Jesse Chun

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시:concrete poem
graphite, handcut Hanji (Korean mulberry paper), wood frame
62.5 x 36 x 2.5 inches / 158.75 × 91.44 × 6.35 cm
2023 - ongoing


시:concrete poem meditates on language, its tangibility and intangibility -- on what it means to speak through gaps, shadow, and time. In this work, Chun reinterprets a Korean shamanic tradition of paper cutting, taught to her by a local shaman in Korea, to create her own abstraction of language. Historically used as a portal for communication with other worlds, talismans for protection, ceremony, and to engage in non-linear transmission across time and place, Chun translates this form to create her own asemic writing. In a meditative, laborious, time-based process, Chun draws graphite lines on Hanji (Korean mulberry paper), then hand cuts with a blade into the paper. Chun’s language, materialized through cut gaps, features abstracted shapes that are derived from Korean and English graphemes (such as O, ㅇ, I, L,ㅣ, ㅓ, ㅏ), and the untranslatable space in between. Situated somewhere between the legible and illegible, Chun’s concrete poems reflect on the diasporic, existential, and cosmic conditions of language.