Sujin Lee

Change

A short film as a draft, an exercise, or maybe the first segment of a long-term project tracing the evolution of my nephew's voice as he grows. In the film, he talks about when he built a snowman called Snow Ice Monster which was then torn down and rebuilt by other children. He listens to a recording of his voice and notices that he sounds like a certain Minjung, who does not exist in real life.

Rosha

The Rorschach Inkblot Test was created by Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist, in 1921. The test employs a series of ten inkblot cards, and the test taker is asked to provide their perceptions or perspectives on the presented images. The test was considered effective in identifying and diagnosing schizophrenia and was administered to Nazi war criminals in an attempt to understand the Nazi personality. Often criticized as pseudoscience, the Rorschach is still used and remains controversial. The test is often referred to as Ro-sha (short for Rorschach) in Korea. The film Rosha tells stories spoken by a girl named Rosha. It is a photogram of the ten inkblot images on B&W 16mm film. The images overlap and break apart, leaving impressions on the film surface. When the film is projected, the printed inkblots turn into Rosha's glossolalia,* which lies between language and non-language.

A Kitchen Reading

The artist reads aloud a piece of text written in English and the artist's friend Sofya Melnichuck orally translates the reading into Russian on the spot. The reading was filmed at the communal kitchen of Artkommunalka*. The kitchen was the place where families in the communal apartment exchanged their ideas, arts, and samizdats during the Soviet era. Unlike other works by the artist, this video was made with an awareness that the work would go through a translation in the future (in this case, into Korean). There are multiple translations in the work: from written text to spoken words, from spoken to spoken words, from English to Russian, and finally from spoken words (English) to written text (Korean subtitles). The text that is read and translated in the video keeps referring back to itself by discussing these various translations and the corresponding processes.

ephemeras

The video features various images of Kolomna along with fragments of texts in English and Russian. The Russian-English and English-Russian texts are a record of translations done in Google Translate during actual conversations. They represent the speakers' awareness of the possible failure of language as well as their mutual efforts to communicate with each other. The audio is the artist copying the text of Moscow-Petushki by Benedict Erofeev, making reference to the history and culture of the city, Kolomna. ephemeras addresses both the physicality and ephemerality of the act of speaking and writing.

This Voice

This Voice is a single channel video in black and white with a voice-over. The voice-over describes another voice that never appears in the video. The black and white images in the video are abstract, fragmented and layered; their textures have sonogram-like qualities. They comment on the impossibility of describing a voice because it has an ephemeral nature and may be remembered on a deeply personal level.

'this landscape

'this landscape is Sujin Lee's response to Frances Richard's poety book titled Anarch. Anarch. helped Lee look at a book as a physical object containing time concerning demarcations such as punctuation marks and empty spaces (which are to be performed by individual choices). The images in the video are scanned pages of Anarch., selected, blown up, and cropped.

This is a story for small children. a true-life love story

There are three main elements in the video: English text, Korean voice-over, and images. The written text is from the example sentences in English dictionaries. I always find those examples fascinating as they display random, surprising and poetic qualities. Their fragmentary aspects also refer to the possibilities of varied narrative context. Subtitles typically function as a translation of the spoken (original) text in films. However, the English text in this piece is the original and the spoken text (voice-over) is a translation. There are two kinds of translations: from one language to another and from written text to spoken text. The B&W images were created as responses to either the English text or Korean text. The three elements had equal weights in terms of creating rhythms in editing process.

Fast

A woman signs the verb “fast” in American Sign Language by putting her thumb and index finger together and “zipping” her mouth, which resembles the action of closing one’s mouth to be silent. The speed of the action is slowed down, so the person signs the word "fast" very slowly.

untitled video

Memories and fragments of stories enter into dialogue with each other as filmmaker Sujin Lee processes the death of her grandmother and the end of childhood.