Jeamin Cha

The Minimum Wage Commission is an entity that negotiates and decides the next year’s minimum wage. Established in 1978, the Commission’s meetings have been held behind closed doors. Thus, we can only assume and imagine the discussion of the 2015 meeting to find out how the 2016 minimum wage was decided. That is, to understand a decision about the present, we have to look back to the situation of a past meeting where the future wage was negotiated. The scenario of the film Twelve is based on the content of a 2015 meeting with reference to various documents. Twelve characters represent the twelve times of the meeting. In addition, a sequentially operating, repetitive machine movement is juxtaposed with the meeting scenes. The work emphasizes the fact that what is called formal, public, and a human discussion is being held only behind closed doors or in a private space, while simultaneously questioning what the future of a nation and its democracy should be. 

Jeamin Cha’s Hospital is the first official trailer of Mediacity Seoul 2016 NERIRI KIRURU HARARA. Based on the idea of the similarity between museums and hospitals, Cha illustrates a night scene in a general hospital where caregivers walk for exercise. In practice, the patient’s family members or caregivers would walk along hospital corridors late at night for exercise. In a hospital, a space for the patient to rehabilitate, caregivers often experience deeper depression than the patients. The first trailer tells about the place and the time of that walking. 

The second official trailer of Mediacity Seoul 2016 was inspired by Shuntaro Tanikawa’s poem “Two Billion Light Years of Solitude” from which the biennale’s title NERIRI KIRURU HARARA came. The film, shot in a subway garage, attempts to deliver certain kinds of sensibilities; it expresses some nuances through the conjunction “or” from the line of a poem—“neririing or kiruruing or hararaing.” The work’s sensibilities include an unstrict state of mind, a state of quietly looking at something, and a state of imagining something in puzzlement. The work represents a specific situation in which people look for something in a subway terminal.