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...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Transgression, triggers, and the thousand cuts of “Blunt Knife” | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Photo courtesy of the artist June 25, 2019 By Corrie Tan (2,700 words, 13 -minute read) Content Warning: Mentions of a sexual relationship involving a teenager This response contains major spoilers for Blunt Knife by Eng Kai Er and A Doll’s House by Theatre of Europe...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Getting schooled on the arts (via The Star) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles September 14, 2018 From surprise visits to schools, replacing white shoes with black, and referencing the Finnish education system as a possible one to emulate, the new Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik has made waves with his fresh approach...
© » KADIST
Yang Guangnan
2011Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
© » 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...
© » KADIST
Charles Lim
2014In SEA STATE 6 Charles Lim takes the viewer down the Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore, a massive underground infrastructure for oil and fuel storage, built to support the commercial operations of oil traders, petrochemical ventures and manufacturing industries in the area...
© » KADIST
Jonathan Monk
2003Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...
© » KADIST
Maria Taniguchi
2012Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney...
© » 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...
© » KADIST
Tacita Dean
2001The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
© » 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...
© » ARTEFUSE
Art Basel reveals 287 leading galleries and expanded city-wide program for its 2024 edition in Basel, Switzerland (News) - ArteFuse Art Basel reveals 287 leading galleries and expanded city-wide program for its 2024 edition in Basel, the first led by the show’s new Director Maike Cruse With 287 premier galleries from 40 countries and territories, Art Basel will once again bring together the international art world at its marquee fair in Basel, Switzerland...
