Jesse Chun

Jesse Chun deconstructs and reimagines language(s) to create poetic, asemic works in mediums that cannot be reduced to singular categorization as she works across video, sculpture, drawing, and performance. In works entitled 시: concrete poem, she draws from an inheritance—Korean shamanic papercutting—to make her own abstract language. The form of papercutting, traditionally used to communicate across time and place during ceremonies and as a talisman for protection, was taught to Chun by a local shaman. Chun reinterprets this tradition to make her own writing that draws from the diasporic and cosmic conditions of language. Assiduously lining Korean mulberry paper in graphite, a repetitive practice to achieve a meditative state, the resulting works are portals, communing with the past and alternate worlds/selves.