Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Woman in the Dune



The movie Woman in the Dunes by the director Hiroshi Teshigahara is based on Kobo Abe's novel of the same name. The novel was published in 1962 and the film came out two years later.

The main characters, a woman and a man, live in a sand the dune and have to shovel the sand every night to prevent their home from collapsing. Unlike Sisyphus, they work to survive not as a punishment.

There are many allegories and methaphors in the movie. For example, the shifting sand is like the shifting nature of identity. At the end, the man found how to collect water from the dune; to me it seems like the concept of the absurd put forth by Albert Camus. Wet and dry, life and death, extrication and entanglement. I think I will read Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus again.

Friday, February 15, 2008

The Taste of Tea (茶の味 Cha no Aji)



The film is concerned with the lives of the Haruno family, who live in the countryside north of Tokyo. It has been referred to as a "surreal" version of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. *


The daughter, Shachiko, thinks that if she could do a backflip on a horizontal bar, she could get rid of her giant doppelganger,who is following her. She decides on this plan after hearing from her uncle how he got rid of a stranger covered in blood. Her situation reminds me of my childhood in the 1980s on the outskirts of Seoul where I grew up. The little floor in the house connecting the interior and exterior of the house, the undecorated and natural yard and the vacant lot (Shachiko practices her backflip on a horizontal bar in this area) near the house.....And of course, her struggle fascinated me. (Some a time growing up, I was scared that I thought my reflection in a mirror was another person looking at me.)


The Haruno Family
The Father, Nobuo
: A hypnotherapist who occasionally hypnotizes his family for fun, and is teaching his son Go.
The Mother, Yoshiko: An animator trying to break back into the business by creating a hand drawn segment at the kitchen table.
The Son, Hajime: who is having a rough time with girls and puberty, but is an excellent Go player.
The Daughter, Sachiko: who is being followed by a giant duplicate of herself and searches for ways to rid herself of it.
The Uncle, Ayano: A sound engineer and record producer from Tokyo taking a break from things.
The Grandfather, Akira: an eccentric old man, former animator and occasional model for Yoshiko's animation.


Sunday, February 10, 2008

Shadow

Before the invention of photography, camere obscura, camera lucida and physionotrace, which is a silhouette drawing traced from a shadow on a wall, were used for copying images. Nowdays, Kara Walker is known for silhouetted figures dealing with the issues of race, gender and sexuality.
One thousand years before the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1279) shadow shows appeared in China. By the 18th century, shadow shows were played in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Egypt, Iran, Turkey and Western Europe with a distinct style. Shadow theater was popular in France in the 1770s. The silhouette figures were called "Chinese Shadows"(Ombres Chinoises) but the images were black silhouettes not like the colored shadows of Chinese shadow plays.
In early the 20th century, the German silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger, who was fascinated with the Chinese art of silhouette puppetry, made films using cut-out silhouettes. Here is her film "The Adventures of Prince Achmed-Harem Scene."

Whether the shadow shows were performed for religious education or entertainment,
I think that people are still fascinated by it because they are searching for their inner world, behind the screen and behind the layers of everyday reality.

Friday, February 8, 2008

MFA Group Show

For Immediate Release
NEW YORK - The Graduate Art Society of City College is pleased to announce an MFA group show titled Informants, opening Wednesday February 13th from 6-8 pm at the City College Art Gallery. Informants is an exploration in the symbiotic relationship that exists between source material and artistic 'objects.' This exhibition chooses to focus on revealing the source imagery, or informants, and in essence, hiding the artwork. Artists used their own discretion in what to share with the public, that which is normally considered to be private. Comprising of two parts, books and objects, this exhibition can be considered an interactive display. Viewers are encouraged to sit in the desks provided and read through the books available as well as observe the objects on the display tables.
A special email has been created for this show, informants@gmail.com, in hopes to further continue the conversation created by this exhibition. Your dialogue is invited.
MFA students participating are: Dennis Delgado, Filipa Farraia, Glenda Hydler, Jang Soon Im, Rachel Jobe, Seung Ae Kim, Sun Kim, Anthony Miler, Nancy Palubniak, Shani Peters, Tricia Riebesehl, Arthur Skowron, Elena Stojanova, Priska Wenger, and Yu Zhang.
Informants will be open to the public from 12 – 4 pm, Monday February 11th through Friday February 22nd at the City College Art Gallery, located in the ground floor of the Compton-Goethals Building, 1619 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY. A limited edition catalogue with opening essay by Anthony Miler and design by Rachel Jobe will be available.

New works from Shirin Neshat

In July, 2001, under a scorching sun, I travelled around Iran. I had to wear a head scarf and I had to cover most of my body as Muslim women do. At the begenning of my trip I felt sorry for the women I saw, but I soon realized that they found ways to express themselves and add some color to their lives. Occasionally, at a cafe, I could catch a glimpse of pretty and colorful clothes worn by a woman under the head-to-toe black hijab, and some women painted their fingernails or toe nails.
With those memories in mind, I found the show at the Gladstone Gallery by the artist, Shirin Neshat who was born in Iran to be extremely moving. Her video installation is based on the novel Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur which is about women in Iran. I look forward to reading this book.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Korean Kite (Yeon)


In Korean history, kite flying is traced back to 637 A.D., during the first year of the reign of Queen Chindok of Silla, when General Kim Yu-Sin used a kite to calm the agitated populace. He launced a kite in the night sky over Kyongju. The kite had a large cotton ball attached that was burning, causing the supertitious people to think it was a falling star soaring up in the sky, and that their misfortunes would soon come to a close. Another general in Korean history, General Ch'oe Yong, of the 14th-century Koryo period utilized kites for shooting fire arms. Admiral Yi Sun-sin used kites in the 16th century as a fast way to inform the naval troops of his strategic instructions, flying kites having different pictures signaling tactics to use, while fighting the Japanese invaders.
Different from the history, I am going to make and decorate a kite and then film it as I fly it. It is going to be simple 10-minute film of the kite in the sky, following the movement of the kite. The film is going to play over and over on a screen hung on the ceiling of a gallery. To watch the movie, viewers will need to lie down on a large bench that is meant to represent the kind of platform that Koreans use outdoors for picnics. It is occasionally placed in the yard of a house or under a tree. The project is about sharing my memories of childhood with growing up on the outskirts of Seoul, Korea in 1970s and '80s.
Toy Stories

Souvenirs from Korean Childhood

An Exhibition of Korean Toys from the 1970s and 1980s

January 31- April 18
The Korea Society Gallery
Open to the Public and Free of Charge
Location
950 Third Ave. Eighth Floor, New York City
(Building entrance on SW corner of Third Ave. and 57St.)
Toys-always more meaningful than the simple playthings they appear to be-can embody the fantasies, values, obsessions and anxieties of a generation......

Sunday, February 3, 2008

To Have or to Be?


To Have or to Be
By Erich Fromm
The Importance of the Difference between Having and Being

For an M.F.A. group show, I have to exhibit objects and books that inspired my works or are related to it. But since my work is about searching for an inner world that cannot be easily represent in the visible world, it was a bit hard to choose objects.
The moments of awakening that I have experienced cannot be recreated in a gallery. Because such experience are invisible and cannot be touched.

"The words point to an experience; they are not the experience. The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone: it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience."


Erich Fromm Interview Excerpt from YouTube