밤, 낮, 달, 비, Speaking in Tongues
Jesse Chun: 밤, 낮, 달, 비, Speaking in Tongues
exhibition view, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, 2024
시:sea (2567)
2024
Single-channel HD video, black and white, silent, mirrors, rocks
2 min 10 sec; installation dimensions variable
시:sea (2567)
2024
Single-channel HD video, black and white, silent, mirrors, rocks
2 min 10 sec; installation dimensions variable
시:sea (2565), close-up
exhibition view, 2024
score for unlanguaging (천지문 and cosmos; no.071723), 2023
Graphite and pigment on vellum paper, pins, hanji, Korean silk, steel cable, artist's
frame, Two parts: 15 x 11.5 x 1.5 in (38 x 29 x 4 cm) each; overall: 46.75 x 11.5 x 1.5 in (119
x 29 x 4 cm)
score for unlanguaging (천지문 and cosmos; no.071723), 2023
close-up
close-up
exhibition view, 2024
exhibition view, 2024
시: concrete poem (no.042024), 2024
Graphite on hand-cut ottchil dyed hanji, aluminum frame
29.5 x 14.75 in (75 x 37 cm)
Framed: 33.5 x 18.5 x 2 in (85 x 47 x 5 cm)
Graphite on hand-cut ottchil dyed hanji, aluminum frame
29.5 x 14.75 in (75 x 37 cm)
Framed: 33.5 x 18.5 x 2 in (85 x 47 x 5 cm)
시: concrete poem (no.042024), 2024, close-up
시: concrete poem (no.032924), 2024
Graphite on hand-cut ottchil dyed hanji, aluminum frame
29.5 x 5.5 in (75 x 14 cm)
Framed: 33.5 x 9.25 x 2 in (85 x 23 x 5 cm)
Graphite on hand-cut ottchil dyed hanji, aluminum frame
29.5 x 5.5 in (75 x 14 cm)
Framed: 33.5 x 9.25 x 2 in (85 x 23 x 5 cm)
시: concrete poem (no.032924), 2024, close-up
시: concrete poems, installation view
시: concrete poem (no.032324), 2024
Graphite on hand-cut ottchil dyed hanji, walnut frame
42 x 22.5 in (107 x 57 cm)
Framed: 46 x 26.5 x 2.5 in (117 x 67 x 6 cm)
Graphite on hand-cut ottchil dyed hanji, walnut frame
42 x 22.5 in (107 x 57 cm)
Framed: 46 x 26.5 x 2.5 in (117 x 67 x 6 cm)
밤, 낮, 달, 비, Speaking in Tongues
exhibition view, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, 2024
시:sea (2567)
installation documentation, 2024
installation documentation, 2024
Jesse Chun: 밤, 낮, 달, 비, Speaking in Tongues
exhibition installation documentation with sound
sound: Jesse Chun x Yeonhee (Kim Hyangsooree and Ahn Yoohee)
nocturne no.071723: score for unlanguaging (천지문 and cosmos), 2024
4 min 21 sec
sound: Jesse Chun x Yeonhee (Kim Hyangsooree and Ahn Yoohee)
nocturne no.071723: score for unlanguaging (천지문 and cosmos), 2024
4 min 21 sec
Jesse Chun: 밤, 낮, 달, 비, Speaking in Tongues
on view May 25 - June 29, 2024
Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
Commonwealth and Council presents 밤, 낮, 달, 비, Speaking in Tongues by Jesse Chun, the artist’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles.
Chun's poetics in moving image, drawing, sculpture, and sound intimately ruminate on language and its interdimensional translations. Fracturing the dominant compositions of legibility, Chun unfixes language from its semantic, social, and hierarchical structures in a process she calls “unlanguaging.” Taking the found grammars of power within linguistics, particularly of the Anglophonic as a site for rupture and abstraction, Chun conjures a new material vocabulary that interweaves the diasporic and familial, drawing from Korean folk and shamanic traditions of communication. Chun’s visual and sonic abstractions invoke alternate semiotics and cosmologies of meaning, time, and the untranslatable.
Two moving image sculptures titled 시:sea(2565) and 시:sea(2567) face each other in the gallery space. Each is comprised of a black-and-white single-channel projection, activated with mirrors and rocks, featuring the artist’s diaristic video fragments and notes on language. 시, meaning “poetry” in Korean, can be mistranslated as “sea” in English when pronounced phonetically. Engaging with mistranslation as an active poetic form, Chun’s moving images refuse clarity and linear narrative, instead offering abstract textual portals and spatial poems.
In 시:concrete poem, Chun creates her own asemic writing through a laborious, time-based material meditation. She interprets the Korean shamanic tradition of paper cutting (설위설경), used to create talismans and to communicate across other worlds, by repeatedly drawing graphite lines on hanji (Korean mulberry paper) and meticulously cutting her own abstract language patterns by hand. This process is also inspired by Chun’s late grandmother, a former Korean folk dancer and Buddhist monk who exposed the artist to writing as a metaphysical 수행 practice. The works reflect on embodied enunciations made through gaps, shadows, and time.
At the center of the gallery, the artist displays a suspended sculptural drawing installation titled score for unlanguaging (천지문 and cosmos, no.071723). The work contains an invisible circle materializing the unseen and unspoken. The drawings are made using a Roman alphabet stencil—not to write English—but rather to map new constellations in a technique which actively decenters the world’s most dominant language. The installation as a whole is activated through a sound work titled nocturne no.071723: score for unlanguaging (천지문 and cosmos) composed by Chun and Korean folk performance artists Yeonhee (Kim Hyangsooree and Ahn Yoohee). The score brings to life a Korean folk sound reinterpreted into sonic abstraction, building itself by weaving together a series of fragmented utterances, voices, breaths, and communings much in the way Chun herself works with language: unraveling so that it may reconstruct as a new constellation, sacred and impure, summoning polyphonic mutations, non-linear passages, and scores for new cosmos.
photo and video documentation by Paul Salveson
courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City