Unidentified body & Dysfunctional language
A body that denies a clear classification created by a nation or a institution is destined to prove their own existence. The exclusion forces the unidentified being to demonstrate exaggerated amount or impractical conveyance of actions and explanations. Growing up, I have attended American systemized school in Vietnam and Dubai with a Korean nationality, which explicitly separated my nationality, race, and language. Not being able to speak the dominant language of the community often lead to a failure in being a part of something. In this case, observing the primary body language and reaction from the society is one way to adjust to the new environment, but such actions functions temporarily as it becomes useless in other places. With these situations, I have recognized myself as a performer who executes a structured movement.
Aliens
A series of videos, where an alienated being appears in the middle of the city, shows a narrative of an individual settling down at a specific space where the individual has no relation with. The performer does not represent a specific character nor act as one, but the performer only appears and disappears for the purpose of disturbing the connectivity of the surroundings. Variation surrounds, (2016), Highwaylands (2016), and Lie towards a Fall (2015) inversely neglect the people who were already there by a choreography without a storyline that temporarily switches the city to a theatre.
Foreigner’s Photography
When I went back to Vietnam that I lived for 8 years in my childhood, a realization of my memory just being a fabricated and objectified image struck through; how fast an image could be flattened and consumed by a foreigner who lacks the social and historical background of the other culture. Silver Picnic Mat (2017) and Palm tree and His eyes (2016) are montages of my personal story intervened with local events that are observed through a foreigner’s eyes such as the King’s funeral of Thailand along with images that are objectified as ‘Southeast-Asian’ such as massive amount of motorcycles, dried coconuts, and cartoon printed snack wraps.
With such background of categorization, my key interests are peculiar images of alienated bodies that are left out, and exploring the ways to suggest narratives that are constructed of images – something that strongly emerges when one side of the other is abandoned – rather than with language. My focus is converting the mechanical smoothness of a screen and a camera to a different material; like how ‘rain’ evaporates but will return to its original formality, like how ‘plastic’ is thrown away but will never disappear completely. These are an attempt to portray a material that has a soft physical body yet solid in substance into a whole new texture in a video medium.
© 2019 Shinhoo Yhi. All rights reserved.