Jesse Chun’s interdisciplinary practice addresses language and its politics to uncover new translations toward poetry, opacity, and the untranslatable. Working with found bureaucratic documents, linguistic hierarchies and histories, Chun engages in various states of (mis)translation to decentre and reimagine colonial narratives.

At Gallery TPW, Chun presents an ongoing body of work that looks to the moon, and to sijo–a traditional form of Korean poetry1–as conceptual sites for “unlanguaging,” a process the artist describes for unfixing language itself. Through video sculptures, film, abstract scores, drawing, and sound, Chun unfixes and rewrites forms of linguistic imperialism into nonlinear modes of language, poetics and being. In doing so the artist asks: what happens when imperialist narratives, the violence of language homogenization, and the bureaucratic documents that enforce this, are disrupted and (mis)translated through poetry, sound, and Korean folklore? Throughout the exhibition, the celestial and earthly are brought together to present language as a constellation of semiotics and sounds, incomplete but whole.