BELATED BOSAL
HD film, 5.1 channel sound, 55 min., 2019
Exhibition view, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul
This film is mainly composed of black and white negatives. Belated Bosal, paired with Fukushima, Autoradiography, stimulates the audiences’ conventional conceptions and images about light, air, radioactivity and nature to the extent that they re-think all of these ideas and representations of them inversely.
Synopsis: A container loaded onto a cargo ship comes into the harbor. No one knows what is inside the container. It is just one of the many containers. A middle-aged female Bosal climbs the mountain, while Gahye measures the degree of the radioactive contamination inside the mountain area. Young men paint and manufacture products. Bosal looks for a place to put the container. Gahye beholds her very own past life in a temple on the mountain. Finally, Bosal arrives at the location of the container. Other people also gather at this place.
The delicately controlled tone of the film creates a subtle conflict with the background setting, or the contaminated radioactive place. The characters seem to float around the core of the narrative, without any special relationships between them. A mixture of the images of mountains, Buddhist myths, a nuclear power plant and art seems to forsake the coherence of the storyline. However, this film is close to a depiction of a society that has lost its coherency. As a result, the film leads the audiences to consider the nirvana of the great saint, the road to our individual deaths and, above all, the “gatherings” that take place at the time of someone’s death.
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2023 Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.
2023 Macao International Art Biennale, Macao
2020 Yokohama Triennale 2020 Afterglow, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan
2019 Gathering, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul
Gathering exhibition trailer