• Journal of Popular Narrative
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.117-144
• /
• 2020

The film Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) is one of the most noted Korean films in recent years as a work that unfolds an elaborate narrative in a delicate visualization. This film is a multi-vocal text in which different types of characters appear and scattered objective facts and ambiguous subjective desires are intertwined, so it is a text that has room for diverse interpretations. This article attempts to read Burning as an ethical discourse centered on the protagonist Jong-su, noting that the film raises universal and significant ethical issues that transcend the specific social and historical conditions of a contemporary Korean youth. I would like to examine the situation in which Jong-su is facing and his reaction to it, above all, from the perspective of Jong-su's ethical awakening and leap forward. Jong-su, a young South Korean non-regular man living in the present, encounters and connects with Hae-mi and Ben and attempts to understand the mysteries of the world. His trajectory, which the film shows closely, inevitably intersects the social and historical dimension of confusion and frustration of a young man graduated from the Department of Creative Writing, the reality of family dissolution and the individual psychological dimension of the sudden disappearance of his lover Hae-mi. Burning is a magistrate film that depicts Jong-su as an ethical subject oriented toward 'communal togetherness' while confronting the world and exploring its mysteries despite all his unfavorable conditions, such as his social position of the precariat youth and the epistemological uncertainty of reality perception. It is read as a story of his painful growth, in which Jong-su is becoming a 'writer', who once was a helpless non-regular delivery worker.

• Archives of design research
• /
• v.19 no.1 s.63
• /
• pp.201-214
• /
• 2006

Modern society is an age of vagueness and confusion. In addition, vagueness, complexity and variety are seen throughout art including modern philosophy, literature, and environmental design. A phenomenon like this shows that modern society has integrated different components as an organic relationship frequently crossing the boundary of fields. This feature can be regarded as hybrid related with accepting contradictory components and binding them into one under relationship between part and whole. As new design concept, presented are attitude to accept the two instead of attitude to select one of the alternatives, abundance instead of dearness, and ambiguity instead of simplicity. This principle has a crucial influence on creative design providing opposing contradiction and several alternative plans as non-deterministic form not completed one and, above all, useful information in mutual dependence and mutual relationship. When it comes to hybrid, therefore, a strategy is needed to consider layer of several fields getting out of standardizing space into a single space. As an event of this situation and concept, space experience means behaving freely based on experience of users' body. It can be known that this experience brings about users' more dynamic experience in comparison with the experience of seeing environmental design from a viewpoint of visual ism on the existing simplicity. Such a practical experience is subjective, synesthetic, and non-observational one. Therefore, hybrid has brought active users to the stage, which is distinguished from synesthesia felt through body's experience, not through observational attitude and visual space which achieve former balance and harmony with non-determination. That's because hybrid creatures are turning to a product resulted from creative imagination instead of from reappearance which makes text visualized. Such experience performed by user's active participation collapses the boundary between special elite-centered art and daily life and it is the present progressive form showing creation process of future events and new esthetic experience.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
• /
• v.25 no.4
• /
• pp.159-190
• /
• 2019

This paper aims to examine to the political unconsciousness of social movies that have caused social repercussions in the 2010s, and to study the social imagination of Korean films at that time. Korean Movies such as (2013), <1987>(2017) and (2017) reflect the ethos of civil society based on common sense and justice. The epic structure was the same as that of ordinary citizens, who move toward a public space (court, square) after awakening their political correctness. More than anything else, the fact that such films were based on "a historical fact" could have been a strategy to avoid censorship in the era of the blacklist. In these social films, courts and squares have become places for democracy. The conservative government of the time was tired of anti-government resistance and the politics of the square. Thus, films from directors and producers blacklisted were difficult to produce. That's why the court in the movie during this period could become a symbolic proxy for the "legitimate" reenactment of the politics of the square, which was subject to censorship and avoidance by the regime of the time. Meanwhile, the square has gradually become the main venue for political films that advocate "historic true stories." The square of the 1980s, which appeared in the movies, will be connected to the Gwanghwamun candlelight square that audiences experienced in 2017. Furthermore, it was able to reach the concept of an abstract square as an "open space for democracy." At the foundation of these works is a psychological framework that equates the trauma of the failed democratic movement of the 1980s to the trauma of the failed progressive movement of the 2010s. Through this study, we were able to see that social political films in the 2010s were quite successful, emphasizing "political correctness" and constitutional common sense. But they also had limitations as "de-political popular films" that failed to show imagination beyond the censorship of the blacklist era.