The work of Yeoseop Yoon draws sharp and direct lines of emotion between creator and viewer — an expressway to the skull, to quote Sonic Youth. From his early film work with the fraught and tender Beginners to his recent collaborations with the poet Walter Kadiki, his imagery is emotive, taut and deeply suggestive. 

"My love for poetry and desire to work with an artist who struggles with verbal communication brought me to Walter Kadiki. I wanted to explore expression beyond obvious form. I avoided written subtitles as I felt the poetry very much existed in the act of Walter signing his poem. The approach was then to position Walter in places where his performance and the emotion from the poem would multiply and propel."

"Beginners is a combination of my own story when I first moved to Australia at 16, plus stories I collected from the Australian Korean community. In the migrant community, there tend to be similar stories — adapting to a new home as 'beginners'. What resonates for me is the experience of making it. As a filmmaker, I am now more experienced and would certainly do things differently, but there's a raw passion I can still recall in making it and also in my approach as a director. It's so unrefined and almost too rough but raw and passionate. It's something you would only do as a beginner, I guess."