Artists

Young-Jun Tak

Press release

Atlantiades [Hermaphroditos] fought back, denying the Nymph her joy; she strained the more; her clinging body seemed fixed fast to his. ‘Fool, fight me as you will,’ she cried, ‘You will not escape! Ye Gods ordain no day shall ever dawn to part us twain!’ Her prayer found gods to hear; both bodies merged in one, both blended in one form and face. — Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Sleeping Hermaphrodite (1st century CE), discovered in the Roman Diocletian baths in 1618 and now displayed in the Sully section of the Louvre, may be one of the most beautiful and sensual representations of the human body from ancient times. The puffy mattress was added by the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini at the request of the sculpture’s owner, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, one of Rome’s wealthiest men and an astute art collector who commissioned works that would define the Baroque movement. Bernini’s adaptation became so famous in the 17th century that it was replicated in royal courts and aristocratic homes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses narrates the transformation of Atlantiades, the gorgeous son of Aphrodite and Hermes, born and raised on Mount Ida, into Hermaphroditos after Nymph Salmacis ’plea to unite with him in passion. Sleeping Hermaphrodite not only plays with the perfect balance of masculinity and femininity, rationality (Hermes) and beauty (Aphrodite) in a mythical body, but also subverts the codes of desire, envisioning a fusion beyond the traditional gender binary, fifteen centuries later.

Filmmaker and sculptor Young-jun Tak resists normalizing how the pagan blends into the sacred, or how the sacred becomes profane in everyday objects and rituals. He refuses to treat this interplay as an exception. Instead, he seeks to instrumentalize the breach playfully, particularly in his exploration of queer desire. Tak understands that representation is inextricable from embodiment, and that within all systems of representation, the iconic and symbolic coexist with indexical forms of knowledge.1 In this context, he would be curious about how the puffy mattress finds its way through the hands of Bernini, how it carries the beautiful hermaphrodite to Catholic households like a magic carpet, and how the defining rules of sexual division are lustfully and artistically renegotiated. Transgressive desire always finds its path in the Western moral world of categories, order, and division through such renegotiations in art.

Tak’s second entry in his choreography film series, Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday (2023), continues to reflect on the heteronormative duality that seeks to impose order through the exclusion of queer, trans, non-binary, and other non-normative bodies—despite the complex embodiments of homoerotic desire that bypass this duality.