Initiatives
Sangjoon Lee’s research project Destination Hong Kong: South Korea’s Encounter with Sinophone Cinemas has larger ambition both in geographic scope and scale and historical perspectives. As a transnational film history, it is a story of South Korean cinema’s seven-decade interactions with the diasporic Sinophone cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. In other words, this project explores the ways South Korean cinema has been shaped by a regional and trans-regional network that included the diasporic Sinophone cinemas in Asia. More specifically, it will show that the practice of transnational coproduction affected what are commonly perceived as national cinemas. To do so, this research will examine the first era of the postwar cinema network in Asia, which began in 1957 and linked South Korea and Hong Kong and, to a lesser degree, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaya. This research will also discuss the movement toward a globalized mode of coproduction in the early 1970s. Lee will argue that the network between South Korean cinema and the Sinophone cinemas resulted from the region’s shared post-war trauma, colonial/post-colonial/transnational culture, Cold War politics, new economic conditions, and historical inter-connectedness. Finally, the study moves to the 1980s and 90s’ Hong Kong cinema syndrome in South Korea and the new millennium’s sudden emergence of the Chinese film market. With this historical study of the regional culture industries of the late 1950s through the 21st century, this project will shift attention from the concept of national cinema to a new perspective on transnational film history based on the material existence of a regional film culture.
