As one of the most ancient responses to fear, religion is again being ideologically instrumentalized to feed the populist demand for scape-goating and expedite political polarization. Young-jun Tak analyses the moral mechanizations of societies that are currently echoing each other throughout the world by targeting LGBTQI communities.
In the artist’s home country of South Korea, Christian leaders and mega churches have risen to dominance in the fields of politics, economics, and journalism, despite the fact that the majority of the population is non-religious. Driven by a belief in “the blessed county” theses religious groups direct their patriotic energy towards promoting anti-LGBTQI and anti-migration sentiment and decrying the country’s rapidly shrinking population. In a newly commissioned work developed shortly before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Young-jun Tak draws on the way South Korean Christian fanatics try to block the annual Pride parades by throwing themselves on the ground and forming a human chain by interlocking arms.
Chained (2020) consists of two life-sized statues of the crucifixion, fabricated in Italy. A closer look reveals that the surfaces of the figures are collaged with anti-LGBTQI propaganda flyers promoting conversion therapies and courses, ephemera
collected by Tak from churches and medical institutions in South Korea. Most of this material can also be found in the Korea Queer Archive.