Seung-eon Yi



Seung-eon Yi is a filmmaker working with animation collaged media, based in Seoul. 

Her work draws upon memories and the lingering sensations of experiences from her everyday life. Through animation, she revisits these memories, attempting to unearth their traces and the textures of remembrance. Using hand-crafted animation and painterly expressions, she conveys the abstract aspects of memory and emotion in a more intuitive and sensory manner. In doing so, she connects the deeply personal memories within her work to the audience, expanding them into new narratives and chapters.

She focuses on the often-overlooked, small things we unconsciously interact with and build relationships with through physical experience in our daily lives. In a society inundated with processed images, she sees how we live amid fleeting stimuli that are quickly consumed and discarded.
This era of ephemeral virtual experiences and superficial emotions, she believes, has led her to question the nature of "truth," drawing her attention to the intimate emotions and memories accumulated through physical experiences. Unlike "truth" as a collective agreement, the personal, unique truth one feels, she finds, is difficult to define but possesses an enduring, ambiguous quality that resists being forgotten. She explores what sustains an individual’s sense of existence, uncovering tentative answers in the memories formed through everyday life.

Her animated films invite viewers to reflect on what remains as "truth" in our memories, even amidst the constant changes of the external world and our struggles to adapt to them. It offers an opportunity to contemplate these truths and guides the audience into a sensory meditation, encouraging them to reflect on the ephemeral yet profound essence of their own lived experiences.

->seungyi95@gmail.com
->syi7@saic.edu
->Instagram




Other Works CV
Dialogue : The Arriving and Vanishing
9min 36sec, 2d hand-drawn animation, 2024

Synopsis : A woman and a man are seated at a seaside café, facing each other. And the traces of their emotions and memories pass by in their mind along the sound of the wave.


Screening
2024 50th Seoul Independent Film Festival, Seoul, Korea
2024 20th Seoul Indie Anifest, Seoul, Korea
2023 Bucheon International Animation Festival, Bucheon, Korea

Funding
2023 Glas Animation Grant
2022 Bucheon International Animation Festival Grant
 <Dialogue: the Arriving and Vanishing> is an animation that unravels the emotional turbulence and manifestations of memory when a couple faces separation.

Rather than focusing on the narrative between the characters, this animation concentrates on the abstract aspects of their emotions and memories. In order to immerse the audience in the abstract concepts of "memory" and "emotion" throughout its runtime, the film paradoxically adopts a monotonous and detached gaze toward the present timeline, where the characters face their breakup with no discernible emotional entanglement.

The present moments, where only formal and surface-level conversations take place, are captured through long takes with an observational and objective perspective. In contrast, the subjective time of memory constantly interrupts and intertwines with these scenes, forming the rhythm of the entire animation. This rhythm itself becomes the core narrative structure of the film, while simultaneously expressing the inexorable nature of memories—how they arrive unbidden and disappear before one can grasp them.

As the characters' present timeline collides with the fluid, subjective time of memory and emotion, the audience is drawn deeper into the atmosphere and emotional landscape of the characters.