술래 SULLAE
술래 SULLAE ruptures compositions of language, power, and legibility by looking to the Moon as a conceptual site; addressing it not only as a poetic metaphor but also as a colonial site. Chun interweaves moving images of a precolonial Korean women’s Moon dance, gang gang sullae (강강술래) with fragmented consonants of the English language, Hangeul (한글) and English text, various index pages from intonation books, white noise, and word-censor bleep. The video oscillates between the sonic, visual, and semiotic; undoing the English language, its embodied violence and dominance through abstraction and mistranslation — a process the artist describes as unlanguaging. Chun highlights the way in which this dance was historically used as a means for collectively unleashing silenced anger: releasing through song, bellowing, yelling, and circling under the Moon.
