This series of interviews focuses on artist’s perspectives on that which remains offscreen in moving image. It accompanies our summer program of screenings: Seoul-based artist Jeamin Cha (born 1986), known for her sensitive interpolations of the personal and the historical, here voices her approach to the re-membering of the past.
It Is Not A Question But A Balloon
It Is Not A Question But A Balloon. HD video, color, sound, 7:39. 2010. © 2015 Jeamin Cha.
Yu-Chieh Li (YCL): How did you come to collaborate with Sukyung Lim, the South Korean dissident-turned-politician for your video, It Is Not A Question But A Balloon? This person is best known for her unpermitted attendance of the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in North Korea, and her subsequent imprisonment upon return. Did she write the script that she reads as a voice-over in the film?
Jeamin Cha (JC): The film originated in my curiosity about the 386 generation in Korea, those born in the 1960s in Korea, who received their university education in the 1980s and became adults in the 1990s. The 386ers had to go through a dark decade in the 1980s when the then-dictator of Korea brutally repressed the Gwangju democracy movement, which was largely led by students.
Lim visited Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, at the age of twenty-four, in order to attend the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students. Upon her return, she was jailed for breaking National Security Law, and has since faced much reproach and criticism from the political right. I wondered, was Lim Su-kyung’s visit to North Korea in 1989 just an event dotting the timeline of North-South relations? What is that real struggle that the past generation holds onto so dearly? How do I view history from the perspective of my generation? As these questions surfaced, I began to see more clearly the gap between their generation and ours. Perusing relevant documents during my research, I also began to ruminate on and sentimentalize a time when my forbearers were as young as I was.
For the voice-over, Lim spoke into a walkie-talkie with no apparent receiver. Through the walkie-talkie, she transmits the events that took place between June and August 1989. The script is written in mixed tenses—past, future, and present—and draws its content from newspaper reports; She gave many interviews between 1984 and 1988 and I found these sentences in different newspapers issued in the 1980s. The paragraph in which she was speaking to her mom was extracted from a letter she wrote to her family. She had left the letter behind before leaving South Korea, and it was published in the news.
YCL: How do you think of the complicated relationship between Lim’s role as protagonist of the incident and performer in the film?
JC: When I was three years old, this young woman left for Germany in pursuit of Korea’s reunification and in 2010, when I was 24-years-old, I met Lim for the first time. She responded to the request by a young female student like me with much welcome. She had been living in seclusion after her son passed away several years ago. I had a hard time communicating with her about her personal history because she was reluctant to open her mind to me. So, at first, I wanted to give up the idea of recording her narration as voice-over. Instead I recorded myself reading the script. However, she called me the day before a show opening and we had a conversation all night. The night was a truly precious time to me. After meeting her in person for 24 hours at Heainsa Temple in Deagu, she agreed to participate in my film as a narrator. I remember that I edited her narration on the train on the way back to Seoul. To be honest, our relationship is not quite one of artistic collaborators: I met her as the protagonist of the incident, and she didn’t see me as an artist.
YCL: Can you talk about the particular kind of balloon in the film? Can the balloon seen a symbol of crossing a forbidden line, or even as the younger generation’s drifting, without knowing which side to take?
JC: The helium balloon contraption seen in the film resembles those used by private organizations in South Korea to distribute leaflets to North Korea. These private organizations are extremely right wing, and they fly these balloons along the ceasefire line to scatter leaflets that slander North Korea and glorify capitalism. The destinations of the balloons are determined by the timers, the weather, and the wind speed and direction—factors that are out of human control. But those who fly the balloon do so with conviction and with the specific intention of having it reach a particular location. This journey can be likened to a kind of progressive modernist thinking: There is a focused charge and a set of destination. The film is divided into two parts: the question and the balloon. In the first part, a balloon carrying a leaflet cluster flies toward its destination in a straight line. The leaflet cluster serves as the weight balance as the balloon is carried by the wind. In the second part, the balloon flies without the leaflet cluster. With nothing to weigh it down, the balloon floats lightly as though it’s swimming in the air just above Seoul. Detached from all ideologies, the balloon moves as the wind does, with no set destination. I consider the leaflets that are attached to the balloon as a metaphor for the weight of the current political situation faced by our generation.
YCL: There is a gap between the narration and the movement of the balloon. This gap seems crucial to your films. How do you consider this kind of gap and the conceit of the offscreen?
JC: This film is a monologue about my generation and about myself as one of a generation which often forgets the fact that Koreans live in a divided nation-state. Rather than accepting the history sanctioned by our government without critical scrutiny, can I instead learn to trust in and remember the past through my personal history? I wanted to explore this question by focusing on personal experience as an active interpretation of history. Thus, I wanted to create a little incident that goes against the times, via a helium balloon, equipped with a timer, en route to some unknown destination. The timer and the movement of the balloon signify a kind of linear thinking, but the narration is in mixed tenses; it’s non-linear. For me, this concept of time is important both on screen and off screen. I hope my work is seen a metonymy of the present.
Hysterics
Hysterics. HD video, color, sound, 7:06. 2014. © 2015 Jeamin Cha.
