Tran T. Kim-Trang is a Vietnamese-American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She works across multiple media, including video, new media, and installation. Major themes in her works include visual dynamics, immigration, biotechnology, and relationships to technology. She has exhibited work at the Museum of Modern Art (1999) and the Whitney Biennial. One of her most renowned works is “The Blindness Series” (1992-2006), a collection of eight short videos that explore the many resonances of blindness, from eye-lid surgery, video surveillance, to word-blindness, and brilliantly incorporate the artist’s interventions over more than a decade of sustained practice. “Kore” is one of eight in this series.
Koré is streaming on OVID.tv
In distinct experimental fashion, the film unfolds as a collage of different types of moving images, which aim to comment on sight and blindness, and the whole concept of seeing, AIDS and the issues with its treatment through an approach that also aims to shock. In that fashion, the 15-minute short begins as a music video of sorts, before a text on screen makes a parallel between the eye and female sexual organs, by naming the first, “the mental vulva”. Focusing on the look as a concept, the film then moves into a series of videos showing people walking among the crowds, in a voyeuristic approach that finds its apogee in the next recurring scene, of two women caressing each other sexually, with their eyes blindfolded.
As if making a point that she does not focus on sensualism, Tran continues with a series of footage that completely destroy any such notion, by having Peou Lakhana, an AIDS worker/activist, talking about the virus and the gaps in treatment and research, particularly regarding homosexuals and other minorities, with the camera frequently zooming in on her face and particularly a mole on her nose. These intense close ups also focus on a penis, before the film goes back to the sex scene, while text on screen makes a connection between blindness and the way people’s eyes look during orgasm. All the while segments from various movies, including “Tokyo Decadence” are presented among the aforementioned vignettes.
Tran T. Kim-Trang directs a film that manages to be both appealing and appalling, both sensual and grotesque, both imaginative and realistic, essentially testing the borders between film and video art with her aesthetics and the borders between entertainment and information through her context. The result is definite not for all viewers, but there is something captivating in all those different images, texts and sequences that are presented on screen, while the comments about blindness, sight and watching, and AIDS are quite well communicated, even if in experimental fashion.
“Koré” is a weird short that many will probably find offensive, but for those who like their experimental movies extreme, there is definitely a lot to like here.
