Young-jun Tak (b. 1989), who works between Berlin and Seoul, explores the dissonant intersections of queer identity, religious belief, and specific spatial contexts through video and sculpture that visualize these complex structures. 

His practice responds to the political, sociocultural, and religious polarization he has experienced as an Asian and a queer individual in both Korea and Europe. Tak focuses on the diverse contexts surrounding physical spaces, and how these influence perception, forms of belief, and bodily attitudes.

Born and raised in Korea, Young-jun Tak first encountered queerphobia among Korea’s conservative Christians, which sparked his interest in religious dogma. After relocating to Europe—a region deeply rooted in Christian culture—he began a deeper exploration of religious imagery and forms shaped by human prayers, including church architecture.
 
For the queer artist, the church evoked ambivalent feelings. As a space meant to embrace the marginalized and the outsider with love and acceptance, it also represented exclusion, shaped by conservative norms and traditions. To Tak, the church became a “space that is both open and closed.” 

Observing the history and physicality of spaces built upon centuries of belief, Tak examines traces of hybridity embedded within them. Soyeon Ahn, Artistic Director of Atelier Hermès, notes, “His attempts to uncover the secular and pagan customs woven into and around church traditions become acts of probing the inconsistencies of religious dogma—attempts to create small ruptures within them.”

To this end, Young-jun Tak actively adopts familiar religious iconography and classical genres. However, while employing forms that have long been legitimized and normalized through dominant historical narratives, he simultaneously destabilizes this familiarity by blurring the relationships between medium, method of production, and subject matter. In doing so, he fractures the comfort zone of the familiar.
 
At the center of this practice is the body. By emphasizing hand-crafted techniques and tactile visuality, Tak foregrounds qualities such as imperfection, immersive intimacy, and hybrid in-betweenness in his work. 

For instance, Salvation (2016), presented in the group exhibition 《The Others》 at König Galerie in Berlin, is a sculptural work that collages anti-LGBTQ flyers onto a traditional Madonna figure cast in resin. The artist, using the individual sheets of paper—originally created by certain groups to convey “moral” messages—purely as aesthetic materials arranged according to black-and-white tones, seeks to dismantle the moralistic content embedded in them.

Meanwhile, in his installation work A Scattered Past (2019), Young-jun Tak uses a car as a medium to explore questions of identity. The piece originates from the artist’s childhood memories of his father, who worked for over twenty years in a Hyundai auto parts factory. For Tak, Hyundai car serves as a conduit where personal memories intersect with the broader social context of South Korea’s rapid economic development.

In the process of randomly cutting apart the basic frame of a Hyundai car, the artist discovered that what appeared to be a solid structure was in fact composed of layers of thin metal sheets. From this realization, Young-jun Tak drew a parallel between the seemingly strong and unified entity of the nation and the fragile individuals who constitute it. 

Accordingly, the artist dismantled and deconstructed the car’s rigid frame, stripping it of its original function and transforming it into fragmented pieces that reflect and refract their surroundings—much like a glass surface. In doing so, he reminds us that individuals are not monolithic parts of a whole, but rather countless imperfect fragments, each emitting light in its own unique way.

Chained (2020), presented at the 11th Berlin Biennale, is a large-scale sculptural installation composed of ten crucifixes of Jesus, created using the same collage technique as Tak’s earlier work Salvation. The exhibition space was arranged to resemble a grand chapel, and at its center stood ten Jesus figures with outstretched arms, linked at the wrists in a circle nearly four meters in diameter. 

The configuration was inspired by the actions of conservative Protestant groups in South Korea, who annually form human barricades by locking arms and lying on the ground to obstruct queer pride parades in various cities. By overlaying these gestures onto the figure of Jesus—whose open arms traditionally symbolize universal love and compassion—Tak reveals the stark paradox at play: moralistic messages created by groups claiming to follow Jesus’s teachings most faithfully are placed directly upon his body, laying bare the contradiction between professed doctrine and exclusionary practice.

In this way, Young-jun Tak has consistently worked to deconstruct the original purpose or function of objects and spaces shaped by religious or social contexts, emphasizing their fragmented and heterogeneous states. Having previously explored the materiality of physical media, he has recently been investigating ways to imbue immaterial media with a tactile visuality. 

Tak finds a point of departure for this inquiry in the queer body and architecture. According to the artist, throughout human history, most systems, structures, and architectural forms have been built upon heteronormative ideals. As a result, queer bodies have either had to reshape themselves to fit those frameworks or modify the frameworks to accommodate themselves. In this sense, the queer body becomes an especially sensitive medium that responds keenly to its surrounding environment.

Accordingly, Tak found the potential for visualizing and communicating these complex surroundings with the audience most effectively through dance. The continuous exchanges—of instruction, dialogue, and interpretation—between choreographer and dancer serve to highlight the body, touch, and movement. For the artist, this discourse and expression embody the most tactile visuality that immateriality can reveal. 

Based on this idea, Tak’s series of contemporary dance films introduces radically different sets of conditions, within which the queer body physically and sharply expresses the circumstances surrounding it. Through dance, the body becomes a medium that bridges the polarized extremes, embodying a process of navigating and negotiating in-between spaces.

Created during the pandemic, Wish You a Lovely Sunday (2021) marked the beginning of Tak Young-jun’s dance film series. Set in two contrasting yet symbolically linked spaces—a historic church and a gay club in Berlin. Both spaces are tied by the notions of “love” and “Sunday”: while believers gather in churches on the Sabbath, those marginalized by religious institutions often find solace and community in nightclubs.
 
