Agenda

Sangjoon Lee, Lingnan University in Hong Kong

BIO: Sangjoon Lee is an Associate Professor of Film Studies and Head of the Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries (DA+CI) at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Lee is the author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network (Cornell University Press, 2020) and the editor/co-editor of Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (University of Michigan Press, 2015), Rediscovering Korean Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2019), The South Korean Film Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2023), and Asian Cinema and the Cultural Cold War (Amsterdam University Press, 2023). Lee is the recipient of the David H. Culbert Routledge-IAMHIST Prize for Best Article by an Established Scholar (2019). His works have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian.

ABSTRACT: "The Origins of the South Korean Film Renaissance"
When Park Chan-wook’s debut feature The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream was released in the spring of 1992, the South Korean film industry had the lowest domestic film market share in its history. From the 1970s through the 1990s, the Korean film market, like the markets of many countries around the world, was dominated by Hollywood. Local film critic Kim Young-jin lamented, “The Korean film industry began in 1993 without a single coin to inherit from the past, and in a state of self-examination, embarked on a solitary battle for its very survival. It was a year distinguished by steely resolve and a solitary, terrible fight for survival.” The majority of film critics, students, and industry professionals viewed the future of South Korean cinema as bleak.
Surprisingly, barely nine years later, South Korea became the first film industry in recent history to reclaim its domestic market from Hollywood. Soon thereafter, South Korean cinema entered its most iconic year in its history. The year 2003 brought a wave of new South Korean films, including Oldboy, A Good Lawyer’s Wife, Save the Green Planet!, A Tale of Two Sisters, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, and Memories of Murder. In 2004, the New York- based film magazine Film Comment published its first special issue on Korean cinema. Chuck Stephens, the special issue’s editor, commended South Korean cinema as “one of the greatest renaissances in global filmmaking the world has ever seen.” Since then, South Korean cinema made history. Indeed, South Korean cinema provides one of the most striking case studies of non-Western cinematic success in the age of the neoliberal world order and Hollywood’s domination in the global film market. What happened to the South Korean film culture between 1992 and 2003? How did what was once an “invisible” cinema become one of the world’s most influential film industries so quickly? And what implications does the South Korean film renaissance have for the ways we approach national and transnational cinema more broadly? This talk will answer such important questions. 

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SPIN project: IL and Korea - From European International Law to Asian One: Korean Experience, 1880s-1940s - CUP: H75F21001780005