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Conference details: Hallyuwood — Korean Screen Culture

Details of today’s Hallyu conference at the Senate House:

Symposium for Screen Studies

Hallyuwood: Korean Screen Culture Goes Global
Friday, 20 May 2005
Senate House, 10.00‐17.00

“Hallyuwood: Korean Screen Culture Goes Global,” featuring international speakers Professor Koichi Iwabuchi (Waseda University) and Professor Kim Soyoung (Korean National University of Arts), and sponsored by Korean Air and Goldsmiths College.

Hallyuwood posted

Largely unknown in the global backwaters of Europe, Korean popular culture is the success story of the last decade.

K‐dramas, or Korean television dramas, are emptying the streets not only of East Asia, but also from Mexico City to Cairo. Korean boy bands and Korean fashion trends are ultra‐chic throughout East Asia.

And Korean cinema has the distinction of being the only national cinema to claw back from losing 80% of its box office to Hollywood and regain a majority of the domestic market, at the same time as it is exported globally.

This symposium introduces the Korean Wave (hallyu), as this phenomenon is known.

9.30 Registration
10.00 Chris Berry (Goldsmith College, University of London): Introduction / Welcome

Chair: Chris Berry (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

10.30 Soyoung Kim (Korean National University of Arts):
Anagram of Inter-Asian Korean Film: The Case of My Sassy Girl

Reclaiming its position between the Hollywood, Asian, and Korean cinema industries, the South Korean film industry in the post-IMF era after the 1997 financial crisis received a most unexpected but welcome gift. This was the pan-Asian success of Korean popular culture known as the Korean wave (Hallyu). In the midst of Hallyu , there emerged a movie entitled My Sassy Girl that became a pan-Asian hit. This paper investigates that phenomenon.

11.30 Tea Break
11.45 Julian Stringer (University of Nottingham):
A Short Look at Short Korean Films

The defining characteristics of the New Korean Cinema of the post-1990s may be said to be its commercial orientation and its democratic outlook – two qualities particularly well evidenced by the explosion of short film production in South Korea in recent years. Yet while Korean feature films are gaining global media exposure, short Korean films remain of marginal interest to both international film distributors and film scholars alike. This paper argues that the active production of short films constitutes one mark of a commercially and artistically healthy film industry. In addition, it questions some of the reasons for film scholars habitual denigration of this particular media form.

12.30 Lunch

Lunchtime screening: Episode of Korean television drama “Winter Sonata,” subtitled in English, starting 13.10.

Chair: Isolde Standish (SOAS, University of London)

14.00 Yoon Ae-Ri (Goldsmiths College, University of London):
Ready to Surf the Korean Wave? The Korean Animation Industry.

Korean animation has begun to achieve internationally recognition in recent years. So is it time now for a Korean Animation Wave? In this paper, I will show how the Korean government and Korean animators have reacted since the 1998 cultural opening policy to Japan, and argue that the Korean animation industry needs a pause for thorough preparation before it can surf the Korean Wave.

14.45 Youna Kim, (London School of Economics, University of London):
Popular Drama: A Site of Everyday Talk

Television, drama in particular, provides topical material for everyday conversation and functions as a shared cultural resource. This presentation will show how Korean women of different generation and class respond to and talk about some of the most popular television dramas.

15.30 Tea break

Chair: Mark Hobart (SOAS, University of London)

15.45 Hsiu-Chin Hung (Goldsmiths College, University of London):
Korean TV Drama in Taiwan: Consumption and Cultural Industry

Much media research has focused on a comparative reading of Japanese and Korean TV dramas, and audience research into how different audiences in different places relate to Korean TV dramas. How can we differentiate Korean and Japanese TV dramas success in Taiwan? Is it simply a matter of the series contents and/or audience tastes? What role does the Taiwanese media play in creating this phenomenon? This paper also aims to explore the concepts of “economic determination” or “marketisation” in cultural industry studies as another force that leads to this phenomenon.

16.30 Koichi Iwabuchi (Waseda University):
Embracing Korean Wave: Japan and East Asian media flows

This paper examines the complexity of the impact of Korean Wave in Japanese society. I will first outline the recent development of Korean popular culture in Japan and then critically consider the possibility of pop-cultural dialogue through the reception of TV drama series, Winter Sonata. For this consideration, I will suggest, it is also crucial to look at how the media flow from Korea has influenced the social positioning and recognition of resident Koreans in Japan as well; the ways in which the trans-national intersect with the postcolonial and the multicultural.

17.30 Wine Reception

(automatically generated) Read LKL’s review of this event here.

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