CASE STUDY
Racial Representation · Geopolitical Realignment · Singapore’s Cultural Position
- Introduction and Background
On 26 February 2026, the Cannes Film Festival announced that South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook would preside over the jury of the 79th edition — the first Korean, and only the second Asian national in Cannes history, to occupy this role. The announcement was not merely administrative: it was a symbolic crystallisation of decades of seismic cultural, economic, and geopolitical transformation.
This case study analyses the appointment through three interlocking lenses: first, how it challenges longstanding racial and cultural stereotypes embedded in global arts institutions; second, what it reveals about the restructuring of international soft power and cultural authority; and third, what implications it carries for Singapore as a small, multicultural, globally integrated society navigating its own cultural identity.
“In this age of hatred and division, I believe that the simple act of coming together in a movie theatre to watch a film at the same time… makes it possible to create a moving, universal sense of solidarity.” — Park Chan-wook, February 2026
- Challenging Racial and Cultural Stereotypes
2.1 The ‘Universal’ Canon as a Western Construct
For most of the twentieth century, the dominant assumption underwriting international cultural institutions — including film festivals, literary prizes, and fine art exhibitions — was that aesthetic universality was, in practice, a Western European phenomenon. Cannes itself, founded in 1946, was premised on French notions of auteur cinema. Its jury presidents have been overwhelmingly European or North American: Cocteau, Visconti, Spielberg, Coppola, the Dardenne brothers. The appointment of a person of colour, and specifically an East Asian director, to the festival’s most authoritative curatorial role is therefore not incidental — it is structurally disruptive.
The stereotype this disrupts is multi-layered. At the most surface level, it refutes the assumption that Asian cinema is a niche, regional, or exotic product requiring translation into Western frameworks to gain legitimacy. At a deeper level, it challenges the racialised hierarchy in which non-Western cultural producers are consumers of universal standards set elsewhere, never their arbiters.
2.2 The ‘Model Minority’ Inversion
There is a second, subtler stereotype at play. East Asian cultures — and Korean culture in particular — have long been racialised in Western popular imagination as technically proficient but emotionally restrained, disciplined but lacking the existential depth associated with European art cinema. Park Chan-wook’s body of work is a systematic deconstruction of this caricature. His films — Oldboy (2003), Thirst (2009), The Handmaiden (2016), Decision to Leave (2022) — are baroque in their emotional violence, philosophically sophisticated, and formally audacious. They engage Zola, Philip Roth, Sarah Waters, John le Carré. They are not ‘Korean films’ in the ethnographic sense; they are world literature on screen.
By placing such a filmmaker at the apex of Cannes, the festival implicitly acknowledges that the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual complexity once coded as exclusively European is neither exclusive nor European. This is the quiet radicalism of the appointment: not a gesture of multicultural tokenism, but a recognition that the centre of gravity in world cinema has actually shifted.
Park’s literary adaptations — from Zola to le Carré — demonstrate that “world cinema” need not mean geographic origin but intellectual ambition. His presence at Cannes signals that cultural authority is being redistributed, not merely diversified.
2.3 The Korean Wave as Systemic, Not Accidental
The appointment cannot be disaggregated from the broader phenomenon of Hallyu — the Korean Wave — which spans cinema (Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, 2019 Palme d’Or and Academy Award for Best Picture), television (Squid Game, KPop Demon Hunters), and popular music (BTS, Blackpink). The instinct is to treat these as isolated commercial successes. The more accurate reading is structural: Korea has invested systematically over three decades in cultural industries as instruments of soft power, and the compound returns are now visible at the highest institutional levels.
This matters for stereotype-breaking because it exposes the limits of a racialised framework that attributed Western cultural dominance to inherent creativity or civilisational superiority, rather than to institutional investment, historical accident, and the self-reinforcing logic of imperial cultural distribution networks. Korea’s rise demonstrates that cultural hegemony is produced, not inherited.
