Toppling the Tiger, Devouring the Dragon: Alternative Readings of Korean History through the Muhy̆op Genre

This article looks into the transportation of the Chinese epic wuxia 武俠martial arts genre to Korean cinema and asks how the genre changed when it became the muhy̆op武俠 of Korean cinema. In this paper, I intend to look behind the Korean version of the wuxia genre and tackle some of the questions it raises. How should we look at these movies with often intensely nationalist content, which at the same time have been shot in China using Chinese directors and technicians? How does the Chinese form of the genre, loaded with historical references and a sense of Chineseness, dictate its perception in South Korea? Interestingly, this Chinese genre has been used to deal with, of all things, issues hotly contested by South Korea and China, such as for instance the question of Kogury̆o and Parhae. The question is how to interpret this tension between format and content. Does the awareness of Chinese elements in a South Korean movie such as Shadowless Sword in any way undercut the nationalist message of its narrative? Are we being confronted with subversive readings of the history and actuality of the relationship between Korea and China? The present article seeks to analyze these tensions and look beyond the obvious historiographical message of the content of