*This event has been canceled [7/20/2024]*
On Thursday, October 17, from 4:30-6pm in the Allen Auditorium, join CKS as we welcome Professor Sangjoon Lee (City University of Hong Kong) for our 2024 Fall Colloquium.
To register, visit our Ticketleap page by clicking here or by scanning the QR code below.
*Doors open at 4:15pm*
Lee’s talk traces the CIA-funded Asia Foundation’s motion picture projects in Asia from 1952 to 1962 and the activities’ lingering impact on Asian cinema throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, and beyond. He examines how motion picture executives, creative personnel, policy makers, and intellectuals in East and Southeast Asia aspired to industrialize their Hollywood-inspired system in order to expand the market and raise the competitiveness of their cultural products. They did this by forming the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia (FPA), co-hosting the Asian Film Festival, and co-producing films.
Lee argues that the emergence of the first intensive postwar film producers’ network in Asia was, in large part, the offspring of Cold War cultural politics and the product of American hegemony. Film festivals that took place in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Seoul were annual showcases of cinematic talent as well as opportunities for American agencies to establish and maintain cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War.
Sangjoon Lee is an Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Lee is the author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network (Cornell University Press, 2020; Korean edition 2023; Chinese edition 2024). He edited/co-edited The South Korean Film Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2024), Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinema (2024), Rediscovering Korean Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2019), and Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Lee also guest-edited “Is Netflix Riding the Korean Wave or Vice Versa?” (International Journal of Communication, 2023), “Reorienting Asian Cinema in the Age of the Chinese Film Market (Screen, 2019), and “The Chinese Film Industry: Emerging Debates” (Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2019). Lee is currently completing a new monograph Destination Hong Kong: South Korean Cinema’s Encounter with Sinophone Cinemas, while working on a new edited volume on Netflix and the South Korean Media Industry. Lee’s works have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian.