Cruising the Art Museum:On the Migration of Queer Experimental Cinema in South Korea Ungsan Kim (bio) 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 [End Page 191] arguably offered more opportunities to queer filmmakers and media art practitioners. Along with the rapid penetration of the internet and mobile communications in the following decades, digital video enabled practically anyone to create, edit, and appreciate audio-visual media. For queer visual artists and independent filmmakers who rarely received institutional support or distributional privilege, this democratization of media access and utilization represented more than a reduction in production costs; it granted queer artists more freedom to articulate their artistic visions.2 It is no coincidence that a new generation of innovative queer media creators emerged in this transitional period, which included siren eun young jung, Kim Dujin, and Kim Kyung-mook. However, the oligopolistic streaming market accelerates the marginalization of independent queer cinema, more specifically queer experimental cinema, that resists commodification.3 Netflix, the most popular OTT service platform in South Korea, for instance, curates about thirty queer Asian works as of September 2022. Out of the thirty titles, eighteen are popular BL films and shows, while only one film is documentary. Considering the relative dearth of queer films in general, the primacy of mainstream popular cinema among streaming oligopolists is more daunting than exhilarating, as it urgently threatens the sustainability of queer experimental cinema. It is thus an irony that the digital turn and technological advancement that not only helped queer filmmakers create and circulate their works in the past but also contributed to the expansion of queer communities through what several scholars call "networked intimacy" now dismiss alternative types of queer film and media works disproportionately in favor of commercially profitable modes of production.4 Hence, one might ask how non-commercial, non-narrative, and abstract queer cinema, which often rejects capitalist metrics, can survive OTT culture and its market logic. In the following sections, I will discuss the resilience of queer experimental cinema by deliberating on its migration to art museums, including the negotiation tactics of recent works by Im Cheol-min. REPURPOSING AND ARCHIVING AS QUEER PRACTICES In April 2019, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Korea hosted a film series titled Dear Cinema: Difference and [End Page 192] Repetition. Among the invited films were Im Cheol-min's experimental films Pingbing (B-ing B-ing, 2016) and Yagwang (Glow Job, 2018). The screening of Im's works at the MMCA deserves special attention, as the artistic conceits and motifs of his films explicitly reflect vernacular queer history of Seoul as well as what can be termed queer aesthetics. Im already screened his experimental feature P'ŭrijŭma (PRISMA, 2013) at the MMCA in 2014. P'ŭrijŭma uses a montage of many different meaningless shots or shots made by mistake that would be deemed useless under ordinary circumstances. For instance, viewers see a series of multiple takes of the same scene, in which the camera records Im spending a tedious amount of time lying down, getting up, and continuously calling "cut" while facing...
Read full abstract
Sep 23, 2024
Hufrish Majra + 1
Open Access