Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lyrics 1, 2, 3 is part of siren eun young jung Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–). The work closely follows first and second generations of Yeoseong Gukgeuk actresses, who later became an important source of inspiration for the artist. Formally, this genre of theater draws from Westernized aspects of traditional Korean music performance, as well as from adaptations of pansori , a Korean genre of musical storytelling, to create a staged version of traditional Korean opera.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Unfollow is a music video by Yung Jake featuring a man haunted by the shadows of a former relationship. With the omnipresence of social media in our daily lives, breaking up in the physical world no longer suffices: posts by his ex-lover still appear in his newsfeed, reminding him of her presence and thus making it harder from him to let go of his relationship. As the ‘unfollow’ button on social media appears to be the only way to break up completely, Unfollow underlines the barrier between our online and offline identities and the difficulty to separate them.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I don’t remember is a video by Yung Jake that combines his passion for both music and the visual arts. As per several of his works the video borrows from the vernacular of rap and relies on the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of music videos. A humorous interpretation of the rap and hip hop genres, the video combines scenes from urban settings and snapshots of a party as the artist raps in a drowsy monotone about having forgotten the wild night.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As the video Datamosh begins to play, Yung Jake emerges out of a colorful, smoke-like background and breaks into rap. Malfunctioning green screens and pixelated digital mash-ups bleed into each other in a parody of the music video trope and specifically of the trend of ‘datamoshing’—a digital technique commonly used across this genre. The song’s lyrics distinctly borrow from the lexicon of rap, combining mentions of clubs, money and fame, with self-referential and humorous lines that literally describe the way in which the artist subverts the medium.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001. The title already implies the cultural complexities about to be ironically unravelled: Ho Chi Minh is parodied and Okinawa (where this was filmed) was a battle site in Japan during World War II which then became an American training base during the Vietnam War. To a remix of James Bond movie tracks composed by Quoc Bao, no less than thirty divers in wet suits and full gear advance against the water resistance armed with cartridges of color.

Painting (Painting)

Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu initiated the series 1000 Pieces (of White) in 2009, as a way to produce objects and images as a portrait of their shared life as partners and collaborators. Interweaving public and private, personal anecdote and pop cultural appropriation, their work attests to the poetry of the everyday. In addition to found and original materials, the artists have occasionally incorporated drawings and sketches by artist friends, and even by their own daughter into the ongoing work.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sun Xun’s lushly illustrated, dynamic short film Mythological Time is a dreamy chronicle of rapacious industrial development, the mythical qualities of state propaganda, and the constancy of change, as experienced by an unnamed coal mining town. While it is not named in the film itself, the town at the center of Mythological Time is a re-imagined incarnation of Sun’s hometown of Fuxin, in the northern Chinese province of Liaoning. Sandwiched between North Korea and Inner Mongolia, Fuxin is a poor coal-mining region that used to contain one of China’s largest open-pit mines and has historically been the site of significant conflict, thanks to its rich mineral resources.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sun’s animated film 21 Ke (21 Grams) is based on the 1907 research by the American physician Dr. Duncan MacDougall who claimed the measured weight of the human soul to be twenty-one grams. Sun used this episode—which was not fully recognized by the scientific community—as a point of departure for his depiction of a dystopian world in which the narration of history and notion of time are interrupted. Because each frame was drawn by hand with crayon, it took Sun and his animation studio team a few years to complete this thirty-minute film of a surreal journey through mysterious cities, plagues of mosquitoes, broken statues, cawing ravens, waving flags, and flooded graveyards.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tomorrow by Jung Yoonsuk is a two-channel video installation, observing the two different sites of factories, one in the mannequin reform factory in Seoul, Korea, and the other in a sex doll factory in Shenzhen, China. The artist’s research began in 2016 when he encountered articles, and some dystopian images, about a “retired sex doll”, a spooky, deformed dummy with big breasts, that stood in an agricultural field backdrop of a high-rise apartment complex in Chengdu, China. Jung’s work explores the factory scene, the (mostly female) workers and their labor, the doll’s artificiality, and human-like eccentricities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Muted Situations #2: Muted Lion Dance by Samson Young, Chinese lion dancers perform the auspicious procession traditionally presented at special occasions such as weddings or during the Lunar New Year. Yet, the customary percussive sound of drums and cymbals are absent. Instead, it is the sound of the performers’ physical exertion that comes to the forefront, revealing the beautiful, exhaustive rhythm of their craft—their feet hitting the ground, deep inhales and exhales, and the rustling of their clothes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Product Recall” is a video perfomative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations. Young enters a practicing psychoanalyst room and begins a session. Dressed in corporate business attire, Young encompasses both the corporation and individual.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space. This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel. The action is simple: I kick a video camera through a site that is embedded with sociological elements, which I try to question through my practice. I chose Red Square as the site to work in Moscow.

