LIST OF NO’S

LIST OF NO’s
HWI HAHM

Artist - Hwi Hahm
A Film by Kijin Jang
Poems & Voice Over: Jennifer Blaine
"Merry Landscape", and "Blue Floret"
Producer: Mitchell Lazar
Director of Photography: Jon Bewley
Assistant Camera: Seth Oh
Filming Location: 205 Hudson St New York, NY 10013

About

Hwi Hahm has been working and living in New York and Chicago for a decade now. As a Korean American painter, Hwi has found a unique position in a superfluity of identity art - rather than directly portraying his culture and personality, his ambiguity in subject represents the repercussions of depersonalization of identity.

Hwi says, “As a maker, I am fully aware that is impossible to completely omit/alienate my identity from the paintings; however, it is a refuge and a survival method that I have developed in response to living as an American citizen born in South Korea, expected to have a perfect balance between being South Korean and being American but constantly being rejected by both societies. This experience dampened my will to navigate my identity with any certainty. Rather than screaming to find a way home, I chose to quietly recede into my inner logic, to find the balance between the two tensions existing in painting: the material properties and the illusionistic possibilities.”

Translating the painter’s movements and his present state in the studio to film, Korean director, Kijin Jang, follows Hwi for this documentary, List of No’s. Capturing Hiw in action and his vision along with the poetry by his colleague, Jennifer Blaine, the short film takes form as an intimate, almost voyeuristic, study of the painter’s day and an assemblage of the inner logic that is impossible to put into words.

Video by Creative Silver.