The 84th ARTCaffè hosted Dew Kim in person in Seoul, with an audience tuning in online from the USA, Italy, Belgium, France, Mozambique, China, Thailand, Vietnam, and South Korea.
To give us a full perspective on his practice, Dew started with his early beginnings as part of a duo called TcoET (The Church of Expanded Telepathy). "We mainly worked on video and performance, but what we were interested in was about post-colonial, queer, post-human and expanding bodies. I was coming from Asia, Luciano from South America, and we were working together while studying in the UK and Europe, questioning the dichotomous thinking and thinking about extended queerness and postcolonial queerness."
In 2018, back to Korea, Dew kept working on music videos in which the Kpop culture is intertwined with Shamanism: "I came to think that shamanism in non-European countries was very queer. In shamanism I could find non-binary, third-gender extended genders such as Tooth Spirit and Multiple Gender, and that they were more focused on the present life, compared to other religions. I tried to express the shamanic music, lyrics, and movements of kpop by comparing them to shamanic rituals. The process of the project was based on the production process of a KPOP music video, and I recruited music directors, choreographers, composers, costume designers, hair and makeup artists, vocal trainers, and personal trainers so that I could play the role of an idol in the film."
As examples of this research, Dew showed teasers of Purple Kiss and Kiss of Chaos. While "by evoking the sound and look of a K-pop video, Purple Kiss is a critical examination of dualistic heteronormative ideas that dominate Korean culture and society," in Kiss of Chaos he views the concepts of 'queerness' and ‘gender’ through the lens of Shamanism, the boundaries of which become blurred as they get more fragmented and expand along a spectrum.
From those early works, Dew guided us through his artistic path to date, a path deeply connected to his life struggles and experiences. He generously shared intimate moments, to help us better understanding the roots of his practice, that "elicit strong emotions by disturbing the dichotomous structure inherent to the rationally accepted categories of the present day."
"My art seeks to combat the self-oppressive world by destroying the self and liberating it from social structures of oppression. This process of destruction, in masochistic terms, is both pain and pleasure, and the resulting space of destruction is neither subject nor object. In other words, the timeframe of my work is both a moment of destruction and birth. To me, the starting point of art, religion and identity lies at the critical junction of change and collision. Transforming the coordinates of change and conflict is a Queer artistic approach that seeks to erase and reform existing normative boundaries."
Photo credit: JT Kim (Instagram @keropix_studio)
