After seeing Uri Han’s solo exhibition 《Thread and Re-winder》, the afterimages that linger in my mind bring the gallery’s works back all at once. It is a curious sensation. The videos were short—10, 5, and about 3 minutes—ideal lengths for focused viewing. In the dim gallery, two projectors faced the walls, and from behind a metal partition the light from an old film projector slowly leaked out. The first two works were Transparent Sensation (2022) and Thin and Deep (2022); the work screened on the projector was Bertinker (2022). In the exhibition space, the projector and the film projector did not so much separate film and digital exhibition as connect them through the flow of time that generates images. Drawn by this light, viewers lingered before the screen, wandered the space, slowly disappeared, and reappeared.

This text seeks to hold on to the memory of the exhibition that remains with me and to consider the relationship between image and time that Uri Han explores.

Among these, two works rest on narrative structure. Transparent Sensation uses lyrical images and sound to imbue the space with synesthetic imagery. Borrowing the form of a fable, the video tells the story of three friends who remember the children of a village enchanted away by a pied piper. One friend cannot see, another cannot hear, and the third can see and hear but cannot move. Though clumsy in layering things together, the three add each other’s eyes, ears, and hands to build an analog device that reanimates images. This device becomes a machine for remembering those who have disappeared, recalling the door of the film archive and the moment of rewinding film to summon images.

The journey of memory, which leads disappearance further into the past, proceeds through Bertinker, screened on a film projector. Beginning with “once upon a time,” the work draws inspiration from the Fly—the only insect constellation—and resurrects, through 3D animation, the tale of Bertinker, who bound places and things with thread to create time. As humans, bewitched by Bertinker’s power, capture it indiscriminately, temporal misalignments grow, and the story expresses a present wish to summon Bertinker once more. In its final moments, stream-like, multicolored drawings on film gesture toward an unfinished imagination of time’s trajectory.

By contrast, Thin and Deep differs somewhat in its mode of unfolding. Here, the narrative scaffolding that undergirds the other works falls away, and a sequence of images on the screen takes center stage. Film itself appears as a thing—a mediator that links the materiality of analog film with the sleek immateriality of the digital era. Treating film as a frame that fills the screen, the video shows a wavering landscape through perforations in the stock, then turns to images of projector parts rendered as virtual sensations drifting through the digital world.

The non-permanent life of objects, fated to be dismantled and decomposed over time, gradually regains its missing pieces through the hands and collective knowledge of those who care. The images adrift move among the material sensations of projector, film, and smartphone; the world of separated materialities, implied by both image and object, stretches along the timelines of those worlds. This composition brings into contact the aesthetic structures of recent, crisp, ghost-free video and, in contrast, the film image of the past.

Viewed individually, each piece might seem to be oriented toward the idioms of early cinema—think of the pronounced bodily gestures of silent film, the simple lines of early animation, and a screen that moves at a leisurely pace. If the era when cinema was separated from images is our “once upon a time,” Han’s work strings together a trajectory back toward that divided epoch through the form of a fable. The way the artist navigates time is to call the near-yet-distant world into the present by way of objects’ stories and to reorganize it there. The method of building the three works introduced above into an exhibition is not confined to the domain of the screen. Rather, in Han’s exhibitions, video aligns more closely with a multisensory experience.

At the center of that experience sits a single projector. When the projector runs and its light washes the space, the light and mechanical sound of the film projector even summon the concealed machinic nature of the digital projector—designed for digital exhibition—into material presence. The works flowing from the projector and from the beamer are independent videos, yet the signals of light and sound projected onto the walls expand the gallery’s sense of place into an extended frame. In the use of sound as well, something subtly splits at the moment it meets light, conveying the separation and meeting of senses as a spatial experience.

One notable point is that the artist’s interest in projectors did not begin with cinema. Diverging from the direction in which contemporary art has pursued post-cinema by bringing film into the gallery, Han’s cinematic approach—somewhat unexpected—began in amateurism. The artist says that the interest in projectors started as an act of collecting; over nearly a decade, as a passionate hobbyist, Han handled projectors and eventually turned them into a subject of work. What began as curiosity led to learning and then expanded in the practice in a particular way.

In this work, the projector is less a relic that encompasses the history and narratives of cinema than a mediator for newly discovering the world of images. Once recognizing the projector as an engine for connecting to a new image-world, Han adopted it as a medium that could drive other possible images. When the film begins to turn, what this machine shines is not an image of the past. As one work suggests by metaphor, the perforations of film uncannily overlap with and misalign against the sleek materiality of the smartphone, linking film’s materiality—where images began—to the immaterial digital world that seems far from it.

Thus, in 《Thread and Re-winder》, the relationship between the images revived by the projector and the projection machine itself is shared as a single spatiotemporal field rather than kept as separate conditions for the three works, so that at certain moments the times of the individual pieces connect as a unified experience. The exhibition becomes a large frame that screens the time created by moving images, drawing the viewer’s body into that time. For contemporaries who live amid the segmentation of time, demanding an organic temporal structure is not easy. In a world where imagining fractured, fragmented time is simpler, the flow of time persists precisely through countless splits. Images appear in reality in real time as fragments, like memes, so divided that one can hardly grasp the whole context.

Han’s work retraces how contemporary people have perceived images in daily life and seeks to connect the domains of segmented time and image. It thus resists today’s split temporality of image-perception, attempting to bring into the present the moment when cinema separated from images. The thread that stitches this together can be seen as an allegory for humanity’s care and attentiveness that have generated images out of absence. In this way, the thread becomes the trajectory that binds things and humans, image and machine, memory and phenomenon—and the re-winder will reappear as the mechanism by which images remember what is absent.

References

• [리뷰] 부재하는 것들을 기억하는 이미지의 작동 기제 (한우리 작가《실과 리와인더》전시리뷰)
  [Review] The Mechanism by Which Images Remember What Is Absent (Exhibition Review of Uri Han’s《Thread and Re-winder》)