In 2020 there was an extreme rise of racist rhetoric and hate crimes against Asians in the USA, where Chun was living, particularly wielded against Asian women. Alongside the rise of the global pandemic and consequent weaponized language and violence, the US space force furthered their plan to colonize celestial bodies such as Mars and the Moon. Chun looked to the Moon as a conceptual site for this film, as a site for new poetics during a difficult time. In 술래 SULLAE, Chun draws from her childhood cultural memory of ganggangsullae, using the Korean women’s moon dance as a decolonial metaphor and solace. Chun also considers the way in which this dance was historically used as a means for women to collectively unleash silenced anger. It provided relief through song, bellowing, yelling, and circling under the Moon. In this video, the English language is fragmented into phonemes and voiceless and voiced consonants. The work focuses in different moments on the sonic, visual, and semiotic; undoing the English language, its embodied violence and dominance through abstraction and mistranslation—a process the artist describes as unlanguaging. Through it, Chun reflects on language, its effect on the collective body as well as on one’s interiority.
