Weep Not, Child

Weep Not, Child is a quiet language of solidarity, extended to all who strive to preserve their dignity amid the world’s oppression and tyranny. Filmed at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Scotland, the project is rooted in a landscape that moves at a tempo antithetical to speed. This space condenses time and sensation into silence, functioning as a “rewritable grammar of time”—an artistic archaeology of continuity and rupture, of memory and de-historicization.

The work arises from two converging moments: the martial law unrest that shook South Korean society in late 2024, and a brief encounter with Kenyan artist Allan “Tisya” Kioko at Glenfiddich. Through him, I came to perceive what I had previously overlooked: the anti-government protests unfolding in Kenya, the Gen-Z movement that animates them, and the emotional fabric of this resistance—the rift between anxiety and hope, between the real and the ideal. Weep Not, Child is an audiovisual response to these distant yet mirroring events, an exploration of how folded histories reflect one another through silence.

The work is structured around Walt Whitman’s poem On the Beach at Night, recited in Swahili—a layered echo of the poem as it appears in Weep Not, Child by the late Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who passed away this year. This chain of citation is more than homage; it is a solidarity of memory that transcends time and place, juxtaposing wounds, resistance, and fragile restorations shared across the postcolonial world. If Whitman found immortality in the stars of the sky, Weep Not, Child searches for endurance among the stars of the earth—weathered walls, worn textures, and the traces of silence. Like fermentation in a distillery, the work does not shout or threaten; it persists. It is a silent solidarity that safeguards dignity, an artistic declaration of slow resistance, and a way for the voiceless to recognize one another—wordlessly.