Jeamin Cha
Almost One
Almost One by Jeamin Cha dives into an uncomfortable meditation on the relationship between socialization, performativity, truth, and childhood, filtered through the optics of a children’s acting class in South Korea. Such a context possesses a loaded set of connotations due to the meteoric rise of Korean entertainment industries. Acting or singing academies have increasingly attracted negative press for their intensity and cutthroat standards, a system for producing talent with little emotional concern for its offspring.
For a majority of Cha’s single-channel video, the child actors are visibly restless, their discomfort juxtaposed against their comfortable, somewhat fashionable clothing, and the warm hardwood floors of the studio. Their increasingly unhappy attempts to wriggle out of actually “acting” makes the static studio develop a claustrophobic tinge, especially exacerbated in the last few scenes, in which each child is placed one by one in front of a camera and forced to act. Almost One seeks no answers, instead reveling in its discomfort. It works as an open-ended vignette, a node of an ongoing system or a captured segment of young life, in the throes of socialization.