why does the wind blow, 2012, 16mm dual projection, 12min
Interview for Jeonju international film festival. 2012.5
1. What inspired you to make this film?
There was a request of performance at the documentary event held at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts 2 years ago. The local curator who managed the program at that time wanted my work to contain Korean historical footages based on the main theme of ‘memories’. Until then, my work was made through improvisation with musicians and my own passage by an approaching method based on hand processing phenomenon, which often was pointed out by traditional expanded cinemas. The performance in Taiwan motivated me to view various film prints I had collected again.
I was also inspired when I was newly interested in editing last year, after watching works done by Hugh Metcalfe, a poet and film artist. I was participating in artist residence program with local artists from No.w.here in London at that time. I barely had any editing experience after I started working as an artist until then, but many writings and sound works based on Brion Gysin’s ‘cut-up’ methodology encouraged me to restart works having their roots on screening. Before I finished my work, I had a chance to perform in Korea with a improvised musician Hong Chulki using
2. What is the main theme of your film?
There is no theme. I wanted to make a new condition using film footages as a material. However, I was not certain what meaning to assign to the new condition that I made because I was not mature enough to be aware of what it means to attach two different film strips.
3. How do you feel to be a part of JIFF this year?
Considering the fact that internationally renowned film festivals gradually shed the traditional form of ‘screening’, we can see that the general format is changing. In my opinion, the Jeonju International Film Festival, with its wide range of view to films, has the greatest potential to develop among all the Korean film festivals.
4. What does cinema mean to you?
My mind is not clear enough yet to answer questions like this. All I understand at the moment though is that a video is something that includes the space for release of the final product (including the structure of defining the release time) as a medium.
5. Do you have any messages you want to share with your audiences?
On most of the film prints distributed in Korea during the 70s, it says “Beyond the Chalkboard”. As video became an auxiliary mean for education, ways to express almost all sorts of matters including widely from natural phenomena to ethical judgment by human were recorded on films. The collection of all these film prints forms an encyclopedia in a macroscopic view. An encyclopedia has descriptions of so many things in it. To someone who has never felt wind, how would you explain what wind is? When someone makes smoke on a beach to make a visual explanation, it looks so vague. This film is the first part of a big chunk of works I am going to continue to make, which is expected to form another subset of behaviors for visual descriptions of human.