Shorts (1995-2001)

MORNING BECOMES ECLECTIC

EMPTY HOUSE

FLYING APPETITE

DOOR

PASSING EYES

THE PICTURE I DRAW

OK MAN, THIS IS YOUR WORLD

HEROINE

(17 min, VHS, 2001)

Shot after "escaping" to the US from the family oppression in Korea. These video diaries represent the isolated life of the artist, alone in a foreign country for the first time.

"The images assembled in Morning Becomes Eclectic are from the period immediately after the director's arrival in the U.S. to escape family conflicts in Korea. "I had to learn to live alone, with no one around to rely on. Time passes only too slowly. I make my everyday activities into strange rituals of my own. When sunlight throws a pattern of squares on the floor, I step on each square carefully. I eat a grapefruit every morning and count to ten. I concentrated on these 'rituals' for I believed they ensured my sanity in such extreme isolation. One day, I wake up with the voice from the radio saying 'Morning Becomes Eclectic.' I look up in the dictionary the definition for the word 'eclectic.' while brewing a cup of tea, I whisper the phrase 'Morning Becomes Eclectic' compulsively, as if they were the magic words that can make my fear and anxiety disappear."
— VC film fest catalog

(24 minutes, VHS, 1999)

Edited from video diary footages shot in one day. Divided into two parts, the first part is shot mostly in blue tone, featuring everyday activities of waking up, going to the bathroom, and hanging a mirror. The second part, shot mostly in yellow, depicts compulsive eating, illustrating both the obsession of the body and the desire to escape from it.
"The film juxtaposes containment, order, and banality with obsession, desire and an explosive tendency for self-destruction. The "diary" depicts the violent fracture of the female subject "I." One constantly waits for the letter that never arrives, for the menstural period that arrives late, and the self-fulfillment of the perfect body that is never satiated. And the other, exhuasted from the wait, disperses into the self-effacement of depression, eating disorder and PMS, transmuting an endless sound of obsessive eating and images of hopeless defect. The representation of the body-registered entirely through fragmented body parts-anchors the fulcrum of the "self" and enunciates a feminist language of "corporeal cinema."
— Yamagata documentary film festival catalog

(4 minutes, VHS, 1998)

(6 mintes, VHS, 1997)

Gina Kim's Door initially displays all the rigor of a project thrown together the day it's due. In the film's only shot, the sunlight that pours through the glass door and the pattern of a squares it throws on the floor becomes the boundary of a barefoot woman's playful impromptu dance and a sense of everyday ritual. — Paul Malcom, LA Weekly (May 9. 1997)

(4 minutes, VHS, 1995)

(6 minutes, VHS, 1995)