Mongolian Mark 1—Flowers of Night and Flowers of Day

Mongolian Mark 1—Flowers of Night and Flowers of Day is a silent video made by Mr. Cheong from footage of himself painting flowers on Yeong-hye’s body. Its carefully composed images join the persistent Mongolian mark to floral imagery and a primeval, soundless atmosphere. The finished work is also a hinge in Mr. Cheong’s story: after completing it, he imagines a second film involving sexual intimacy, but recognizes that he cannot take part himself.

Creation and Form

Mr. Cheong works through the night on the master tape. The footage exceeds his expectations: he finds the lighting, Yeong-hye’s movements, and the atmosphere compelling. He considers adding background music, then rejects the idea. Silence, he decides, makes the images seem to unfold in a vacuum, and the combination of her movements, flowers, and Mongolian mark becomes a soundless harmony that feels primeval and eternal.

The finished piece runs for four minutes and fifty-five seconds. It begins with Mr. Cheong’s hand painting Yeong-hye’s prone body, then fades out on the Mongolian mark. A later shot frames Yeong-hye’s face as a desert, her features so shadowed that she is almost unrecognizable, before the image fades again. These transitions make the mark a formal destination, while the obscured face unsettles the distinction between the person being filmed and the images composed upon her.

The work’s title, written by Mr. Cheong in black pen on the master tape, is “Mongolian Mark 1—Flowers of Night and Flowers of Day.” The act of labeling gives the finished video the first number in a series that exists, at this point, only in his imagination. Exhausted after rendering the footage, he covers his eyes and thinks of an image he knows he should never attempt to capture, which he would call “Mongolian Mark 2.”

Artistic Fixation and the Imagined Sequel

Mr. Cheong imagines the second work as a film of a man and a woman with flower-painted bodies having sex in the same unutterably silent atmosphere. He pictures their movements as matter-of-fact rather than theatrical and the sequence as moving from violence to tenderness, with extremity finally giving way to quiet. This vision extends the first film’s formal elements—painted flowers and silence—toward an intimacy that the finished video does not contain.

The imagined sequel is also a limit that Mr. Cheong confronts rather than crosses. Holding the master tape, he concludes that he cannot be the man filmed with Yeong-hye: he is acutely conscious of his own body and considers himself unsuitable for the part. He then wonders whom he could find, while recognizing that the project would require actual sexual participation, not merely an imitation of it. His questions about a possible partner and Yeong-hye’s response remain unresolved in this moment; the imagined film is not the completed work.

Context and Significance

The work emerges from an image that had occupied Mr. Cheong for nearly a year. At a performance, he sees a poster depicting naked backs covered in painted flowers and is struck by the realization that someone else has conceived an image like the one that has obsessed him. That encounter helps place the video within a larger artistic preoccupation, rather than presenting it as an isolated technical exercise.

The book’s second part, “Mongolian Mark,” places the video’s making after Mr. Cheong encounters a crushed small bird in Yeong-hye’s hand. The juxtaposition gives the work’s carefully arranged beauty an uneasy context: the images are aestheticized, but the narrative around them also includes animal suffering and Yeong-hye’s vulnerability. Later, in the part titled “Flaming Trees,” the flower-painted body returns as an image more intense than the one Mr. Cheong filmed. The video thus becomes both a finished object and a threshold: it records his artistic vision, while its imagined continuation exposes the distance between composing an image and acting within it.