London Korean Film Festival:
An interview with Seo Young Chang

Seo Young Chang discusses her moving image works presented at the London Korean Film Festival 2020

Sun Park

Seo Young Chang employs moving image as a proxy for a body in her multimedia installations. Through a transparent screen, viewers are lured to encounter one’s corporeal existence from within. What constitutes these simulations are symptoms or testimonies of fraudulent identity, undiagnosed illness, invisible pain and unborn beings. The screening at the London Korean Film Festival (6 – 9 Nov) showcases four moving image works in which erratic journeys are guided by disembodied narrators whose agencies trapped in the linear timeline. Ahead of the festival Chang shares how her personal experience with pain informs her conceptual approach to the use of moving image and the ongoing exploration into the time filtered through bodily sensations. This interview was conducted by Sun Park through email and translated with support from the London Korean Film Festival.

 

The programme at the LKFF begins with Who is Lea? (2015) in which a docent introduces an exhibition. You make her an untrustworthy narrator in Who is Lea? which not only makes the audience doubt her identity but also see the work itself as being ’empty’. It was interesting to see how the process of forging human identity led to the question of what art is. I’m curious about the background story behind the work and why you chose to centre around a person acting as an exhibition guide in a white cube.

At the time for personal reasons I saw exhibitions more often through publications than by being in the physical space. I wondered if it was possible to perceive and understand a work even if I experience the work only through documentations of it, such as texts and images. Under the somewhat radical premise that existence can be established and have a meaning just by being seen, recognised and shared, I wanted to create a work that focuses only on the medium – a work that exists only through testimony and description and also collapses on itself through testimony and description. As a result I ended up producing a video of an exhibition guide testifying a work made up of testimonies. I wanted to create something that has only a name without a body – the inverse of an illness which does not have a name and exists only through symptoms.

 

Similarly in Circle (2017) audiences are “invited” to the screening only to experience a repetition of scenes without a beginning or an end, and not a complete film. (Circle was originally conceived to play on a loop in the original installation.)

Circle is a work created with an interest in the relationship between time and body. In particular I focused on the video playing in a loop within an exhibition space, thinking that the closedness of circular temporality and that of bodily sensations are parallel to each other. The narrator in the video cannot escape because she is within the circular time that continues to return to the same spot. In a two-dimensional space she is trapped in a circle, continuously returning to the same area, whereas the circle becomes a spiral shape in a three-dimensional space. The audience can leave the room at any time from the endless loop in the video, but the narrator remains trapped within this eternal time. I wanted to present a (failed) story of escaping from the body by creating an analogy with time.

 

If the body portrayed in Circle is trapped in an endlessly looping time, the body of the narrator in A Globe in a Flat World(2016) disappears in the flat space and cannot move forward. What was the impetus behind the continuous attempts to escape from space-time or the ‘space’ of the body?

In my work the body is the ‘space’ I want to leave. The body is located in the same coordinates as I am, but it feels infinitely far away, and it also feels strange like an alien object. The body in my work is a place full of abnormal senses induced by an unidentifiable illness, whereas the world on the screen is a flat space of numbness, that I employ as a distraction from the body.

 

For A Globe in a Flat World, are there any particular reasons behind capturing the outdoor space of the ancient palace Deoksu Palace (덕수궁) and the inside through the VR viewing environment?

I found it interesting that it was a space that I could not enter even though it was right in front of me. The idea of continuing the journey into this inaccessible space by stitching what I can only access indirectly from the monitor appealed to me. I also thought that this limit of access resembled one’s limited relationship to a body, in the sense that it is right here, but you cannot see the inside, except through a screen. I wanted to create a screen like a body, or a body like a screen.

 

A Globe in a Flat World (납작한 세계의 구체), Seo Young Chang, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

 

As you enter the virtual space, the colour of the film changes from B&W to colour. The virtual space that the text describes as being “sucked in” feels more real, but it leaves no room for anything extra such as the body or any ‘wasted’ time. Who is this virtual space for in this work?

The virtual space in A Globe in a Flat World is a place that connects with the world by communicating through media as seen in Who is Lea?. The world seen through the screen is set as a place that is more easily accessible and provides a detailed experience than in real life, and as ‘a place where important things are shared’. I thought of it as a place that is opposite to the bodily sensations that cannot be shared and thus are left as trivial personal realms. This personal space sits on the ‘outside’ of the binary (inside and outside) world, which was portrayed in my previous work A Monument.

On the screen, physical sensations exist only as emulation, so the sensation of touch, taste, and smell, and even pain, becomes flattened. In the Junmyeongdang (준명당), at Deoksu Palace (덕수궁) I installed this work alongside a white sphere-shaped sculpture. This sphere appeared as a white circle in the video.