- Reflections of a Shifting World Order
3.1 From a Unipolar Cultural Moment to Multipolarity
The post-Cold War 1990s represented what might be called the apex of Western cultural unipolarity. Hollywood, the BBC, French haute culture, and the Anglophone novel consolidated a global cultural infrastructure that mirrored the economic and military dominance of Western liberal democracies. The 2000s and 2010s began to fracture this arrangement, and the 2020s have accelerated the process. Park Chan-wook’s jury presidency is one data point in a much larger pattern.
Compare the trajectory: in 2002, Imamura Shohei was the last Asian director to receive the Palme d’Or (posthumously honoured). In 2019, Bong Joon-ho won it. In 2025, an Iranian director — Jafar Panahi — won for It Was Just an Accident. In 2026, a Korean presides over the jury. The progression is not random. It reflects the increasing legitimacy of non-Western cinemas within institutional frameworks historically designed to adjudicate Western aesthetic value.
This parallels broader geopolitical realignments. The rise of Asia-Pacific economic power, the relative decline of Euro-Atlantic institutional authority, the emergence of ASEAN, the BRICS expansion, and the increasing capacity of formerly peripheral nations to project cultural, economic, and diplomatic influence — all of these create conditions in which a Korean filmmaker can credibly occupy a role that was, for decades, the preserve of European directors.
The 79th Cannes jury presidency mirrors a world in which the axis of cultural production — like the axis of economic production — has shifted eastward. It is, in miniature, a portrait of multipolarity.
3.2 Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy
Park Chan-wook’s appointment is also legible as a function of South Korea’s deliberate soft-power architecture. Beginning with the Korean Film Council’s policy interventions in the late 1990s, the South Korean government identified cultural export as a strategic priority. The results — Cannes prizes, global streaming dominance, K-pop’s $12 billion annual export value — represent a textbook case of soft power operationalised as national strategy.
Joseph Nye’s original formulation of soft power — the ability to shape preferences through attraction rather than coercion — finds its clearest contemporary instantiation in the Korean model. A nation with a population of 51 million, no colonial legacy of cultural projection, and no linguistic hegemony has constructed a global cultural brand that now shapes the aesthetic preferences of audiences from Manila to Mexico City. Park Chan-wook’s role at Cannes is the symbolic apex of this strategy.
The broader implication for world order is significant: cultural authority and geopolitical authority are no longer coterminous. A country need not be a military or economic hegemon to exercise meaningful cultural influence. This decoupling of cultural from military-economic power is itself a structural feature of the emerging multipolar order.
3.3 The Role of Streaming Platforms in Decentring Production
A structural enabler of this shift has been the globalisation of distribution via streaming platforms. Netflix’s investment in Korean content — beginning notably with Okja (2017) and accelerating through Squid Game — bypassed the traditional gatekeeping function of Western distributors and exhibitors. Content that might previously have circulated only on the festival circuit reached mass global audiences. This de-gatekeeping effect has democratised the global imaginary, making it possible for Korean, Indian, Spanish, and Nigerian stories to achieve genuine transnational resonance without Western intermediaries.
Park Chan-wook’s engagement with streaming — including HBO’s The Sympathizer (2024) — illustrates the increasingly hybrid nature of prestige cultural production, operating simultaneously across the festival circuit, national cinema traditions, and global digital platforms. This hybridity is itself a marker of the new cultural world order.
- Singapore’s Position: Implications and Resonances
4.1 Singapore as a Multicultural Mediating Space
For Singapore, the Park Chan-wook appointment carries particular resonance. Singapore is, by design and necessity, a multicultural society that has long positioned itself as a bridge between East and West, between Asia’s diverse civilisational traditions and the norms of liberal internationalism. The legitimation of Asian cultural authority on the world stage — which the Cannes announcement represents — has direct implications for Singapore’s own cultural self-understanding.
Singapore shares with Korea a history of rapid post-colonial development, a Confucian-influenced institutional ethos, and an acute sensitivity to the relationship between cultural identity and international standing. But unlike Korea, Singapore has not yet produced a director or cultural figure of equivalent global stature. The question the Cannes appointment implicitly poses for Singapore is: what would it take to do so?
