The Greens
A series of two single-channel films
2024
About the work
The Greens explores how an encounter with nature can make the limits of an individual life perceptible. Green landscapes suggest continuity, recurring cycles and a world extending beyond any one person. Within them, human figures encounter loss, desire and the uncertainty of their own place. The apparent persistence of nature can be unsettling, yet it can also offer relief from the weight of individual existence.
The two films approach this shared question through different relationships between bodies, landscapes and time. Pathetique turns towards loss through the exposed sound of a viola and figures in forests and open moorland. Langue III follows the gradual formation of a lived place through familiar routes, language and the camera’s attention. Together, they consider how perception gives an environment meaning, and how that meaning changes through movement, memory and feeling.
The films
The Greens: Pathetique
The Greens: Pathetique explores loss and human finitude through figures placed within forests and open moorland. Landscapes without incidental passers-by intensify the distance between an individual life and the apparent continuity of nature. A second figure becomes both someone who is lost to the protagonist and a person experiencing loss in their own right.
The sound of a string instrument changes with its surroundings. Rehearsals across domestic, enclosed and outdoor spaces led to a performance among trees, where the viola acquires an exposed, precarious quality. Landscape and musical performance become connected ways of approaching vulnerability.
Like Langue III, the film treats recurring natural forms as signs of cycles and apparent infinity. Pathetique develops this shared inquiry through the scale of the landscape, the changing resonance of the viola and the relationship between two finite lives.
- Format
- Single-channel film · 07:48
- Presented at
- Rome Art Expo · Palazzo Vella Expo, Rome · September 2024
- Credits
- Viola · Dongin Lahr Girl · Donna Kim Assistant director · Seongmin Kim Recording · Kyubin Hur
The Greens: Langue III
The Greens: Langue III records the process of coming to understand a place inhabited over two years. The camera’s gaze constructs a lived space through attention, movement and memory. A familiar route can change its apparent direction or meaning depending on how it is approached; the film takes this variability as a way of thinking about the relationship between perception and the world.
Green becomes a recurring sign of cycles and apparent infinity. Encountering that continuity can produce anxiety about human finitude, but can also offer relief from the weight of individual existence. The work holds these feelings together in a world where tranquillity and unease remain closely related.
A text adapted from the preface to Muguasu’s 안녕한 가 is spoken in French, introducing a further distance between language, familiarity and place. Drawing on a phenomenological understanding of space and Deleuze’s writing on images and language, the film explores how images, voices and environments can open possibilities beyond a fixed account of what a place is.
Filmed in a heath and a park within everyday surroundings, Langue III retains traces of other people in the landscape. The possibility of returning to ordinary life remains nearby, giving this encounter with nature a different scale from the forests and moorland of Pathetique.
- Format
- Single-channel 4K video · 03:52
- Presented at
- Perches: Somewhere, Anywhere, Nowhere · Nunnery Gallery, London · 10–16 September 2024
- Credits
- Talent · Garam Hong Music · Zhao Jiajing Original text · Muguasu Translation · Chanson Cho