This volume offers a critical examination of how widening age asymmetries across diverse Asian societies shape the representational economies through which older adults are constructed, mediated, and understood. Foregrounding the intersection of gender and age, it analyses the discursive positioning of older women in multimodal media environments and situates such portrayals within broader configurations of kinship, intergenerational obligation, and socio‑emotional labour. The essays assembled here draw on textual, visual, and audiovisual materials from China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan to interrogate emergent narratives of ageing and to map shifting cultural, familial, and institutional expectations surrounding later life

By engaging with demographic change, transformations in family structures, and evolving regimes of care, the collection elucidates the rearticulation of filial responsibility, economic dependency, and affective interdependence in rapidly ageing societies. It further considers how contemporary multimedia reframes the experience of decline, loss, and grief, and how these representational practices mediate broader ideological debates about the status, agency, and social value of older adults. Collectively, the contributions provide a theoretically grounded and empirically rich account of the cultural imaginaries through which ageing is negotiated in Asia, highlighting the profound reconfigurations of social relations and life-course expectations unfolding across the region.

Bernard Wilson teaches at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, Japan and specialises in children’s literature and cinema, postcolonialism, and East/West theory. He is widely published in these areas, and his work has appeared in leading international journals and book collections throughout the world. He is the co-editor of The Asian Family in Literature and Film Volumes I and II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film: Beyond East and West (Routledge, 2021); and Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age: Local, National and Transnational Trajectories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Sung-Ae Lee is a Lecturer in the School of International Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research areas range across Asian cinema, adaptation studies, trauma studies, Korean diaspora, and Korean literature, film and TV drama. She is the author of 40 book chapters and journal articles. Her recent publications include “Past in the present: film and TV drama, Korean families, and the palimpsestic Neo-Confucian family schema” (in The Asian Family in Literature and Film: Changing Perceptions in a New Age - East Asia, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and “Coming-of-age in South Korean Cinema” (in The Oxford Handbook of Children's Film, OUP, 2022).