 

In 2019, I watched Your Delivery(2019) at MMCA in Gwacheon. It felt like an installation where you mapped out the movement of the audience from entry till exit. What kind of thoughts do you have about the relationship between the exhibition space and your videos? You said you recently worked on a video for an online space. Have there been any changes in the process of your practice?

The works exhibited at Young Korean Artists 2019: Liquid Glass Sea and my solo exhibitions such as Black Hole Body (2017) and Beginning to End at the Beginning (2019) were made to create a holistic experience by organically connecting the works within the exhibition space. Though each piece has its complete structure, I tried to create a pathway where each element in the show could refer to each other and could shift from one to another. When viewing multiple screens or multiple works at the same time from a specific perspective, a viewer can create numerous iterations from which multiple interpretations are generated. Coupled with this spatial synthesis, I wanted to create a time that could be deciphered in various registers.

Taking into account the COVID-19 restrictions, I have recently produced a video Infinity Pool (2020) for viewing in a private environment that does not rely on a white cube in the first place. I imagined a new world, triggered by the coronavirus, as a place where contact and senses disappeared. I expressed this as an infinity pool. The fact that it is a place to experience a visually open sense of space in a physically small space, I thought it was similar to the quarantine situation where each of us is connected to the world through the screen in our rooms.

Unlike the classic version of the siren, the siren in my video does not let the audiences collide with anything but lure them into drifting infinitely. By creating 3D audio effects, I tried to implement an aural sense of space instead of the physical sense of space that seems to have disappeared from reality. It is designed to give the best effect when listening with earphones in a private space.

 

Your Delivery, Seo Young Chang, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

 

In Your Delivery, there is a phrase “May a small thing represent a bigger one. May a part contain the whole”. The sentence epitomises your artistic practice that takes a body as a conduit to probe the world around an individual. Would you say that your work is about experiencing through the notion of the body, and not necessarily about the body of a specific individual?

I want to create a situation in which the viewers are more conscious of their bodies in the exhibition by creating a flow between the works or allowing multiple works to be viewed at the same time. In Reflection Reflected the viewer’s face is reflected on the mobile screen during the dark and shaded scenes only – creating the effect of looking in the mirror.  Making use of the material characteristics of the display devices, I want to make the audience become aware of their own body and eventually reach a tactile experience.

 

Each piece has a narrator that speaks a different language. Please tell us about the process of working with an unfamiliar language. As someone who saw your body of work it seemed like an attempt to distance the work from taking the autobiographical first-person perspective by continually changing the language.

Angelina, who appears as the recipient of the letter in Your Delivery, is modeled after Angelina Jolie, who has undergone a preventive surgery through genetic testing. The traceable names from Jolie’s maternal ancestors were, in fact, Dutch, so I selected the Dutch language for the letter, and the names of her ancestors appeared as the senders of the letter. Although Dutch-speaking audiences would not feel distant to the language, most Korean audiences would. And I thought this idea fitted well with the conceptual element of the work as it deals with temporal and spatial distance.

The decision to work with English has often been motivated by a specific English word that has multiple meanings and the interconnectedness amongst them. In Circle, the term ‘screen’ was like that. I used this word as a metaphor for a body since ‘screen’ is considered both a monitor and barrier simultaneously. In the case of Spin-Off, I used the English language because there is a series of words meaning rotation (e.g. spin, turn, revolve,…). I thought it would be possible to capture various images of rotating by listing words that are similar but different.

As you mentioned, keeping a distance is one of the reasons. Also, I personally find it challenging to write the Korean script in a colloquial (honorifics are also problematic for me). Since my works do not have much emphasis on the linear narrative, it is not a script for acting but rather a script for conveying situations. So, a lot of the time I use languages other than Korean.

 

The emphasis on the imperfections and limitations of the body or the bodily senses is consistently maintained across your works. I am curious about how your thoughts have changed since the outbreak of COVID-19.

At first, I naively thought that the unification of humankind might be possible in the face of suffering shared by everyone, but it became more apparent that the fate of the individuals is decided according to the quarantine policies chosen by their government or their economic status. All in all, suffering from illness and death seem to be nothing different from before in that it is a personal matter.

Meeting people is possible only through the screen now and seeing a real-life face has become possible only in a parallel universe through media (a version of the world without COVID-19 continues in TV series and movies). Compared to the flattened body of the others, my body is very material and very fragile, and it would not be strange if it collapses anytime. In a world where contact and senses have disappeared, the feeling of drifting continues, and as this sensation continues, it seems that the sense of distance and space becomes uncertain. Along with that, there appears to be an uncertainty in the sense of time. In addition to the shifting perceptions of space and time, I would like to explore the possibilities of remote touch further, if such a thing exists.

 

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