Fog and Smoke
2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
20:40 minutes
Jeamin Cha
Fog and Smoke is the first video Jeamin Cha made after returning to Seoul from London where she studied and started as an investigation into the meaning of “otherness” in documentary filmmaking. The opening scene depicts an abandoned construction site that had once been part of the Songdo International Business District in Incheon, near Seoul. In the dark of the night, the sounds of a countdown and piano notes fill an empty apartment building and echoes far into the unknown corners and hollows of a newly built city. Delicate movements of the camera follow the last remaining fisherman in the old town as he drives toward the new town: once his waterfront workplace, the land is now filled in with soil and the debris of city development. Sequences of the fisherman’s journey into the cityscape are woven together with movements of the ghostly tap dancer continuing his frantic tapping in the empty streets at night. Nothing seems to ever happen as the camera follows patiently each individual as they retrace their daily routes and tell personal stories, representative of the artist’s methodology to let herself guided by encounters and unplanned conversations. The rapid socio-economic and political changes in the city appear slowed down, to the exception of the scene with the tap-dancer whose frantic tappings in the dark (as if possessed) become a metaphor for capitalism and echo the speed of gentrification driving these developments. If the video refers to the craze of urban construction in Korea and its halt due to the global financial crisis and economic recession after 2008, the depicted cityscape could belong to any location of hyper-capitalism in the world.
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.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » DIANE PERNET
Dutch Emerging: Ruben Janssen X GRA Fashion Bachelor 2023 – A Shaded View on Fashion From the back to the middle and around again — Ria’s wedding dress, Alan’s patterns and John’s model: ‘My project is an investigation into evolution, explored through prisms of biology, computation and a poetic personal narrative, shifting between timescales on an evolutionary timeline...
© » KADIST
John Gerrard
2016Flag (Thames) 2016 depicts a small section of the Thames River—one that is adjacent to the Palace of Westminster in London—as an algorithmic representation on an LED panel...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Solid are the Winds: Aeolian Encounters at The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial (Part I) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Natasha Harth for QAGOMA untitled (giran) (2018), Jonathan Jones in collaboration with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM January 10, 2019 By Marcus Yee (1259 words, five-minute read) This is the first of a two-part essay on the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial running at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, from 24 November 2018 to 28 April 2019...
© » LARRY'S LIST
Ed Ruscha
The fashion designer is selling off all the art inside his West Village townhouse at Sotheby’s New York to make way for a new collection....
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Weekly Southeast Asia Radar: Vietnam's post-war writers; Burmese voices in book | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar BACC October 8, 2020 ArtsEquator’s Southeast Asia Radar features articles and posts about arts and culture in Southeast Asia, drawn from local and regional websites and publications – aggregated content from outside sources, so we are exposed to a multitude of voices in the region...
© » KADIST
Maria Taniguchi
2012Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney...
© » KADIST
Gregory Halpern
2016Gregory Halpern spent five years shooting ZZYZX , and another year editing the results, from an estimated thousand rolls of film, about half of which were shot in the final year after his Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to live in California...
© » KADIST
Mikhael Subotzky
2006At the halfway point along South Africa’s Highway N1, running from Cape Town to Johannesburg, sits the small town of Beaufort West...
© » KADIST
Cally Spooner
2016The installation Self Tracking (the five stages of grief) was realized from a performance that is to be re-activated...
© » KADIST
Consider the Drone , Barbara London and Aura Satz in conversation What’s in a sound? And what of a drone? Venerable curator Barbara London is joined in conversation by artist Aura Satz, an interdisciplinary artist based in London, UK with a particular interest in the sustained, ambient, and minimal...