4.2 The Infrastructure Question
Korea’s cultural rise was not accidental — it was the product of deliberate policy architecture: the Korean Film Council (KOFIC), the Korean Cultural Centre network, public investment in arts education, and a regulatory environment that protected domestic cinema through screen quotas. Singapore has invested meaningfully in cultural infrastructure — the National Arts Council, the School of the Arts, various international co-production agreements — but the scale and strategic coherence have not matched Korea’s.
The lesson for Singapore is not that it should replicate the Korean model wholesale, but that cultural prestige at the international level requires systemic investment, institutional patience, and a willingness to support risk-taking artistic work that may not achieve commercial returns in the short term. Singapore’s creative industries are disproportionately oriented toward commercial and entertainment production; the cultivation of a serious auteur tradition — the kind that produces Park Chan-wooks — requires a different institutional logic.
Singapore’s multicultural identity is simultaneously its greatest cultural asset and its most underexploited one. A truly Singapore cinema — engaging Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and Eurasian narrative traditions in dialogue — could constitute a genuinely original contribution to world cinema, one that no other country could replicate.
4.3 The Stereotype Question Closer to Home
Within Singapore, the Park Chan-wook appointment also invites reflection on domestic racial and cultural dynamics. Singapore’s own cultural landscape is not free of racialised hierarchies: the relative marginalisation of Malay and Tamil artistic traditions within mainstream cultural funding, the persistent dominance of English-language cultural production in access to international markets, and the ambivalence about whether Singapore’s Chinese-majority culture is adequately distinguished from mainland Chinese or Taiwanese cultural production.
If the Cannes appointment demonstrates that Asian cultural producers can achieve global institutional authority on the basis of artistic merit rather than demographic or geopolitical weight, it should prompt Singapore to ask whether its internal cultural policies are sufficiently egalitarian in their support for all of its constituent communities. A Singapore that aspires to international cultural relevance cannot simultaneously marginalise significant portions of its own creative talent base.
4.4 Singapore as Audience, Platform, and Potential Producer
In the immediate term, Singapore’s most tangible relationship to the Park Chan-wook appointment is as a sophisticated, internationally oriented audience — one of the most cinema-literate in Southeast Asia, and one in which Korean cultural content has achieved extraordinary penetration. The popularity of Korean cinema, drama, and music in Singapore is not merely a consumer trend; it is evidence of the kind of multicultural cosmopolitan sensibility that Singapore has cultivated as a national identity.
Singapore also plays a significant role as a regional platform for cultural exchange — through the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF), the infrastructure of Marina Bay Sands as a venue for international touring productions, and Singapore’s role as a regional hub for streaming platform operations. This platform function is valuable but insufficient for the kind of cultural agency that the Cannes appointment represents. The aspiration — if Singapore chooses to pursue it — would be to move from being a node in a global cultural network to being a generative source within it.
- Conclusion
The appointment of Park Chan-wook as jury president of the 79th Cannes Film Festival is, on one level, an institutional decision about an individual’s artistic qualifications. On every other level, it is a cultural event of considerable analytical richness. It breaks stereotypes about which racial and national traditions can claim aesthetic universality. It reflects a genuine restructuring of global cultural authority that mirrors broader geopolitical realignments. And it poses substantive questions for Singapore about the relationship between cultural infrastructure, multicultural identity, and international standing.
The world that Park Chan-wook’s Cannes presidency inhabits is not the world of 1946, when the festival was founded, nor the world of 1990, when Western cultural unipolarity reached its zenith. It is a genuinely multipolar cultural world, in which the capacity to shape global aesthetic sensibility is distributed across nations, languages, and traditions in ways that would have been structurally impossible two generations ago. Singapore, as a small, multicultural, globally integrated society, is both a beneficiary of this world and a potential contributor to its further evolution — if it chooses to invest accordingly.
The question is not whether Asian cultural producers have earned a place at the global table. Park Chan-wook’s career — and the Cannes jury presidency — answers that definitively. The question, for Singapore and others, is what kind of chairs they intend to bring.