[Werkstattkino München] - GINA KIM: Desire & Diaspora Retrospective Interview

Published March 2019 - Source

By Susanne Mi-Son Quester

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the 2019 retrospective Gina Kim: Desire & Diaspora, A Retrospective held in Munich, Germany. It offers a reflection on Gina Kim’s artistic trajectory, beginning with her seminal early work Gina Kim’s Video Diary, and tracing the evolution of her narrative practice through to the internationally acclaimed features Invisible Light and Never Forever. The conversation engages with the thematic and formal developments that define her oeuvre, foregrounding the intersections of personal history, diasporic identity, and cinematic language.

Gina Kim (김진아) is a multifaceted filmmaker and artist whose practice spans experimental video diaries, multi-channel installations, and internationally recognized feature films. Born in South Korea in 1973, she moved to the United States at age 22 to study film and media art at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, where she was mentored by James Benning and Hartmut Bitomsky, among others. Her early experiences of dislocation, solitude, and bodily estrangement during this period became the subject of her first feature-length work, Gina Kim’s Video Diary (2002)—a deeply personal yet formally rigorous piece that blurs the line between confession and critique. In her subsequent narrative films, Invisible Light (2003) and Never Forever (2007), Kim continues to explore the subjectivity of women shaped by diasporic displacement, focusing particularly on their inner lives, unspoken desires, and the complex negotiations of identity across cultural and national borders.

The video source for GINA KIM'S VIDEO DIARY was shot over a long time and you edited several short films prior to the long diary version. Can you tell more about the process?

I first encountered the video medium during my final year of college and was immediately drawn to its potential for the democratization of art—the capacity for mass production that could make artistic expression more accessible to a broader public. Beginning in 1995, I committed to recording a video diary nearly every day, eventually accumulating hundreds of hours of footage over the course of five years. Initially, these recordings were a private refuge, a form of self-consolation with no intention of being shared. But over time, I began to sense that this daily practice carried a deeper significance. In a handwritten journal entry from 1996, I wrote: “I don’t know exactly what it means to pursue this, but I am doing it because I know it will mean something to someone someday. I know in my gut that my struggle is not mine alone. It is the struggle of a young woman whose voice has no place in a postcolonial, male-dominated world. Maybe someday, someone will be able to tell me what these images all mean.”

I am particularly interested in the editing process – was there anybody supporting you?

As mentioned earlier, I eventually made the decision to shape this vast archive of footage into a work I could share with the world. The editing process, however, was long and at times excruciating. I began by watching the material over and over, trying to discern an overarching narrative—a structure that could hold the emotional and thematic weight of the diary. From there, I meticulously reviewed each tape, making difficult decisions about what to keep and what to let go. The entire process spanned nearly two years, partly because I often needed to pause and create distance between myself and the footage. During moments of doubt or emotional exhaustion, I would share fragments with trusted mentors and friends to receive feedback and regain perspective. But ultimately, it remained a solitary endeavor. In many ways, the act of editing—no less than the act of recording—became a rite of passage. It was through this sustained engagement with the material that I came to terms with the issues I had been grappling with and emerged not only as an artist, but as an adult woman.

Are you still keeping a video diary or when and why did you stop?

I stopped keeping a video diary in 2000. Over the course of the editing process, I gradually lost interest in continuing the diary itself. What captivated me more was the act of interpreting the images I had already gathered—as if I were conducting a psychoanalysis of my own fragmented self. More importantly, by then, another creative current had begun to take hold. As I immersed myself in editing, certain elusive, dreamlike images kept surfacing in my mind. Intrigued, I began recording them in a large notebook. These recurring images often featured two solitary women occupying parallel spaces—one situated in Korea, the other in California. Though the images appeared random at first glance, they carried a strange internal coherence, as if I were holding a thousand scattered puzzle pieces without knowing what final picture they might form. By the time I completed Gina Kim’s Video Diary, the notebook was brimming with sketches and notes. And when the threads finally came together, I realized that two distinct women had emerged from the page. They would go on to become the central characters in Invisible Light.

INVISIBLE LIGHT is divided into two parts, showing the two female characters completely isolated from each other. What was the idea behind this concept? What do the two women have in common?

On a thematic level, both protagonists in Invisible Light grapple with an inability to reconcile with their own bodies and desires. Each woman intentionally displaces herself—geographically, emotionally, existentially—in an attempt to confront the question of what she truly wants. This act of self-imposed exile results in profound solitude and disorientation. Structurally, the two women are connected by one man: Gah-in’s lover, who is also Dohee’s husband. Yet his presence is deliberately withheld from the screen. Though he links their narratives, the film is not about him. It is, unequivocally, about the women.

