Kyung Hyun KimAssociate Professor, East Asian Languages & Literature Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies |
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Research Interests |
east asian cinema, modern Korea, critical theory | |
| URL | www.humanities.uci.edu/eastasian/people/kkim.html | |
| Publications |
My current book project, Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema in the Global Era , traces the recent commercial successes of Korean cinema that have reframed the crosscutting interests of the local, the national, and the global under the term hallu (Korean wave), and examines the cinematic subjects rendered therein: “salary-men” looking for a quick fix, vengeful fighting machines, decadent libertines, retired prostitutes-cum-middle-class housewives, female automatons, and aging provincial men. My first book, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, published by Duke University Press in 2004, contends that the cinema emerging from South Korea during the 1990s strongly re-identified with the desire for “dominant men.” Through a close analysis of the many films from the 1980s and the 1990s that are fraught with male anxiety, the book argued for the need to imagine a salient manhood that defies the contradictions of sexual repression, and that instead projects a struggle between dueling traditional vs. modern, traumatic vs. post-traumatic, and Imaginary vs. Symbolic identities. The male violence that is ubiquitous in many Korean films symptomized Korea’s then-ongoing struggle with its quest for modernity and a post-authoritarian identity. From fall '04-fall '07, I served as the Director of the Film and Video Center (FVC), where weekly, on-campus film screenings and discussions with film directors are held. I curated many film series and retrospectives for the FVC, including a Japanese Documentary Film Series (fall 2004-5), “Tell Me That You Love Me: the Films of Hong Sangsoo,” which was co-hosted by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and two major Korean film festivals (one in 1998 and another in 2005), and Contemporary American Indie Film Series (fall 07). I have organized three major academic conferences, two on Korean cinema (1998 and 2002), and another one on Asian cinema in 1999. The papers from the 1999 conference were published as a special volume (co-edited with Esther Yau) of positions: east asia cultures critique (Fall 2001) called Asia/Pacific Cinemas: a Spectral Surface. Since fall '03, I have also co-organized workshops, graduate student conferences, and lectures sponsored by participated the Asian Film and Media Studies group on campus. I co-produced with Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation and Korean Film Archive the restoration of a Korean classic film from 1960 The Housemaid , which premiered at 2008 Cannes Film Festival. I have also served as a consultant on a Korean film retrospective held at the Harvard Film Archive in Spring 2005, a major Korean film retrospective held at the Smithsonian Institute Freer Gallery in Washington DC in October 2004, a graduate student conference on Korean cinema held at UC Irvine in March 2005, and a film series of Lee Chang-dong’s work held at the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles in January 2003. I am particularly proud of my continued dedication to writing film reviews and articles in both Korean and English. The Korean-language articles have mostly appeared in The Korean Studies program at UC Irvine was recently given a boost by a generous grant from the Academy of Korean Studies. More information on the events sponsored by the Academy of Korean Studies can be found from the East Asian department homepage. Representative Publications: Articles: · "The Works of Hong Sangsoo," New Korean Cinema. Eds. Julian Stringer and Chi-Yun Shin. Edinburgh University Press, 2005 · "Lethal Work: Domestic Space and Gender Troubles in Happy End (1999) and The Housemaid (1960)," in Eds. Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2005) · "Korean Cinema Manifesto," Film Comment Vol. 40, no. 6 (Nov/Dec 2004). · "Post-Trauma and Historical Remembrance in the Recent South Korean Cinema: Reading Park Kwang-su's A Single Spark and Chang Son-u's A Petal" in Cinema Journal 41, no. 4 (University of Texas Press, summer 2002) · "Male Crisis in New Korean Cinema: Reading the Early Films of Park Kwang-su" in positions vol. 9 no. 2 (Duke University Press, fall 2001) · "Fractured Cinema of North Korea: the Discourse of the Nation in Sea of Blood" in In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture, eds. Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder (Colorado, Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 85-106. (Also translated into Chinese, Dianying Gansyang [Film Appreciation]; Taipei, Taiwan: March/April, 1996; pp. 29-44.) Books · The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (2004, Duke University Press) · Co-editor (with Esther Yau), positions: east asia cultures critique special volume on Asia/Pacific Cinemas vol. 9 no. 2 (fall 2001) · Co-editor (with David E. James), Im Kwon-Taek: the Making of a Korean National Cinema (Wayne State University Press: 2001) (also translated into Korean by Hanul in 2005) Graduate Courses: · East Asian 260 (Visual Studies 220), East Asian Cinema and Theoretical topics · HUM 270: Deleuze and Cinema |
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| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=3315 | |
| Last updated | 10/27/2009 | |