What Remains When Language Falls Silent
Hong Leeji
Jesse Chun’s work begins with a reconsideration of language’s historical identity and its sensory potential. She dismantles and reweaves the boundaries between spoken language and typography, reconfiguring the ways in which language, time, and thought become intertwined. Having lived across multiple cultural contexts, she has come to resist defining a mother tongue as a singular root of identity. Instead, traces of memory and migration have led her to construct a new visual language. Jesse Chun’s artistic journey extends toward a point where language no longer functions solely as a vehicle for meaning. For Jesse Chun, language exists as a phenomenon in which sound and body, memory and sensation intersect. It also serves as a means of both reinforcing and settling structures of perception that we have long taken for granted. Rather than remaining fixed within a particular grammar or historical context, this perspective opens onto layers of experience that emerge anew in the spaces where speech and silence intersect. Through these interstices, Jesse Chun reconsiders the directionality of time and translates unrecorded sensations, quiet voices, and diverse modes of being into alternative rhythms. Her work refuses allegiance to any single language or identity. Instead, it captures the subtle emotions and vibrations generated through the encounter and collision of different cultural traces. In this way, Jesse Chun’s practice does not seek to establish fixed meanings. Rather, it creates a space for reflection by abstractly mapping a sensory terrain that is continually being reconfigured.
Moving across different countries, Jesse Chun explores her own visual language from the liminal space of diaspora, where memory becomes a language and a mode of survival, and where past and future continually intersect. In doing so, she resists defining either her language or the world to which she belongs as singular or fixed. This approach takes shape through what she calls “unlanguaging,” a term she developed to describe her work within a broader conceptual framework. It is a creative process that dismantles and recontextualizes the historical meanings, identities, and hierarchies surrounding language and the mother tongue. Attentive to the power dynamics that exist beneath language, she has long engaged with non-Western languages and narratives, as well as voices shaped by marginalization and transformation. This creative practice is both a means of sustaining an open-ended conversation across time and space and a narrative that continues to unfold through her work. Her grandmother, who lived as both a traditional dancer and a Buddhist practitioner, was a figure whose life spanned the period of Japanese colonial rule and its aftermath. For Jesse Chun, the memories her grandmother left behind, along with the possibility of newly written forms of language and communication that transcend time and space, serve as important points of departure in her practice. At the same time, her grandmother’s presence prompts the artist to reflect on the limitations of institutional and recorded histories. Her engagement with questions of identity and ideology unfolds across a range of media, including language, image, memory, and sound, while emphasizing the biological and emotional meanings embedded within the mother tongue. 시: concrete poem, a drawing installation that employs the Seolwi Seolgyeong technique transmitted through a shamanic practitioner, is one outcome of this process. It also marks a point of origin for Jesse Chun’s own language of vision, sound, and sensation.
For Jesse Chun, language extends beyond the simple transmission of meaning to encompass the opacity of the body and sensation, as well as that of sound and significance. In the Score for Unlanguaging series, she embodies wounds inscribed in memory and sensation, transforming erased alphabets, graphite-defined boundaries, and emptied spaces into musical scores. Through this process, she visualizes the time of thought and the space of imagination. These two-dimensional works invite viewers to move beyond their physical positions in relation to the artwork and experience a reconfiguration of perception itself. This synesthetic dimension was particularly evident in her exhibition 밤, 낮, 달, 비, Speaking in Tongues. Through installations that encompass the entire exhibition space, she sculpturally deconstructs and reassembles video and audio, revealing the conflicts that arise when language and action diverge from social expectations surrounding race and ethnic identity. In this process, the courage to listen to what remains unknown, along with the vulnerability that such listening entails, prompts renewed reflection on the ethics of existence and communication. Bodily experience becomes central to the formation of new identities, and Jesse Chun’s aesthetic practice simultaneously reveals the potential and abstraction of language, casting the visual languages we have long taken for granted in unfamiliar and newly illuminating ways.
