Ilmin Museum of Art is screening films. Taking a step away from its usual repertoire, Ilmin Museum of Art will be presenting full-length and short films based on feminist perspectives. As the exhibition hall is structured as a media art exhibition, audiences will have to accommodate discomfort in spectating movies over 1 hour long.

The documentary show, which can almost pass as a feminist movie, mostly deals with stories of the mother and daughter, and that mother and her mother. It delves into the notion of living as a female and as a mother or living as a daughter of a mother or even as a granddaughter of a grandmother.

Kwang-Joo Son’s ‘The 3^rd Language’ (2003, 14min) and ‘Yoyogi Park’ (2006, 22 min) are close to being experimental films which describe the loss of a historical identity as a female and Asian in the post-colonialism era to ultimately express personal perspectives of the close but distant neighbor, Japan.

 ‘Mom…’, a film by Mi-Rye Yoo which portrays the life of a woman who was widowed at 42 and became a subsequent recipient of the Great Mother Award; ‘In Search of Mother’, a film about complications that arise between widow and her husband’s aunt after his death; and ‘The Grace Lee Project’, a film by Grace Lee who attempts to discover the identity of the name Grace Lee which is the name of one in five Asian American females; are all based on stories of the mother and daughter that are common in our everyday lives.

 ‘Ecstasy’, (2003, 52 min) by So-Young Kim who is a Professor of Film Studies at Korea University of Arts and also a film director, is an assortment of reenactments of ‘women on the screen’ based on the on-screen images of female characters of gathered from a vast database of movies from the 50’s of Korean cinema to the present day. ‘Ecstasy’ is structured as a collection of footages. The 60’s was the 1^st Golden Age of Korean cinema and the women of that era were very much modern. The characters of the women who discovered their own identities in a time when the sudden incorporation of the Western culture resulted in its clash with the traditional Korean culture are remarkable.

‘Ecstasy’ is seen to have the value of a thesis on the image of women in Korean movies and viewers will realize that its fruition was the outcome of a level of endeavors required for the production of a thesis. This exhibition of Ilmin Museum of Art will not fail to impress.