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Renowned as a cult film director in the U.S. and U.K., South Korean film director Chan-Wook Park has been promoted as much as criticized for his sensational features. Although Park is a popular celebrity director in South Korea,1 his films have mostly been distributed in the West as DVDs and under the label of "Asian Extreme." The genre known as Asian Extreme Cinema started as nothing more than a brand name, which was Tartan Film's marketing strategy in Europe and North America, beginning in 2001, for a line of Asian films that share a combination of sensational features, such as extreme violence, horror, and shocking plots.2 However, Park has been renowned as "a commercial auteur" and "a national celebrity" in South Korea (Lee 203-4). For Korean audiences, the extreme cinema of Park delivers the otherwise unrepresentable trauma of the modernizing process that South Korea has undergone. Chan-Wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy-comprised of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)-has opened up questions of the politics and aesthetics of transnational Korean films.
Many film scholars of East Asian cinema have criticized Tartan's marketing strategy- their clustering of Asian films from different genres and labeling them with the orientalizing as well as essentializing term, "Asian Extreme." These critics, in response to extremely negative reviews of Park's films, have suggested that the dismay of western critics and audiences results, in part, from orientalist perceptions about the East, in which the "shadow" of western culture is projected onto the construction of an "Orient" that functions as an inversion of "the West" (Shin 86-7). The branding of the Extreme Asian genre borrows from orientalist fantasies of the West, and, in turn, reinforces exotic stereotypes of the East.3 In other words, western cultists, collecting specific genres of East Asian films with the expectation of graphic visual extremity and classifying that visual style as distinctively Asian, disclose a recurrent anxiety toward the East, which once again presents the East and its artifacts and commodities as unknown, incomprehensible, and wholly "other."
Although the global spectator's cultural and national positioning, in turn, has influenced the branding and categorizing of Park's films as Asian Extreme, the western recognition of something beyond the ordinary in extreme cinema, even within the...