Sound Garden: Short Films by Jeamin Cha

Sound Garden

30min, 2019, South Korea

Jeamin Cha

"Sound Garden" alternates between scenes of large trees being transported and interviews of South Korean female mental health counselors who reflect on counseling’s ambivalence and complexity. Most of the trees transported by trucks are farmed and not wild. These cultivated trees are tended so that they grow large in size and maintain aesthetic quality; furthermore, they are designed to thrive in urban environments, where they are transplanted as street trees. For these trees, even natural nourishment like sunlight, regardless of its quality, is part of a commodification process. Mental health counseling, for its part, has traditionally been associated with self-reflection, upliftment, or the treatment of mental illness. However, post-capitalism actively employs counseling as a form of mental health management for individuals. On the other hand, this film also pays attention to the anti-capitalistic possibility of counseling. Counseling performs the function of searching for the cause and reason of mental disorders, instead of treating them as biochemical problems. Counseling is the vast task of disentangling the human spirit damaged by contemporary values and social environments; exploring in reverse order someone’s inner side no longer able to self-recover. The work is an attempt to discover the potential of this overwhelming mission through the women’s voice.

Ellie's Eye

11min, 2020, South Korea

Jeamin Cha

"Ellie’s Eye" is an essay-video comprising found and original footage. Ellie is the name of an AI therapist in development at the time of writing, as well as the name of one of the dogs featured in the work. Dogs and AI avatars are similar in that both are dependent on humans. "Ellie’s Eye" examines how technologies invented for medical treatment relate to the human desire to see through, and into—such as x-rays, through-wall movement sensing, and AI-assisted psychotherapy. In the process, the work intertwines facts and fiction about the eye, eyesight, and the act of seeing. Medical scans and image technologies, tools that produce evidence of physical health or the lack thereof, have made rapid progress in the recent past; meanwhile, technologies for mental diagnosis are also developing at a similarly fast pace. This work interrogates how future societies and technologies can approach psychological issues of different individuals, and whether we are objectifying the human psyche itself.

Nameless Syndrome Patch Version

24min, 2022, South Korea

Jeamin Cha

"Nameless Syndrome" concerns the constant reduction of the self through digitization. Often unidentifiable illnesses are dismissed as trivial or psychological, yet there is a growing number of women suffering from conditions that are overseen by society that holds medical science as the ultimate truth. Rather than relying on body imaging during diagnoses for such patients, it is more important to listen the patients’ particular use of language. Medical imaging does not always guarantee empirical veracity. This is not only due to technological inadequacies nor due to a diseased area exceptionally difficult to capture digitally. Medical imaging fails to capture the nature of modern illnesses based on symptomatic and political complexity. Composed of five chapters, this essay uses narration and juxtaposition to layer reflection of bodied in mirror, glass, and water inside an examination room. This work focuses on the objectification of a body as a private space through its manifestation as an image, and the alienation of the corporeal subject from its image. While seeking to understand the various possibilities of experiencing an image lacking its subjecthood, this work examines the consequences that entail the effort to recognize the subject.

Photosynthesizing Dead in Warehouse

30min, 2024, South Korea

Jeamin Cha

Wooden boxes topped with glass cases sit in an empty house that has stood vacant for a long time. The situation seems at once an isolated art museum, a resource-depleted near future, and a private house under interior construction. Scenes of decaying fruits on a box are interspersed with the correspondence from a researcher studying the "kusōzu", Buddhist paintings that depict nine stages of a decaying corpse and are associated with the practice of realizing impermanence. "Photosynthesizing Dead in Warehouse" is a neo - "kusōzu" in a sense, with its documentation of decay and questions about death. The narration consists of fragments of correspondence, intertwined with various excerpts from the study of the "kusōzu", and contemplates the reason for our symbolic experience of death—or our inability thereof. This work is an essay film about looking at things as they are, making up stories in an attempt to make sense of them, and, as we follow these two axes that cast shadows on each other, what binds and liberates us.

About the Director

Jeamin Cha

Jeamin Cha is an artist based in Seoul whose practice spans film, performance, installation, and writing. Cha’s work deals with the relationship between the psychological, emotional, and physical. She approaches the reality of individuals through processes of field studies and notes personal interviews of hard-to-articulate experiences. She is also interested in preserving the unknown realm that is shrinking as technology advances. Cha has participated in numerous solo exhibitions, including IMA Picks 2024 - Stories of Visible Spectrum, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024; Freeze Response, Salzburg Kunstverein, Salzburg, 2024; Troubleshooting Mind I, II, III, KADIST, San Francisco, 2020; Love Bomb, Samyook Bldg., Seoul, 2018; Day for Night, Sindoh Gallery, Seoul, 2015; hysterics, DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul and New York, 2023.