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).

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

1. 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.
    

2. 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
    

The Atlas of Maritime Buddhism is an archive of historic evidence for the spread of Buddhism from India to Korea through the seaports of South East Asia from 2 nd century BC-12 th century AD. It is one of 54 cultural atlases developed and maintained under the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) administered by University of California, Berkeley (UCB). With contributions from researchers around the world, it includes geospatial coordinates, gazetteers for hundreds of sites, images of archaeological sites and artifacts, religious and geopolitical empires and zones of influence, inscriptions and transcriptions of Sanskrit texts, historic maps, accounts by Buddhist monks and ambassadors, records of trade, hydrographic data, monsoon records, and shipwreck datasets.

Given its tremendous heterogeneity the Atlas requires a new form of visual, cartographic and time-space narrative strategy that is currently outside traditional forms of interpretation. This is what the The Digital Atlas of Maritime Buddhism will provide. The aim of the proposed research is to develop a pioneering narrative-driven deep mapping schema for interactively exploring the narrative patterns, historical processes and cultural phenomena in the Atlas. This schema will afford pathways for multiple users to undertake different journeys through this rich and fascinating material through the experimental development and application of the world's first deep mapping data browser—a navigational interface to be developed in a 360-degree 3D (omnidirectional) virtual environment.

The research is being conducted by Jeffrey Shaw in collaboration with UNSW, Australia, University of California, Berkeley, Fudan University, and École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne.

EXHIBITION RECORD
2021/05/16 - 2026/05/30 : Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum Gallery, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
2021/07/07 - 2021/10/03 : Indra and Harry Banga Gallery, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China