Special Exhibition by Hey-Yeun Jang

 

Part of

Korean Cinema’s Celluloid Fever: The 1970s (May 15-26, 2026)

 

 

May 16-17, 2026

Furman Gallery, Walter Reade Theater (144 West 65th St)

 

This free exhibition of moving image works will take place Saturday, May 16 and Sunday, May 17 in the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery inside the Walter Reade Theater as part of Korean Cinema’s Celluloid Fever: The 1970s.

 

 

#“4-frame-movie 202605”

material: 16mm film, two slide projectors, dissolve unit

running time: ongoing as a loop

 

 

#“Flickering 2026”

material: Super 8 film, 35mm slide film, two slide projectors, dissolve unit

running time: ongoing as a loop

 

 

Artist’s Statement

Images never move. It’s only our desire for continuity that creates the illusion of motion. I focus on individual frames to pursue what is absent, treating the images as the remnant of something unseen -a slow disappearance. By crafting moving images, I try to perceive the liminal space between frames: the moments that can neither be captured nor witnessed. My work is an invitation to the void.

 

Last year, I encountered a series of films produced in the 1970s by Korea National Film Production Studio. Though created to promote national identity and culture, I found the most haunting beauty in the head and tail leaders. These segments bore the physical traces of the light, marked by a spectrum of accidental colors. Positioned at the threshold of the films, they were never meant to be seen; they existed only to protect the content and to facilitate the projector’s mechanics.

 

The format of the ‘4-frame-movie’ series draws from the four-panel political comic strips I read as a child in the 1970s and ’80s. Forbidden from reading comic books by my mother, the comic strips published in the daily newspapers were the only window that I had access to. Because they navigated the censorship of a military government, their humor was covert and complex—far beyond my understanding. Since I believed all comics were meant to be funny, they felt like a somber adult waiting at the door for the morning paper.

 

About the Artist

Based in New York and born in Korea, Hey-Yeun Jang (b. 1968) is an installation and film artist whose practice explores the liminality between frames—those transient instances that elude both capture and observation. Working with 16mm film and slide projection, she converts stillness into kinetic energy and absence into tangible presence. Her films have been featured at the New York Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Edinburgh  Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her installations have been exhibited internationally at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul and the Queens Museum in NY, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin with further presentations in Havana, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mexico City. She received her BFA in sculpture from Ewha Women’s University (Korea) in 1991 and BFA in sculpture from San Francisco Art Institute in 1994, MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1996.

https://www.heyyeunjang.com