Peripherals Encounter: The Hong Kong Film Syndrome in South Korea

Despite the enormous popularity of Hong Kong films in the mid 1980s to the mid-1990s in South Korea, a scarcity of documents makes this phenomenon difficult to prove or illustrate. Very few explanations of this phenomenon are mentioned in any academic publications on Korean film history in Korean or in English. This period of the "Hong Kong Film syndrome"¹ has been commemorated as the personal memories of individual audience members who lived through the time, rather than being mobilized as an important part of the cultural history of Korea: it seems to be completely erased from the cultural memory of Korean society, destined to vanish with the fading memories of fans. This article reevaluates the significance of the presence of Hong Kong cinema in Korean film culture at that time. In the process of analyzing this cultural phenomenon, the "Hong Kong Film Syndrome," I want to argue how popular culture, and especially that coming from a neighboring society, Hong Kong, provided an alternative space in which Korean people could actively engage themselves in the act of resistance and negotiation with various challenges coming from the domestic social and political situations, intertwined with the larger politics of global culture and economy.

The Hong Kong Film Syndrome

The 1980s were not in fact the first period of interaction between the film industries in Hong Kong and Korea. As early as in the 1960s, the two film industries maintained a close collaborative relationship. Although the fascination with Hong Kong films in Korea persisted throughout the early 1970s, due mostly to the international stardom of Bruce Lee, and was revived in the early to the mid-1980s with Jackie Chan's popular action films, in actuality, with the exception of the passionate reception of Lee's and Chan's films, this enthusiasm did not translate into a general popularity of Hong Kong cinema. Until the mid-1980s, the popularity of Hong Kong films in Korea was built up only around these two names.

A new stage of popularity of the Hong Kong cinema in Korea began in the mid-1980s, with the influx of a new generation of Hong Kong films. Besides the changing sociopolitical circumstances of Hong Kong during this time—most notably the Sino British Joint Declaration by the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United Kingdom in 1984 and the return of Hong Kong to PRC on July 1, 1997—the same period witnessed a significant transformation in the Hong Kong film industry as well. The Hong Kong film industry saw the rise of a new generation of filmmakers many of whom were educated in Western countries and/or were actively responsive to the changing social conditions. These filmmakers include Ann Hui, Alex Cheung, Tsui Hark, and John Woo, among many others.² This new generation of filmmakers consciously created films that differed from the earlier mainstay of the Hong Kong film industry most of which were mass-produced genre films such as costume sword plays or melodramas. They wanted to make films not just for mass entertainment, but that contained meaningful messages, reflecting what the contemporary citizens of Hong Kong were feeling about their volatile social situation. This group of directors and those who followed them started to explore new cinematic techniques and aesthetic styles to enrich their local film culture as well. The series of Hong Kong films that were produced by this new generation of Hong Kong filmmakers during the period eventually ushered in a new phase in the Hong Kong film history, commonly known as the "Hong Kong New Wave."³

The popularity of Hong Kong films in South Korea started in 1987 with the release of A Better Tomorrow (dir. John Woo, 1986) and A Chinese Ghost Story (dir. Ching Siu-tung, 1987), two notable films of the "New Wave," and lasted almost a decade, until the introduction of Wong Kar-wai's art films in the mid-1990s. The kinds of Hong Kong films imported in Korea during the time were mostly modern gangster/cop films often called "Hong Kong Noir...