Hayoun Kwon: Virtually Real

489 Years, by Hayoun Kwon (2016)

Los Angeles Filmforum and GYOPO present

Hayoun Kwon: Virtually Real

Artist in person!

Commissioned in part by Los Angeles Filmforum, through a generous grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. 

Sunday, December 10, 2023, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 W. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA

Tickets: $12 general, $5 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

Masks are highly recommended at Filmforum shows - N95 or KN95. 

Discussion following the screening with Hayoun Kwon and Mark Toscano 

Filmforum commissioned five artists to make new work, generously funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.  We’ve hosted three thus far, and Hayoun Kwon is our fourth.

Los Angeles Filmforum is thrilled to welcome internationally acclaimed media artist Hayoun Kwon to present her immersive digital animation work in her first solo screening in Southern California.  Originally from South Korea, Paris-based Kwon employs numerous tools – including first-person game engines, VR, and various forms of CG – to conjure worlds both real and imagined in a startling documentary mode that blurs the lines between evidence and speculation.  Kwon is a rare artist whose dazzling visuals and technological engagement are fully matched and dimensionalized by her powerfully critical perspective and subtle conceptualizing and framing of her subject matter. 

Her early breakout film Lack of Evidence conjures landscapes and spaces of uncertain stability in telling the dramatic story of a young Nigerian’s application for asylum in France.  In three remarkable pieces from 2013-2015, Kwon examines the border and DMZ between North and South Korea, allowing three very different technical and aesthetic strategies to enable deep critical and poetic investigation of the implications of this highly politicized frontier.  In her more recent work, her subjective and vivid documentary mode of inquiry has employed VR and interactivity as the spectator inhabits fantastic but complex landscapes of unexpected social and political resonance. 

With support from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Filmforum has been honored to commission a new work from Hayoun Kwon, and this film - The Butterfly Dream - will have its premiere in our screening, with the filmmaker in person to discuss her work. 

GYOPO is a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals generating and sharing progressive, critical, intersectional and intergenerational discourses, community alliances, and free educational programs in Los Angeles and beyond. www.gyopo.us  

Program and notes by Mark Toscano.  Special thanks to Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.