Unlanguaging

Perpetuated through colonialism, capitalism, and Eurocentric knowledge systems, the English language has become a mechanism for globalization. For many, the dominance of English as the language of internationalism and economic growth serves to reinforce global inequities. In Unlanguaging, Jesse Chun considers the impacts of Western hegemony on linguistic agency. Through drawing, video, sculpture, sound, installation, and text, Chun reappraises our experience of language. Chun employs a concept she calls “unlanguaging”—a practice that actively subverts, troubles, and undoes the fixity of language. Born in South Korea, raised in the former British colony of Hong Kong, and currently based in New York, Chun’s work is informed by her polylingual positioning. Through abstracting and rearticulating bureaucratic design found in government documents, pedagogical tools for English learners, and Hangeul (Korean) text, Chun sets out to destabilize the primacy of the English language, discovering new linguistic junctures where words thrive in their impenetrability.

In score for unlanguaging, Chun produces a visual language of abstracted bureaucratic watermarks and English stencils—a distinct lexicon that perforates language systems and resists translatability. These illegible yet indelible markings form a “grid paper” of overlapping elements that appear to blur into each other, but are redacted, fragmented, and repeated—coordinates that suggest an internal logic withheld from us. Chun’s score for unlanguaging proposes a poetics of the untranslatable, a mass of unintelligible text and drawing that renders language abstract.

For the video 술래 SULLAE, Chun interweaves index pages from intonation books, Hangul, and English consonants with moving images of gang gang sullae, a precolonial, circular dance performed by Korean women under moonlight. Their song, shouts, and hurried movement release suppressed anger, as speech fragmented into sound animates their communal dance. White noise, bleep censors, and audio from YouTube tutorials for English pronunciations provide the video’s soundscape. Exploring the moon as a colonial site, the video unravels as a discordance of sound and pulsating montage, revealing an untethered space beyond the limits of language.