La Mer Single channel video, 8min 47sec, music: Lena Circus, 2005

Emerging 9 (Selected 3 emerging artists solo exhibition), Ssamzie Space, Seoul, 2009

 

Everyone dreams of a place. It is a place that you can not either name, or be sure of whether it is real. Eunyoung Park’s works stem from the pursuit of this place. In her videos, the place is depicted as fluidity while recurring images of water, fire, plant, trees slowly appear and drift away. In Chunja rain series, the characters keep fluttering their repetitive way of birth and disappearance. As such the place becomes not only a place of birth and disappearance for Park, it offers her an origin of her imagination.

La Mer, the title of the video in this exhibition, is homophone of mother in French. In her video introduced is the process searching for such place as the audience follows her mother taking a walk. Her hesitating gestures, sensitivity of an old black and white movie, red filtering, and dreamy waves overlapping on her back with a contemporary tune by Lena Circus, all suggest us to travel between dream and real world. As we float on the waves of camera, we find ourselves we are already in the place. Then the video reaches a tomb. Then we realizes this place we have been submerged is the place where crisscrossing start and end.

 

Eunyoung Ju (Ssamzie Space Curator), 2009