Description of the exhibition
Minha Park’s A Story of Elusive Snow (2013) begins with a nod to the illusion of a “white Christmas” that has been fabricated by Hollywood’s television and movie industry for decades. In her film, we follow Park, a Korean woman, as she narrates her unusual quest through Los Angeles in her native tongue, a “stranger” in a strange land looking and longing for Seoul’s snow.
Park’s film is filled with found and filmed footage, a mix of fact and fiction that mirrors the artificiality of the ice, snow, and winter landscapes that she discovers through her own performative excavation. Morton Feldman’s atonal soundtrack that accompanies the work conjures a sense of anticipation, a fragmented and stutter-stepping rhythm that mimics Park’s own wandering through special-effects studios, faux-ice-melting tutorials, and constructed sledding theme parks in mega-malls where lugers wear scarves despite the apparent warm climate.
Like the Hollywood Sign mug that Park uses to make her own simili-snow in her apartment, A Story of Elusive Snow is ripe with different points of entry and vignettes that draw on the illusion and spectacle of the movie industry and its love for seasonal comfort, be it synthetic or real.
