The Woman Carrying A Basin Over Her Head
Leung Chi Wo + Sara Wong, 4K video, 9 min 10 sec, 2023
 

Comissioned by the Asia Culture Center (ACC), Gwangju, Leung Chi Wo + Sara Wong produce a short film that appropriates a photograph by Kim Ki-Chan (1938-2005), a work from the ACC Archive. In this photograph, taken in an alley near Seoul Station in 1970, four women walk with a basin on their heads. This way of carrying basins came to be used to facilitate people in carrying stuff in crowded streets and demonstrates the movement of the body that adapts and changes with the city structure. The artists’ structural analysis of the city is not only physical but also progresses to imagining the social and cultural system that begins with an individual’s life as a woman of a certain period of time. The figures’ gestures in the photograph are re-played by another woman (Park So Young) born many years later, showing the encounter and interaction between the two persons, transcending the generation gap.