Only a few years after graduating from the BFA program you were teaching in it. How did that happen?

Celebrity Deathmatch had ended in 2002, and SVA called to say that John Gati, who had been my stop-motion animation teacher, was sick and couldn’t teach anymore, and had recommended me as his substitute. [A filmmaker and Holocaust survivor, Gati taught at SVA from 1989 until his death in 2002.]

I visited Mr. Gati and asked him, “Why did you choose me?” And he said, “Because you were the first one who came to the class and the last one to leave. You would set up all the equipment at the start and pack it up at the end.” Also, he was Hungarian and had a language barrier like me, so I think maybe we had that connection.

I taught stop-motion at SVA from 2002 to 2007. For a while I was working on a new show, The Wrong Coast [2004], attending the MFA Computer Art program and teaching all at the same time.

I love the craft of stop-motion, but it can be a challenge to get students to sign up for courses on it. What’s the interest in it like at Chung-Ang?

Well, it’s a bit different, because I’m at the graduate school. There are only eight students each year, and typically four of them will be doing CG, two or three of them will do 2D and only one is doing stop-motion. So I’ll teach them personally. But I think all of the animation schools have the same issue with stop-motion, where only a few people are interested in it.

My Central Animation Studio is for stop-motion, and it’s hard to find people to hire. I’ll put a job listing on a professional site and get no responses. But if I put it on a hobby site, like for people who make dioramas or plastic models, then I’ll get some interest.

It can be hard to get people to think of animation outside of its predominant commercial modes. While access to streaming services opened up the doors to more varieties of animation than usual, it seems like people are returning to the comfort zone of their pre-pandemic viewing habits.

I see it the same way, too. I have, like, five or six concepts for more personal, you know, “ages 15 and up” projects that I hope to make. It’s just about finding investors who are interested.

So, what are you aiming to do as the BFA Animation chair? I’ve always thought of SVA’s animation program as more independent and artistic than other colleges’, and I like that. I take pride in that.

With undergraduates, a lot of them are navigating their own identity—in themselves as well as art—and that’s okay. I’ll have students who are really ambitious. They’ll have experimental animation and stop-motion and 3D, and they’re combining everything together, and that’s great. I also have students who are taking it one day at a time. Either way, the goal is for them to have a project they care about to focus on and finish. Because when you finish it, that's a great accomplishment in itself. Of course, we pay attention to what the industry requires, but I want to support students in creating with intention.

The finishing part is very important, I think. It took me four years to figure out that photography was not for me, but I worked hard and was good at it. I don’t think that time was wasted because just that realization was worthwhile.

Tell me about your time as Korean Alumni Association president. What are you most proud of having accomplished during your tenure?

I guess we kind of made it more “official.” We drafted rules and built a website, I had cabinet members, and we did more fundraising to support our scholarship for Korean students.

Right now, we’re working on getting permission from Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to register the association as a nonprofit, so it’s a lot of paperwork.

What do you see as KAA’s mission? It seems like you’ve created a real community and network of alumni from all these different majors.

It's all about pride and confidence. We’re all from SVA and we’re all celebrating each other’s achievements. It’s mostly about building friendships but we all support and help each other professionally, too.

With everything you have going on, what do you do to unplug? Do you get any downtime?

Sure, I take Sundays off to play with my kids and take them out to eat, and to visit my parents.

But you know, two years ago I was having a really hard time. My studios almost closed down. I was so stressed—I’m responsible for my family, my staff. Luckily, I got some funding from the government, and the work started coming in again.

Now whenever I get tired or feel like, “Oh God, this is hell,” I’ll just think about how things were two years ago. So even when I'm busy, I'm okay, I’m happy. I work hard now, because maybe when I’m 60 or 70, nobody’s going to want me for work! [Laughs]

This conversation has been condensed and edited.

A version of this article appears in the spring/summer 2023 Visual Arts Journal.

Features

The longtime animator, educator and former Korean Alumni Association president has joined the Board of Directors of the School of Visual Arts