Se So Neon’s music video, ‘New Youth‘, is like a praise to the joy of living. Although Junseok Eom adopts here the principles of a narrative video, the project is based on a structure with a strong symbolic content, in which the lyrics become a reading key of the image and vice versa. Apparently within the parameters of a raw realism depicting the attempts of a young girl to preserve her own intimate universe, far from the prejudices of those around her, the video illustrates a kind of interior initiatory path of the protagonist who must step into a new stage of life. This “new youth” that becomes a leitmotif of the whole project is the equivalent of a new age, that of maturity, which the young girl must openly accept, without abandoning her inner child. Basically, the project brings to light tensions and conflicts of the human soul struggling to naturally accept the biological whims of age.
The video includes elements that recreate a nostalgic and evanescent atmosphere, bordering on daydreaming. The act of sucking her thumb that the protagonist makes as a magical act taking her out of everyday reality becomes a personal mark of her fragile sensitivity which, in an adult world, can become an anomaly. However, her inner metamorphosis occurs, and this doesn’t distort the magic of childhood that defines her existence. This delicate transition is transposed by slow, fluid images of a diffuse poetry, through which the young girl seems to contemplate the happiness of her own childhood not with a destructive sadness, but with a tender nostalgia. The slightly blurred images, seemingly detached from her memories or from her flow of consciousness, capture details from nature and symbolic objects that combine in a metaphorical panorama of the young girl’s soul. Likewise, the indie rock music creates a perfect ambiance for this necessary “initiation” in adulthood, harmoniously highlighting the bright melody of the character’s innocence. Junseok Eom thus creates a project with a strong human stake, succeeding in convincingly hypostasizing the emotional blockages of a person who must understand that maturity is not the end of happiness, but the beginning of a “new youth” at least as special. Se So Neon’s ‘New Youth’ music video is a tender meditation on the small and big challenges that the beginning of maturity brings.
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