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Since the 1990s, there has been dense traffic of pop culture routinely crossing the national and cultural boundaries of East Asian countries of Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The unequal traffic is predominantly from Japan and Korea into ethnic-Chinese dominant locations, which has a historically long and well established production, distribution and exhibition network; Japan and Korea are primarily production-exporting nations, while China and Singapore as primarily importing-consumption ones, with Taiwan emerging as the production centre in Mandarin pop music and Hong Kong remaining as the primary production location of Chinese languages cinemas. Japanese and Korean pop culture are translated, dubbed or subtitled into a Chinese language in one of the ethnic-Chinese importing locations and then re-exported and circulated within the entire Chinese ‘diaspora’. The structures and processes that engender this transnational flow are the foundational to the emergence of an East Asian regional media cultural economy that increasingly see co-production of films and television dramas.

This chapter examines cult Asian cinema in the UK at the very peak of its critical acclaim and commercial success, and the drastically altered context for Asian film reception will be discussed. This chapter argues that the proliferation and high visibility of a wider range of Asian cinema than critics had ever experienced before has allowed them to finally construct their own canons of quality within national Asian cinema industries and genres. The frames of reference used by British critics to assess meaning and value have changed dramatically. At this point, too, Tartan’s brand had been transformed, achieving mainstream visibility, yet finding itself in danger of expanding to the point of losing authenticity and fracturing into meaninglessness. Nonetheless, 2004 was the peak year for Tartan, and a wide range of their releases and promotional (and self-congratulatory) activities are examined: the acclaimed release of bold new Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs (2002); the unprecedented success of Oldboy (2003), hot off its award from the Cannes International Film Festival; the critical debate inspired by the uncategorisable cult hit Save the Green Planet! (2003); and finally the scandalous (non-)release of Battle Royale II (2003).

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of how East Asian cinema emerged on the international stage towards the end of the twentieth century. It then sets out the book's purpose, namely to draw attention to the relevant debates around and analyses of East Asian directors and their work. The book discusses the wider questions of gender, history, nationalism, economics, artistic movements, and war together with evaluation of the interplay between the global and the local, national and international. The aim is not an analysis based on socio-history but an interdisciplinary one that will see the directors and their works as integrally involved in the wider cultural debates that are taking place on a regional, national, and international scale.

This chapter discusses significant trends in contemporary Hong Kong horror film including the growing importance of transnational co-productions, export markets, and a fertile cross-breeding of popular genres native to both Hong Kong and other East Asian cinema. It reveals how the Hong Kong film industry, previously threatened by such Hollywood blockbusters as Jurassic Park (1993) and The Matrix (1999), has attempted to move toward more regionally driven film production through the successful efforts of Filmko Pictures and its supernatural thriller Inner Senses (2002). It also describes how regional film industries such as Hong Kong's have successfully crafted self-consciously pan-Asian films via the horror genre, and have helped transform production strategies.

Pop culture has emerged has a vehicle of soft power and an arena for competition in cultural diplomacy between China, Japan and Korea. As a middle-power, Korea is the most self-conscious about turning the popularity of its pop culture into an instrument to influence its consumers in Japan and, especially China. Japan’s ability to exercise cultural influence is limited by the potential push-back from memories its colonization of Korea and war time atrocities in China. With a nascent media industry, China is currently at a disadvantage because it is a net importer of pop culture; however, its massive consumption power has begun to force foreign producers to seek co-production opportunities with Chinese companies in order to avoid being kept out by import restrictions imposed by the Chinese government. Co-production gives the Chinese counterparts the right to control the content of the programs, than an ideological advantage. In view of the soft power competition, the idea of pan-East Asian cinema seems to be a project deferred rather than one that is imminent.

Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) achieved only moderate success on its initial release in South Korea, but upon finding international distribution it attained much greater notoriety, winning a major prize at Cannes and attracting an unusually passionate and positive critical consensus. This chapter examines Spike Lee’s 2013 transnational film remake in terms of its critical reception, and the way in which the ‘reinterpretation’ was framed by its director in press interviews and public discourse. The chapter analyses how Lee attempted to escape the negative connotations of the ‘remake’ and brand his film as another entry in his own auteurist canon, despite the sceptical response from critics. This chapter further analyses the reception of the film in terms of the ways critics address the spectacle of violence, notions of taste, and the assumed cultural differences between American and South Korean audiences. Lee’s Oldboy thus offers the opportunity not only to examine the transformation of material from one director to another, but to interrogate broader debates over the intersection of the auteur as symbol/brand and the imagined (lack of) creative freedom afforded directors of remakes.