One of the consistent drives for me to complete this monograph was a desire to engage and update scholarship on the long-standing notion of film authorship in relation to the rise of East Asian filmmakers into global stardom, and to mark how discourses on the subject developed in close relations with transmedia culture in the last two decades. It was this period when I was studying in the UK and the multi-platform distribution that has since emerged that further draw me into the world of transnational East Asian cinema. As mentioned in the introduction chapter, the revival of film authorship in Anglo-European academia in the early 2000s, with attention given to previously under-represented agents and cultural landscapes, coincided with the phenomenon whereby East Asian cinema gained unprecedented recognition in the global film market and related cultural domains. East Asian cinema's diverse styles, production contexts, and distribution networks also contributed to the emergence of interest in “world cinema” and “transnational cinema,” albeit represented by a relatively small number of filmmakers at the beginning. While there were various anthologies mapping expanded definitions of East Asian cinema and new cinematic area studies in the early 2000s (see, for example, Ciecko, 2006; Hunt & Leung, 2008; Lee V. P. Y., 2011), explorations of the growth of East Asian film authorship as part of a transmedia culture engaging with areas of studies such as film festivals, multi-platform distribution, media fans/ cinephiles, and film stars/celebrities have been far more limited. This book contributes to a lineage of studies of film culture that have paid attention to the various forces (including ideological, commercial, and creative) that sustain and extend the idea of auteur cinema.

I began this book by contextualizing its case studies within recent debates on film authorship and the context of transnational East Asian cinema. The introduction located film authorship in the realms of post-auteurism and reflective auteur studies. Presenting a palimpsestuous history of authorship, traced through a series of paratexts operating over time, different chapters then addressed the transnational cultural spaces and marketplaces, aided by digital media, which have produced recurring and expanded discourses in relation to my case study filmmakers and associated parties.