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빛을 향한 수행 | Practice Towards Light
South Korea | 2025 | Color | Silent | 12min 12sec | 16mm
Select Screenings
2026 Cycle Film Lab: South Korean Avant-Garde Program, Moscow (RU)
2026 Wuhan bǎilin Film Festival, Wuhan (CN)
2026 Unicorn Image: Korean Independent / Experimental Cinema , Tokyo (JP)
2026 Viennale, Vienna (AT)
2026 64th New York Film Festival (Currents Program), NYC (US)
2026 Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS), Seoul (KR)
2026 Repeat as Necessary @ Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria (CA)
2026 Busan International Short Film Festival Lumière Extérieure , Busan (KR)
2026 Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago (US)
2025 Daegu Art Museum - Installation @ Beams of Emptiness Exhibition, Daegu (KR)
South Korea | 2025 | Color | Silent | 12min 12sec | 16mm
Select Screenings
2026 Cycle Film Lab: South Korean Avant-Garde Program, Moscow (RU)
2026 Wuhan bǎilin Film Festival, Wuhan (CN)
2026 Unicorn Image: Korean Independent / Experimental Cinema , Tokyo (JP)
2026 Viennale, Vienna (AT)
2026 64th New York Film Festival (Currents Program), NYC (US)
2026 Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS), Seoul (KR)
2026 Repeat as Necessary @ Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria (CA)
2026 Busan International Short Film Festival Lumière Extérieure , Busan (KR)
2026 Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago (US)
2025 Daegu Art Museum - Installation @ Beams of Emptiness Exhibition, Daegu (KR)
Synopsis
In collaboration with painter Huh Yun-hee, this work documents a year-long practice of filming the sunrise through multiple exposures on four 100ft rolls of 16mm film. Each of the four rolls represents a season (fall, winter, spring, summer) with seven separate sunrise shoots layered onto a single roll of film, creating a compressed record of time and light.
Directors Statement
Practice Towards Light is a 16mm film that emerges from a year-long collaboration with painter Huh Yun-hee, whose daily practice involves capturing the sunrise in plein air. This work began as a dialogue between practices (hers of painting, mine of filming) each oriented toward the same ephemeral subject.
Huh's paintings compress time into a single surface, accumulating the observation of the day’s sunrise into one frame. I sought a filmic equivalent to this temporal collapse. Rather than develop individual days of filming, I chose to create multiple exposures: seven sunrise sessions layered onto a single roll of 16mm film for each season. After each shoot, I would rewind the exposed film in darkness and reload it for the next session, a process that spans weeks within a season. This method makes every mistake, every fluctuation in light or judgment, permanent- a mark that reverberates through all subsequent exposures on that roll. Like the plein air painter working in real conditions, there is no correction, only accumulation.
The physical materiality of the 16mm film allows for this layering of time in a way digital media cannot replicate. Though it is a physical limitation to not be able to review each shoot, the process demands trust and a meditative awareness of each layer held only in memory. Each of the four rolls (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer) becomes a palimpsest of mornings, a season condensed into approximately three minutes of overlapping light, gesture,and atmosphere.
The film presents these four seasonal rolls, each roll holding a different season's accumulated light. In following Huh Yun-hee through a complete cycle of seasons, Practice Towards Light becomes less about capturing sunrise than about the discipline of returning, a 수행, a practice of cultivation through repetition and sustained attention.
In collaboration with painter Huh Yun-hee, this work documents a year-long practice of filming the sunrise through multiple exposures on four 100ft rolls of 16mm film. Each of the four rolls represents a season (fall, winter, spring, summer) with seven separate sunrise shoots layered onto a single roll of film, creating a compressed record of time and light.
Directors Statement
Practice Towards Light is a 16mm film that emerges from a year-long collaboration with painter Huh Yun-hee, whose daily practice involves capturing the sunrise in plein air. This work began as a dialogue between practices (hers of painting, mine of filming) each oriented toward the same ephemeral subject.
Huh's paintings compress time into a single surface, accumulating the observation of the day’s sunrise into one frame. I sought a filmic equivalent to this temporal collapse. Rather than develop individual days of filming, I chose to create multiple exposures: seven sunrise sessions layered onto a single roll of 16mm film for each season. After each shoot, I would rewind the exposed film in darkness and reload it for the next session, a process that spans weeks within a season. This method makes every mistake, every fluctuation in light or judgment, permanent- a mark that reverberates through all subsequent exposures on that roll. Like the plein air painter working in real conditions, there is no correction, only accumulation.
The physical materiality of the 16mm film allows for this layering of time in a way digital media cannot replicate. Though it is a physical limitation to not be able to review each shoot, the process demands trust and a meditative awareness of each layer held only in memory. Each of the four rolls (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer) becomes a palimpsest of mornings, a season condensed into approximately three minutes of overlapping light, gesture,and atmosphere.
The film presents these four seasonal rolls, each roll holding a different season's accumulated light. In following Huh Yun-hee through a complete cycle of seasons, Practice Towards Light becomes less about capturing sunrise than about the discipline of returning, a 수행, a practice of cultivation through repetition and sustained attention.