the voice

There is something powerful about the way a man articulates himself and shapes images around the words he uses linguistically to communicate context, meaning and emotion.

While I was living in England from 2003-2005, I became interested in the voice as a subject of study, mainly because the voice holds so much information that isn't easily discerned immediately. The tone, the pitch, the way a voice carries over into a space, are the things that we sense at once, but delay in recognition.

It is said that everyone possesses a unique voice, like that of a fingerprint. Working with voice-over talent, I've found that I always like the first take, because the first take seems to me the most genuine in perfectly expressing what is meant to be conveyed.

When I first screened this installation that I had produced for a tutor of mine, she started to cry.

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I suppose there is something entirely powerful about his voice that leaves an indelible imprint in one's mind. I suppose there is also something rather powerful about the way as a director, one can elicit that kind of emotion from a man who mainly keeps to himself, and never shows you what he's really thinking or feeling. In this case, with the enigmatic artist, Martin Callanan.

the year in question

I'd spent a greater past of last year in South Korea, as the director of an educational institute. Since there aren't many resources for students to learn English in many parts of the rural areas, I had discovered that implementing a strategy to progress learning in an area where there was a lack of guidance was a bigger challenge than I had originally envisioned. Although South Korea is very much a modern country, with internet cafés on every corner and a producer of semi-conductors, the morale of the younger generation seemed lost in their inability to conform completely to their fast-changing nation. Hence, many students find schools a stifling presence in their lives and the only outlet for their collective despair is online gaming and being dulled by the distractions of their ubiquitous television programming in which families are more aware of pop culture references than what is going on inside a student's head. Television in South Korea isn't merely entertainment or infotainment, but a complete way of life.

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Although its architecture has been rapidly changing, I found something quite subversive about the landscape. Despite its name, "the land of the morning calm," I found underneath the surface was a kind of chaos and instability of a proud nation that was conflicted between two different eras: on one hand, the traditional mindset of the generation before the separation of North and South, and on the other, the overwhelming poverty in cross-generational flux.