Me Gustas TúPost-Cyber Feminist International
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
2017
Me Gustas Tú, 2016, Single channel video, 05’14''
Me Gustas Tú (2016) places a queer Asian body inside a decommissioned British naval submarine, a sealed and traditionally male domain that once served an empire’s command of the sea. The work introduces a body excluded from military, imperial, and heteronormative structures into a machine built to sustain those very forms of power. Dew Kim enters this fortress not to bring it down, but to test whether its rigid boundaries can register and be altered by his presence.
Performing as HornyHoneydew, his K-pop alter ego, Kim sings a cappella as a male body assuming the role of a female idol. The deliberately off-key and unpolished voice disrupts the submarine’s disciplined environment, replacing military order with breath, error, vulnerability, and effort. Against the cold machinery and enclosed air, the body becomes unstable and hybrid. Pop performance, erotic desire, and military technology begin to occupy the same space.
The work proposes a cyborg sexuality in which pornography and technology converge and established boundaries begin to dissolve. Kim’s body refuses to settle into a fixed identity, moving instead between male and female, performer and object, human and machine. Within the submarine’s imperial and masculine architecture, this indeterminacy becomes a form of resistance. The work does not seek the complete destruction of the structure. It asks whether a slight disturbance produced by the body might already be enough to make its authority shift.
Conceived as a companion piece to Paradise Lost (2016), Me Gustas Tú was created in collaboration with Argentine filmmaker and writer Luciano Zubillaga and produced by The Church of Expanded Telepathy (TcoET), the collective they established in 2016. Created across the distance between two migrant backgrounds, the work uses the moving image as a form of direct theory. The collaboration itself becomes part of its meaning, opening a post-anthropocentric and post-identity position grounded in hybridity and indeterminacy rather than doctrine.
Produced by TcoET
Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga