Resumen

The image industries in Asia are a real spearhead of a new expansion despite the ups and downs of the last 20 years, with the emerging shadow of neighbouring China, which has become a major film producer today. In this region, the image industries developed at the turn of the 1990s, in historical contexts that were certainly varied, but marked by promising economic development with cyclical crises. Our primary objectives would be to provide a new and relevant framework for reading these cross-fertilized audiovisual phenomena, based on the collection of local literature, which is often poorly deciphered, as well as on various surveys carried out over a period of five years in East Asia.
Under my direction, as part of a network of researchers in Europe and Asia, we published an issue of Théorème entitled «Les industries de l’image en Asie de l’Est (Chine-Hong Kong, Corée, Japon, Taiwan) entre mondialisation et identités locales», published by Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2022, to develop another point of observation: that of Asia, based on these four converging poles: South Korea, China and Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan, never really approached from this comparative angle. This part of Asia, which could be described as East Asia, is a region which has also been less studied from the point of view of the cultural industries, and therefore remains a favourite terrain for understanding certain significant changes on a planetary scale (one individual in six in the world is now Asian, with a global population of approximately 1.6 billion inhabitants in all four zones).
This new economy excels today in the high-tech sector concentrated around the main urban centres in South Korea, Hong Kong/Shanghai in China, Japan and Taiwan. But these socio-cultural and economic transformations linked to the globalisation of the image industries are almost essentially perceived from the point of view of the United States. We need to analyse them differently.
A geopolitical reflection here on the borders of images and their circulation in East Asia, also obliges to restate that of the more porous relations between cultural industries and creative industries to measure a set of evolving and disparate practices during this Avanca conference.