시, language for new moons

This discussion between Artistic Director Rachael Rakes and artist Jesse Chun focuses on the artist’s survey exhibition at the Seoul Museum of History, 시, language for new moons, which demonstrates the artist’s longtime engagement with questions of language and power. Chun was born in Korea and subsequently lived in Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States. While abroad, she began to observe the marginalization of non-English languages and non-Western narratives and histories. Drawing from sustained connections to her own matrilineal history, Korean folk literature, and the country of her birth, Chun uncovers the “other side” of language, mapping its various cosmologies. By deconstructing languages into fragments of phonemes, characters, images, and constellations, Chun embraces linguistic abstractions that fracture its social and semiotic structures. In the context of the Seoul Museum of History, Chun’s works unfold new ways of seeing the histories and poetics that percolate through Seoul, arising from preservation, complexity, devotion, and reinvention.