Thursday, April 13, 2023, 6–9 pm
@ Journey’s End Refugee Services (2495 Main Street, Suite #530)
Free or suggested donation

Presented as the opening of the symposium Genre, Gender and Language in Korean Film and Drama, Soon-rye Yim’s 와이키키 브라더스 (Waikiki Brothers, 109 min, 2001) is about high school friends who form a band and struggle to find success, relationships and happiness. The screening will be followed by a lecture by Molly Kim of Hanyang University about the film’s writer and director, Soon-rye Yim. The lecture, “Korean Cinema and The Single Woman: Korean Women Filmmakers through Yim Soon-rye,” will be the opening keynote lecture of UB Asia Research Institute’s Korean studies symposium, followed by a Q&A with Margaret Rhee, assistant professor of Media Studies at SUNY Buffalo and The New School, and Ekrem Serdar, curator at Squeaky Wheel. Special thank you to Kathy Spillman and Journey’s End Refugee Services.

Molly Hyo Kim is Adjunct Professor of the College of Humanities at Hanyang University. She earned a Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, an M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University, and a B.A. in Communication and Culture from Indiana University at Bloomington. She has published her works in Acta Koreana, the Journal of Cultural Studies, the International Journal of Korean History, and more.

Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar and new media artist. Rhee’s debut poetry collection, “Love, Robot,” was published in 2017 and has been named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association.

As a new media artist, her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine is exhibited at the Electronic Literature Review Volume III and included in the anthology Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change(Routledge, 2022). From 2008 – 2018, with collaborators from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, she co-lead the participatory project From the Center which focused on digital storytelling, women of color, and HIV/AIDS education in the San Francisco Jail.

Rhee is an assistant professor at The New School in the School of Media Studies. Prior to The New School, Rhee held a faculty appointments at the University at Buffalo-SUNY, Harvard, and University of Oregon. Rhee earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in ethnic studies with a Designated Emphasis in new media studies, and her B.A. in Creative Writing/English from the University of Southern California.

This symposium Genre, Gender and Language in Korean Film and Drama will feature scholars from the U.S, Asia and Europe examining a wide range of topics in Korean film and television, including sexuality, LGBTQ representation, translation, violence, and popular productions like Squid Game and Parasite. This event is sponsored by the UB Asia Research Institute, Academy of Korean Studies, and Squeaky Wheel. Cosponsors include the UB Departments of Media Study, English, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, Art, and Linguistics, UB Asian Studies Program, Global Film Studies Minor Program, and Gender Institute.

Image: A still from Waikiki Brothers. Four young people looking off to the side of the camera lens on a sunny day.