𝕃𝕠𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝔻𝕖𝕗𝕚𝕟𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟: 𝔹𝕠𝕣𝕕𝕖𝕣𝕤, ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕩𝕚𝕞𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝔻𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕤𝕥𝕚𝕔 𝕆𝕓𝕛𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕤
artists in-person: 陳省聿 Hsin-Yu Chen + 林怡平 Jessi Ali Lin
❍ 2024. 5. 23, THU 8 PM
❍ Whammy! Analog Media
2514 Sunset Blvd. ReaR, Los Angeles, CA 90026
ticket page: whammyanalog.com/events/loose-definition
Loose Definition (borders, proximity, and domestic objects)
From the bodies and objects situated between borders and imaginary spaces to the measurement of the immaterial, in the 8 works by filmmakers and artists, naming and positioning becomes an ever-changing slippery process. Our relation to image, statehood, and identities collapse and expand, both physically and metaphorically.
後照鏡 ReaRflex is a Taiwanese experimental filmmakers collective focusing on artist-self-organized micro-cinema events since 2021. Mostly based in Taipei, this special edition features Hsin-Yu Chen, who has been showing work in many of ReaRflex’s screening series, to curate a program while he visits Los Angeles. The following program is organized by Hsin-Yu Chen and Jessi Ali Lin, with the support of Erica Sheu.
Beigu Islet (Hsin-Yu Chen, 12’, hd video, color, 2022)
A voyage to the northern border of Taiwan — the eponymous Beigu Islet, a sea rock roughly 300sqft submerged under water half of the time — delves into regional histories, the gaze on borderline landscapes, and the ambivalent state of Taiwanese territory and subjectivity.
Around the World 2023 (Ruotong Zhao, 11’, hd video, color, 2023)
Around the World is a name of collective community building in Taipei. The architecture is an inwardly closed round system. Compared with naming the buildings after foreign cities, it creates a huge misplacement and contradiction. Two texts are interspersed in the work. One is the novel "Around the World in 80 Days" published in 1873, the other is "Around the World in 72 Days" written by a New York journalist in 1889, which imitated the travel route in the novel. The distance between places gradually shortens in the sense of time . When such a journey is transplanted and placed in the Around the World built in 1995, the distance seems to disappear completely. The residents move physically in the same building, but their consciousness is traveling to distant places every day. Traveling around the world has become their daily practice. In 2023, I attempted to use video time to respond to the question
raised in the novel: "Is it impossible for people to travel around the world in a shorter time?"
Semiotics of the Home (Jessi Ali Lin & Hs no in-Yu Chen, 8', hd video, color, 2023)
Construction machines are cast as actors in a domestic space, completing daily tasks such as cooking, cleaning, eating, and resting. The gentle gestures enacted by large-scale machines subvert our notions of the domestic, imagining industrial equipment as bodies in a home rather than the machines that construct the spaces we inhabit daily.
Between a Lost Home and a Losing Destination (Illya Mousavijad, 7', hd video, color, 2020-2022)
“Between a Lost Home and a Loosing Destination” is a computer animation film/video piece. Using 3D scanning and Photogrammetry I have captured some of the 3D models used in the animation piece from real objects which I have brought with myself form my home country. The rug, dishes, tray, and some other objects are among the souvenirs. Other models such as fresh fruits and some of the foods are mostly acquired or modeled and sculpted on the computer. The animation comprises of a meticulous programing, involving combinations of key animation, physic dynamics, and graph editing. In this animation piece I have tried to investigate the depth and limits of the exile and migration experience as they relate to my heritage/Iranian diaspora. The translation to 3D/computer aims to explore the notions of proximity, distance, access, and inaccessibility. The movement of the animation is motivated to understand and explore an experience in between remote departure and destination points. A surreal situation created by the collision of two spaces: the abstract nature of memory and a more precise physical present.
Born, Unborn, and Born Again (Kyuri Jeon, 12', hd video, color, 2020)
The film revolves around Jeon’s struggle to embody the White Horse, a Chinese zodiac sign which occurs every 60-year cycle in South Korea. With the abortion debate’s entanglement with misogynic myths and the introduction of modern technologies, an untold history resurfaces in the present, and re-orients us towards the future. Korean and grammatical structure of the future perfect tense in English, are weaved to contemplate ruptures, repetition of time, and violence against women.
Still Life I & III (installation documentation excerpt)(Jessi Ali Lin, 5', hd video, color, 2019 & 2021)
The Still Life series points to the instability of image in relation to identity. The project emerged as I explored the weight of image both physically and metaphorically. If image has weight, who is holding it? I approach this question through considering image as woman and how both function as apparatus exploited to sustain the status quo. My presence in the work is motivated by the desire to simultaneously be the image maker and the image itself. Each work from the series includes a video performance that considers each side of the seesaw as a surface to construct still life images. Through both the specific positioning of the camera while filming, as well as the fragmentation of the resulting images in the exhibition space, my installation implicates the viewer’s bodies, pointing to the positionality of their bodies and the space they occupy, both within the exhibition space and in the larger world.
BIPM (Hsin-Yu Chen, 3', super 8mm digital transfer, b/w+color, 2023)
On one roll of Super 8 film, 15m (50ft) = 2.5 minutes, at 24 frames per second.
I walked 15 meters over 2.5 minutes of an entire roll of Super 8 film outside the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), where the international system of units, including standardized time and length, was developed and defined. The forced synchronicity premised on the structural materiality of film interrogates the notion of measurement, standardization, adaptation, and embodied experience.
Different Dusts (Chloe Brenan, 7', super 8mm digital transfer, color, 2021)
'Different Dusts' is a non-narrative, experimental Super 8mm film and sound work. Using the theremin - as a sensor of forces below the threshold of human perception - as a central motif, the film explores the sensing/vulnerable body, intuition, tacit knowledge, erosion and measurement against a backdrop of climate change. By suspending various subjects in relation to one another, the piece considers the impression of touch beyond close proximity and across non-human time.
The title is taken from the first chapter 'The Confusion' from Elizabeth Bowen's novel 'A Time in Rome' where she writes: "The knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. Substantiality comes through touch and smell, and taste, the tastes of different dusts. When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. [...] Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge."