Butterflies

Butterflies appear in an uncompleted film idea proposed by Mr. Cheong: they would lift from Ji-woo’s footsteps as the child learned to walk. The image gives the insects a brief, imagined motion within the family’s sunny living room, but the project never reaches the lawn it requires, leaving the butterflies suspended between artistic possibility and the ordinary conditions that prevent it.

The Proposed Image

A little after Ji-woo’s first birthday, when he was just beginning to walk, Mr. Cheong filmed him tottering around the sunny living room. He then imagined turning the child’s steps into animation. At first, he suggested flowers springing up behind Ji-woo; he changed the idea to butterflies and proposed filming the scene again on a lawn. The butterflies were to rise with each unsteady step, making the child’s movement appear to release a multicolored burst of life.

The concept developed into a carefully pictured scene. Mr. Cheong proposed that In-hye and Ji-woo wear white, then reconsidered in favor of shabby, worn clothes, imagining them as a poor mother and child on an outing. In the finished image he described, butterflies would fly up like a miracle whenever the baby moved forward. The contrast between the worn clothing and the colorful, apparently miraculous flight made the butterflies the scene’s central transformation: an animation that would make small, precarious steps visible as an event.

A Film That Never Happened

The proposed sequence depended on circumstances the family did not have. There was no lawn, and Ji-woo soon grew out of his unsteady, tottering phase. The video of butterflies rising from his footsteps was never made. Its absence is specific rather than abstract: the child’s brief developmental moment passed, while the place needed to stage the image was unavailable.

That unrealized scene sits beside Mr. Cheong’s broader, often unproductive labor as a filmmaker. He later worked himself harder, shut himself away in his studio, and sometimes slept in the empty bathtub without having anything to show for his effort. The imagined butterflies therefore belong to an idea he could describe vividly but could not bring into being. Their flight remains confined to a proposed artwork, while Ji-woo’s actual steps continue beyond the moment the camera could have captured.

Narrative Significance

The butterflies are not presented as independent animals in the scene; they are an animation Mr. Cheong imagines adding to a recording of his son. Their narrative force comes from that mediation. They would transform an ordinary family film into an artistic image, yet the project’s dependence on a lawn, suitable timing, and a fleeting stage of childhood exposes the distance between conception and realization.

The unfinished film also sharpens the contrast between Mr. Cheong’s animated account of family life and the family’s actual experience of his absence. Even while he was still around, Ji-woo saw him so infrequently that he asked each morning whether there was a father in their family. Against that detail, the imagined butterflies promise a vivid, shared outing that never occurs. The image survives as a record of what Mr. Cheong wanted to make, not as a memory of what the family did together.