The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

131 ARTISTS Beyond the sea (stills) 2018 Three-channel HD video: 16:58 minutes, colour, sound / Director and Editor: Bona Park / Camera: Daegyeon Kim / Light: Woohyung Lee / Voice: Sohee Kim / Stunt: Young Yoon Hwang / Text excerpted from Marguerite Duras The Atlantic Man 1981 and Jean-Luc Godard Alphaville 1965 / Courtesy: The artist / Commissioned for APT9 / Supported by Arts Council Korea / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery Collection Born 1977, Seoul, South Korea Lives and works in Seoul Bona Park’s three-channel video Beyond the sea 2018 reprises two major themes from her recent practice: workplace relations, with a particular focus on thankless jobs; and extinction or redundancy brought about by human activity, technological development and economic imperatives. Park finds inspiration in the people with whom she collaborates to tell outwardly simple stories that avoid grand narratives, yet touch on broader social themes. The appeal of her works lies in the way her collaborators — who have ranged from cooks to carpenters to comedians — respond to the unusual, and occasionally awkward, game-like situations in which the artist places them, and the complex social and historical contexts that these scenarios bring into play. For Beyond the sea , Park collaborated with individuals working behind the scenes in the Korean film and television industry: a voice actor, a lighting operator and a stunt double. Each performs a single action, with the three channels creating a poetic whole. The work centres on the voice actor in a sound studio, reading a monologue. To one side, a stunt double repeatedly rehearses a sweeping kung-fu move in slow motion, while on the other screen, a lighting operator, standing on a beach, flashes out Morse code on a studio lamp. The central monologue is drawn from French playwright Marguerite Duras’s experimental 1981 film The Atlantic Man , an ode to a departed lover throughout which shots of the seaside recur. For Park, the ‘you’ addressed by the central monologue in Beyond the sea is intentionally directed towards workers in Korea’s film and television industry, and the profession of voice acting in particular. Once popular for providing Korean language dubbing to foreign films, many actors were made redundant after the global financial crisis of 2008, their function replaced by subtitling. After the economy recovered, a preference emerged for employing famous actors to contribute the dubbed voices, rather than vocal specialists. The stunt performer in the left-hand channel typically portrays a gangster or kung-fu artist in action movies. Park admits feeling nostalgic for an earlier era of martial arts films, before the advent of computerised special effects, but also notes that this particular performer ‘appears again and again after dying in a movie, but nobody notices’. 1 The blinking light in the right-hand screen, meanwhile, recalls Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 French New Wave cinema classic Alphaville , depicting a technological dystopia in which human emotion is forbidden. In Park’s work, the operator of the light flashes in Morse code a poem read by one of Godard’s characters. Brainwashed to think only with cold rationality, she cannot understand the poem’s emotional content. Beyond the sea references exemplars of filmmaking — from European art house to classic kung-fu — that have much to say about disappearance, longing and the role of culture in shaping sensibilities. At the same time, it places before the camera individuals who typically work behind it. All three perform simple gestures; however, abstracted from their workaday context and framed by Bona Park’s videography, they take on a poetic resonance. Deeper readings are also possible — both of the oblique cinematic references inherent in each action, and of the broader conditions of labour in jobs that are vulnerable to disappearances and redundancies, the workforce equivalents of endangered species in the natural world. Reuben Keehan Endnote 1 Bona Park, email to the author, 21 May 2018. bona park