DocLab’s Works

Based in Hanoi, DOCLAB is an art center for documentaries, experimental films and videos. Founded in 2009, DOCLAB has been working to take film and its audience back into the realm of the individual. Taking documentaries beyond “objectivities,” Hanoi DOCLAB explores the unknown in-between spaces: between objective observance and subjective experience, fiction and non-fiction, the public and the private.


Unknown (Honchunjeondo, Replica)

The Complete Map of the Celestial Sphere (Hon-cheon-jeon-do) is a revised version of a traditional oriental planisphere affected by and combined with the Western astronomical knowledge imported to Joseon Dynasty around the 18th century Korea, which included 33 constellations and 121 stars found only in the Southern Hemisphere.


Shakespeare Must Die

A dictator sits alone in his dark mansion, grieving for his mad, dead wife, as a mass uprising rages against him. Elsewhere in a theatre, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is being staged; its scenes intercut with his flashbacks to tell the story of an ambitious general who, prompted by witches, kills the king to crown himself.


Choi Min-Hwa

The painting materializes the lyrics of a hymn in the scriptures of Cheondogyo, a religion based on the Donghak movement. The work references research on Oh Yoon’s woodcut prints, which was one of the studies to explore traditional formalism, one of the main interests of Minjung art in the 1980s.


Vampire

Somewhere along the border of Thailand and Myanmar lives a creature called Nok Phii (Ghost Bird) or there used to. Nok Phii feeds on other animals’ blood and even attacks human beings.