YCL: In your notes to the film Hysterics you said that this work involved an “attempt to stage ‘meaninglessness’… a hysteric state as a theatrical situation where white papers and a specific kind of lighting interact with each other.” What is the theater that is defined here? Is it a lighting installation, or the psychological status of the moving camera?
JC: Simply speaking, White paper represents meaninglessness. The flickering black light indicates a hysteric state. The spatters of unidentified fluids on the sheets of paper reminds us of the sacrificed.
YCL: What is the song at the end of the film?
JC: I wrote the lyrics and my friend Minwhee composed the song. I asked her to make a song for people whose questions are never answered or for people who lost their family.
YCL: What is the relationship between the hysteric or unidentified body and (19th century German poet) Heinrich Heine’s poem?
JC: For me, Heine’s poem seemed to be a perfect background for the film Hysterics. I thought the story of the poem was similar to Hur’s story in the film Autodidact. The unidentified body embodies more than the death, but it also signifies Hur’s son technically.
Autodidact
Autodidact. HD video, color, sound, 9:50. 2014. © 2015 Jeamin Cha.
YCL: How did you come to collaborate with Youngchun Hur? His son died in the military of unclear reasons in the 1980s, and he insisted it wasn’t a suicide and has since then trying hard to prove it. It’s amazing that he taught himself criminal forensics in order to bring this case to the trial. Did he have a say in how the materials were presented?
JC: Yes, Mr. Hur had a strong voice in the making of the film. He was a fisherman who cultivated seaweed. Thirty years after his son’s death, he started to work as a representative of the organization “National People and Democracy Bereaved Family Meeting Hanul Life.” He became a politician, a protester and a lonely, broken-hearted man. I think his voice contains his life.
While I worked for LIG Art Center Magazine as a journalist, I first met Mr. Hur as an interviewer. I wrote about him under the title of Teachers Nowadays and Age… I became so touched while typing the transcript of our interview, so I decided to ask him to check some of the notebooks and materials that he had compiled for his study during the 30 years. There were approximately 80 books and 20 notebooks. I spent some time reading them, and I selected the sentences from the materials myself, which Mr. Hur read out in the film.
He knew that I was going to present his handwritings from the notebooks in the film, but I choose the part of the martials in the video by myself. He admired the way I study what he had studied. I explained I was making a video work, which is quite different from normal TV reportage program. I wanted to make a path for people like Hur, not just hand him the microphone. If the purpose of the film was to report on Mr Hur’s life, I would have used different media such as public speech, publications, protest and would give him greater power in how the materials were presented.
YCL: Do you think it has characteristics of a documentary film?
JC: No, this film is not a traditional documentary film. It is true that this film shows real handwriting and includes a voiceover by the protagonist. However, this film doesn’t show Hur’s face, nor present his painful life directly. I wanted to avoid using images of the pain of the lives of others. This film was made with the goal to get through to an emotion, which is very different from reportage documentary films.
YCL: Has homicide just come to be presented recently in visual art? Minouk Lim’s piece Navigation ID. (2014) at the Gwangju Biennale caused quite a stir, where she collaborated with people who lost their families during the Korean war and politically-motivated massacres, including those at Jinju and a cobalt mine in Gyeongsan—that are not recognized by the government—both in performance and documentary film. She created an installation of the remains of civilian victims and their living families on the Biennale Plaza, and held a funeral there. What’s your opinion about the ethical issues in such a collaboration, in Lim’s case, but also in your collaboration with Hur?
JC: I really admire Lim’s enthusiasm. I think she has managed to communicate with the authorities for the sake of those sacrificed without fear. However, I question why people who have lost their families should be shown in art performances.
For me, it is important to avoid showing images of victims or people living a painful life on film. I was eager to approach Mr. Hur’s life, which doesn’t mean that I wanted to show his face or make him plead to the spectators on screen. Spectacles evoke sympathy. However, it fades away as soon as the visual effect is achieved. So I tried to use the approach mentioned above to raise some of the ethical issues. The influence of visual art sometimes exceeds the realm of conventional ethics. Some artists make works that provoke and push themselves forward to risky, to perilous boundaries.
However, only when the artists and the collaborators are equal can we show solidarity. In other words, the mental status (of the artist and the collaborator) should be equal. I think some artists are so powerful that they don’t have to commit to this solidarity. For me, the condition of the collaborator or subject should be respected. That’s when we can also respect the language of the artist.
YCL: Do you think that, in this film, the voice is more essential than the images? It’s a question especially important for non-Koreans.
JC: Yes, the voice is more essential than the images, for non-Koreans and Koreans. The handwriting shown in the film consists of fragments of sentences. Koreans can read what the handwriting means. But it doesn’t convey any specific information or a coherent story.
YCL: What do you want to achieve by playing the footage twice with two different narrators?
JC: The narration alternates between Mr. Hur and a man in his early twenties with no relation to the story. The work attempts to establish a method of reflecting the “voice” of the others through reading by eyes, reading by one voice, and re-reading by another voice. When one reflects on the voice of the other (the non-protagonist) and watches the same footage, it seems to be barely possible to understand the incident in the film. Any attempt to understand other people is doomed to fail. But this is the kind of failure I want. I wanted to speak about the impossibility of the possibility of understanding the pain of other people.
