Join us for a screening and conversation with artist Heehyun Choi moderated by film curator Jheanelle Brown the occasion of A Motionless Movie, the 19th Korea Arts Foundation of America Award Recipient Exhibition on view October 23–November 14, 2025.

Screening: 

Our Cave 우리의 동굴 (16mm and Super 8 to Digital, 22 min. 30 sec., 2024)

Magritte doubted Plato's allegory of the cave through his painting The Human Condition(1935). In the 18th century Joseon Dynasty, Shin Don Bok put together the anecdote collection Hak San Han Eon, which includes a story of two people willingly venturing deep into a cave rather than seeking light outside, eventually reaching a completely different world. In this film, the two people become women, and together, they load the film into the camera. In the utter darkness where only the sound of water is heard, images emerge. In that place where everything is inverse, the camera becomes a watering can, a mirror, and a teapot.

A Dark Room 칠 실 (16mm and Super 8 to digital, 9 min. 51 sec., 2025

A Dark Room begins with an imagined perspective of those who encountered the camera before the conventions of cinematic language were established-when it was less a tool or machine but more a phenomenon. The principle is simple: pierce a small hole in a dark room and light will project an image of the outside world. This is the camera obscura, which literally means "dark room." The modern word camera, with obscura dropped, means simply "room." To take a photograph or make a film, then, can be likened to filling ones own room with an image. In fact, across both Eastern and Western cultures, the camera obscura served as a sketching aid that allowed paintings to be rendered more closely to reality. After first experiencing the camera obscura, Chöng Yagyong(1762-1836) described its projected image as a landscape painting in his essay Chil Shil Gwan Hwa Seol (On Viewing Paintings from the Dark Chamber).

A Dark Room pictures a woman who might have encountered the camera obscura in that same period, or perhaps read Chöng Yagyong's essay. Within her own room, landscapes already unfold: in the water poured into a teacup, inside a bojagi (a traditional Korean wrapping cloth), and across the blanket she is sewing.

A Motionless Movie 움측이지안는영화 (16mm and Super 8 to digital, 25 min., 2025)

In 1928, the Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo published a brief article introducing a scene from the Hollywood silent film Get Your Man (1927), starring the popular actress Clara Bow. The article bore the paradoxical title "Umjigiji-Anneun Yeonghwa (A Motionless Movie)". According to the writing, Clara Bow's character meets the male protagonist for the first time at a wax museum in Paris. However, the countless wax figures in the scene were not mannequins but dozens of actors, who all confront the camera perfectly 'motionless. The only moving presence in the frame was Clara Bow herself.

Two years later, Bow filmed her first sound film, The Wild Party (1929), directed by Dorothy Arzner. To allow Clara Bow to move more freely in front of the camera while recording sound simultaneously, Arzner devised a device now known as a boom microphone, suspending a mic from a fishing rod.

The essay film A Motionless Movie, which shares the same title as the exhibition, imagines the perspective of Korean women reading the domestic/women's pages of newspapers carrying Hollywood news in the 1920s and '30s, and loosely traces Clara Bow's trajectory across these pages. Her constant presence under descriptors such as "the quintessential Modern Girl" or "the typical flapper," followed by her sudden disappearance after marriage and childbirth, prompts reflection not only on her movement within film but also on what it means to be free in front of the camera and in the gaze of the press.