Jihoon Kim (Chung-Ang University)
This paper discusses two theatrical performances by Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul in terms of the intermedial correlations of cinema and performance, and of the intersections between the aesthetic devices of the Western experimental film and video and the non-Western, Asian cultural traditions. The two filmmakers commonly extend their exploration of the cinematic experience in a live-action or multimedia event, in which the boundaries between cinema and its neighboring art forms are broken down and redrawn. Tsai’s The Monk from Tang Dynasty (2014) brings the aesthetic of slowness, which he repeatedly explored in his Walker series since 2012, to Lee Kang-sheng’s choreography of barely noticeable changes in his movement and gesture that unfold in real time on the stage that evokes both the screen and the canvas. Likewise, Weerasethakul’s Fever Room (2015) investigates the multilayered entanglement of fantasy and reality as manifested in his feature films in the form of projection performance where the boundaries between the screen-based fictional narrative and the phantasmagoric world of the projected light on the stage are collapsed. While demonstrating that both performances creatively translate the traditions of the expanded cinema in the 1960s and 70s (in Tsai’s work, video performances that explore the aesthetics of duration and bodily presence in real time; and in Weerasethakul’s piece, Anthony McCall’s ‘solid light films’ that establish the cinematic projected light as a three-dimensional object), I argue that their attempts at blending cinema with performance aim to negotiate those traditions with the Asian concepts of time and reality: the Buddhist concept of transcendental time is mixed with the contemporary interest in slowness in Tsai’s work; and the Western allusion of the cinematic apparatus to the cave meets with Weerasethakul’s obsession with living with ghosts as part of Thailand’s cultural history.
Jihoon Kim is associate professor of cinema and media studies at Chung-ang University, South Korea. He is the author of Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). His essays on film theory, experimental film and video, art of the moving image, cinema and contemporary art, digital cinema, and experimental documentary have appeared in Screen, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Millennium Film Journal, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and the anthologies Global Art Cinema: New Histories and Theories (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), among others. Currently He is working on two book projects, each entitled Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media, New Platforms, and the Documentary and Post-vérité Turns: Korean Independent Documentary in the 21st Century respectively.