“images […] give up their optical clarity, to engulf the viewer in a flow of tactile impressions” – Laura U. Marks

In 2015 the series of screenings and discussions Embeddedness: Artist Films and Videos from Korea 1960s to Now held at Tate Modern offered a ground-breaking survey of the history of artist's moving image work in Korea. Presented in collaboation with LUX, this new strand on artist's film and video at the LKFF continues to focus on significant artists' work from Korea, proposing a survey through three decades of work by video artist Seoungho Cho.

Early works by Cho such as The Island with Striped Sky, (made in collaboration with the painter Sang-Wook Cho), Forward, Back, Side, Forward Again or Identical Time display tropes of isolation and loss within the urban environment of his adopted city of New York. Cho's gaze is that of a passers-by filming the city’s busy transport system, depicted as a transient zone made of fleeting images abstracted through the use of visual manipulations, texts and dense soundtracks. Orange Factory is a beautiful and haunting video that sees the author travelling the back-roads of the Korean countryside using twilight as a metaphor for his own feelings of displacement, his personal identity and history.

Cold Pieces morphs technology and nature – images of water flowing become a powerful equivalent for Cho's aesthetics, standing for constant mutation and infinite variation. This blending of the elements is used by the artist to create meditative landscape pieces such as Shifted Horizon filmed in the Death Valley desert or the very recent Latency/Contemplation 1, where the lines of the horizon are transformed into abstract dynamic moving lines of colour and light. The sense of gesture so present in the artist’s work is represented beautifully in 1/1 the short and delicate film opening this selection: shot in old stock material, the film shows the filmmaker rubbing his fingers against the video strip before unveiling a degraded colour image of a moth flapping its wings.

The Island with Striped Sky, 1993, 10 min, Colour, Digital
Forward, Back, Side, Forward Again, 1995, 11 min, Colour, Digital
Identical Time, 1997, 14 min, Colour, Digital
Cold Pieces, 1999, 11 min, Colour, Digital
1/1, 2001, 4 min, B/W & Colour, Digital
Orange Factory, 2002, 12 min, Colour, Digital
Shifted Horizon, 2009, 6 min, Colour, Digital
Latency/Contemplation 1, 2016, 6 min, Colour, Digital

Part of the Artists’ Video strand of the London Korean Film Festival

More info:
koreanfilm.co.uk
www.lux.org.uk