The Brooklyn Rail

Young-jun Tak vowed to never work with video. A former journal editor who began his artistic practice in 2015, Young-jun Tak preferred the tangibility of sculpture. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Unable to get to his materials or visit any workshops, the artist found himself at home, watching YouTube videos. On one of these viewings, he came across a clip of London’s the Royal Ballet in rehearsal. A light went off. “It was my first clue,” Young-jun Tak told me over a Zoom call in early December 2024. “It was like touching with your eyes.”

The intense physicality of the dancers’ work was apparent even from YouTube, inspiring Young-jun Tak to rethink his previous judgments about video. A concept for a choreography film formed in his mind. “I realized that I could work with video in a way that was almost sculptural,” the Berlin-based artist shared. “By showing the process of how choreography was created, I could make films that still incorporated a bodily element.”

His first film, the roughly nineteen-minute Wish You A Lovely Sunday, premiered in 2021. For the work, Young-jun Tak enlisted two dance artists, Jee Chan and Liam Warren, to create site-specific choreography for two distinct locations in Berlin, with Warren assigned to Kirche am Südstern, a nineteenth-century neo-Gothic style church, and Chan to SchwuZ, Germany’s oldest queer club. In an unexpected twist, the artist then swapped the venues after the choreography was finished, so that the dance made for the church was performed at the club and vice versa.

The switch highlighted that although churches and queer clubs may seem like opposing venues, they are alike in the sense that they are fundamentally community-oriented spaces. As Young-jun Tak points out, both are formed according to shared identities and beliefs. Moreover, both seek to comfort the visitor’s mind and body.

Throughout the film, the dancers, Yi-Chi Lee and Daniel Norgren-Jensen, move as fluidly through the red-lit back hallways of SchwuZ as down the nave of the Kirche am Südstern. Their ease at adapting to the new sites challenges the notion that they are performing at the “wrong” place, aligning the two spaces in the viewer’s consciousness. Continuous scene changes between the church and the queer club further dissolve the venues’ differences.

Wish You A Lovely Sunday foregrounded Young-jun Tak’s interest in using dance to bring together two worlds that on the surface seem to be in opposition—in this case, the church and the queer club—and reveal their underlying similarities. It also started the director on a kick of titling his projects after days of the week. “I came up with this idea of making a project to represent a week,” Young-jun Tak explains. “You repeat each day every week, yet each day there’s the possibility that a part of you is operating a little bit differently.”

His next work, Love Your Clean Feet On Thursday, premiered in 2023, marking the second entry in a planned seven-film series taking titles from days of the week. So far, Young-jun Tak has released three of the seven installments, with choreography serving as the primary mode of expression throughout. “I think I announced a little bit too much by saying that I’m going to make seven episodes—now I need to complete it!” the director laughs, his smile lighting up my Zoom screen.

Jokes aside, Young-jun Tak has already attracted the attention of the film world’s most exclusive circles. In September 2024, Love Your Clean Feet On Thursday was entered into competition at the St.Moritz Art Film Festival, an annual, week-long event fostering the dissemination of cinema, art, and audiovisual culture in Switzerland’s Engadin Valley. The festival featured a stacked line-up of films by the likes of artists Ali Cherri, Martine Syms, and Paul McCarthy, but it was Young-jun Tak that stole the show, walking away with a prize for what was only his second film.

Like Young-jun Tak’s previous work, Love Your Clean Feet On Thursday utilizes choreography to place two polar opposites in direct conversation. This time, dance draws our attention to the parallels between two highly specific gender constructions: the hypermasculinity of Spanish Legion soldiers based in Málaga, Spain, performing the Maundy Thursday ritual, and the hyperfemininity of a gay male dance group, staging a take on Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 ballet Manon in Berlin’s popular cruising forest Grunewald.

