Son Park
Son Park is the founding editor and publisher of CINEMAWORDS. He established the publication in 2023 as a Korean-language journal of film criticism and has led its expansion into English and Japanese — and outward from cinema into personality psychology, Korean interpretive systems, and narrative theory.
His editorial project asks why certain frameworks for understanding human behavior persist across time and culture, and what they reveal when examined past the surface. It is one register of the question the journal is organized around — how a person is made, and what it costs to be made that way — asked of the frameworks themselves.
That question drives the personality series he edits in The Frameworks. The series proceeds not from surface trait descriptions but from the internal logic each framework claims for itself — the cognitive-function architecture beneath a sixteen-type profile, the trait-and-facet structure of the Big Five, the nine motivations of the Enneagram, the elemental configuration of a Saju birth chart. Western or Korean, clinical or classical, every framework is tested against the same two questions: what does it actually track, and where does it fail?
The journal’s analytical instruments — the sixteen-type test, the Big Five assessment, the Saju calculator — are built under his editorship from the same research that produces the essays, on the conviction that a framework should survive contact with a reader’s actual life.
He also writes, within The Canon, on narrative structure and myth: the recurring formal patterns through which cultures organize experience into story, and how those patterns operate inside contemporary visual storytelling.
His editing proceeds from a conviction the journal has since adopted as a house standard: the reader is capable of following a sustained argument, and does not need to be managed toward a conclusion.