Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab)
Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab):
A Global Virtual Network of Asian Cinema Researchers, Curators, and Archivists
亞洲電影研究實驗室（ACR實驗室）：
亞洲電影研究者、策展人和檔案工作者的全球虛擬網路
Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab) is a virtual network of Asian cinema researchers, curators, and archivists working in Asia and beyond. As a university-industry collaboration entity, ACR Lab brings together film scholars, curators, and archivists from various cultural and ethnic backgrounds who specialize in curating and programming Asian cinemas, scholars from different disciplines and national cinemas, as well as cultural policymakers to advance scholarships for the film industry, culture, and policy studies.
ACR Lab’s primary goal is to establish CityU’s School of Creative Media (SCM) as the center for Asian cinema research in Hong Kong, and eventually one of the major hubs in Asia. ACR Lab will make use of Hong Kong’s geographical competitiveness as a city where East, South, and Southeast Asian cinema are intertwined, and will establish strong partnerships with the world’s leading film studies institutions, archives, and festivals around the world.
Key objectives
- To provide a platform for cross-sectoral communication, networking, and sharing the best practice and latest knowledge to benefit film academics, archivists, curators, and programmers.
- To organize and host impactful academic events with prestigious film institutions in Asia-Pacific, the US, the US, and Europe and also screening events at local cinemas, archives, or a museum that will create greater visibility of Asian cinema.
- To foster collaborative research projects with core and overseas members and publish individual journal articles, book chapters, journal special issues, edited books, and monographs.
- To promote diversity and equality of cultural expressions in the Asian film industries
- To enhance the teaching of Asian cinema in higher education and nurture the next generation of film scholars, archivists, and curators.
Lab Partners
Nam Center for Korean Studies
The University of Michigan
Center for Hallyu Studies
Seoul National University
PROJECTS
ACR Lab’s first multi-year major research project is tentatively titled “Transnational Networks of Cinema and Digital Media in Asia.” This project explores how cinema and digital media industries located in East, South, and Southeast Asia have interacted and influenced each other. Locating Hong Kong as a ‘contact zone’ of the film industries in Asia, this research project draws attention to the industrial networks of directors, actors, authors, technicians, genres and styles, formats, consumers, languages, and capital across trans/inter-regional contexts. ACR Lab, accordingly, will organize an international conferences and a series of virtual and in-person lectures and talks during the first 30-month duration of the CityU start-up grant (2024-2026).
Forthcoming Publications
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Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas
Edited by Sangjoon Lee (lead editor) and Darlene Espena. Amsterdam University Press (June 2024).
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463727273/remapping-the-cold-war-in-asian-cinemas#:~:text=This%20book%20is%20about%20cinema,height%20of%20the%20Cold%20War.
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The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas
Edited By Zhen Zhang, Debashree Mukherjee, Intan Paramaditha, Sangjoon Lee
Routledge (June 2024)
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Asian-Cinemas/Zhang-Mukherjee-Paramaditha-Lee/p/book/9781032199405
From the 1970s through the 1990s, the Korean film market, like the markets of many countries around the world, was dominated by Hollywood. The majority of film critics, students, and industry professionals viewed the future of South Korean cinema as bleak. Surprisingly, in 2001, South Korea became the first film industry in recent history to reclaim its domestic market from Hollywood. Since then, South Korean cinema made a 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?
ACR Lab’s project “The South Korean Film and Media Industry” will host an international symposium on the subject and also publish a series of books, journal articles, and special issues. The South Korean Film Industry, the project’s first outcome, is the first detailed scholarly overview of the South Korean film industry. This edited volume maps out a compelling and authoritative vision of how that field may be approached in historical and industrial terms.
Forthcoming Publications
The South Korean Film Industry
Edited by Sangjoon Lee (lead editor), Dal Yong Jin, and Junhyoung Cho. University of Michigan Press (August 2024).
https://press.umich.edu/Books/T/The-South-Korean-Film-Industry2
Published Special Issue
“Is Netflix Riding the Korean Wave or Vice Versa?”
International Journal of Communication 17:1 (November 2023).
Edited by Dal Yong Jin, Sangjoon Lee, and Seok-Kyeong Hong
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/20718
Ongoing Project
Netflix and the South Korean Media
Edited by Sangjoon Lee (lead editor), Dal Yong Jin, and Seok-Kyeong Hong
Brill (expected in 2025).
People
