Professor Justin O’Connor, University of South Australia and Dr Hye-Kyung Lee, King’s College London.

This seminar aims to discuss how we can rethink and reconceptualise creative industries (CI) policy by exploring the policy development in China and South Korea. Justin O’Connor (University of South Australia) and Hye-Kyung Lee (CMCI, KCL) challenge the prevailing West-centrism in the current literature by taking different approaches: ideological and institutional. O’Connor argues that the discourse of creativity is a crucial component of the global ideoscape and its global dissemination from post-industrial liberal democracies essentially carries a new sense of (neoliberal) modernity, with which countries such as China should/can transform themselves and catch up with their Western counterparts. He notes that ‘creativity’ forms a discursive bundle appealing to both the government and grassroot cultural actors, and creates new interface between them, which is often mediated by urban creative clusters. Meanwhile Lee compares CI policy in the UK (passive, indirect, discursive and focusing on market failures) with Korea’s content industries policy (centralised, interventionist, industry-specific and focusing on creating markets). She finds complexity and paradox in the culture-state-market nexus. Despite the neoliberal undertone, the UK’s CI policy engenders space for ‘cultural’ policy agendas; while Korea’s statist policy is underpinned by a stronger tendency of cultural commodification. O’Connor and Lee hope that the seminar will be interactive with lively Q&A.   

Biography

Justin O’Connor is Professor at the School of Creative Industries, University of South Australia. He is also Visiting Professor in the Department of Cultural Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University. Between 2010—2018 he was part of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression, and a board member of Renew Australia. He has led several funded research projects in cultural policy and creative cities in Australia and China. He works closely with international and national cultural policy makers, and has published numerous writings on cultural economy, cultural policy, and creative urban policy in China. 

Hye-Kyung Lee is senior lecturer at Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London. She teaches cultural policy and has worked on cultural/arts policy, creative industries, fandom and cultural marketing. Her recent publications include Cultural Policy in South Korea, the Routledge Handbook of Cultural and Creative Industries in Asia, and Cultural Policies in East Asia.