Arts PhD Student Project: Good Mourning, Mx. Oaxaca / Izumo 2024

This is a project that pays homage to Nam June Paik’s world’s first satellite artwork “Good morning, Mr. Orwell”, happened 40 years ago in 1984. This project refers to George Orwell’s novel “1984”, depicting the totalitarian regime by the dictator Big Brother, governed through the telescreen that has both function of television and surveillance camera.

To invert this scenario, Paik made this project to envision media art as the means of liberation from totalitarian society, transmitted simultaneously in New York and Paris. In the time of ongoing war and mass death, we wanted to respond our political situation through connecting the dead and the living.

The project also negotiates and reflect on nuclear history and memory between U.S., working with existing footage from films on nuclear history. (For example, Hiroshima, Mon Amour in 1959). The project asks what has been removed or marginalized unconsciously from the representation on nuclear history and bring that negotiation into representation, bringing the past into present. The project perceives culture and memory as river, water, flow and relations. The project stands as trans cultural, trans-pacific viewpoint instead of binary oppositions between countries. By doing so, the project aims to bring healing to the collective trauma of wars in history through performance and video projection, through the contemplation on death, and continuation of afterlife to non-human entity.

During the period of “The Day of the Dead” in Mexico in November 2024, we plan to screen 2 video works in Oaxaca, Mexico and Izumo, Japan at the same time as a transmission from this world to afterlife. My film “Fate of Love” (2024) and Shinya Watanabe’s “Meeting My Dead Father in Oaxaca, Mexico” (2024) both explore death and love. During the screening, I myself will perform on top of the projection during the screening as human silhouette in homage to artist Ana Mendieta who also made a performance artwork Silueta Series (Silhouette) near Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. Izumo in Japan is known for the sacred place where all the spirit gods gather once a year during the month of November that coincides with the same period when “The Day of the Dead” happens in Mexico.