Felt Like a Privilege 

Single-channel video installation | HD video, color, sound | 20:33 min | 2017

Press release from Weekend, Seoul:

This exhibition presents new video works by Yi Sa-Ra. Felt Like a Privilege, the main video work of the exhibition, is a video that follows a journey of an interviewer played by the artist, trying to understand her family history within a specific event in South Korean economic history.

In 1997, the “Hanbo Crisis” occurred with the bankruptcy of Hanbo, the 14th largest conglomerate in South Korea. At the time, due to corruption, the demise of Hanbo rapidly led to bankruptcies of other conglomerates and, eventually, to the most severe financial crisis in the history of the country. The crisis was so significant that the country had to borrow a massive loan from the IMF the same year. The artist’s father, who had worked at the construction firm of Hanbo for ten years until its bankruptcy, was then immediately diagnosed with a brain tumor and passed away the next year.

20 years later, In Felt Like a Privilege, the artist discovers, and then visits, the buildings in whose construction her father participated while working for Hanbo. To gather diverse perspectives on these fragments of the past, she also interviews a resident of one of the buildings, her uncle in-law, who also worked for Hanbo at the time, and her mother, and both explain the details of the situation to the artist on her absent father’s behalf. By overlaying archival news footage and medical records onto the current views of the buildings and interviews­­—which exposes the distance between information from different time periods and the gaps of missing information—the artist connects the national financial crisis with her family dissolution.