A red screen flickers as the sound of the running projector is heard. The screen flickers to white as a green screen is laid over the red, followed by a blue screen based on the RGB order. What is seen as the scene instantly changes are the blue sea and sky shining through a square cave entrance. The white rectangle that harbors light has merely changed to another rectangle, and is still a screen.
Minjung Kim’s recent work “THE RED FILTER IS WITHDRAWN.”(2020) begins with the empirical truth that perhaps everyone knows. The artist, while staying at a residency in Jeju Island, visited numerous coastal caves and bunkers built during the Japanese occupation, and while gazing at the scenery through artificially created square frames such as hangars, crenels, surveillance windows, etc. came to think that the scenery through the square frame is exactly the same as the screen of a film. Both, in theory, resemble each other in that light is viewed through a square frame in the dark. By consecutively showing several square openings in the encampment caves of various sizes and ratios, the film visualizes a rectangle of white light, which is the most fundamental condition for showing illusions created by the light. The text that is presented with the image at this time is the performance manuscript of Hollis Frampton’s A Lecture (1968).
“It is only a rectangle of white light. But it is all films.”
“We have all been here before. … We have come to watch this. … The rectangle was here before we came, and it will be here after we have gone.”(1) What is interesting is that this passage, which Frampton uses to explain the fundamental elements of film media such as darkness and light, screen and film, also applies in the context of images of historical tragedy. In one aspect, we are all gathered in the dark to watch a square rectangle which harnesses light, and the film will be present before and after us. In another aspect, we watch the colonial rule of Jeju Island and the scene of fratricidal war, which is the image exhibited by the light, and the places will remain before and after us. Considering that until now the work of Minjung Kim has literally been faithful to the essentials of structural film, such as depth of film or materiality of film strips, time, light, etc., the emphasis on the content apparent in “THE RED FILTER IS WITHDRAWN.”appears to be an important turning point or the beginning of an extension. While the structural frame, which was her previous interest, supports the entirety of film as a voice of the entirety of work and as form of the work, the sense of place, which is the content of the image, seeps in between the structure, and the content and form are soon naturally amalgamated to one.
The increase in sociocultural context is a newly perceived change in “THE RED FILTER IS WITHDRAWN.” but all elements of the work are exactly in their place without anything to add or remove structurally, and the unique accuracy in which the content and form intimately correspond is a common feature in the work of Minjung Kim. For example, in (100FT)(2017), which connects the unit feet, derived from the size of an adult male foot, with the physical length of a 16mm film, which is 100 feet per roll, the artist reveals a sense of precision by setting one step to 40 frames (1 ft) and the entire length of the film to 4000 frames (100 ft), even if viewers could never perceive such an aspect. The exactness, almost compulsiveness, may be a product of the artist’s inclination to seek out structural exactness. This aspect is not an exception in “THE RED FILTER IS WITHDRAWN.”, and the film cannot be understood at a first viewing, but in hindsight as the work is analyzed, when it gradually accumulates in multiple layers. In the first half, the film is an exemplary demonstration of A Lecture by Hollis Frampton. Frampton’s performance, which reflects on the white rectangle while describing the projector being turned on after the light is turned off and darkness, is repeated in the temporal construction of “THE RED FILTER IS WITHDRAWN.”. The beginning of the actual film is the moment when the color surfaces overlap as the projector runs and a white rectangle appears. The order in which the text appears also coincides with the order of the Lecture manuscript, and the image corresponds to the content of the Lecture, visually supporting the story. When “It is only a rectangle of white light. But it is all films”(2) flows out, the screen changes intensity and shows all types of flickering bright rectangular frames. Soon after, as the scene in A Lecture of fitting a red filter in front of the lens begins, the screen is covered in red, and a white screen created by an orderly layering of red, green, and blue is visually presented.
The elements of film, such as the screen and the light, the red filter, and the dark space are completely combined with a hole as a scar, what remains, blood and anti-communism, the history of a tragedy that is deeply etched in Jeju.
