How to make Kimchi or How to be Korean
https://www.youtube.com/embed/mcX1pcLSD7M
investigate themes of family, heritage, and god through audiovisual language in video art and film. The goal of my work is to understand how the divine and spiritual are entrenched in the personal. I seek to create new cinematic images that continue in the line of filmmakers like Andrey Tarkovsky, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Eduardo Williams, informed by my own personal history coming from an immigrant family from Korea to Argentina and eventually to the US. These cross cultural threads are integral parts in my work, represented through language, landscapes, and folk tales which I draw from as source material.
My father received a vision from god when he was a young man; showing him the course of his life and the direction in which I was raised. He became a pastor and I was brought up soaking in information from a Protestant Christian background. From church spaces that became familiar to my childhood, to the Korean Christian community tied to a balancing act between Western and Eastern cultures. These moments were formative and helped create an important blending between the divine and the mundane that informs the way I reproduce this duality through moving images. The divine for me isn’t something that is seperate from reality, it is my Father sleeping in front of TV with Sunday golf blaring in the background.
In the single-channel video work “Tangun”, I captured a performance between two individuals crossing through an abandoned opera house, improvising and performing written dialogue about growing apart. Referencing folklore, tales, and creation myths, the piece employed the camera as a “wandering eye” in the space, creating a sense of presence as it followed in and out of the performers in an uninterrupted sequence. In the end of the piece, the pair walk slowly apart, continuing their dialogue being separated by a river as they walk beyond the camera’s gaze. This film was a shift for me in seeing how the divine can be melded into something still and routine, while still maintaining its magnitude. Using Tangun as a case study into this relationship, I am currently working on a five piece video installation titled “Dreams of My Father” revolving around key memories from childhood and illuminating the connections between God and my Father to me.