giving a definition of seven Korean vowel visemes. Various spatio-temporal features of a lip are extracted from the feature points located on both inner and outer lip contours of image sequences and their classification performances are evaluated by using a hidden Markov model based classifier for effective lipreading. The experimental results for recognizing the Korean visemes have demonstrated that the feature victor containing the information of inner and outer lip contours can be effectively applied to lipreading and also the direction and magnitude of the movement of a lip feature point over time is quite useful for Korean lipreading.