• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.41
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• pp.7-32
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• 2015

This study started from an interest in the unique history and literature of Okinawa and Jeju Islands. The Battle of Okinawa at a late stage of the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II, and the indiscriminate violence in the 4.3 Jeju Massacre directly show the shared tragedy of the two islands; furthermore, they are are both located on the frontier of a nation's authority, and thus are symbolic cases. This thesis analyzes Oshiro Tatsuhiro's Island of the Gods and Hyun, Ki Young's Sooni's Uncle, both directly deal with the tragedy of two different but analogous incidents, and question the difference in memory struggle and definitions. Thus, though both novels show a similarity in focusing on and exposing the forbidden memory of mass suicide and massacre, the methods of suggesting the course of memory struggle are different. For example, in contrast to Hyun who took a different approach from the fury, accusations, and violence of South Korea to espoused forgiveness and reconciliation, Oshiro showed the changes in the form of responding to the mainland Japan.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.14-28
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• 2013

This study aims to identify the elements of black culture and use it to analyze the formative characteristics of casual fashion items as well as the symbolic meanings presented in the graphic designs of the items. First of all, in order to distinguish the identity of black culture, this study made a division into racial, social, and artistic aspects based on cultural specificities of Stuart Hall, a culture theorist. This was for a theoretical review and based on this review, a theoretical framework was developed to analyze the characteristics of American casual fashion design of black people. The case study selected 1719 fashion images of 137 male brands and 33 female brands from websites of companies manufacturing casual wear of black people in America. The following is a summary of the study results. The conceptual characteristics based on specificities of black culture can be categorized into ten attributes: playfulness in order to digest human grief and emotion positively, satire of the mainstream society, spontaneity through emotional expression from the heart, abstractness of various emotions elating suffering, humor trying to express negative aspects as the meaning of light and innocent laughter, dependence with passive attitudes toward discrimination and master-slave relationships in history, resistance against discrimination and disadvantages, African orientation and primitiveness pursuing natural conditions, aggressiveness against violence and unfair treatment, and confidence and defiance against social deprivation and corruption. Based on the results of an analysis through formative classification system founded on racial, social, and artistic aspects of black people, specificities of black culture are of formative characteristics of their casual fashion design. These elements are presented on graphic t-shirts through strong colors, loose silhouette, and details with many pockets. These characteristics were reflected in symbolic meanings presented in the graphic.

• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.151-160
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• 2012

The Purpose of this study is to examine the inner symbolic meaning of the revenge movies, forcing on , , by producer Chan-Wook Park. This study was analyzed with theoretical frames of Greimas's and Lacan's desire theory. The results of this study is as follows: Main characters of these films were tangled each their with love, desire, angry, hate and revenge. They also had desires and needs of revenge caused by deficiency. These films represented blue as sorrow, depression, frigidness, loneliness and deficiency, red as love, desire, angry, hate and revenge, black as strong will, till-eat, death, violence and bloody-mindedness and white as forgiveness, expiation and salvation. The function of colors in conveying meaning was very effected to analyzing the visual power implications and psychological effects on human feelings that colors have in the movie.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.301-338
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• 2021

John Woo's A Better Tomorrow arrived at the turning point of Korean society between 1987 and 1988. The Hong Kong movie boom that started here reached its peak around the 1990s. What does this phenomenon mean? Hong Kong action films have functioned as an important resource for Korean young male subculture since the late 1960s. The audience of A Better Tomorrow matches the audience of previous Hong Kong films in a generational and gendered way. The fascination of Hong Kong action films by young Korean men from 1987 to 1991 has nothing to do with Hong Kong's political context. However, a certain affect is shared between Korean and Hong Kong audiences. It could be said to be the brotherhood within the struggling group. The affective economies of this fraternity embodies the broad solidarity of 1987, the solidarity of comrades seeking to resist the violence of the world. It also works on symbolic and practical gender bias. In other words, this loyalty is nothing but loyalty between the (male) brothers who are confronting the injustice of the world. This is the "translational possibility" of A Better Tomorrow.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.353-368
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• 2015

Walter Van Beirendonck expresses a fairy tale world of perverted sexual desire of sadism and masochism, violence, and aggressiveness that breaks from a transient one-time concept as is an essential element of fashion. This study classifies the aesthetic characteristic shown on the design of Walter Van Beirendonck and analyzes the intent of his symbolism and meaning. The attempt has a meaning in exploring a new directionality of fashion by conveying a critical message to this end, contemporary fashion breaks down boundaries with artistic genre and connects a problematic consciousness that exists in life with fashion. The results of study on the aesthetic characteristics of Walter Van Beirendonck are as follows. First, Beirendonck emphasized an interpersonal image about body by giving a question through the deconstruction of image on a perfect body into race, age, and body based on body modification. Second, fetishism appeared as a consciousness that human identity and character can be changed by connecting a fetish element of sexual identity, and sadism and masochism with fashion's imagination. Third, infantilism as an amusement expression of the form metaphorically satirized life of modern people. Fourth, makeup shown on performance or festival of an African tribe was used in the way of mixture or reuse for ethnography to obtain inspiration from ethnography. Fifth, pop art combined a popular culture code as amusement through mass production and mass media. Aesthetics of Beirendonck do not have norm and are bold in using form, color, pattern, print, and styling because Beirendonck reinterpreted critical attitudes about essential problems that human life entails into a motif of his symbolic meaning in amusement. In regards to his design aesthetics, Beirendonck expanded fashion to the scope of Gesamtkunstwerk in a consistent and continued theme combined with philosophical creativity and differentiated from other fashion designers.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.6 no.12
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• pp.287-295
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• 2006

