ABSTRACT
Korean cultural policy under Park Chung-Hee's leadership in the 1960s and 1970s was a very complicated political and socio-cultural phenomenon that occupies a rather awkward location in the country's narrative of cultural policy. The statist cultural co-option was an essential element of authoritarian governance that lasted till the late 1980s. The cultural policy was a social phenomenon, where many artists, writers and intellectuals co-operated with the government and helped to culturally legitimise the regime's political and economic endeavours. The government's dealing with the cultural sector was oriented towards working with 'organised' artists and cultural practitioners. What Korean policy makers did was to transform the Western discourse of 'modernisation' to a top-down national project. In Korea there was an abundance of discussion of the culture-economy nexus throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The Motion Picture Act, the first film law in post-liberation Korea, provided a strong ground for state control over film production, exhibition, import and export.