In this way, Jesse Chun’s practice and thought move beyond language and its historical contexts, tracing a contemporary aesthetic and intellectual trajectory that explores spiritual communication and the reconfiguration of identity beyond social expectations and historical constraints. The language and experiences that constitute her world are realized through abstract and spiritual forms, and she invites viewers to approach her work as they might read a poem. Some have argued that the origins of abstraction lie in non-visual experience. For Hilma af Klint, often associated with abstraction and spiritualism, painting was a revelatory act, and she regarded herself as a conduit rather than an autonomous creator. Likewise, Jesse Chun developed her own intricate symbolic system, a pursuit that ultimately led to the creation of a series of abstract drawings during her time in Korea. Additionally, in her 1907 essay The Dancer of the Future, Isadora Duncan argued that art devoid of a spiritual dimension is not truly art, but merely a commodity. For Jesse Chun, language is not divided into English and Korean. Rather, it exists beyond the realm of clear knowledge and fixed meaning, as something deeply bound to bodily experience—a sonic presence whose meaning and sound do not always coincide. The abstract language of contemporary art offered her a means of visualizing uncertainty. Through this process, she pursues performative repetition and sacred meaning, acquiring new forms of identity through experiences embodied and learned through the body. In this creative practice, Jesse Chun connects past and present, revives forgotten memories, and seeks deeper forms of understanding through bodily experience. Her work extends beyond visual technique alone, creating forms of communication with viewers that operate on both sensory and spiritual levels. Through a language uniquely her own, Jesse Chun explores new artistic boundaries where tradition and contemporaneity, personal experience and shared identity, intersect. More than an exploration of new artistic forms and modes of expression, her practice reveals an ongoing journey into the complexity and depth of human existence.
In Jesse Chun’s work, the embodiment of language can ultimately be understood as an attempt to give form to that which remains unspoken, unrecorded, and gradually disappearing. In this sense, her practice resonates with the tradition of concrete poetry, a form that reveals meaning through the visual structure of language itself. In concrete poetry, letters and words move beyond their function as vehicles of meaning, becoming forms in their own right and speaking through their very mode of existence. Because Jesse Chun’s drawing installations arrange performative repetition, vocal traces, and the reverberations of invisible memories across the pictorial field, the visual scenes she constructs may be read as a kind of expanded concrete poem. In the space where language has been dismantled, the body, rhythm, breath, and gesture themselves become letters and structure.
This aspect of Jesse Chun’s practice also resonates deeply with the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who transformed diasporic rupture, linguistic loss, and the impossibility of speech into an artistic language. Just as Cha, in Dictee, layered fragments of different languages, historical traumas, and women’s voices to visualize a space of “unspeakability,” Jesse Chun constructs another form of unlanguaged narrative through spiritual records inherited from her grandmother, sensations inscribed on the body, and traces of erased language. Both artists take the fractures that emerge between the mother tongue and the language of the other as conditions for creation. In the very moment language is lost, they call forth its latent possibilities and memories, discovering its capacity to move the body and forge connections across time. In this sense, Jesse Chun’s work rearranges the forms and rhythms of language much like a concrete poem. Standing alongside the history of diasporic sensibility explored by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, it becomes another kind of spiritual record, one that practices speaking again from the site where language has been erased.
Jesse Chun’s artistic journey can ultimately be understood as an ongoing effort to allow the work itself to speak from the place where language has been lost. This is neither a simple return nor a search for a singular identity. Rather, it is a movement toward a world continually brought into speech along the boundaries where memory, sensation, and spiritual lineage intersect. The forms she constructs summon unrecorded voices into the present, reorganize sensations on the verge of disappearance into new structures, and set invisible time into motion once again. Through this process, language in Jesse Chun’s work ceases to function merely as a vehicle for meaning. Instead, it expands into a mode of being and a form of relation. Just as concrete poetry transforms language into form, opening up new possibilities for sensory interpretation, Jesse Chun’s work proposes another grammar for reading the world through the rhythms of the body, breath, and memory. This grammar also resonates with the spiritual and narrative experiments of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, carrying into the present a lineage of women artists who undertook the act of “speaking again” from within the fractures of diaspora. In this way, Jesse Chun’s world remains a dynamic site where past and present, memory and body, language and silence continually mediate and expand one another. Her practice ultimately points to a space that transcends any particular era or geography, a place where art encounters the fundamental sensations of human existence and becomes the starting point for an ongoing dialogue with other forms of being that are continually coming into existence.
Hong Leeji (Curator)
Hong Leeji is a curator based in Seoul, Korea. She has curated include Ron Mueck (MMCA, 2025), Game Society (MMCA, 2023), Peter Weibel (MMCA, 2022), Museum of Everyone, MoE (Animal Crossing online game project, 2020), Monstrous Moonshine (Gwangju Biennale Collateral Exhibition, 2018), Shame on you (Doosan gallery New York, 2017) and The Subtle Triangle (2015), FANTasia: East Asia Feminism (2015), and Phantomarm (2018). Hong has co-authored Share Me: Shared Art and Responding Platforms (2019), Share Me: Imagining the future of art after catastrophes (2021) and Crash: 10 hours to read Technology, Speed, Art Market (2023). She is currently a curator of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul. She researches cultural conditions that result from digital media and changing creative environments.