The film begins with a choreographer and a queer dancer each entering one of the empty, once-crowded venues. Recognizing that every space imposes behavioral norms, the two performers initially choreograph their movements to fit the atmosphere of their assigned locations, set to the music of Bach. 

However, on the day of filming, due to the artist’s intentional change of instructions, they are assigned to opposite spaces, placing them in a situation where they must revise their choreography. They suddenly become outsiders entering unfamiliar spaces, but as they adapt and translate their choreography, the spaces themselves are also newly conditioned, and the gap between the two opposing spaces gradually begins to dissolve.

In the artist’s first solo exhibition in Korea, 《Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday》 (2023), held at Atelier Hermès, the dance film Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday (2023) was introduced for the first time. This work expanded its spatial and temporal scope by placing multiple historical and cultural references within a dual structure.
 
The film uses the march of Maundy Thursday, during which the ritual of foot-washing is performed as a symbol of love and devotion during Western Easter, as a connecting thread. Through the body of a queer dancer, it experiments with blurring the rigid gender boundaries traditionally emphasized. 

First, Young-jun Tak focused on the macho appearance of the Spanish Legion soldiers who carry the crucifix during the Maundy Thursday march in the Andalusia region of Spain. The artist views the hypermasculinity and militaristic sentiments embedded in Christian culture since the 1920s—shaped by political and economic factors within the local community—with a sense of strangeness, and envisioned another march positioned in direct contrast to it.

The artist’s idea, which began with the clean feet after the foot-washing ritual, largely draws on a scene from Act 2, Scene 1 of the ballet Manon, where the female body is passed from one hand to another to avoid touching the ground—presenting femininity in an extreme form. The artist instructed five queer dancers to adapt this scene in a forest path in Berlin, well known as a gay cruising spot. 

The movements of climbing over other dancers’ bodies to avoid touching the floor evoke the image of the crucifix, creating a relationship where the hypermasculinity of the crucifix march contrasts with, yet also reflects, the hyperfemininity in Manon.

Love at First Sight on Monday (2024) is the third in Tak’s on-going choreographic film series, transforming the nature of orally transmitted transcendent love stories into choreography.  

The film was inspired by Norwegian writer Lars Mytting’s novel The Bell in the Lake (2019), originally titled The Sister Bells in Norwegian. The novel centers on complex romantic relationships in a remote Norwegian village in the late 19th century, while also exploring the legend surrounding the medieval wooden church’s “sister bells,” and examining the structural changes and architectural history of a community infused with hybridity linked to national modernization.

The film follows a chain of adaptation and re-creation, starting with solo dances created by two female dancers in their late teens based on each parents’ love stories, which then develops to a duet by two male dancers. Fragments of each choreography, woven together with story, memory, and empathy, gradually reveal their structures as the scenes alternate between a 12th-century Norwegian stave church and a decommissioned jumbo passenger aircraft, responding to and overlapping with each other in phases.

In this way, Young-jun Tak has discovered the hybridity embedded in the long, solid history of humanity, intricately weaving together the polarized stories and meanings within it into a fusion. His work confronts the massive structures that have emphasized exclusive uniformity for the sake of collective interest and efficiency, creating fractures and proposing the possibility of an alternative reality—a pluralistic world where diversity coexists.

 ”We currently feel more overwhelmed by this phenomenon because the fragmentation fueled by social media focuses us to take a position in any polarized category and such tense conflicts become almost fundamental. Ironically, the more I work with our bodies, the more I am reassured about how diverse and different our bodily features are. 
 
However, we still want to categorize similar aspects in a few limited groups according to our beliefs and likings and point the finger at others outside the boundary. Therefore, I try to infuse complex self-contradiction into a single body of work. Such a quality is one of the most human characteristics.”    (Young-jun Tak, Atelier Hermès 《Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday》, Conversation with the Artist) 

Young-jun Tak majored in Cross-Cultural Studies and English Language and Literature at Sungkyunkwan University. From 2012 to 2014, he worked as a editor for an art monthly magazine in Seoul before moving to Berlin. He has held solo exhibitions both domestically and internationally, including 《Pain Is Left After the Bite》 (PHILIPPZOLLINGER, Zurich, 2024), 《Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday》 (Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2023), and 《Double Feature: Young-jun Tak》 (Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf/Berlin, 2023).
 
Tak’s works have also been featured in numerous group exhibitions such as the 《24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2024), the 4th Bangkok Art Biennale (BACC, Bangkok, 2024), 《Unsentimental Education》 (BB&M, Seoul, 2024), the 16th Lyon Biennale (Guimet Museum, Lyon, 2022), the 11th Berlin Biennale (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2020), and the 15th Istanbul Biennale (Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, 2017). 

He received the ‘TOY Berlin Masters Award’ for young artists at the 9th Berlin Masters (2021), and was also selected as the winner of the 24th SONGEUN Art Award last year.

References

• 탁영준, Young-jun Tak (Artist Website)
• 아뜰리에 에르메스, [가이드북] 목요일엔 네 정결한 발을 사랑하리 (Atelier Hermès, [Guide book] Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday)
• 고양시립 아람미술관, [아람미술관] 영상미디어아트전 “SHOW ME YOUR SELFIE” 탁영준(Young-jun Tak), 2019.09.18
• 송은, [도록] 제24회 송은미술대상전 (SONGEUN, [Catalogue] 24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition)