Hyeree Ro's Precise Ambiguity | Art21 "New York Close Up"

(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)

(speaking Korean)

(speaking Korean)

(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)