Korean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World

Click to read about the conference published on the website Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute

Nishant Shah will be participating in this event as part of our collaboration with the Inter Asia Cultural Studies consortium, to launch a new research cluster around trans-cine-media in the global context along with Kim SoYoung and Earl Jackson. He will speak on "The Asian Intercourse : Reimagining the Inter-Asia moment through ‘net-porn’ In networks".

The conference is a response to what we see as a new epistemic shift, a new possibility for the reading of Korean cinema and Korean media texts. The previous “discovery” or “acceptance” of Im Kwon-Taek at Cannes, and the ambivalent Japanese obsession with “Winter Sonata” are moments in a recognition of Korean textual achievements that, at best, maintain a hierarchical (and highly circumscribed) “tolerance” of Korean cultural production. The subsequent achievements of other directors such as Pak Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk deepened and expanded the hermeneutic situation internationally – a tendency that has continued in recent European conferences dedicated to Korean auteurs and most recently, Kim Ki-duk’s receiving the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Moreover, Korean transformations of Japanese media texts have advanced a new kind of alchemical conversation across media that engages both the present and the past in new, multi-vocal ways. Beyond these mass-media events that can capture the attention of journalists, is the years of work of the scholars involved with the decentering of film history and canon in the work of scholars such the late Paul Willemen. And in addition to the “external” legitimation of the international film festival circuit are the internal developments within Korean cinema – namely the recent resurgence of a vital and engaged independent cinema – in both fiction documentary films. These events create an environment in which we can return anew to Korean cinema- past, present, and future – to read and realize in ways not-here-to-fore possible.

These readings will include taking Korean cinema seriously on its own terms, but also to set Korean cinema in dialogue with other East Asian Cinemas in a global context.

The outcome of the conference will be contributed to the project entitled as “A Compendium of History of Korean Cinema” sponsored by National Research Foundation of Korea.

Click to download the full program.