London Korean Film Festival 2020: Seo Young Chang

In Who is Lea? (2015), a docent introduces a video installation that the audience is about to see. She describes the subject of the video as an investigation into a person called Lea and her dubious identity on Facebook. The question is deftly transposed onto the credibility of the docent whose appearance mirrors the depiction of Lea, delegitimising the initial inquiry, ‘Who is Lea?’

As an endless spiral stairway pulsates like a breathing organ in Circle (2017), the narrator’s invitation to join the “screening” turns into an illusion of being gulped into the digestive system. Motivated by Chang’s personal experience with undiagnosed pain, the narrator laments that she can neither escape her own body nor proceed to the future whilst imprisoned by pain. The incoherent narrative turns and twists the stream of thoughts like an unending coil.

A Globe in a Flat World (2016) follows a wanderer’s journey into an Augmented Reality simulation of Deoksu Gung, a traditional palace in Seoul. The interior of this treasured site is permanently closed to the public in real life and only accessible as an awkwardly compressed imagery of three-dimensional experience. Inside the AR space, the aimlessly drifting wanderer becomes bodiless, impeded to take a step. Unable to find a liminal space between corridors and rooms, the wanderer loses autonomy to exit. 

Your Delivery (2019) is a love letter from “I” to “you” who is yet to be born or delivered. While the polaroid photographs slowly reveal seeming lumps of a body or craters in snow, a voice reading the letter contemplates the idea of living as a constant waiting for “you” to come. The message teeters between an affectionate expression of longing for a newborn and prophecy of the arrival of unknown cells growing inside a body.