(ethereal music)
- The world of image felt always like never enough for me.
(piece being dragged)
What felt the most real, close to life,
was performance, involving body.
You feel the weight,
you feel the texture,
you hear the sound.
It is there, tangible,
but with this tangible thing,
you create intangible scenes in mind.
(ethereal music)
(traffic hums)
I arrived in LA to meet my father
for the first time, in... 13 years?
(traffic hums)
I remember in the car driving to his apartment.
He held my hand and kind of said, (chuckles)
"Oh, your hand grew so much."
(turn signals) (traffic hums)
Since I started reconnecting with him,
almost every time I visited him,
he tried to plan some kind of road trip together.
So the car space is like the space
that I spent the most time with my dad.
The project came about with thinking about this car space.
(paper rustling)
This is actual Niro,
outlining what kind of skeleton that I could build.
I made the car sculpture based on the model my dad drove.
(items rattle)
I laid out a lot of materials and objects that I have made
or collected over time,
seeing if it works or not, compositionally,
considering its shape, material,
and different sounds that it would make.
(soft scraping)
I wanted some kind of a plane in my piece
because it's very skeletal and it only has sticks.
I wanted some space
for other objects to exist on.
(clay thumps)
Each step of the way required interpretation
and a lot of like abstraction.
(twinkling music)
Being precisely ambiguous, it's important to me because
when you're puzzled by what you're seeing,
you see things even more closely.
(twinkling music)
You observe the thing as what it is
instead of what it means or what it's symbolizing.
(twinkling music)
Driving for hours, you're kind of together the whole time.
I had faint memory of like who my dad was,
but then there's like this big gap,
so it felt like meeting a familiar figure
but a stranger.
What we like or how we like to do things
felt pretty different a lot of times.
(piece being dragged)
no music
not too slow
not too fast
don't stand out
he said
Look for a Korean restaurant
McMornings
and Korean food
(gentle music)
Object, movement, and language,
I want each part to exist on their own
and then try to figure out
how they can coexist in a performance.
Water
pouring
climb the hill
I think of language as sound components in my performance.
There's a kind of calculation in silences
for words or scenes to sink in
and give space to the object sounds.
(objects rattle)
Some words I feel like I cannot say in English,
or in Korean.
Whenever he talks about the trip
sometimes it’s ominous
strange
Translation is perpetually incomplete.
Accepting that there are things that are not understandable
or accessible at the moment is also part of the experience.
(gentle music)
They said
Do you know
a blue Kia Niro?
emptied parking lot
a car left there
(falls roaring)
My dad talked about going to Niagara Falls,
but we didn't go.
He was afraid to go near the US border.
After he passed,
it kind of hit me that
it will be meaningful to take that trip
with him, metaphorically.
I wanted to just spend time in car, moving,
and think about the time I spent with him.
(falls roaring)
(speaking Korean)
door
(speaking Korean)
embrace
(wood slams)
(twinkling music)
I like road trips because you're moving forward
to a destination together,
but then you're also intimately in this one space.
You're almost in a same destiny.
(twinkling music)
When I perform, I feel the presence
and energy of the audience
and that feels like we kind of shared something
at that moment.
What's important lies in what's actually not being said
because it gives room for mixing with people's own thoughts,
own memories, or stories.
(twinkling music)