Practice Towards Light

From Viennale

Jonathan Seungjoon Lee’s film operates on multiple registers. It is a study of the sun rising over the ocean over the course of a single year. And it also observes artist Huh Yun-hee as she works on a painting of that same seascape. Through superimposition and radical time compression, Lee compares and conjoins these two acts of representation. The screen and the canvas sometimes operate as one unit, sometimes diverge. Streaks of light become brushstrokes, and Lee’s dense images reconfigure time and space into an impasto of thick light. (Michael Sicinski)