Lee Jang-wook is a lesser-known figure in Korean cinema, an independent and experimental director whose films are seldom encountered outside arthouse screens and festival circuits. Yet his career of tinkering with the very materials of film reaches back to the 1990s. While Korean filmmakers and audiences turned toward digital production and consumption, Lee remained with 16mm film, exploring its possibilities as a medium of light, sound, time, and memory. The question arises: are his works products of intellectual experiment, or do they still hold resonance for the twenty-first century?
FISURA: International Experimental Film and Video Festival presented a Lee Jang-wook retrospective this August in Mexico, screening his major works including Surface of Memory, Memory on Surface (1999), Landscape in the Afternoon (2013), and Chang Gyeong (2024). The festival introduced him as a central figure in contemporary Asian experimental cinema, recognizing his dedication and achievement in the field. Earlier, at the 26th Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea, Lee was invited to the “Stranger than Cinema” section to premiere Chang Gyeong in Asia. His 16mm films, which explore not only the materiality of celluloid but also memory and identity, have come to form a genre of their own. In an era when cinematic vision is increasingly rendered in digital code—bytes and pixels—Lee remains a distinctive artist of celluloid.
Intellectual Nostalgia
Lee Jang-wook’s filmic creations appear more closely aligned with post–World War II experimental works such as Mothlight (1963) by Stan Brakhage. Now canonized as a milestone of American experimental cinema, Mothlight was made without a camera: Brakhage pressed moth wings, flower petals, and grass blades between strips of 16mm film, leaving their physical imprints directly on the celluloid. Through editing, these fragile materials flicker and shift, producing a poetic recreation of natural movement. Lee’s penchant for such early modernist techniques may, at first glance, render his works a nostalgic remembrance or an intellectual play with early film history.
The techniques believed to be central to Lee’s practice—scratching, bleaching, double exposure, and layering—draw from such precedents in 1960s American experimental filmmaking. Yet his thematic concern with memory and identity reaches toward a different historical lineage, recalling avant-garde landmarks such as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Deren, working within a surrealist tradition that includes Un Chien Andalou, discovered a cinematic language of female desire, fear, and dream to escape banal domesticity. Like these early avant-garde films, Lee’s works extend far beyond formal innovation. They enter the realms of consciousness and the subconscious, touching on pain, repression, and remembrance. For this reason, his films are not simply intellectual exercises in experimental form, nostalgic echoes of modernist cinema, but rather endeavors to resonate with the hearts and minds of contemporary audiences.
Surface of Memory, Memory on Surface
The etched geometric patterns, irregular in form and rendered in dark monotone, flicker impulsively at the beginning of Surface of Memory, Memory on Surface (1999). Here, Lee Jang-wook’s experimental practice reveals itself as an inquiry into the material and perceptual limits of the cinematic image. Detached from representational reality, the patterns resist mimetic function and instead open a field of symbolic association, where abstract forms generate concepts and affective impressions through processes of analogy and imagination.
Out of this unstable field, human figures gradually emerge in forms resembling private photographs—holiday snapshots, casual records of everyday life. Overlapped with the patterns, the figures appear trapped, even imprisoned. What are these scattered, fragmented shapes, moving frenetically as if to keep the figures under control? Fear, loss of memory, impaired cognition, repression of desire, anxiety, or even compulsion? The figures—a child, a woman, a man—cannot form a coherent network of meaning. They are neither family, nor couple, nor friends, but isolated individuals, fragmented and crushed possibly beneath the weight of fear and anxiety.
The grainy texture of 16mm film immediately renders these images as memories, or as dream-like fantasies in which networks of meaning—and the possibility of human bonds between figures—appear only as distant recollections or distorted reflections of unfulfilled desires. Surface of Memory, Memory on Surface stages a series of questions concerning the status of what we remember, dream, and fantasize about. In Lee’s projection, no stable distinction exists between recollections, desires and fantasy.
The film subsequently shifts to an evidently foreign landscape, possibly the United States where Lee once studied and lived. This displacement expands the scope of memory and fantasy into processes of negotiating identity. By juxtaposing two seemingly disparate locations, Lee probes the tenuous boundary between events that occurred and those that never did, revealing their shared role in shaping personal identity. In a displaced setting, the ways in which past experiences or desires are constructed become integral to one’s sense of self. In this respect, the film may be read as obliquely biographical: an exploration of how the artist confronts the condition of foreignness by revisiting his own memories and desires—fractured, repressed, or unresolved—in an effort to reconstitute a coherent self.
Chang Gyeong
Lee’s most recent work, Chang Gyeong (2025), continues his sustained exploration of memory and identity. The film’s title refers to Changgyeonggung Palace in central Seoul, and the work bears the artist’s hallmark: the rough, tactile surface of 16mm film patterned with abstract designs. Sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree, for instance, cuts to a negative-image close-up of a leaf, its intricate veins exposed. The Palace holds a special place in Lee’s childhood memory, as it once housed a zoo that he frequently visited on weekend outings. Yet this site also embodies a fraught history. Formerly a royal palace, it was transformed during the Japanese colonial period into a hybridized space containing a zoo, museum, and botanical garden—an imposition that displaced the legacy of the Joseon dynasty with a modern colonial pleasure ground. Set against this history of forced transformation, Lee’s return to the Palace through 16mm becomes more than a personal act of remembrance. It is an artistic meditation on belonging and the imposed identities that emerge when personal memory collides with collective, and often traumatic, histories.
However, it would not be fair to confine Lee Jang-wook’s work to a niche of experimental film often associated with philosophical themes and subjects that are difficult or narrowly defined for a small circle of devotees. His works are part of the ecosystem of the Korean film industry. Oldboy (2003) by Park Chan-wook tells the story of a man imprisoned in a private cell for fifteen years and left disoriented about who he is and what the purpose of his life should be after his sudden release. The brightly colored and daringly patterned wallpaper of his cell accentuates the puzzles of his forced imprisonment and embodies the chaos of his search for answers to these mysterious circumstances. Burning (2018) by Lee Chang-dong follows an unemployed young man in pursuit of a wealthy acquaintance who may or may not have killed his girlfriend of a brief relationship. The confrontational scenes between the young man and the suspected killer—in a rice field, a valley, and a parking lot—oscillate between his yearning for belonging, sense of justice, and envy, drifting amid the uncertainty of locating himself at the intersection of old norms rapidly losing ground and new rules yet to take root. What Lee’s works attempt to make sense of may be part of the larger picture that the Korean creative community strives to envision: a version of Korea hidden away from the glare of its remarkable economic success, one that calls for thoughtful examination.