Qi Wang
Qi Wang is an Associate Professor of film studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), a study of post-socialism and independent films made between 1990 and 2010 in China. She has also published articles in positions: asia critique, Asian Cinema, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, MCLC (Modern Chinese Culture and Literature) Resource Center and so on. Currently she is writing a new monograph on East Asian cinema; this is a comparative study of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese-language cinemas focusing on their varied approaches to the dynamic relationship between film form/aesthetics and topics of history, society, culture, and modernity including war crimes and responsibility, shamanism and urbanization, neoliberalism and youth, ethnic minorities and diaspora.
Georgia Institute of Technology
Session
With the success of the Apple TV + drama series Pachinko (2022), the stories of Korean diasporas—scattered in Japan, China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and in more recent decades, the US—began to enter the arena of global public attention. Closer at home in East Asia, however, the representation of Korean diasporas in mainstream cinema and media tends to see stereotypical association with crime and illegality. While Zainichi Koreans-in-Japan appeared in Japanese cinema in the 1960s—the most famous example being Oshima Nagisa’s Death by Hanging (1967)—which soon became enriched and balanced by works by Zainichi filmmakers from the 1970s on, Korean Chinese (chaoxianzu/joseonjok) have made scanty and often marginalized appearances in mainstream Chinese and South Korean cinemas.
My paper focuses on the representation of Korean Chinese in contemporary South Korean crime thrillers. In films like The Yellow Sea (dir. NA Hong-jin, 2010), New World (dir. PARK Hoon-jung, 2013), and Decision to Leave (dir. PARK Chan-wook, 2022), joseonjok characters, despite their co-ethnicity, appear as cultural others exploited through outsourcing employment and investigative desire. Whereas joseonjok males tend to be hired as low-paid killers whose skillful ferocity is typically associated with animalism, joseonjok females work low-pay service jobs and also seem desirable only through associations with crime and illegality. Enlivening film analysis with research on migration history, labor, (post-)globalization, and issues such as aging and low birth rate in contemporary South Korea, my presentation offers a rich interdisciplinary discussion on film, genre, diaspora, migration, labor, desire, and modernity.