For anyone that speaks the Korean language, unni is immediately familiar as a term that signifies kinship and closeness, used by women to refer to older individuals of the same gender. Embedded in this innocuous everyday terminology, nevertheless, are premises of social structures that touch on such issues as subjectivity, sexuality, and community. As a sign of proximity, the word raises the question of under what circumstances unni might be used instead of other honorifics. Plenty of queer men also call each other unni regardless of their age, which suggests how the seemingly immutable gender dynamics in Korea has been stretched and subverted in the fringes. Unni also strikes a balance between a sense of care and responsibility, as she is expected to know better, to have been through it already, and to guide the younger ones. By embracing its various layers as a guiding framework to contextualize the works of the participating artists, the exhibition seeks to identify the radical possibilities of this ordinary word that helps us reimagine how to exist with each other.

To that end, 언니 (unni) brings together works that emphasize surface, tactility, openness, and intimacy, considering how each object opens up to new potentialities of the term. Carrie Yamaoka’s panels that reveal atmospheric shapes, which were autonomously formed when urethane resin was poured onto the surface of reflective polyester film, produce an awareness of being present with the self as they shift and absorb light differently depending on the position of the viewer. Young Joon Kwak’s works trouble preconceived notions of gender and body: while the video reveals how the limp-wristed motion, oftentimes associated with femininity, is re-appropriated as a techno-feminist machine flicks off wet clay like excess flesh, Trans Creation Relic II merges this very hand with interiors and exteriors of male sex toys to produce silver-cast forms with dirt and rocks that appear like a ruin. Meanwhile, Dongho Kang’s paintings produce an eerie interplay of distance and proximity, as the artist repurposes images found from sources ranging from black and white films to the Internet, reconstructing the sequence of events that are seemingly familiar and yet estranging like a forensic expert.

Throughout, time, history, and the archive emerge as generative thematic concerns that connect the practices of individual artists to the notion of unni. Kang Seung Lee’s embroidery and watercolor pieces take as their points of departure the work of Joe Brainard, an American artist who passed away in 1994 from AIDS-related complications, to explore how queer narratives can continue to blossom across time and space despite their many discontinuities. For Grim Park, the history of Buddhist art that spans thousands of years offers a playground for subversion and queering, as indicated by the extreme close-up of Untitled that features a contemporary subject with a third eye paired with a wisdom eye of Buddha. Isaac Chong Wai’s Touched: Rouge—Fluttering Fan uses body imprints to trace the movements of the ill-fated lovers of Stanley Kwan’s classic Hong Kong film Rouge (1987), collapsing longing, colonial history, and the ephemerality of human life into a single, reflective surface. Muyeong Kim’s assemblages—one in which a 1910s pinhole camera is positioned within a glass aquarium to decompose over time, and another that is lined with eel skin to recreate props used in cinematic and theatrical sets—juxtapose the decaying and the living, the functional and the creaturely.

Rather than illustrate sisterhood, the works in 언니 (unni) therefore probe how we address each other and position ourselves in the wider world. And though there is no singular answer to this question—one that harkens back to fundamental questions of existentialism—언니 (unni) suggests that muddying the waters a bit is both liberating and empowering. After all, that is key to making the most fascinating art, and perhaps to living the most fascinating life.

—Harry C. H. Choi