Young-jun Tak was inspired by the contradictions present in the Maundy Thursday ritual, an Easter celebration in which Legion soldiers carry a life-size crucifix aloft through the streets of Málaga. “I got to know the ritual through my Spanish gay friends who were always making fun of it, saying ‘It’s publicized gay pornography,’” Young-jun Tak explains, noting how the Legion soldiers’ pronounced muscles and chest hairs can often be seen peeking out from behind their uniforms.

It struck Young-jun Tak that by just looking at the historic procession in a different way, its meaning was immediately subverted. Rather than represent the ugly legacy of Spanish colonialism and Francisco Franco fascism with which they are typically associated, the soldiers—at least in the eyes of his friends—reflected homoerotic desire.

This realization prompted Young-jun Tak to consider the power of the individual gaze in shaping perceptions of public spectacles. For instance, Young-jun Tak himself most readily associated the Maundy Thursday ritual not with images of gay pornography nor feelings of desire, but with act 2 scene 1 of Manon, a ballet he had first viewed on YouTube during the pandemic.

In the scene from Manon, male dancers lift the eponymous female protagonist in the air and carry her for the duration of the sequence. Much like the Legion soldiers holding the crucifix aloft, the men treat Manon as an object of worship, idolizing her body as they pass her among themselves. The scene, which takes place in a gambling hall, is the balletic equivalent of an orgy, with Manon delighting in the men’s attention and stretching her limbs sensuously above their heads.

Although on the surface the Maundy Thursday ritual and Manon have little to do with each other, the similarities in their construction fascinated Young-jun Tak. To illustrate the links he perceived between the two events, Young-jun Tak engaged choreographer Jamal Callender, along with five dancers, to restage the scene from Manon. Young-jun Tak gave Callender a few brief instructions: Manon should be male, his bare feet should never touch the dirt on the ground, and the choreography should be performed in the Grunewald forest.

With these directions in mind, Callendar assembled an all-male, gay cast who perform choreography in which one dancer, Yi-Chi Lee (who also appears in Wish You A Lovely Sunday), is continuously lifted by the others. Together, they carefully discuss how best to maneuver Lee’s body, contorting it into at times dramatic positions (one of these includes a fish dive, a partnering lift in ballet in which the male dancer holds the female dancer low to the floor, her legs pointing up to the ceiling).

Love Your Clean Feet On Thursday splices scenes of the men’s dance with real-life footage of the Maundy Thursday ritual, which Young-jun Tak shot with permission from the Congregation of Mena in Malaga. Similar to the technique employed in the artist’s first film (in which continuous scene changes between the church and the queer club highlighted their similarities), quick, seamless cuts between the two settings align them in the viewer’s mind. The soldiers’ and the dancers’ similar body movements further collapse their supposed differences.

Still, Young-jun Tak prefers to leave the interpretation of the film ambiguous. “If you watch the film, it’s never announced, ‘these are gay boys,’” the director says of the dancers, noting that he also doesn’t introduce the soldiers in any special way, instead letting the audience arrive at their own conclusions: “I didn’t want to come with this idea that certain bodies behave or act differently. It’s up to the viewer how to read them.”

For now, Young-jun Tak is continuing on his quest to complete the seven-film series. The third entry, Love at First Sight On Monday, premiered in Young-jun Tak’s native South Korea at the 24th SONGEUN Art Award exhibition (December 17, 2024–February 22, 2025), where it won the grand prize. Drawing inspiration from the acclaimed Norwegian author Lars Mytting’s romantic novel The Bell in the Lake, the film features two teenage girls telling their parents’ love stories through dance, which a choreographer later combines and reimagines as a pas de deux for two men.

Incidentally, the prize Young-jun Tak won at the St.Moritz Art Film Festival, presented by the Kulm group, was also called “Love at First Sight.” While such a coincidence might be boiled down to kismet, it happens to closely align with the artist’s personal belief system. “It might sound a little bit naive, but I believe that love overrides everything,” he shares. “In my own life, I have experienced that more and more. That’s why I want to focus on love—I really feel that it’s the strongest human belief.”