Meejin Hong lives in Winnetka, California, with a crew of tortoises and other unruly creatures, and makes experimental animation the old-fashioned way: by hand, one painstaking mark at a time. Paint on glass, scratch on film, stop motion, ink, crayon, she treats every technique as a different way of thinking about movement and time. She holds an MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts and is part of the collective Electronic Countermeasures, through which she’s created live visuals for Joy Williams’ Venus Tour.
At Kinomural she’s showing Deluge, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and picked up a special mention at Animafest Zagreb. The premise sounds almost too simple: 24 frames of ink drawings that endlessly build on one another, in the tradition of Adam Beckett’s “infinite animation.” What comes out is anything but simple. Fantastic figures surge and dissolve in mesmerising motion, and the second your eye locks onto one part of the frame, the next thing is already emerging somewhere else. Present and past pile up together, memories forming, warping and wiping each other out, all fighting for the same space. Control gets surrendered, mistakes and second chances welcomed in. Deluge is the slow stampede of a vulnerable mind.
