“Destination Hong Kong: South Korean Cinema’s Encounter with Chinese-Language Cinemas” conference is organized by the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong in partnership with Korean Film Archive (KOFA) and Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab). This conference will explore how South Korean cinema was shaped by a trans-regional network that included the cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and mainland China from the 1950s to the twenty-first century. The two-day conference will bring together leading and emerging scholars and experts of South Korean and Asian cinemas from the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America, to present their research findings and new developments in theory and methodology.

Asian cinema studies has rapidly expanded under the impact of globalization, compounded by the resurgence of varied nationalisms, resistance movements, and the affordances of digital media. Differentiated experiences of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have further heightened interest in local politics and cultural activism, newer media and the
digital everyday, and a renewed geopolitical divide between East and West and between North and South. A new “companion” to Asian cinemas therefore feels necessary and urgent in these times. This collaborative volume takes up emerging questions in the field to weave a model for a “trans-Asian” film studies that is cognizant of the durability of the nation state as well as alternative models of situated multiscalar ideas of place and belonging.

“New Directions in Trans-Asian Cinema and Media Studies” symposium is organized by the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong in partnership with the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Asian Film & Media Initiative (AFMI), and Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab). This symposium is a subsequent event for the publication of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas, a massive volume of Asian cinema studies, which was edited by Zhang Zhen, Sangjoon Lee, Intan Paramaditha, and Debashree Mukherjee.