The Possibility of the Half
2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
13:32 minutes
Minouk Lim
The Possibility of the Half by Minouk Lim is a two-channel video projection that begins with a mirror image of a weeping woman kneeling on the ground. As both frames progresses, a montage of large crowds of mourners are depicted in slow motion interwoven with a variety of images including bomb explosions, fireworks, vacant stores, sunsets and sunrises, beachside landscapes, and infrared shots. At midpoint, life in the year 4012 is foreshadowed down to living insects and the video concludes back in the year 2012 as a burning inferno. A melancholic soundtrack of a stringed orchestra number plays in the background. In this video work Lim appropriates various televised footage from the aftermath of two different historical events: the death of former President of South Korea Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) and the death of former dictator of North Korea Kim Jong-il (1941–2011). By combining these undistinguishable footage from separate eras in each channel, Lim extracts the political divide that underlies the two events and focuses on the universality of their anguish. The Possibility of the Half is the first in a series of works that center on broadcast TV. The video in its original installation form restages a broadcast network studio, this simulated newsroom addresses the integrity of journalism amidst today’s fake news phenomena. In recent years, the pervasiveness of fake news and the manipulative power of the media to shape public knowledge and thus collective memory has prompted a subversive tactic in which Lim incorporates reportage in her work.
Loss, grief, trauma, death, and memory are consistent themes that Minouk Lim addresses through her sculptures, installations, performances, and videos. Lim’s provocative body of work is a response to and reconciliation of traumatic historical events in Korea from the late 1940s to the present day, including the undocumented massacres that occurred during the Korean War of the late 1940s and 50s, the protest for workers rights in the 1970s during the economic expansion of South Korea, and the ever-present fear of nuclear obliteration that clouds the entire Korean peninsula. For Lim, the collective experience is personal and her research confronts forgotten pasts and unlawful persecutions and in many instances, involves direct contact and establishing meaningful relationships with victims of torture, wrongfully accused North Korean spies, and civil rights organization employees.
Colors:
Related works featuring themes of: » Art and Technology, » Assemblage, » Collective History, » Contemporary Fact Versus Fiction, » Korean
» see more
© » KADIST
Wallace Berman
1969While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...
© » KADIST
Haegue Yang
2016A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work...
© » KADIST
Zai Kuning
2014Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Wallace Berman
1969While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...
© » KADIST
Zai Kuning
2014Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » ARTS EQUATOR
A Malaysian under lockdown reviews Singapore Art Week 2021 | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints January 27, 2021 By Ellen Lee (2,500 words, 9-minute read) Looking through the 35-page programme booklet for the 9th edition of Singapore Art Week (SAW), I was fully struck by my Malaysian-ness...
:quality(70):focal(3635x2915:3645x2925)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/thenational/74ZGLA3OLJGYFOAOTPFRYRWT6Q.jpg)
© » KADIST
Luke Butler
2008In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
Other works by: » Minouk Lim
» see more
Related artist(s) to: Minouk Lim » Jewyo Rhii, » Clara Kim, » Nicolaus Schafhausen, » Babak Afrassiabi, » Nasrin Tabatabai, » Sarah Morris, » Shilpa Gupta, » Adrià Julià, » Erik Van Lieshout, » Saâdane Afif
» see more
© » KADIST
Saâdane Afif
2005In this work, Saâdane Afif quotes André Cadere’s round wooden batons using the copy share and remix principles...
© » KADIST
Shilpa Gupta
2009In Untitled (Sword) , addressing histories of colonialism with abstraction, a large steel blade extends from the gallery wall...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Podcast: Singapore Theatre Festival 2018 | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints August 2, 2018 Duration: 48 min Matt Lyon and Naeem Kapadia are back on ArtsEquator’s theatre podcast, and with a bang: nearly an hour’s worth of discussion on the Singapore Theatre Festival 2018 which just ended on 22 July...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
The working processes of artists: Lim Ai Hooi | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles May 25, 2020 Choral conductor Lim Ai Hooi deconstructs the visible and less visible aspects of her work, from how to read notations on a score to the gestures she uses, and how this can reach the hearts of the audience...
© » KADIST
Lim Sokchanlina
2018The photographic series Wrapped Future II by Lim Sokchanlina brings fences used on construction sites to enclose the surrounding areas, to different locations, lakes, valleys and forests; and places them at the center of works to obscure the beautiful Cambodian landscape...