Almost One
2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
28:19 minutes
Jeamin Cha
Almost One by Jeamin Cha dives into an uncomfortable meditation on the relationship between socialization, performativity, truth, and childhood, filtered through the optics of a children’s acting class in South Korea. Such a context possesses a loaded set of connotations due to the meteoric rise of Korean entertainment industries. Acting or singing academies have increasingly attracted negative press for their intensity and cutthroat standards, a system for producing talent with little emotional concern for its offspring. For a majority of Cha’s single-channel video, the child actors are visibly restless, their discomfort juxtaposed against their comfortable, somewhat fashionable clothing, and the warm hardwood floors of the studio. Their increasingly unhappy attempts to wriggle out of actually “acting” makes the static studio develop a claustrophobic tinge, especially exacerbated in the last few scenes, in which each child is placed one by one in front of a camera and forced to act. Almost One seeks no answers, instead reveling in its discomfort. It works as an open-ended vignette, a node of an ongoing system or a captured segment of young life, in the throes of socialization.
Jeamin Cha’s questions exist in the gyre between individual and social environment, stepping over conspicuous strands of relation between the two in favor of cultivating characters that dwell in the night, under-noticed or otherwise surplus figures outside of mainstream societal representation. She works primarily in video-based installations, which oftentimes are the result of years of interviews, research, and a meticulous editing process. Her films are indexes of reality in its minutiae, both regionally specific to her native South Korea, and also purposefully roaming, fragmented and nonlinear, able to touch almost any contemporary population in the world. The subjects Cha conjures expand fluidly beyond the limits of her work, giving depth to figures ranging from an electrician to a trio of ancient garbage collectors, their paths echoing off of the urban environment, engaged in a web of political, cultural, and social factors. Her films have increasingly consisted of nuanced, unblinking meditation on political issues and their echoes within urban existence. It would be wrong to describe these films as positivist, or documentarian. Rather, they strive to capture the viewer’s affective affinities with a critical edge.
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