Flight and failed escape

Flight and failed escape is a recurring motif in which the promise of rising beyond human limits is repeatedly checked by the body, loss, and uncertainty. Birds and other flying things enter Mr. Cheong’s art as images without clear explanation; later, his attempt to fly ends at a veranda railing, while a child’s dream and In-hye’s last glimpse of a bird leave open whether flight offers release or only an image of it.

Flight in Mr. Cheong’s Art

Mr. Cheong repeatedly filmed things in flight: birds, butterflies, airplanes, moths, and flies. The images could appear beside scenes with no apparent connection to them. In-hye remembers asking why he had placed a two-second shot of a bird’s black shadow rising slowly into the air after footage of a ruined bridge and people crying at a funeral. His answer was simply, “Just because” and “I just ended up putting it in. I put it in and I thought it looked good.” The juxtaposition offers no explicit interpretation; flight sits beside grief without explaining or cancelling it.

The unexplained images also mark the distance between In-hye and her husband. She had hoped his video art might disclose his nature, but his works remained incomprehensible to her. His insertion of flight scenes, apparently disconnected from a work’s subject, makes that opacity visible: an image can attract him without yielding a reason that In-hye can understand. The motif is therefore not just a set of airborne subjects, but a recurrent limit on what his art—and her knowledge of him—can make legible.

In-hye had also seen evidence of a passion that his quiet, easily wounded manner did not suggest. At an exhibition after their marriage, she was struck by the labor behind his footage: he had carried a camcorder to varied and sometimes sensitive locations, negotiating permission and persisting through difficulties. That contrast helps place the flight images within a practice sustained by patient effort, even when the finished work offered her no transparent account of what the images meant.

A Proposed Flight for Ji-woo

A domestic recording briefly turns flight into a plan for an artwork. A little after Ji-woo’s first birthday, as he was just beginning to walk, Mr. Cheong filmed him tottering around the sunny living room and being scooped into In-hye’s arms. Excitedly, he proposed animating flowers that would spring up from the child’s footsteps, then revised the idea: butterflies would be better, and they should film it again on a lawn.

The envisioned scene would transform each unsteady step into an emergence of color. Mr. Cheong imagined In-hye and Ji-woo in white clothes, then considered shabby, worn clothes instead, settling on the image of a poor mother and child whose outing is answered by multicolored butterflies rising whenever the baby steps. The proposal recasts flight as something made to appear around a vulnerable body—not the child’s own escape from the ground, but an artistic miracle attached to his effort to walk. Mr. Cheong showed In-hye how to operate the camcorder and played back the footage while talking through the idea, bringing his otherwise difficult-to-read artistic excitement into the living room.

The Attempt to Fly

The motif darkens when In-hye’s memory of Mr. Cheong’s video images is overlaid with the sight of him trying to throw himself over the railing of Yeong-hye’s veranda in an effort to fly like a bird. The contrast is stark: the flight he had repeatedly included in his videos proves beyond him when he needs it most. The attempted leap makes the motif’s promise bodily and dangerous, replacing an image of ascent with a failed escape that leaves In-hye unable to think of him as she once did.

His later attempt to contact her brings that rupture into the present. In-hye knows that refusing him again may mean he will not contact her for a long time, but hangs up without answering. She pictures him in the middle of the night in worn-out sneakers and shabby clothes, his face despairing and no longer young; those imagined details are joined in her mind to his attempt at the railing. She tells him, “I don’t know you,” and repeats that there is no need for them to forgive each other because she does not know him. When the telephone rings again, she pulls out the cord. The next morning she reconnects it, but, as she expected, he does not call again. The failed flight thus persists not as artistic freedom but as the defining image of a relationship she chooses to sever.

A Dream Passed Between Mother and Child

Flight also enters the family as a child’s disturbing dream. Ji-woo once told In-hye that he had seen his mother flying in the wind. Looking toward the sky, he had seen a bird say, “I’m your mum,” and two hands emerge from its body. The memory belongs to a period when his tongue still stumbled over certain words; his vague sadness and tears unsettled In-hye because he was crying simply from feeling sad, not to make a request or seek help.

In-hye tried to reassure him by suggesting that the bird meant it was a mummy bird, then pointed out that she was still there and had not changed into a white bird. Ji-woo managed a faint, uncertain smile, and she concluded that it was just a dream. The exchange gives flight an intimate, unsettling form: a mother seems to leave her human body and return through a bird, while the child’s grief resists the comfort of an ordinary explanation.

Later, in the ambulance, In-hye remembers this conversation and doubts her earlier certainty. She wonders whether the dream was merely coincidence, because it had been the morning when she turned her back on the rising sun over silent trees and retraced her steps down the mountain in her faded purple T-shirt. The remembered descent makes the bird dream touch In-hye’s own past without proving that the two events were connected. The motif holds the gap between a comforting statement—that it was only a dream—and the possibility that the image carried a meaning neither mother nor child could then understand.

The Last Bird and the Unresolved Escape

As the ambulance rounds the final bend away from Mount Ch’ukseong, In-hye sees a black bird flying toward dark clouds. The summer sunlight stings her eyes, and she can no longer follow its flight. The bird is visible only briefly, then lost to her gaze; its departure does not supply a destination or a promise of rescue.

In-hye looks instead at the roadside trees, whose moving green she sees as “green fire,” and stares as if waiting for an answer or protesting against something. The sequence sets the bird’s vanishing flight against rooted, blazing vegetation and In-hye’s insistent gaze. Her earlier reassurance that a dream is only a dream returns in altered form as a question rather than a settled truth. Flight remains open to interpretation—an artistic image, a child’s vision, an attempted escape, or a bird disappearing from sight—while the story refuses to turn it into a successful way out.