siren eun young jung

Deferral Theatre

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 camera operator were staggering feverishly. The frame is continually disrupted, unstable, unable or unwilling to contain the multiplicitous presence(s) within its rectangular bounds. Later in the video, the screen splits over and over again with a hypnotic rhythm, like a visual Fibonacci sequence. Each sub-screen fills with images of the three main characters of Deferral Theatre as they perform their respective art forms, singing, commanding, quivering, clutching, never still, in dynamic dialogue. In this work, deferral becomes a radical act of imagination, in its production of a kind of temporal resistance. In Deferral Theatre, gender roles, cultural history and even the trajectory of artistic tradition itself are destabilized, anomalized, queered. Perhaps, as jung seems to suggest, only in that space of uncertainty can new subjectivities reveal themselves.