siren eun young jung is known for her art projects that are based on her own studies, researches, and analyses of traditional Korean female theatre called yeoseong gukgeuk, which refers to a genre of performing art that was popular in the 1950s but has been forgotten without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theatre. Yeoseong gukgeuk whose performers are exclusively female is a subject that serves as a greatly important ethnographic entity through which she attempts to reveal how gender norms and cultural contemporaneity are understood and constituted. This form of female theatre can be observed in the histories of modern East Asian regions including Korea, and this subject allows one to face head-on what modernity’s desire invented and interpellated— the firm dichotomy in gender performance and the ideological ideas that govern the dynamics of the formation and exclusion of tradition.

In this work, Deferral Theatre, the artist deliberately puts on hold the existing history writing methodologies of yeoseong gukgeuk and stays herself in/side the discourses and memories of yeoseong gukgeuk. And she fills this inactivated time with the sense of mass of space, namely, the bodily movement of performance. Her emphasis is not given to the restoration of the intrinsic legitimacy of yeoseong gukgeuk. Rather, this sense modification of jung underlines the political power of more anomalous and queer artistic practices.