Lim Chan-sang’s The President’s Barber (효자동 이발사, 2004) was the first KCC screening of 2013, in which we will be seeing films featuring four actors each of who will be coming to London for a Q&A. The first three months feature Moon So-ri, who will be in London for a screening of Hong Sang-soo’s Hahaha … [Read More]
People in History: Park Chung-hee
Selected publications
- Peter Banseok Kwon: Cornerstone of the Nation: The Defense Industry and the Building of Modern Korea under Park Chung Hee, Harvard University Press 2024
- Jung In Kang: Contemporary Korean Political Thought and Park Chung-hee, Rowman + Littlefield 2017
- Carter J Eckert: Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866-1945, Harvard University Press 2016
- Chong-Sik Lee: Park Chung-Hee: From Poverty to Power, Kyung Hee University Press 2012
- Anthology: Reassessing the Park Chung Hee Era, 1961-1979: Development, Political Thought, Democracy, and Cultural Influence ed Hyung-A Kim and Clark W. Sorensen, University of Washington Press 2011
- Anthology: The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea ed Byung-Kook Kim, Ezra F. Vogel, Harvard University Press 2011
- Anthology: Developmental Dictatorship and the Park Chung-Hee Era: The Shaping of Modernity in the Republic of Korea ed Lee Byeong-cheon, Homa + Sekey 2006
Book review: Yi Mun-yol — Our Twisted Hero
Yi Mun-yol: Our Twisted Hero Originally published 1987 Translated by Kevin O’Rourke Available on Kindle (Minumsa, 2012) or hard copy (Hyperion Books, 2001) Moving to the provinces from a school in Seoul in which the social hierarchy was one he had lived with all his life, our twelve-year-old hero Han Pyongt’ae is faced with a … [Read More]
White Badge: Korea and the Vietnamese War
In a year that we remember the 60th anniversary of the first post-WW2 US military involvement in Asia, it was a great idea to invite Director Jeong Ji-yeong (정지영) to the UK. Jeong is known for a number of well-received films, including Nambugun, a film which gives a nuanced view of the Korean War from … [Read More]
President’s Last Bang gets uncensored DVD release
Im Sang-soo’s controversial black comedy receives a UK DVD release this month, with four minutes of documentary footage, excised by the censors, restored to the cut. Based on the true story of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1979 assassination of South Korean President Park Chung-hee, the controversial satirical black comedy The … [Read More]
Richard Stubbs: Rethinking Asia’s Economic Miracle
(Palgrave MacMillan, 2005) Stubbs’s thesis is simple: that one of the key drivers of Asia’s economic growth has been not free market economics, not Confucian values, not the developmental state, not Japanese or American hegemony, but war, both hot and cold. Stubbs takes seven countries – South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and … [Read More]