Chun’s largeformat hand cut paper works propose meditations on language and materiality, inquiring into what it means to speak and enunciate through gaps, holes, and time. In a laborious and deliberate process, Chun draws graphite lines on Hanji (Korean mulberry paper), then hand cuts her own asemic writing with a scalpel blade into the paper. Chun’s language features abstracted shapes that are derived from Korean and English graphemes (such as O, ㅇ, I, L, ㅣ, ㅓ, ㅏ), and the untranslatable spaces in between. This papercutting technique was taught to Chun by a local Korean shaman, who uses it to make traditional talismans for protection, ceremony, and blessing as well as to communicate across time and place. Chun reinterprets this technique to create her own cryptography. Situated somewhere between the legible and illegible, Chun’s concrete poems reflect on diasporic, existential, and cosmic conditions of language.