Painting (Painting)

They burn our village by Aung Ko is part of the artist’s daily visual diary as an attempt to process and note what has been happening in Myanmar while he is being exiled, following the military takeover of the government in February 2021. Almost two years ago, Myanmar’s military ousted the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and seized power in a coup. Since then, the country has descended into turmoil.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Modelled and rendered in 3D, Moving Target Shadow Detection by Sung Tieu reconstructs the entire interior of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, the site of the first-known instance of a supposed sonic attack, which collectively became known as ‘Havana Syndrome’. First reported by CIA staff in the Cuban capital in 2016, the syndrome includes a range of unexplained disorders ranging from nausea, fatigue and memory loss to brain injuries resembling concussions. In Tieu’s film, CCTV camera footage and images taken by a nano drone lead from the hotel’s lobby to an occupied hotel room, where the viewer is confronted with classified documents and news reportages of the recent Havana Syndrome attacks around the world.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing. As the shot widens it reveals the process we see unfold: a piano being vigorously tested by a factory machine designed to determine the endurance of the instruments. Contrary to what is often relayed, the work has nothing to do with Chinese factories or fast changing global economies.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

“We both died at the same moment” is a humorous observation of anthropomorphism, the attribution of human emotions to nature and animals. A siliquaria armata is a slitworm that loosley-coiles a shell. Growing inside a sea-bed, a siliquaria armata will grow vertically until it touches another siliquaria armata, at which point they will knot together.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2019, Ayoung Kim traveled to Mongolia to research its widespread animistic belief system towards land, mother rock, stones, and sacred caves that purify human guilt. The Mongolian people’s belief that rocks and minerals are alive, like other natural elements, consider the particular origin myth that human beings were born from stones. For the video work Petrogenesis, Petra Genetrix Kim creates her own hyperbolic mythology connected to the origin of the fictional mineral genderless Petra Genetrix, a figure who also appears in other recent works by the artist.

Painting (Painting)

Young Min Moon’s recent paintings repetitively portray the rituals bound up in the Korean tradition of Jesa. Even amidst the disappearance of many Korean customs, Jesa, a type of Confucian ancestor veneration rites, remains a practice in South Korean society that cannot be easily discarded. Throughout the artist’s childhood, Jesa were the only moments through which he could find peace and safety in times that were rife with violence and commotion.

Painting (Painting)

Young Min Moon’s recent paintings repetitively portray the rituals bound up in the Korean tradition of Jesa . Even amidst the disappearance of many Korean customs, Jesa, a type of Confucian ancestor veneration rites, remains a practice in South Korean society that cannot be easily discarded. Throughout the artist’s childhood, Jesa were the only moments through which he could find peace and safety in times that were rife with violence and commotion.

Installation (Installation)

This research-based artwork acts as a memorial to early twentieth century European exploration of China. An antique open suitcase reveals a pile of rubbings and an air-dried peony, while projected photographs of the Chinese landscape appear as a slideshow on the gallery wall. The artifacts refer to a 1908-1909 expedition of naturalists, missionaries, and colonists to the west of China, which ended abruptly with the death of one of the travelers by unusual circumstances.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pacific Limn weaves together three narratives that comment on hyper-capitalism pan-Pacific cities that San Francisco exemplifies. Each of the large works comprise of moving images overlaid with giant text, all synched to a stealthy, up-tempo jazz soundtrack. In The Secret Life of Harumi, a Japanese woman fantasizes escaping her job and living a temporary dream life in San Francisco.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions. The drawings incorporate both traditional and contemporary Chinese landscape techniques to reflect on the memory, history, and aesthetic practices of the Chinese laborers who played a prominent role in the American westward expansion. By representing the Western landscape according to Chinese aesthetics, Lam calls attention to the distortions and cultural specificity of American representations of the Western landscape and non-Western cultures.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010. tranzit.cz is part of a network working independently in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, and Romania since 2002. Such doodle-like drawings are often crucial components of Kim’s performances. The imagery of faces, heads, snakes, and serpentine paths are recurring motifs in the artist’s drawing practice.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Truong Cong Tung’s Journey of a Piece of Soil (2013) and its accompanying object-based installation of the same name (2014) consider the function of ritual in larger modes of collective engagement and cultural production. In examining how spirituality inflects social engagement, Truong’s contemplates the juncture at which the rational beings encounter the unexplained while also suggesting how embodied practices offer vital conduits for experiencing new modes of consciousness. The video features a man dressed in camouflage fatigues with a blue cap tilling a patch of red-clay soil amidst a green-stalk covered patch of land.