Film & Video (Film & Video)

In On Guard by Jeamin Cha, a security guard receives safety training, juxtaposed against his patrol of an empty building as he tries to give care instructions for his ailing mother over the phone. The film dismantles the binary oppositions between “caring” and “guarding,” two actions that parallel one another in their emphasis on attentiveness without a logical conclusion. Cha’s exploration of the relationship between these two focuses is channeled through nocturnal urban space, drawing attention to the labor that each requires.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jeamin Cha’s essay-film Ellie’s Eye is an extensive examination of the human mind and the effects of new technology, such as chatbots and virtual avatar therapists on the mental health industry. One such avatar, named Ellie, was developed by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Ellie has the ability to interpret the user’s emotions through data collected from their speech and physical gestures to indicate psychological distress on a micro-level, which would be imperceptible by a human therapist.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.