Meesoo Lee: A Nowhere Man Making Nowhere Videos for a Nowhere Land Rating: NNN
Rating: NNNNN
Speaking of blogs, reality TV and Tarnation, Vancouver videomaker Meesoo Lee is in town with a selection of his self-exploratory, diaristic video work.
But in a cultural milieu where “personal” is becoming a synonym for “harrowing,” Lee’s work is a little oasis of wry, self-deprecating playfulness.
Some of his most likeable videos are as minimalist as a three-panel comic strip. In Work, Lee expresses his views on labour by confronting a decidedly Soviet-realist, decidedly unoccupied tractor. It’s a funny, multi-layered image, and more of an aside than a statement – blink and you’ll miss it.
He’s also good at wrapping big ideas in tiny, funny, mundane-seeming packages.
Bad Hair Day, in which his father, swaddled in pink bib and perm cap in a South Korea hair salon, chortles derisively at his son’s artfully asymmetrical do, says as much about generation and culture gaps and the tenacity of parent-child dynamics as 10 pages of artist’s statement, and it’s way funnier. (January 29, Cinecycle)
