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Minyong Jang

Filmography

A respiratory exchange between the viewer and a bamboo forest.

‘Through the acts of very close looking and capturing on film, Minyong Jang relishes the discovery of all manner of perhaps otherwise unnoticed visual poetry. His films are also significantly about the advantageous juxtaposition of one image with another, the resulting one-plus-one adding up to considerably more than two. Take, for example, the clear sense of closure at the conclusion of The Breath, his just-completed film. All of the shots until just before the end result from the camera having been hand-held and pretty much always in motion. Jang seems to be saying, “Let’s just explore this small bit of nature and see what we discover.” At the end of the film, however, all motion stops. The highly abstract images from the now tripod-mounted camera, along with Jang’s precise editing, tell us without fanfare that the end is at hand. He thus subtly creates what musicians call a perfect-authentic cadence, the ultimate sense of closure. All of his work is about the unique kind of silence that film viewing sometimes engenders. What we are offered in these works is not just silence in the usual sense, but rather, the opportunity to experience the kind of concentrated absence of sound that lets our minds flow into their own silent and/or sonic realms.’ —Charles Boone, San Francisco Cinematheque

20 September 2018

Sensory, colourful and widescreen, the forest is already naturally cinematic.

Since the turn of this century, the forest has fascinated a new generation of global art filmmakers who have chosen the forest as a space for their creative exploration. ‘Screening the Forest’ takes nature as its point of departure by weaving together cinematic forests from India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. In some cases, the forest may even refer to nothing but a world construed as its own territory.

Like the real forest, where many genuses of trees coexist, the programme emphasizes that cinema is constructed not only culturally and aesthetically, but also ecologically or even animistically. As new strategies and interpretations of the forest emerge from a variety of Asian filmmakers, new trees can be sowed within our own imagination.

Q&A with curator Dr. Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn

Run Time

86 mins
More Info