• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.187-198
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• 2020

With the cultural background of whiteness I did examine the universal meaning of absolute good, the special of psychosis, and the fantastic of femininity and memory/record. As an example I analyzed the symbolic meaning of white used in Korean films. Unconditional goodness, white as a generality: White color in all the films of good-evil confrontation falls into this category. The most obvious and the simplest configuration are the black-white dichotomy. In Nameless Gangster: Rules of Time(2011), The Merciless(2016), Asura: The City of Madness(2016) and The Bad Guys: Reign of Chaos(2019), white is the absolute good but it is not limited to a fair key figure. Paradoxically, black is not given only to the side of absolute evil. White is used to be a flexible visual device that reflects the socio-political situation without changing the meaning of the general good. Psychosis and pills, white as a peculiarity: The visual function that emphasizes sado-masochism in the absolute good and the universal symbol of white extends to psychotic specificities such as hysteria. In all the films creating horror, white symbolizes the mentally disabled and the pill for healing. Femininity and haunted white: White of absolute good is expressed by the socio-cultural tendency of femininity and the black-white contrast of vision is applied to the gender difference. In general the women's sexuality is emphasized in color red, but white is arranged in the background. In TaeGukGi: Brotherhood Of War(2004), 71: Into The Fire(2010), My Way(2011), The Front Line(2011), Roaring Currents(2014), Northern Limit Line(2015), The Battle: Roar to Victory(2019) and Battle of Jangsari(2019), white given to female figures sticks to the traditional femininity such as motherhood, sacrifice and weakness. The concept of specters is applied to desires, memories/records, history, fantasy, virtual/reality and social media images. The film history capturing to list memories and moments brings up the specters of socio-political genealogy. Most of films aiming for socio-political change are its examples and white constituting Mise-en-scene records to remember a historical event in Peppermint Candy(2000), The Attorney(2013) and A Taxi Driver(2017).

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.43-76
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• 2020

After comparing three video dramas based on Yoon Sim-duk and Kim Woo-jin, this paper intensively explores the movie Praise of Death(1991), which has the most meaningful traits in embodying the characters, focusing on the relationship with the previous works of the director or an actress. The movie Yoon Sim-duk(1969) focuses on meiodramatic narrative around the issue like love triangle or a relationship between out-of-wedlock woman and the wife of one man. The TV drama Praise of Death(2018) is pursuing ideal youth genre between attractive two lovers adorning even the suffering of the Japanese occupation with customary visual image. In comparison, the movie Praise of Death(1991) focuses on visual beauty, while overlaps the agony of two characters as pioneering artists with frustrated love narrative. In the process, this film reveals two-sided characteristics, especially the heroine, compared to the other two. She shows a rift between the passivity for the salvation of man and the activity of choosing even the fall of her own life. In order to examine this trait, we have to explore the other works which affect the movie Praise of Death. This came from the tendency director Kim Ho-sun and actress Jang Mi-hee had built in 1970s films. It also relates in the movies Jang Mi-hee had worked with director bae Chang-ho in the 1980s. The tendency to show a pursuit of classical cultures in the field of popular movies, and to overlap the problems of desire, including sexuality, with mental and intellectual issues, continues from the previous films to the movie Praise of Death for shaping a main female character. This study results in examining the movie Praise of Death in two contexts. One is the context of three video dramas having same materials, Yoon Sim-duk and Kim Woo-jin. And other is the context of the works that director Kim Ho-sun and actress Jang Mi-hee have continued together, or the works that Jang Mi-hee have continued with director Bae Chang-ho. Until now, Yoon Sim-duk and Kim Woo-jin has been used as a material for cultural contents in the various genres over and over again. Under this circumstance, by looking at this movie, one of representative case dealing with Yoon and Kim, in the complex context, it can reaffirm the effect and difficulty in fictionalisation of them as a subject matter.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.281-313
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• 2019

This paper was written to investigate the narrative traits of Lee Ae-rim's Comic Books. Lee Ae-rim arrived on the scene with the boom of comic book magazines in the 1990s. Although she started her career as a Comic Book writer, she expanded her own area gradually and has been working actively as an animation director as well. The superficial characteristics of Lee Ae-rim's works can be summed up as sexuality, grotesqueness, and fantasy. In other words, Lee Ae-rim's comic books are mainly characterized by the visualization of sexual, grotesque, and fantastic shapes. Lee Ae-rim has faced challenges with her own overwhelming and compelling images like no one else. For that reason, it is true that people haven't paid careful attention to the hidden stories behind her pictures. This paper considers that looking back on the narratives that Lee Ae-rim has been interested in, from early days to recent days, that is to say, the contexts of stories, is a shortcut to reveal a point of contact between her past, present, and future. Especially, this paper focused on the properties of the circulated and repeated stories, the stories ruled by fate and coincidence, and the stories in which elements of fantasy encounter an attempt of violation. As a result, it was found that the narratives of Lee Ae-rim's comic books demand us to face suppressed desires in a new way, by wrapping up the most fundamental aspects of human being in universality and constancy with specificity and grotesqueness. The reason why Lee Ae-rim has continued the avant-garde and omnidirectional works thus far explains what our society suppresses, inversely. Moreover, the narratives of Lee Ae-rim are significant, by being devoted to the right function of art not only to disclose suppressed desires but to satisfy them. Making an in-depth investigation of the narratives of Lee Ae-rim's comic books in various contexts, this research is intended to establish a diversity of Korean comic books, by adding meaning to the creative values of individual writers.

• Women's Studies Review
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.73-109
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• 2010

The cultural pluralism on which more and more emphasis is put in the globalized cultural environment, takes local identity as a crucial index for the cultural exchange on the global level, but at the same time it results in transforming individual regions/places into a homogeneous space, as it forces the local identity itself to fit into the standardized global perspective. In this context I focus on two art projects that are related to 'Dongducheon', a town that houses the U. S. Second Infantry Division. These projects attract specific attention due to the fact that Dongducheon is a significant place with very 'thick' cultural identity: it reveals that modernization in Korea took place in intersection of nationalism, patriarchy and gender/sexuality postcolonial (military) culture. With these two Dongducheon related art projects (Donglyung Kim) and (Eunyoung Jeong) as excellent examples of site-specific art practice, this paper asks what it means to keep the historicity of disappearing local space/place in the global era. And how is it possible to 'represent' an extremely gendered/sexualized place like Dongducheon. This should be examined from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Since emancipation from Japanese occupation Dongducheon has been an island or an outside space in the nation-state Korea. This becomes more complicated, as now mostly women from the Philippines or former Soviet countries are working in the nightclubs in Doungducheon. and are feminist activist experiments to make the place with its residents to be seen and heard in proper a way of mourning, recognition and communication. shows the 'new' kijich'on women as those who are daring to be on an 'Odyssey' for a better life as they run everyday life in Dongducheon, working in clubs, doing laundry, bearing children, going to mass; tries to help them to be heard and felt, while it gathers sounds on the street or at mass and shows the doors or narrow alleys which lead to the their rooms. It aims to mourn the dead kijich'on women and to represent the precarious life of the present migrant kijich'on women, as it shows no faces.