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The Promise of Parasites: Queer Currents, Currencies of Queerness, and Dew Kim’s Latrinxia: A New Utopia The Courtauld is an internationally renowned centre for the teaching and research of art history and a major public gallery.

Home·Research·Research Resources·Publications·Immediations Postgraduate Journal·Immediations Online·Immediations No. 18 (2021)· The Promise of Parasites: Queer Currents, Currencies of Queerness, and Dew Kim’s Latrinxia: A New Utopia The Promise of Parasites: Queer Currents, Currencies of Queerness, and Dew Kim’s Latrinxia: A New Utopia Andrew Cummings i Fig. 2 Dew Kim, Ttongkko-Chung (Anus Worm), 2019, Silicone casting, silicone tube, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of the artist © Dew Kim. Parasites are typically maligned: they take without giving, weaken the individual or social body, and produce disorder. However, in Latrinxia: A New Utopia, a 2019 installation by South Korean artist Dew Kim in which future humans have been transformed into ‘anus worms’ (ttongkoch’ung), the parasite is mined for its potential, in Michel Serres’ words, to ‘generate a different order’ (1982). This article traces in Latrinxia and the homophobic slur of ttongkoch’ung the legacies of colonial capitalism and Cold War geopolitics, and the formation of rigidly sexed, gendered, and ideally healthy and impenetrable bodies implemented partly through medical interventions such as the anti-parasite initiatives of the late twentieth century. Examining the installation’s markers of cleanliness and filth, gay sexual subcultures, and shamanism, I argue that Latrinxiaoffers a queer understanding of the body as penetrable, with implications for sex, gender, desire, and the human. This constitutes one promise offered by the image of the ‘anus worm’ parasite. I conclude by situating Latrinxia in the economy of so-called global contemporary art and the growing currencies of the ‘queer’ and the ‘local’, weighing up the economic and cultural promises of queer visibility against the gains for LGBTQ+ people. Fig. 1 Dew Kim, Latrinxia: A New Utopia, 2019, 3D printed plastic, silicone tube, water pump, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of the artist © Dew Kim. INTRODUCTION In the last few decades of the twentieth century, the neighbourhood of Itaewon in Seoul occupied a peculiar place in the eyes of the South Korean[1] state as a hotbed of impropriety, disease, and the foreign – or, as Elisabeth Schober has put it, a ‘containment zone’ for ‘unwanted cultural forces.’[2] The supposedly insalubrious ingredients of Korea’s modernity coagulate on the Usadan Road and its offshoots, home to various gay bars and sex worker clubs whose clientele was typically represented as composed of American soldiers on leave from the army base located nearby.[3] More recently – and in the last few years in particular – the presence of gay-friendly venues and the appearance of multiculturalism in a gentrifying Itaewon has been held up by the government as a yardstick for the country’s progressiveness and evidence of its ‘global’ status.[4] Independent art spaces have begun to emerge in the neighbourhood too. One such space is 5%, which is located on the Usadan Road. From September to October 2019, 5% hosted an exhibition featuring an installation of works grouped under the title Latrinxia: A New Utopia by South Korean contemporary artist Dew Kim. Kim’s recent exhibitions have revolved around the post-apocalyptic narratives written to accompany them. In Latrinxia, humans have survived ecological destruction through a shamanic fire ritual that has transported them to a new planet and transformed them into sexless beings. The installation unfolds across three spaces. What greets the visitor as they first enter the gallery space is a sculpture of a landscape made of 3D printed plastic, sitting on artificial grass, and representing the planet, called ‘Latrinxia’ (2019, Fig. 1). A form spews up from the ground like a frozen fountain; a thin stream of water is channelled along a pockmarked silicone tube, and trickles onto a silicone cast of an anus with thin, tentacle-like appendages, which Kim calls a ttongkkoch’ung or ‘anus worm’ – humanity’s parasitical new form (Fig. 2). After the water collects at the bottom of the sculpture, it is pumped back into the room behind into the second space of the installation: a lavatory, with its toilet bowl and sink populated by more anus worms (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4). The third and final component of the installation is located in the gallery’s outdoor space, where we find the remnants of the shamanic ritual mentioned in the narrative of Latrinxia: a talisman inscribed with Chinese characters arranged in the shape of a human figure, skewered into the soil next to a stainless-steel flame (Fig. 5). The broader space of the neighbourhood acts as the backdrop to the exhibition and is invited into it (Fig. 6). Fig. 2 Dew Kim, Ttongkko-Chung (Anus Worm), 2019, Silicone casting, silicone tube, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of the artist © Dew Kim. This article explores the ‘promise’ of these parasites: namely, the ways their presentation in this exhibition opens up an understanding of the body, and relations between bodies,...

The Promise of Parasites: Queer Currents, Currencies of Queerness, and Dew Kim’s Latrinxia: A New Utopia - Courtauld