South Korean Cinema and Hybridity of East Asian Identity

Book excerpt: In attempts to identify the integral elements contributory to the recent success of South Korean films in East Asia, most existing researches maintain their wide focal length on either: underlying political conditions like South Korea's media liberalization, or the continually rising demand for non-Hollywood films in the region. This text, however, takes a different approach and looks more closely to the question of "South Korean cinema's place in (re)construction of East Asian identity" as it was found a significant yet underexplored area of research. The questioning is attempted by testing the hypothesis that the merit of South Korean films relies more on the cultural "similarity / proximity" based on "common experience of absorption of Western modern civilization" than the cultural "otherness / distance" based on "different experience of consumption of modern culture". The mode of production and the relationship between the global and South Korean film industry are contextually examined in order to identify and understand the invisible underpinnings, which otherwise would go unnoticed while spectators watch films. In doing so, the text analyzes the unique conditions that the South Korean film industry grew out of, and the effects such underlying conditions had on the contemporary "genre-bending" films, for which South Korean cinema is best known and favored nowadays. Furthermore, by placing hanryu (Korean Wave) phenomenon within the context of globalization discourse, the three main strands of globalization discourse - 1. Cultural imperialism, 2. Modernity project, 3. Hybridization of identity - are applied to the questioning of South Korean cinema's place in East Asia amid the changing trend of cultural flows in times of globalization.