Cruising the Art Museum: On the Migration of Queer Experimental Cinema in South Korea

Abstract

Despite the shrinking space for independent cinema during the COVID-19 pandemic, several queer Korean films have found screening opportunities in both local and global over-the-top (OTT) video streaming services, including Netflix, Wavve, Watcha, and GagaOOLala. Following the favorable reception of Ke zai ni xindi de mingzi (Your Name Engraved Herein, Liu Kuang-Hui, 2020), global OTT video streaming services included more queer Asian contents, many of which are Boys’ Love (BL) films and dramas. Numerous queer Korean films and TV shows also achieved commercial success during the pandemic. The popularity of Shimaent’ik erŏ (Semantic Error, Kim Soo-jung, 2022), Watcha’s first original series, offers a particularly compelling example of the reciprocal relations between queer digital media and OTT streaming platforms, as the series not only formed a huge fandom but also helped the OTT company’s market share in South Korea.1 The optimism around the OTT streaming services that include more and more queer content evokes the memory of the optimistic outlook in the early twenty-first century, when digital formats outmoded conventional celluloid film. Indeed, the increasing prevalence of digital technology has