Deferral Theatre
2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
35:05 minutes
siren eun young jung
Taking the same name as their most recent solo show at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, siren eun young jung’s video work Deferral Theatre intertwines various threads from the last decade of the artist’s research into the Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatrical form, in which all of the roles are played by women, as well as performance-based modes of queer resistance in South Korea. The radical and temporally border-crossing qualities of gender fluidity, and lineages of queer subversion within performative spaces, animate Deferral Theatre through a critical deconstruction of Korean history, tradition and gender norms. One particularly powerful scene depicts a young drag king performer tearing at their suit and tie as they lip-sync passionately to a song in English, while the frame lilts with an ecstatic languor, as if the operator of the camera were staggering feverishly. The frame is continually disrupted, unstable, unable or unwilling to contain the multiplicitous presence(s) within its rectangular bounds. Later in the video, the screen splits over and over again with a hypnotic rhythm, like a visual Fibonacci sequence. Each sub-screen fills with images of the three main characters of Deferral Theatre as they perform their respective art forms, singing, commanding, quivering, clutching, never still, in dynamic dialogue. In this work, deferral becomes a radical act of imagination, in its production of a kind of temporal resistance. In Deferral Theatre , gender roles, cultural history and even the trajectory of artistic tradition itself are destabilized, anomalized, queered. Perhaps, as jung seems to suggest, only in that space of uncertainty can new subjectivities reveal themselves.
With a practice deeply engaged with feminism and LGBT rights issues, siren eun young jung reveals the subversive power of traditional culture, one unknown in the Korean modernization period, and provides unique perspectives and documentation of important communities. Through their long-term research projects bridging different generations of women, jung keenly addresses questions of gender as a norm of “becoming.” Their early works have examined the struggles of a younger generation of women against androcentrism and violent patriarchy and subsequent projects have addressed issues surrounding environmental change, human rights, activism, and homosexual rights. jung’s pivotal work Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–2016) engages the existing queer community in South Korea by focusing on Yeoseong Gukgeuk , an all-female traditional theater genre existing since the 1950s, after the Korean War. The ongoing project tells an empowering story of gender-becoming in the mid-20th century. Unveiling traditional yet subversive narratives that existed during the transitional period of a country moving towards a modern society and challenging the myth of Korean “andro-modernization” achieved by a rapid masculinism of national development.
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