On (un)language: Jesse Chun
Due to unforeseen health reasons, this event has been postponed until further notice
On (un)language: Jesse Chun
A screening program followed by a conversation with Erika Mei Chua Holum and Jo-ey Tang
Jesse Chun’s moving image poems, short films, drawings, and installations address language, translation, and historiography. Traversing found institutional narratives, documents, and imprints of linguistic imperialism as a site for (mis)translation, rupture, and abstraction, Chun’s work unearths alternate semiotic trajectories and poetics for non-linear passages of meaning, time, and untranslatability.
On the occasion of From the KADIST collection: Be here, or even better, be nowhere, KADIST presents a screening of 3 video works by Chun, followed by a conversation on unfixing language and its politics for alternate poetics with Erika Mei Chua Holum, Assistant Curator, Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston and KADIST curator-in-residence, and Jo-ey Tang, Director, KADIST San Francisco.
In O (for various skies) (2021), which is currently on view at KADIST San Francisco, Chun decentralizes American colonial narratives about the moon through “unlanguaging”—a methodology that the artist has conceptualized for unfixing language. The project disrupts bureaucratic documents pertaining to the United States government’s lunar colonization and militarization, such as The Lunex Project of 1958 and Project Horizon of 1959, through methods of visual, semiotic, and sonic (mis)translation and abstraction. Chun redacts the found texts, transforming them into concrete poetry, while interweaving lesser-known Korean folklore about the moon, such as the precolonial Korean women’s moon dance (ganggangsullae) and shamanistic ritual dance for ushering the departed into another world (gildakeum).
Screening Program
O (for various skies) (2021), 10:27 mins
KADIST collection, originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto
술래 SULLAE (2020), 6:25 mins
술래 SULLAE translates systems of language, power, and legibility by looking to the Moon as a conceptual site; addressing it not only as a poetic metaphor but also as a colonial site. In this video, moving images of a precolonial Korean women’s Moon dance, ganggangsullae (강강술래), are interwoven with consonants of the English language, Hangeul (한글) and English text, various index pages from intonation books, white noise, and word-censor bleeps. Chun highlights the way in which the dance was historically used as a means for unleashing silenced anger: release through song, bellowing, yelling, and circling under the Moon.
Tongues of Fire (2022-23), 6:00 mins
Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa
Tongues of Fire is a 3-scroll moving image poem that meditates on language as living bodies, spirits, and inheritance. The film ruminates on the American English language history in Marfa, Texas — where a forced burial ceremony of the student’s mother tongue, Spanish, took place at the segregated Blackwell School in 1954. Decades later, the students gathered and unburied their language in a symbolic ceremony. Inspired by their unearthing, the film summons various American tongues – Spanish, English, and Chun’s mother tongue, Korean. Taking an experimental format of one-word prose in three languages, the non-narrative film speaks through a lyrical soundscape, vistas of engraved alphabets found at the Blackwell School, and footage of Chun’s video performance in the night desert. Chun unfixes the Texas landscape with light, making offerings with moving images, flowers, pomegranates, and mirrors. Tongues of Fire unearths a nocturne for language — its gods, ghosts, and diasporas.
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Jesse Chun‘s (b. 1984, South Korea. Lives in Brooklyn, New York) recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale hosted by the Seoul Museum of Art; the Nam June Paik Art Center (South Korea); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (Canada); SculptureCenter, New York; Queens Museum, NY; The Drawing Center, NY; BAM, NY; the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, NY; Ballroom Marfa, TX (United States), among others. Select awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (US); Art by Translation (Paris); Smack Mellon (NY); the NEA fellowship at ISCP (NY). Select public collections include the Museum of Modern Art Library (NY); the Smithsonian Institution (DC); the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library (NY); and KADIST (FR/US). Chun currently works between New York and Seoul.
Erika Mei Chua Holum (she/they) is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Assistant Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. Her curatorial work and research focus on intimacies and interconnected histories within artistic practices, south-south relationships, ways of gathering, and archival methodologies. They have contributed to projects and exhibitions worldwide, including Sanman Studios, Alief Art House in Houston, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Lagos Biennial in Nigeria, and Obscura Festival of Photography in Malaysia. Forthcoming projects at the Blaffer Art Museum include solo exhibitions with John Guzman, Reynier Leyva Novo, and Cian Dayrit.