Young-jun Tak, Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday,i 2023, Single channel 4K video, color, 5.1 sound, 18min 53sec. ©Young-jun Tak

Young-jun Tak’s first solo show in his native Seoul, “Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday,” was a study in duality. Two single-channel videos projected on perpendicular walls framed the gallery of Atelier Hermès, punctuated by two adjacent sculptural works that both opened and closed the show. As if the twoness of things were not already sufficiently legible, one of the two sculptures, My Big Expectation, 2022, was also conceived as a diptych: Made from limewood, beeswax, metal, oil, and rubber, the objects facing each other resemble enlarged white asparagus. Curiously, though, only one of the two features a grimacing face (that of Saint John the Baptist, we are told) at its tip, his mouth slightly open in an ambiguous expression that merges agony and ecstasy. Tak’s idea of duality, it seems, has less to do with the mirroring of identical objects than with the juxtaposition of entities that might appear dissimilar and yet share surprising commonalities. 

That logic is reinforced in the binary structures in the videos Wish You a Lovely Sunday, 2021, and Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday, 2023. The former brings together two pairs of dancers, one navigating the passageways and bathroom stalls of famed Berlin gay nightclub SchwuZ, the other caressing the columns and staircases of the nearby Kirche am Südstern. We see the dancers adjust their choreography to the architectural conditions of their respective venues—an unanticipated challenge, as Tak had the sites of performance swapped on the day of filming without prior notice. Interlacing awkward bodily movements that do not quite correspond to the particularities of the new locations and the taut conversations that reveal unexpected moments of spatial discovery, the video hints that club and church are not as antithetical as one might presume. Both are spaces of love, performance, and spectacle—albeit of different kinds—frequented on the weekends by those seeking refuge from the outside world.


Young-jun Tak, Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday,i 2023, Single channel 4K video, color, 5.1 sound, 18min 53sec. ©Young-jun Tak

The straddling of parallel worlds continues in Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday, which alternates between hunky chiseled soldiers carrying a gaunt statue of Jesus in a celebratory Easter procession in Spain and a group of gay dancers performing a scene inspired by Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Manon (1974) in the Grunewald forest, a popular Berlin cruising spot. Central to the work is the queering of gendered expressions of physicality: The hypermasculinity of the Spanish soldiers is captured through a homoerotic gaze that focuses on the most arousing parts of the male body, while the sequence of Manon being carried by a group of men without her feet touching the floor is enacted by a cohort of gay male dancers. For Tak, the dichotomies that so easily bifurcate the world at large are generative precisely because these boundaries can be blurred.

At times, though, Tak’s dualistic worldview seems somewhat antiquated. One wonders whether it makes sense to pit the church against queer subjectivity in an age when LGBTQIA+ identities have been normalized more than ever, and after generations of artists have already advanced radical, subversive strategies for queer liberation. But placing Tak’s practice in such a genealogy might itself be the result of a biased perspective shaped by a certain Western, if not North American, outlook, as such developments are hardly universal. After all, it has been less than a year since the Seoul metropolitan government refused Pride parade organizers the use of a public plaza in the city center, only a few kilometers away from Atelier Hermès. Against the backdrop of Seoul, the seemingly exhausted binaries that inform Tak’s work do not appear so obsolete. With an urgent, handsomely crafted aesthetic, Tak reminds us that the world—and not only in relation to queer identities—remains divided still.

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