Heehyun Choi

An imaginary look back at the present and distant past from the point of view of the year 2049. The return of an exile to Los Angeles decades after social and environmental collapse. He recreates the memories of his past (our present), and imagines the lives of those who inhabited his old apartment when he was gone. His sense of displacement elicits a meditation on place, memory and dream.

The audience encounters a report in blue pages discussing the death of wild birds caused by collisions with transparent soundproof walls. Two hands appear to turn the pages, cut the paper, move the objects and paint, following the text from the report. While birds fly towards a transparent wall, what is the audience colliding with?

The camera sets out on a journey to find the headless Buddha statues scattered across Namsan Mountain in Gyeongju. What has disappeared, who caused it to vanish, and how has it been recorded? People stroll along the river, the sea, and mountain paths, taking photographs, where images from the past and the desire for excavation overlap.

A short artistic, experimental, humorous film about saving birds.

Utilizing the screen recording method, this desktop-essay film successively follows the colour blue that has been used in paintings and videos under expressive or technical decisions. The colour blue in this work connects artworks from different periods in art history and inquires about the truth and delusion in the act of seeing. After a short surfing session, there is a random yet organically constructed archive about the colour blue.

Magritte doubted Plato's allegory of the cave through his painting The Human Condition(1935). In the 18th century Joseon Dynasty, Shin Don Bok put together the anecdote collection Hak San Han Eon, which includes a story of two people willingly venturing deep into a cave rather than seeking light outside, eventually reaching a completely different world. In this film, the two people become women, and together, they load the film into the camera. In the utter darkness where only the sound of water is heard, images emerge. In that place where everything is inverse, the camera becomes a watering can, a mirror, and a teapot.

A mass of space continuously emerges between the squared gazes. The gazes around a camera, each pointing at different directions, instantly create worlds of various dimensions. This video attempts to twist the linear connection between those worlds.

Tracing the faded time of those who once turned the pages Chŏng Yagyong(1762-1836)’s Chil Shil Gwan Hwa Seol (On Viewing Paintings from the Dark Chamber). In a dark room of their own, they steep tea, mend fragments with thread, and enfold them in bojagi cloth—crafting a cinema that was unseen.

The film conducts an elusive search for the traces of Lee Kyung Soo, a Korean War orphan adopted by a U.S. Navy officer. Lee’s image circulated widely across newspapers, magazines, and photographs—serving specific purposes and cultural narratives. Over time, these representations fractured, faded, and reemerged, leaving silences in the archive and gaps in visibility. The cut-out fragments from the scattered information are pieced together to imagine the child’s unspoken point of view throughout his wandering life.

Four puppet soldiers walk and make a movement inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Quad (1981). By visually adapting Deleuze’s analysis of Quad (The Exhausted, 1995), the film explores the idea of "The exhaustion of possibilities” through stop-motion animation. The puppets and the printed images slowly disintegrate, and the residue envisions new possibilities.

A short artistic, experimental, humorous film about saving birds.

The prototype of beauty is modelled by structural software, where it’s associated with the physical and mechanical characteristics of the material. Some faces of the model are constrained, while others force it: in this way, internal tensions are created within the material and displacements are produced and made visible thanks to color gradient and simulated in 3D. Numeric evaluation lead in a deep research on the model of beauty, testing its resistance and investigating hidden properties.

Among everything obscure in an image, there is always the camera. This Isn’t What It Appears reconstructs and radicalizes the ways to see and interpret archival photographs of Korean women taken in the 1950s by American soldiers stationed in South Korea. This film attempts to reveal the camera within the frame, not as an omniscient eye but as a reciprocal medium that subverts the hierarchy in an image.