New Recently introduced to domestic market, MMA(Mixed Martial Arts) is growing very rapidly, thereby acquiring the property of sub-culture. With its proper function of providing dynamism and vitality, it also becomes the target of apprehension for its social dysfunction due to excessive violence. However, it is important to recognize MMA as a phenomenon and to understand the cultural flow inside MMA. It is required that the space where MMA is held should provide new experience in each contest. It is necessary to prepare very diverse productions for this purpose. While comprehension on this cultural and spatial phenomenon could mean one of starting point of space creation of space designer, it is necessary to study in the contextual aspect including historic and psychological approach. Thus, this study aims to understand one of the diverse meanings of modem space by investigating the space inherent in the phenomenon of MMA.

• The Journal of Korean-Japanese National Studies
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• no.32
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• pp.215-275
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• 2017

In the absence of the alternative public space of women in Japan, the experience of the "Bongseonhwa" was interpreted as the public domain of Japanese society as a public domain, a confession that focused on gender discrimination in the patriarchal system of Japan, Most of the enemy discourse is. These alienated discourses are the product of the efforts of women in Japan who do not want to forget about the traces and memories that can not be incorporated into the big narrative. It can not be denied that the women in the society of Japan have been excessively excluded and alienated by national ideology and patriarchal ideology. The meaning of presenting them through "Bongsinghwa" is the resistance of the minority, and it is the expression way of reconstructing and strengthening the identity of the women, and it is said to be a space of symbolic meaning. It is further clarified that it is based on a narrative that creates a new life area for coexistence with Japanese society, on the other hand, by constantly searching for the linkage with the motherland, held by women in Japan. As a result, between public social phenomena and private living space, confirmed that it conflicts with repetitive internal contradiction of controlling power and confirmed that complicated and detailed material of women living in Japan who undergo double discrimination What has been expressed over a period is considered to be a resistance expression and a will of expression of reconciliation to coexist with Japanese society. I have attempted to analyze the confessed alienated discourse of "Bongsinghwa" by classifying it as . As a result, it is confirmed that the public social phenomenon and the private life space are confronted with the repetitive internal contradictions of the power of domination, and the expression of the complex and detailed material of the discriminated women in Japan over a long period of time is a resistance to symbiosis with Japanese society And the will of the conversation.

• The Critical Review of Religion and Culture
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• no.25
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• pp.77-122
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• 2014

A Japanese director Sion Sono(園子溫, born in 1961), who is not so familiar to us yet, has been depicting the world of violence and sexuality filled with poetic and philosophical messages through the shockingly impressive works such as Strange Circus(2005), Love Exposure(2008), Cold Fish(2010), Guilty of Romance(2011), and so forth after the great success of Suicide Circle(2001) and its second film Noriko's Dinner Table(2005). In addition to these, he has also presented a kind of realistic visions in much more direct ways by Himizu(2011) or Land of Hope(2013) after 3 11 disaster. The purpose of this paper is to try a psychoanalytic interpretation of Sion Sono's film, centering on his Guilty of Romance(愛のむきだし), in terms of the concepts of Jacques Lacan(1901-1981), for example, gaze, objet petit a, fantasy, desire, the imaginary-the symbolic-the real, jouissance, etc. In so doing, this paper will pay special attention to the discourse of love on one hand, exploring the way how to show any new perspective to the religious studies by reading film and religion in association with Lacan on the other hand.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.95-124
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• 2021

As the symbolic images of girls besides its definition have varied according to the age and society, a posthuman girl character recently appears in the digital cinema. This study aims to analyze its cinematic representations and the social contexts in which they are created. For this purpose, the study focuses on what extent the society allows its imagined figurations as a future female body and the meanings revolving around the image of 'technologically body-enhanced female fighter'. Current digital visualization technology has developed to the extent any imaged future humans can be represented, but posthuman girls' representations have its limitation that only a human-like figuration can be allowed in accord with the traditionally idolized image of girls. It is because of the representation logic in which digital cinema is visualized based on perceptual realism that values audiences' experiences. Despite such less critical figuration which does not dare to cross the boundary between the image of human and inhuman, the posthuman girl characters create a new category of the 'dangerous girls' who are both void of sexual femininity and independent of motherhood and heterosexual romance narrative. Of course, they support the modern human-centered belief that humans can take entire control of technology with their moral behaviors and dispel the fear about the negative impact the nature of technology may have on society at large by showing their child-like figuration protecting ethical values. However, the new character of 'unruly girl' exerts her subversive act that seeks to fight against the human-centered liberal humanistic values and melancholic feeling and vulnerability that the neoliberalism and technocracy enforce. When posthuman girl characters are considered to be a marker through which we can see how different social forces are intervening and competing each other in the upcoming posthuman age, the limited figuration of the posthuman girl characters in South Korean movies illustrates the opinionated thoughts toward the instrumentalism in technology but their bloodshed struggles reveal how the corporate or state-governed techno-biopower has oppressively treated and appropriated the human body as the technology-object and also provide a meaningful opportunity to rethink its unethical violence.