In Yeon Sang-ho’s Colony, the zombies develop collective intelligence after overcoming individuality as human beings and achieving collective consciousness. The introductory sequence of the film hints at communication through pheromones, like that of ants, but it brings to mind Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory instead. This theory suggests that an individual’s genuine thoughts can only be conveyed to others through social systems. Since each of us holds a system of thought that is closed off from the others, we cannot directly transfer our thoughts or feelings to others, and what we call communication is the work of encoding that system into language and behavior according to social convention and then interpreting what comes back, which means it can never be anything but indirect. In other words, communication is a socially constructed system of representation, which prevents us from fully understanding what others are thinking.

Nothing can be smoother than reconstructing the memory of the Jeju April 3rd Incident. Unlike many other Democratization Movements in Korea, such as the May 18th Democratization Movement in 1980 Gwangju, the Jeju April 3rd Incident has not encountered much allegation of fabricated history from the political power or has not evoked public dispute. I believe there are basically two assumptions behind this appreciation of the Jeju Uprising: first, victims and perpetrators are obvious, and second, this incident is too isolated from the mainland people of South Korea. However, no incident can be categorized as black and white, and if it receives zero contention from South Korean society, I believe the effort to recognize this movement would be nullified since it means no interest in whatever is being said about the Jeju incident. The film director Ha Myung-mi attempts to achieve the double mission of increasing the sense of reality of the Jeju Uprising through the screen with a balanced view of complex historical events.

“소녀는 소년의 소녀/소년은 소녀의 소원 (A girl is boy’s girl/a boy is a girl’s wish)” —LOONA Haseul, “소년, 소녀 (Let Me In)”

This thesis argues that Faizullah established a subgenre of “panoramic paintings” at Awadh by incorporating pictorial idioms from mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Mughal painting. Rather than perceiving his work primarily as shaped by European prints and technique, I contend that the zenana building (female quarters in elite households and palaces) in Faizullah’s compositions functions as a narrative apparatus, a space where literary imagination and physical reality are made to overlap simultaneously, and that this architectural logic allowed him to articulate a distinctly Awadhi cultural identity in dialogue with Mughal heritage.

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream?
— Edgar Allan Poe, A Dream Within a Dream