While developing the film and writing the script, I kept returning to the mathematical function Y = 1/X. The resulting graph does not form a single curve, but two elegant, asymptotic lines—one in the positive quadrant and one in the negative. I imagined the man as the origin point, zero, and built the arcs of the two women around that void. Their stories unfold like mirror images, symmetrical yet irreconcilable.

Gah-in (가인, 家人)—whose name in Chinese characters means “house + person”—is an international student living in Los Angeles who rarely leaves her home. She is engaged in an affair with a married man, an act that fills her with shame and self-disgust. In response, she retreats into isolation, punishing herself through starvation and withdrawal. Dohee (도희, 道人)—literally “street + person”—resides in the U.S. but returns to Korea upon discovering her husband’s infidelity. In contrast to Gah-in’s inward implosion, Dohee externalizes her pain through a series of sexual encounters that culminate in an unwanted pregnancy. Unable to confront her situation, she drifts through the streets of Seoul, suspended in a liminal state of anger and despair.

These two women are not so much opposites as reflections—two curves bending away from a shared center, never touching, but always shaped by one another.

Your next feature film, NEVER FOREVER was entirely shot in the US, starring the awesome actress Vera Farmiga. Why did you decide for a Caucasian main character?

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why I chose to build the story around a white woman. Stories don’t come to me through deliberate calculation; rather, they emerge organically, shaped by intuition and subconscious resonance. My inner life often feels like a kind of black box—absorbing fragments of people, environments, and experiences around me, then releasing them unexpectedly in the form of characters and narratives that I don’t fully understand at first. I make films, write, and paint in order to decipher them.

When I relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2004 to teach at Harvard University, I was struck by the demographic homogeneity of both the academic community and the city itself. My predominantly white colleagues and students were generous, brilliant, and welcoming; I never experienced overt discrimination. Yet there was a persistent, disquieting sense of otherness—an ambient solitude I felt each time I realized I was the only Asian, or even the only person of color, in a room, whether it was a classroom, a library, or a cinema.

At the same time, I was teaching a course on Korean cinema—the first such course offered at an Ivy League institution—which gave me the chance to revisit the classic melodramas of the 1950s and ’60s. I was struck by how subversive many of the female characters were, even as their narratives ended in punishment or erasure for daring to articulate their own desires. These contradictions—between visibility and repression, power and punishment—haunted me. And slowly, the vignettes and figures that would eventually shape Never Forever began to emerge.

In retrospect, I believe the film’s three central characters—Jiha, Andrew, and Sophie—represent distinct facets of identity within the racial and cultural landscape of the United States. Jiha, an undocumented Korean laborer; Andrew, a successful Korean American who has assimilated into the mainstream; and Sophie, a white woman paralyzed by emotional repression and the inability to articulate her own desire. It’s possible I was unconsciously projecting aspects of myself into each of them—dividing my experience across lines of race, class, and assimilation. Making Sophie white may have been a way of introducing a degree of distance between myself and the character, while also allowing for a triangulated reflection on identity, desire, and belonging within the American context.

You chose 'Desire & Diaspora' as title for this retrospective – what is the meaning of these terms for you and your cinematic work?

Desire and diaspora are two key concepts that not only define my body of work, but also articulate the condition of my life. The contemporary world continues to function through false dichotomies—man/woman, East/West, native/foreigner, human/nature, white/nonwhite. Despite the increasing complexity of our lived realities, our semiotic imagination remains largely binary. These binaries produce boundaries, and those boundaries delineate who is considered “inside” and who is cast “outside”—who belongs, and who is othered. Once established, such boundaries are difficult to cross.

And yet, desire has the capacity to destabilize these boundaries. It becomes a subversive force, one that unsettles taboos and opens up spaces of ambiguity. The boundary itself does not disappear; the world is not structured to allow that. But desire enables a form of nomadic subjectivity—one that resists fixed positions and slips between categories. This is where diaspora begins: not simply as displacement, but as a state of being that eludes total belonging.

As a Korean living in the United States, I’ve come to accept—and even embrace—this nomadic condition. But it brings with it an enduring sense of existential melancholia, a deep and unresolvable nostalgia. Nostalgia for what was left behind, and for what has since been lost. This, to me, is the emotional core of diaspora. In many ways, all of my works are attempts to reckon with this condition—to give form to the affects, memories, and contradictions it produces.