How Old Are You? How Old Were You? 入世, 2017
Bodies in flight, bodies in stasis. Our bodies are bound by both the current reality and aspirational future of science, but expand even further in the search for an otherwise. This program takes as its jumping off point questions, experiments, and memories of the body, wrestling with history, memory, gender, social institutions. Junha Kim and Noam Youngrak Son approach deconstructions of humanism and socially-encoded bodies with whimsy and sardonic humor. Léonie Hampton, Maria Fernandez Pello, and Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu hone in on the atmospheric intimacy of human bodies and the memories they hold. Jeamin Cha and Jes Fan present the expansive potential of scientific practices that inform race, history, violence, and personhood.
Curated by Jheanelle Brown.
In person: Filmmaker Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu and curator Jheanelle Brown.
SCREENING
Our Body is a Planet
Léonie Hampton, UK, 2022, digital, color, sound, 11:08
How Old Are You? How Old Were You? 入世
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, USA, 2017, 16mm, color, sound, 15:50
Shot on 16mm film using a handmade camera obscura, How Old Are You? How Old Were You? fractures the logic of time to contemplate bringing oneself back to the origin, the womb. A dialogue between two selves – infant and adult, the film traverses through a series of psychological events, transforming memories, emotions, thoughts, and imagination.
Mother is a Woman
Jes Fan, USA, 2018, digital, color, sound, 4:44
In Mother is a Woman, Fan extracted estrogen from urine samples collected from their post-menopausal mother. This estrogen was then blended into a face cream and distributed to Fan’s network of non-biological kin. This project grapples with the slippery constitution of “natural” and “synthetic” genders, posing a series of seemingly absurd questions: What happens if I re-feminize my body with my mother’s estrogen? If your body absorbs my mother’s estrogen, are you feminized by her? If so, who are you to her, and who are you to me? Can our epidermis be our first contact of kinship? Can kinship be infectious?
The Posthuman Hospital
Junha Kim, South Korea/USA, 2023, digital, color, sound, 6:54
The film showcases medical records of posthuman patients in an imaginary hospital through experimental digital images.
Xenophoria
Jes Fan, USA, 2018-2020, digital, color, silent, 7:56
Xenophoria chronicles Fan’s pursuit of eumelanin pigment, the molecule responsible for skin color found in both human and non-human bodies. Referencing the aesthetics of both microscopic imagery and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos, "Xenophoria" includes actions such as dissecting squids and bursting their ink sacs, harvesting fungi with scalpels, and locating bodily moles, irises and skin. The work also includes close-ups of bulbous tumors protruding from faces in the medical paintings by Qing Dynasty painter Lam Qua. In this work, Fan presents an absurdist investigation and fetishization of the molecule responsible for centuries of racial othering, suggesting how this molecule in fact exists within all of us, human or not.
Autodidact
Jeamin Cha, South Korea, 2014, digital, color, sound, 9:00
Youngchun Hur is the father of Private Wonkeun Hur who lost his life in 1984 (during the Fifth Republic of Korea). Suspecting the death of his son, Mr. Hur taught himself forensic medicine to reveal the truth. Autodidact was initiated by my meeting with Mr. Hur, at that time, a family member of the victim as well as an unofficial forensic investigator. The video shows magnified images of Mr. Hur’s investigative materials he studied and his handwritings, while two different narrators tell a story. (The script was made based on my conversation with Mr. Hur about his struggles, in which he went against the state’s cracking down on his attempt to unearth the truth over the last 30 years. The topics of conversation also include politics and key life events of the time, and the forensic evidence he found.) The two alternating narrators are Mr. Hur himself and a man in his early twenties. The work attempts to reflect the “voice” of the others through reading the material only with eyes, reading aloud, and re-reading by a different person’s voice.
Yummy Body Truck
Noam Youngrak Son, Belgium/the Netherlands, 2021, digital, color, sound, 7:00
Noam Youngrak Son’s YUMMY BODY TRUCK is a fictional food truck that sells edible human body parts. What sounds like cannibalism at first turns out to be a biotechno-queer fantasy of interspecies mixing – quite literally so. In the computer-generated video, the pancake-shaped head of a "fluidic chimera" tells of its creation: that a rapidly spinning blade has taken on a multitude of organisms – from bacteria and fungi to plants, insects, reptiles… and also sometimes hominids – ingested, ground up their flesh and mixed it all into a malleable paste of diverse cells, organelles, DNA, enzymes, hormones, pigments, toxins: a pool of proteins, amino acids, nucleic acids, phospholipids, and all sorts of different polymers with all sorts of unidentifiable energy states and genetic information. This mushy mass is now being modeled into human body shapes in the YUMMY BODY TRUCK – similar to the multi-species convergence from fishing waste being reshaped into desirable seafood as surimi.
“I can transform into any color, smell, taste, texture or shape depending on what I contain and what you desire. I am a piece of dough – mold me into organisms that are extinct or your fantasy creatures that never existed.” Promises the Chimera. “My plasticity will liberate your appetite”. Both narration and visuals play with our desire and disgust. But the snack from the digital meat grinder also has a sociopolitical undertone. By molding the paste into human body parts, factors such as pigmentation, endocrinological status, and toxin accumulation of the meats gain political significance: lighter or darker pigmentation from melanin indexes “race,” and estrogen residues determine “gender.”
The truck serves the edible body parts in a lunchbox, and an instructional video shows visitors how to see, smell and taste them. The flavors of pigments, hormones and toxins are meant to heighten awareness of the nuances of the bodies they eat. If, for example, the chosen carcass tastes bitter, this could indicate a higher toxin content – carnivores are more likely to accumulate environmental toxins than plants. Nevertheless, the “oral intercourse” from the YUMMY BODY TRUCK promises a sensual experience with the result of turning the consumers themselves into chimeras through the fusion of different DNA.
Bodies and Places are Contiguous
Maria Fernandez Pello, USA, 2021, digital, color, sound, 9:42
Earth’s surface cuts across every one of us, it traverses our bodies in the shape of a tube, challenging distinctions between the inside and the outside, the body and the world, self and nonself. Bodies And Places Are Contiguous is a visual experiment, an effort to attend to the recurrent cylindrical formations that permeate human bodies, our technology, our parasites, and most of our cities’ infrastructures. Through a focus on form, the project seeks to generate unexpected connections between categories often seen as entirely separate from each other. The connections that emerge from the repeated attention to tubes are also seen as a challenge to traditionally bounded understandings of the human, the body, and the world. In the film, as inside of any tube, perspective is lost, there is no up nor down, inside or outside, just a dizzying encounter with sameness. Music score improvised by Marina Peterson and Cassius Walker.
Tickets: $10 General | $5 Student/Seniors | FREE for LA FIlmforum Members
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Jheanelle Brown, Los Angeles Filmforum board member is Project Director and Curator, leading project management, offering scholarly and curatorial guidance to project scholars, developing several film programs, developing the overall curatorial framework of the film series, and serving as co-editor of the resulting publication. Jheanelle is a film curator/programmer, lecturer, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is currently Special Faculty at California Institute of the Arts. She has co-curated Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today and the traveling film showcase Black Radical Imagination: Fugitive Trajectories from 2018 to 2019.
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s creative activity often starts from a life event or curiosity concerning an anomaly in language or in the aging material world. Her working method at various times involves handcrafted material, mixed media, and experimental interchange between new and old technologies. Cherlyn’s films have been shown internationally at venues and festivals including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival (Finland), Festival Des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Image Forum Festival (Japan), CrossroadsFilm Festival at SFMoMA (USA), among others. She received the Jury Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for How Old Are You? How Old Were You?