Jennie Guy

Boys Before Flowers

Boys Before Flowers is a collaboration between artists Jennie Guy and Sven Anderson, named after the popular Korean drama show which provides the project’s core content. Broadcast in Korea in 2009, this show is a window into Korean (and Asian) pop culture, as well as a mirror reflecting more universal issues and themes.

Boys Before Flowers activates a translation process in which 25 participants (selected artists, academics, and writers) are invited to work with a set of pre-existing subtitles as an initial structure to generate more elaborate texts that would be fed back into the original television series as experimental sub(title)texts. Each participant will translate / reinterpret the subtitles of a single episode of the 25-episode series.

The output envisaged for the project is an exhibition in which an audience can watch the shows with both original and artist-translated subtitles in a comfortable setting, along with an accompanying publication and website.
Boys Before Flowers is focused on contemporary processes of cultural transition / transmission / translation, as well as with media-recycling (working with popular media culture as a readymade), international media distribution communities, and with an incidental parallel that we see emerging between the histories and contemporary situations of Ireland and Korea.

Simultaneously, the project amplifies a personal obsession with consuming media cultures originating from the ‘Other’, hinting at a process of West-East-West voyeurism in which perceptions of fashion, iconography, beauty, sexuality, wealth, and power are forced into an internationally distributed, post-colonial feedback loop.

The Korean broadcast of Boys Before Flowers was the third adaptation of the highly successful Japanese manga series Hana Yori Dango (produced in 2003); thus this project extends a process of repetition and translation that has already taken place in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea to a Western audience in Ireland.

This project is currently in an initial research phase.

Jennie Guy

Boys Before Flowers

Further Reading