On (un)language: Jesse Chun

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
• Tongues of Fire (2022-23), 6:00 mins, Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa