I Have / Had a Dream

David Khang is a visual, performance, and biological artist whose practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, and law. Khang selectively imbeds these disciplinary codes into his work, to compose interdisciplinary languages that materialize in visual, textual, and spoken forms. In performing, Khang often embodies these languages to interrogate social constructions - of gender, race, and interspecies relations - that are present within dominant historic narratives in contemporary culture. By strategically employing non-native languages and code switching, Khang produces divergent, dissonant, and often hyperbolic and humorous readings that re-imagine the poetic and the political.

In 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial (Washington DC), Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech for the American civil rights movement. Forty-five years later, this speech is translated into Korean, recited for an Anglophone audience, while wearing a Korean military uniform painted in UN-blue. English words and phrases spliced into the speech become cues for imbedded "assassins" to shoot pink paintballs at the uniform, as well as at portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama. After the performance, the blue uniform is painted pink (a reference to the term "pinkos," used to label Communist sympathizers). Through the conflicted emotional memory and prism of an era that represented hopes for social justice, the contemporary political climate is re-interpreted and reevaluated. This is the second project in an ongoing series of site-specific public performances titled Wrong Places. For each. Khang researched specific geopolitical histories, and juxtaposed and/or remixed seemingly disparate events. In this way, Khang produces dissonant as well as consonant readings, and works to re-imagine these events' poetic and political potentials