Byoung Nam An

Contemporary Art Practice (MA)

Still Image from PFear Notes[Play!], 2025, Single Channel Video, 12'34" — Can we become knights while still fighting with our own troubles, even if we were failed, sick, old in the future? What we could do was just playing. We read script of PFear Notes[Sample:] and play Don Quixote written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605 and 1615. This connects the past times' fear and the future, while asking which stance we can take on present days. Whistling becomes the sound of typhoon. 1. Camera man should move around us, like we are the centre of a typhoon. 2. Eric Satie lived a miserable life, and composed songs with detailed dynamics. 3. Silence and speech must make their own rhythms.

Pfear Notes[Sample], 2025, Single Channel Video, 15'00" — "Peer to Foreigner, Poop to Fuck, Pianissimo to Fortissimo." In the video, the performer mistakenly pronounced the "P" sound instead of "F." We shared our personal fear notes and read them together, both in a room and in a forest. We wore masks to hide our faces, evoking a sense of both detachment and intimacy. Aging. Not having a park where I live. Getting sick. Rotting. Eating spoiled food. Getting sick because of it. My spine curving. Not realizing it’s curving and leaving it unattended. Losing family members. Being in a cramped space with many people. Passing by strangers. Seeing people as things to be passed by. Things that are too fast or too slow. Fights. Arguments. Getting startled while watching a horror movie. Anxiety. The fact that this moment might turn out to mean nothing. Goodbyes. My pet dying. Seeing a small animal hit by a car while walking. The thought that it might have been because of me. Aging. The feeling that I’ll grow old having achieved nothing.

The Sun Erased You, 2025, Single Channel Video, 12'19" — Why some images are too fragile to exist? Bright sunshine hides you, but I keep trying to see your face. 1. In a world where the senses of disappearance, disease, and death permeate, how does the ambiguous word "image" contribute to this? This is an essay film about gaze and image. 2.Myth and superstition are the imaginative products of an encounter with an eternal, elusive Others. Moreover, the European seas are places that gave rise to colonial fantasies. The video combines actual footage, fictional narratives, and analog stop-motion drawings, aiming for a hybrid state of digital editing techniques and analog methods. The overlapping images conceal and layer over previous ones. 3. Script "I can't see the fish and mermaids because of the light reflected on the sea surface.") "Why is it that when I search for mermaids on Google, they all look like women with long hair? I dislike Disney") ”Look at these bones.” "In distant times, they looked at these bones and imagined monsters." "From this place, they see the giant of that place, and from that place, they see the dwarf of this place."

Sliding Rumors, 2025, Single Channel Video, 12'21" — Can we imagine the people who faced their own crisis properly without any deception? What if the people on the Mars in the near future suffered from a vast disaster, and if we could only hear it after a few years because of the time difference, then how can we react? Is it possible to purely mourn for others? We gathered in a room, read three kinds of scripts, sang and dance tofether in the dark forest. The scripts are filled with deceptive lines like the rumors around us.

About

“How can Whistling (individual, silence, poetic speech) defeat Typhoon (fascism, politics, loud voice)?”

Byoung Nam An (Lim) is an interdisciplinary artist from South Korea, working with writing, painting, object-making, and film, creating poetry that engages with society and art, with a particular interest in the theme of moral injury.

After realizing myself as a ‘spectator’ to the world, I began to combine this and that in my head. I love to flow between fact and misunderstanding—something that resembles human destiny. I am drawn to recovering myths that describe pain, disappearance, and temporality, especially within the media-mediated reality of contemporary society. The outcomes—writing, drawing, painting, objects, and moving images—are connected through a thinking process that forms an archive of memory, ultimately integrated through spatial installation.

I talk about moving existences, weak bodies under structures and systems, people who remain, the invisible crises of others, and things in marginalized areas. We are beings captivated by systems like capitalism. When we make holes in those systems, we may feel miserable and in pain. But what if we are becoming painful bodies in the end? These questions are the first steps toward writing scripts for plays and films, or intuitive thoughts that lead to making.

Recently, I’ve been focusing on how sound functions in our daily lives—people talking or singing. We listen to rumors; they strongly affect our emotions. Even silence becomes a kind of sound in this context. A rumor has no body, yet it holds great power. I believe a similar process occurs in art. I trace how facts become rumors, and use that transformation as a medium—collecting and researching stories.

Lastly, the reason I am interested in other people and the outside world is because I hope to know you. Although it always fails, at least I can imagine us.

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