Introduction

Abstract

This special issue of The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema both celebrates and continues the legacy of the Korean Screen Culture Conference. The Korean Screen Culture Conference held at King’s College London between June 2 and 4 in 2016 (Figure 1), was only the fifth-year event since the one-day workshop, ‘Korean Film: Years of Radical Change’, hosted at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2012. As Andrew Jackson sketches in his introduction to the special issue (Volume 8, no. 1) of this journal, despite the short history of the conference it has indeed attracted a wide range of interest from media and Korean studies scholars and students not only in the UK and Europe but across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. As will be discussed below, the topics and various threads that ran throughout the conference showcase the expansion of not only the object and scope of study, but also the methods employed. In 2016s conference, the number of panels reached twelve with over forty presenters, a great increase from the previous year of seven panels with twenty six presentations. We appreciate the continuing support from the Korea Foundation, without which the conference would not have been feasible. Those funds helped us to support speakers who otherwise would not have been able to attend, and this was especially important for the substantial number of research students who participated. Speakers came from as far afield as New Zealand and Ghana. The School of Arts and Humanities and the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London further granted generous support. The Korean Cultural Centre in London kindly collaborated with the conference organizers for this event, holding a very convivial reception that was a memorable social highlight to match the academic ones. The papers given at the 2016 Korean Screen Cultures Conference featured continuing strength in core areas of Screen Studies, such as analysis of classic films and auteurfocused projects. But they also demonstrated the diversification of objects of study and approaches that has been a characteristic of the KSCC all along. These two tendencies are reflected in the selection of articles for this special issue. The focus on classics and auteurs is evident in the inclusion of the essays by Hee-seung Irene Lee (University of Auckland), Andrew D. Jackson (Monash University), and Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park (University of Hong Kong), which focus on Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then, Lee Gwang-mo’s (Lee Kwangmo) Spring in My Hometown and Yu Hyun-Mok’s Obaltan respectively. The diversification of objects and approaches appears in the essays by Julia Keblinska (University of California, Berkeley) on the television drama Reply 1994 and by Antonetta