The Conceptual-Drawing Series

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 2019

This exhibition engages with one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Central to the project are 189 drawings that reinterpret the silent film, transforming its narrative and visual language into a compelling new visual experience.

Dreyer’s work is renowned for its radical focus on the human face, emotion, and the existential drama of Jeanne d’Arc. The drawings capture this intensity while following the film’s structure, offering fresh perspectives on its imagery, composition, and expressive power.

Conceptually, the series draws on the 1930s theory of Alternative Endings, which proposes new or reimagined conclusions to cinematic narratives. The drawings explore the interplay between historical record, filmic interpretation, and imaginative re‑reading, creating a dialogue between motion and stillness, cinema and drawing. Jeanne d’Arc emerges not only as an iconic martyr but as a profoundly human figure, articulated through gaze, contrast, and line.

In recent years, I have developed four major sequences totaling over 300 drawings, reflecting on films by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Uccellacci e uccellini, 2012), Binka Zhelyazkova (The Tied Up Balloon, 2013), Sergej Eisenstein (Bronenosets Potemkin, 2014), Ahn Chul-yeong (Fisherman’s Fire, 2015), and more recently Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Using these narratives, I have created new interpretations, transforming the endings into positive and optimistic resolutions. This ongoing approach reflects the sustained structure of my artistic practice and enables continued research into twentieth-century cinematography.

The films are initially chaptered into sequences, which form the basis of the drawing installation. Individual images are organized into a logical progression, materialized as drawings in a standard format of 15 × 21 cm. Gradually, the compositions expand beyond these borders, developing into a freer visual language. The careful arrangement of each image is a fundamental part of the creative process, translating historical filmic material into a spatial and imaginative concept.

Recreating cinematic meaning through a drawing installation allows the viewer to experience the work both atmospherically and physically, immersing them in the dialogue between film, image, and imaginative interpretation.

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