The Exhausted

A physical space in a film is always frozen within a small fragment of time - a frame. The artist dynamically explores each space as the frames become combined, transformed, rearranged, and repeated.

A walk in the woods, an encounter with an animal, a body of water. On the soundtrack, a woman’s voice responds to an internet personality quiz, while grainy, inkjet printouts—animated and collaged by the filmmaker—approximate the imagined scenes. Distortions in the reproduction of word and picture accompany the blur of memory and fantasy, past experience and desire.

Lazarus (2023) is a reconstruction and extension of José Leonilson’s Lásaro (1993). The film also pays tribute to Goh Choo-San, a pioneering Singapore-born choreographer. Choreographed by Daeun Jung in collaboration with director Kang Seung Lee, the piece draws inspiration from Goh's ballet "Unknown Territory" (1986), known for blending classical ballet with contemporary introspection. In his multilayered video work, symbols from American Sign Language further challenge our perceptions of communication. The use of sambe—a traditional Korean funeral fabric—deepens the rituals of mourning embedded within the work, honoring the lives and memories lost to the AIDS epidemic. - Alexander Gray Associates

The film conducts an elusive search for the traces of Lee Kyung Soo, a Korean War orphan adopted by a U.S. Navy officer. Lee’s image circulated widely across newspapers, magazines, and photographs—serving specific purposes and cultural narratives. Over time, these representations fractured, faded, and reemerged, leaving silences in the archive and gaps in visibility. The cut-out fragments from the scattered information are pieced together to imagine the child’s unspoken point of view throughout his wandering life.

The camera sets out on a journey to find the headless Buddha statues scattered across Namsan Mountain in Gyeongju. What has disappeared, who caused it to vanish, and how has it been recorded? People stroll along the river, the sea, and mountain paths, taking photographs, where images from the past and the desire for excavation overlap.

The audience encounters a report in blue pages discussing the death of wild birds caused by collisions with transparent soundproof walls. Two hands appear to turn the pages, cut the paper, move the objects and paint, following the text from the report. While birds fly towards a transparent wall, what is the audience colliding with?

In 1995, an astronomer proposed a peculiar project. It was to use the Hubble Telescope to capture a small part of the universe that was then known to be a void. In 1447 in Chosun Dynasty, Prince Anpyeong had a dream of walking through a peach blossom forest shrouded in clouds and mist, and he asked the painter, Ahn Gyeon, to capture it in a painting. Through the juxtaposition of the two historical anecdotes, the film examines the images of ‘the far and near’ through printing, transforming, and distorting the photos from the NASA Image and Video Library.

For the purpose of collection, preservation, and recording, numerous faces that existed in different times and places densely gather in a single space. Among them are photos of Koreans taken during the Japanese occupation era for physical measurements and Buddha statues with severed heads for reasons unknown.