Gentle

Gentle explores the slow, subtle doom of everyday trans-femme ennui in traditional domestic space. It engages with confinement at "home," constricting body shapers, and absent intimacy through a dance of desire and antagonism with the phantom gaze of the viewer. "Ordinary" spaces and rituals reveal an inherent queerness. ©2020 Young Joon Kwak. To view supplemental materials related to this article, please view http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.1162/DRAM_a_00937.

Young Joon Kwak and Christopher Richmond are longtime collaborators. Kwak is a multidisciplinary artist who imagines new fluid plastic bodies and futures and is typically not so subtle in responding to being forced into femininity. Richmond creates videos, photographs, and drawings that interweave the realism of documentary with science fiction and myth. Gentle is a video with Xina Xurner, Kwak's noise-dance band (with Marvin Astorga), which combines electronics, mutated vocals, and bad drag to create sadical/sexperimental anthems of transformation and rebirth.