To Commune 13: Sriwhana Spong, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Ho Tzu Nyen

And the creeper keeps on reaching for the flame tree | Sriwhana Spong, UK, 5 min, 2022

And the creeper keeps on reaching for the flame tree animates the insects found in the last painting by Sriwhana Spong’s grandfather, the Balinese painter I Gusti Made Rundu. Painted in the traditional Kamasan style, unusual for him, it depicts a battle scene from the Bhomantaka: The Death of Bhoma, a twelfth-century Javanese epic by an unknown author. These insects can be found in the white spaces between the warring figures, where, mosquito like, they function like the small motifs called aun-aun or “haze” found in nearly all the traditional schools, which represent dust particles in the air. 

In the painting, Made Rundu appears to have transformed the traditional aun-aun motif into insects. The film animates these insects, producing a swarm that follows the artist’s voice as she recites a circular, looping text formed from a section of the Bhomāntaka that describes a hermitage left in ruins after a battle. As one of the lines laments: “The circle has been broken and destroyed.” Her grandfather’s insects are animated as a swarm, imaging ancestry not as a linear succession but as an accumulation of energy, as a vibration full of shimmering diversions “charged with potentiality”. 

Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 | Korakrit Arunanondchai, Thailand, USA, 25 min, 2015

Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 is the epilogue to a trilogy of videos Arunanondchai began in 2012. In the video, Arunanondchai revisits his past times spent with Chantri, the main character of the trilogy who we never see – the incarnation of the in-between space in communication that is part spirit and part drone. For the first time in the trilogy, Chantri speaks back to the artist, through the voice of his mother, Chutatip Arunanondchai. The dialogue between the two characters amounts to a closure for the series as they string together fragments of personal and collective experiences that touches on the issue of memory lost in the digital age, the fluctuating present and the anxiety filled future.

The 49th Hexagram | Ho Tzu Nyen, Singapore/South Korea, 30 min, 2020

The 49th Hexagram explores the construction of cultural memory and political narrative surrounding the history of the Korean peninsula. Employing the services of an animation studio in Pyongyang, North Korea, Ho Tzu Nyen’s work reinterprets scenes of political uprising and mass demonstration as depicted in South Korean narrative film and television. The project aims to form a direct relationship between South Korea’s political  history and the tensions that still define the country’s relationship with its northern counterpart. The result is, in the artist’s words, a “game of exquisite corpse across geopolitical barriers.” The artist developed the experimental soundtrack in collaboration with Korean artists and musicians Bek Hyunjin, Park Minhee, and Ryu Hankil. Offering two vocal renditions of texts from the forty-ninth hexagram of the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese divination manual, the soundtrack composites historical interpretation with translation to speak of revolution and renewal.

This is a single-channel cinematic presentation of The 49th Hexagram, whose original form is a two-channel video and sound installation.