my dear friends

This piece is dedicated to the memories of this summer. I wondered how to preserve and not forget the memories that I care a lot about, so I looked back to the images and videos that I took throughout the summer. I asked the performer Cho to mimic what I said or did when I took those pictures and say the lines from the films that come to my mind when I look at the images and also interact with the printed images physically. I am the only person who can fully ‘understand’ this work since I am the person who experienced it. Maybe the people who share some parts of the memories could get bits of it but this work is a love letter to my own memory which makes it extremely personal. So of course, there are tons of things that are only relatable to myself. Soundwise, I used what I recorded during the summer and edited them: conversation with my friend, ambient noise from the balcony, interior train sound, bus from Seoul, and a gig. I mostly focused on the sounds that are happening inside of the image, but some shots include things that are not in the frame. The title ‘my dear friends’ is a lyric from the song ‘The Generation of Tribulation’ by Lang Lee which is played at the end of this film. I saw her performance in person at the Seoul Pride this year, and I personally like that song too. I decided to use this music from the stage of pre production since this song expresses the love and hate of the process of existing and the sadness of not being able to physically touch the time that has already passed and ended really well. I try to be careful of using music and wasn’t sure if I should use subtitles for the lyrics or not but I considered that subtitles could participate in as an image, so I chose to use subtitles. Images, videos, voice recordings, things that are said and done, and the text that happened in a certain era in my life is sealed in this film. It was my first time working on 16mm and the film suits well as a material for pieces that carve and seal something into themselves.