Kieran Boland

A woman discovers a watermelon emitting exhaust fumes amongst motorbikes on a street and stops for a closer inspection.
A short promo featuring Minji KANG for the "interactive" film project You sae Phonetic, I say Fanatic first presented at KDMoFA (Kuandu Museum of Fine Art) Taipei, Taiwan in October 2019. A collaboration with Brie TRENERRY (KBT) 
 

The project took its inspiration from a Taiwanese friend who insisted she learnt English by watching only three films over and over again. She watched them fanatically to learn the language phonetically. The three films were Fight Club (1999) Trainspotting (1996) and Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Curiously, all films share a reactionary, counter cultural theme—some may even say they represent a decline in western culture. By way of response, we reinterpreted scenes from three Taiwanese films; A Brighter Summer Day (1991) The Puppetmaster (1993) and Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud (2005) from which emerges ubiquitous watermelons. The questions that influenced our choice of films were made with an aim to establish a dialogue between Taiwan and Australia. Can we find merit in sharing perceptions and translations of cultural decline framed by cinema? What expectations do we have of our own culture and what shadows do they cast elsewhere? Is the theme of ennui and youthful disenfranchisement, along with a sense that life is elsewhere common across cultures and if so, can we always attribute it to an external cause?

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