Heesoo Kwon (MFA’19) on feminist resistance
Congratulations to Heesoo Kwon (MFA’19) who was recently featured in Berkeley News.
Article excerpt:
“Converting to Feminism: A Berkeley-trained artist invents a religion”
“A few years ago, when Heesoo Kwon was visiting South Korea during a summer break from her MFA program at Berkeley, she found old home videos of her family. Watching the decades-old interactions among her family members and the Catholic rituals they practiced fascinated her. But in one video, her mother stood by the table while others ate, waiting to serve them. It made Kwon angry.
Driven by the sadness she felt about how women were treated in Korea and what her female ancestors had endured, Kwon tried to reimagine their history. She designed a digital avatar of herself, which she then edited into her family’s old photos and videos. Her virtual presence, which could be seen supporting her mother and grandmother, dramatically shifted the dynamics of the scenes. “That was the motivation to start the whole Leymusoom practice,” she said, the name she derived from 무성별 (museongbyeol), a Korean word meaning agender, and gave to the invented religion fueling her art, one based on the tenets of feminism and freedom from patriarchy.
Inspired, she incorporated Leymusoom into her final MFA project at Berkeley in 2019, placing her avatar in grainy footage taken throughout her family’s history. This video compilation, titled “A Ritual for Metamorphosis,” is now featured in Kwon’s solo exhibition A Flower Strong in the Wind, showing at Micki Meng’s Chinatown gallery in San Francisco through April 21. Later this year, Kwon will also have solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José and New York’s Ryan Lee Gallery…
Heesoo Kwon. Image courtesy of Robert Borsdorf.
Work by Heesoo Kwon. Image courtesy of Micki Meng Gallery.