Paradise Lost Post-Cyber Feminist International
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
2017
Paradise Lost, 2016, Single channel video, 05’15''
Paradise Lost (2016) places a queer Asian body within one of Christianity’s most powerful architectural and symbolic settings. Filmed in Rome with St Peter’s Basilica behind the performer, the work brings Dew Kim’s body to the threshold of an institution that was never designed to accommodate it. Kim enters this space neither to destroy it nor to submit to its authority, but to test whether a structure so certain of itself can be made to shift.
Kim performs as HornyHoneydew, his K-pop alter ego, singing a cappella as a male body assuming the role of a female idol. His voice is deliberately off-key, unpolished, and uncomfortable. It refuses the seamless surface that idol production is designed to manufacture, leaving instead the physical labour of the throat: breath, error, and effort set against a monument built to endure. Stereoscopic 3D imagery, stained-glass refractions, and the visual grammar of the music video are layered until the devotional image and the pop image can no longer be separated. The sacred and the sexual ultimately come to share a single frame.
For Kim, this encounter is rooted in personal experience. Growing up gay in a pastor’s household, he was surrounded by prayer, hymns, and scripture. The sacred and the forbidden existed side by side and, during childhood, did not yet feel contradictory. Yet the faith that shaped him also dictated what his body was not permitted to do. Paradise Lost returns that body to the threshold of religious authority and stages its excess there, asking whether an institution built to exclude it can nevertheless register its presence.
Conceived as a companion piece to Me Gustas Tú (2016), Paradise Lost 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. The collective approaches the moving image as a form of direct theory and uses de-automatisation to interrupt habitual modes of perception. Within this framework, the queer body becomes a site where devotion, desire, technology, and institutional power can be dismantled and recomposed.
Produced by TcoET
Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga