A Study on Artistic Imagination through Remediation : the case of the TV drama adaptation of the webtoon ‘Jeongnyeoni’

This study explores the artistic imagination and cultural implications manifested in the remediation process of the webtoon Jeongnyeoni into a television drama. Applying Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation, it analyzes how the drama reconfigures the webtoon’s narrative not by diminishing its themes but by adapting them to the medium-specific aesthetics and audience sensibilities of television. The original webtoon emphasizes female solidarity against 1950s gender hierarchies through a GL narrative between Yoon Jeongnyeon and Kwon Buyong, and introduces characters like the cross-dressing President Go and Baek Doaeng, who rejects traditional roles, to critique women’s social marginalization. The drama, in contrast, reframes the GL narrative as a female hero narrative centered on Jeongnyeon’s artistic growth, and revives the forgotten tradition of ‘Female Gukgeuk’ (women’s national drama) through play-within-play techniques and performance scenes, establishing a unique aesthetic as a ‘drama that watches a performance’. By integrating the webtoon’s core narrative with the expressive capacities of television, the drama does not distort the original but demonstrates artistic imagination shaped by intermedia interaction and social-cultural context. This study contributes to content analysis in the cultural industries by shifting the focus from fidelity to the source toward a remediation-based framework.