Research
Media theory through screen cultures
My central research question is what media can do beyond representation.
Media Theory & Media Philosophy
My central research question is what media can do beyond representation. I examine how media organize value, circulation, presence, judgment, affect, and agency, and how these capacities reshape human relations.
Core questions: What powers do media acquire when they cease to be merely representational? How do screens organize capital, presence, judgment, and agency? How do media alter the boundaries between human and nonhuman actors? What happens to judgment and responsibility when machines begin to interpret, respond, and decide?
Screen Capitalism & Transnational Media
This research examines the circulation, remaking, localization, and transformation of audiovisual cultures across national borders. Rather than treating China as a passive market for Korean cultural export, I use Sino-Korean screen circulation as a site for theorizing contemporary transnational media ecology.
My first book develops Screen Capitalism and Amnyu as frameworks for understanding how media circulate through industrial transfer, localization, affective exchange, mutation, and partial invisibility.
Alterity, Religion & Audiovisual Media
This strand of my research examines how media relate to alterity, ritual, spirituality, and presence. Rather than asking only how media represent religious or shamanic practices, I ask how audiovisual forms themselves participate in mediation.
My concept of Shamanic Audiovisualization develops this argument by theorizing audiovisual media as a site through which alterity may be made perceptible as presence — see “Channeling Alterity: Toward a Theory of Shamanic Audiovisualization,” Theory, Culture & Society (OnlineFirst 2026). DOI
Law, Judgment & Screen Justice
My second major research project examines how screens become alternative sites of judgment when formal legal institutions fail.
Moving across Korean cinema and television, the project asks how media produce testimony, judgment, moral visibility, and public forms of justice. It develops the concept of Screen Justice as a broader theory of media, law, and judgment.
Human–AI Relations
My emerging work on artificial intelligence extends these questions into human–AI relations. I am interested in agency, judgment, responsibility, creativity, and the changing meaning of the human when nonhuman systems begin to generate, interpret, respond, and decide.
This research connects media philosophy with contemporary questions of AI governance and ethics.
Books
First book · Under contract with University of Michigan Press
Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture
The book examines what happens to Korean audiovisual culture after its national origin becomes unstable, obscured, localized, or disavowed in China. Rather than telling a conventional story of Korean cultural export, influence, hybridity, or soft power, it asks how Korean audiovisual forms continue to operate after they no longer appear securely—or even visibly—as Korean.
The book develops two central concepts: Screen Capitalism and Amnyu. Screen Capitalism describes the systemic logic through which audiovisual media circulate, localize, commodify, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize. Amnyu names the submerged and mutable persistence of Korean screen culture through localized forms, industrial knowledge transfer, affective practices, and transnational reassembly.
China functions here not simply as a national case or receiving market, but as a generative site from which transnational media theory can be revised.
Second book · Book manuscript in progress
The Spectral Screen: Media, Law, and the Historical Transformation of Screen Justice
My second book project examines how screens become alternative sites of judgment when formal legal institutions fail, prove inadequate, or lose legitimacy. Through cinema and television, the project investigates how testimony, evidence, moral judgment, punishment, memory, and justice are reconfigured through screen media.
The project develops Screen Justice as a conceptual framework for understanding media not only as representations of law, but as active sites where judgment and public forms of justice are produced. Its chapters move from shamanic channeling and the ethics of receptivity, through televised judgment and affective populism, the transnational Togani effect, and counter-forensic screens in Japan, Korea, and China, to supernatural judgment on the speculative screen and the limits of algorithmic justice in an age of prediction.