OCAT Shanghai | China & Korea Video Artworks Exchange Week

Chinese Artists and Works

GAO Wenqian, The Encoffiner of Data, 2021

The Encoffiner of Data explores the issue of digital heritage that has arrived. I imagined a career as a data encoffiner, using her perspective to examine the data that people have left in the world. Digital heritage carries the memories of the dead, the sorrows and joys... For the clues, we follow the path of the data grave to explore the secrets of a person's memory.

GAO Yutao, Dialogue, 2020

The work was partly inspired by an ancient poem written over one thousand years ago. When you read out the first half of a well-known poem to the Chinese-version Siri of iPhone, she is most likely going to read the second half. So, the artist created the work by using this function.

WANG Kejing, Kayaking, 2020

This short film tries to reboot an individual's search of nature, just like Don Quixote's rebellious journey. It retrogradely explores the motif of mythology that swings between reality and imagination. Any established knowledge about the contrast between the surf and turf can be subverted and restructured by an individual's footage. The secret words are whispered in the unrelated two polarized extremes. The key to this Pandora's box can be merely an unexpected turbulent incident in an individual's life.

YANG Di, Safe Word, 2020

Created as a clip of a fictitious sci-fi movie from the 1960s, this film tells a story of racism at the Mars Immigration Office. It is about the oldest son, born and raised in a middle-class family, moving to Mars alone as a first-generation immigrant.

YANG Xiao, The Mountains Sing, 2021

"Hawfwen", a traditional gathering that once popular where the Zhuang people sing folk songs. It often takes place around the clan temples or under the old trees. Singers are divided into male and female groups. They improvised their lyrics to sing in correspondence with one another. Traveling along the songs in antiphonal style, the camera has found different singers and gatherings, lingered in the rural areas and urban cities, trying to find the broken echo of "hawfwen". The work is a poetic experiment in fictional ethnography.

Objects in Mirror are Closer 

than They Appear

The title "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear" is related to a recent noteworthy trend in the Korean video art scene, which is not to use the screen as a representational space constructed by perspective but as a special kind of mirror, like the side mirror of a car. The side mirror doesn't reflect the driver's face, but it's a mirror anyway. The driver doesn't experience it as a transparent window into the world. When we drive, we do not face the world of representation separate from our own body. We move with the mirror. In a way, our eyes and our bodies are the other side of the mirror. We don't look in the mirror, we see through the mirror. We experience the side mirror as a part of our body which is constantly being transformed in changing viewpoints, fragmented, and alternately diffused and converged. The side-mirror-screen is the eyes, the body, and the limbs.

But the screen does not belong to us, to any individual, or even to anything particular. The screen is a space in which anonymous sensation and affect occur, or, rather, the movement of space itself. Having inner field and outer one, depth and surface, the images escape the identity while endlessly changing their coordinates. Of course, this body-screen experience might be related to contemporary audiovisual technologies such as VR and computer game. However, the artists invited to this program ask about a wider and more ambiguous area where images, screens, and bodies intersect, rather than focus on a specific technology or medium.

The phrase "objects in mirror are closer than they appear" printed in the side mirror of most Korean cars is perplexing itself. Don't 'Objects in mirror' sound like 'images in a mirror'? Where do objects exist? In the mirror? Outside the mirror? Is what is in the mirror being or non-being? The artists deal with the confusion and indefinability of being/perception in contemporary media culture.

(CHO Seon Ryeong)

Korean Artists and Works

SONG Min Jung, Wild Seed, 2020

Wild Seed is a thriller surrounding the case of a person whose body was stolen through data manipulation. Wearing the body of a ghost, an anonymous entity, a minority, the protagonist goes through a proxy experience of a world different from before. Through a moving body, the work observes a world hybrid of materiality and immateriality and examines the contradiction of the city beneath its surface.

JEONG Yeoreum, The Long Hole, 2021

In The Long Hole, a detective is led by an accidental postcard to investigate an incident at USFK base Camp Long. Camp Long is in ruins with no one coming for twenty years. In the process of gathering, defragmenting, and arranging neglected information, the detective discovers that a strange geographic data value called Camp Long ATM occupies all space and time. However, there are no traces of any ATMs or banks at the scene. The film is a mystery report of a detective trying to understand the legacy of time.

Seo Young CHANG, Exoskeletal, 2021

Exoskeletal visualizes the spatial and temporal end by a chain of metaphors, starting from cancer cells that grow infinitely in a finite body, to Magellan as a figure who has closed the world by circumnavigating the Earth, to crustaceans that continue to grow inside the shell. The spatial end appears as the image of the shell, and the temporal end appears as the image of the bone. Two become one in the structure of the exoskeleton. The narrator of the work appears as the last survivor (and the deceased) who was culled in the process of molting to leap into the next stage when the world came to the end.

KIM Heecheon, Deep in the Forking Tanks, 2019

Deep in the Forking Tanks continues in the vein of Kim Heecheon's background in world building; an interest that grew from his early training in architecture before deciding to work in moving image. Following its premiere at Seoul's Art Sonje Center in November 2019, Kim Heecheon's latest work sees him meeting with divers and venturing down deep into the water. He begins by simulating a dive in a sensory deprivation tank; in a pitch-black, lightproof, soundproof environment such as this, a person can lose all sense of their body and mind. As Kim Heecheon enters the tank he begins to confuse the simulation for the real thing. Unwittingly, he is drawn into a state where his consciousness of physical reality is unclear. Once out of the tank (or perhaps he never leaves it) his life becomes its own simulacrum as everyday images are affected with video layering, audio manipulation and temporal blending to efface the boundary between the real and the perceived worlds.

Images coutesy of the artists

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