The film, which was one with A Lecture by Frampton focusing on structure, is subverted as it first deviates from the order in A Lecture. The film repeats the previous content, positioning the red filter in front of the lens at a time when the content of the red filter being withdrawn is to appear, and deviates off-course temporally as well as at a point of emphasis. The “We have all been here before,” which appeared in the beginning, appears again and the film transitions from a structural issue to a historical question and a matter of memory. If the aforementioned “we” represents the current audience who have gathered to watch the film, the “we” thereafter represents those who have disappeared, lingering only as breath in the historical site.(3) Thus, the film changes tense from the present to the past, and the exploration of media in structural film is jumbled with a documentary that contemplates the context of subject. From this point, the camera is not looking out from the inside to the outside, but looking at a cave or an air hole entrance from the outside. Rather than intruding in a place where one would not dare to enter recklessly, the artist has chosen to quietly observe the traces of scarring as an outsider. The camera, after panning over the Darangshi Cave, the Keunneolgwe, the Billemotdonggul Lava Tube in Eoeum-ri, the Sagye Cemetery to the Baekjoilsonmyoyeuk, composedly observes the site of tragedy from afar. Here, the image does not follow A Lecture by Frampton as before, but instead leads the lecture and reverses in role. The text “We can hold a hand before the lens. … Let us say that we desire to modulate the general information with which the projector bombards our screen”(4)—which flows out at the scene of Baekjoilsonmyoyeuk (the tomb of 100 ancestors with the same descendant), where 132 bodies were buried in a mass grave because it was not possible to identify whom the mixed up bones belong to—seems to portray the dilemma faced by the filmmaker in front of subjects that have too many stories that could not be told. Thoughts such as “perhaps it would be better to say nothing” and “isn’t there already too much information overflowing in this place?” lead to the text “A hand blocks all light from the screen.”(5) Then, the screen blacks out. An image of a foxtail swaying in the wind, eventually followed by the text: “Our white rectangle is not nothing at all.” The most common weed represents the countless souls that have died namelessly, and they are not “nothing at all.” Here, the elements of film, such as the screen and the light, the red filter, and the dark space are completely combined with a hole as a scar, what remains, blood and anti-communism, the history of a tragedy that is deeply etched in Jeju.
What symbolizes this dramatic amalgamation is the end of the film. In the end, the artist returns to the beginning of A Lecture by Frampton. What is shown together with the text “As long as we’re going to talk about films, we might as well do it in the dark”(6) is the sky, which is the brightest image. With “Please turn out the lights. … The projector is turned on.”(7) the screen is blacked out and the film ends, but considering that these words are the beginning of the Frampton lecture and that the beginning of darkness is a condition for starting the film, which is entirely an illusion and a dream, this dialog alludes to another film being started by those who remain, and the stories that could not be told to continue thereafter. In other words, like the moving image being continuously looped inside the gallery, the end of the film is the beginning of the film, and the remaining words continue. Thus, the film that started from a structural interest is expanded to a reflection on the meta history of film and a return to history, and the content becomes a part of the structure as an axis as important as the form.
The corporeality as a l’être-au-monde (being-in-the-world) as described is a trend that is emphasized increasingly in the recent works of Minjung Kim.
The part to focus on here is the body of the artist, which detects the non-visible mood and sentiment of the corresponding location and captures the same onto a film medium like a pathway. As the eye of the camera and the first audience, the body of the artist that views the scenery of Jeju from inside the encampment cave feels the memories and energy harbored by the location in our place and is a medium for intertwining the apparatus of the film and the placeness of the subject. Through this body, the past and the present, Jeju Island and the screen, the audience and the subject meet. The corporeality as a l’être-au-monde (being-in-the-world) as described is a trend that is emphasized increasingly in the recent works of Minjung Kim. In the installation version of “THE RED FILTER IS WITHDRAWN.” presented in 2019, the audience was able to watch a film with the colors intact only after passing the red filter set up at the entrance and entering therein. Here, the body of the audience and the corporeality of space as an object of intrusion emerges as another aspect of the film. From this perspective, the most recent work MY WARMEST REGARDS, MINJUNG KIM (2020) is a vignette that well represents memory and sentiment, and the point of expansion where the body is united with the film medium achieved in “THE RED FILTER IS WITHDRAWN.”. This long-take film—taken with a fixed camera showing a freight train that continues following one after another in the Tehachapi Loop, which is famous for its long spiral railway section—contains the wish for everyone to be safe while worrying about the safety of friends in the COVID-19 situation. The dialog “It’s gone. Sad” recited by her mentor, James Benning, while watching the train disappear at the time of filming, lingered in the mind of the artist, who used multiple expose so that the disappearing train continuous to stretch on and on, realizing the wish in film. Like the wind that is unseen but constantly blowing in “THE RED FILTER IS WITHDRAWN.” the memories of the teacher in MY WARMEST REGARDS, MINJUNG KIM are materialized through cinematic strategies such as double exposure and looping and connects the ins and outs of the film. Is what we see there a train, a longing, a light, or all of the above, or nothing at all?
Hye Jin Mun is an art critic, scholar of art history and visual culture. Her main interests include technological media, Korean contemporary art, and visuality.
Translated by Jee Hae Park
