In Pursuit of Greatness | MFA Thesis

We all learn every day. Not only do we educate ourselves for a better life, but we also learn from unintended exposure to information, including propaganda. It is easy to find the motivation to...

In October 1968, 120 members of the North Korean Commandos landed in the Gangwon Province to create a guerilla base in the mountain region of South Korea. They entered and occupied villages and indoctrinated the villagers.

I was one of the children who was forced to watch this film. It was about thirty years ago, so I don’t remember most details of the film, except for the murder scene. It...

Indeed, it is the path to lethal traps of the oxymoron, hypocrisy, and the paradox. I find that absurdity is part of the basic nature of most political “stories.” To avoid missteps in the multi-dimensional and complicated nature of the events I created, I also

I grew up hearing a plethora of nationalistic rhetoric, such as “I should be proud of being a member of this homogeneous society.” I was born three years before president Park Chung-Hee was assassinated in 1979.

I created a world based on my emotional memory of childhood. A memory that has always stuck with me from my past is the presence of dust. It was dusty, it was always dusty. In towns, bulldozers created dust while skinning out vegetation to build roads and bridges.

https://asianfrank.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/InPursuitOfGreatness_5.mp4 In a historical context, Korean nationalism seems necessary as an effort to control what it could within the context of a complex weave of Korean traditions. It was obvious there was a need...

In my own self-deprecating fashion, I expected the film would not go as well as I had planned. Consequently, I determined that the production would be concept-driven and its development would involve a progression...

One of the references I used is the Japanese animation Sailor Moon (1991). I remember it as an animated series on TV when I was a child. I initially dismissed it as too girly...

There is another ego, the news reporter, who comes in at the end of the film. This news crewmember is selling bigotry and the twisted Korean cultural value of victim-blaming empathy to the victims...