Heesoo Kwon
A Ritual for Metamorphosis
A Ritual for Metamorphosis (2023) is an installation presented on a CRT monitor in which the artist’s 3D avatar is inserted into home video footage. Drawing from Kwon’s family archives featuring the artist’s sister, mother, and grandmother; the footage follows her family’s day-to-day such as the family having dinner at home and or trips to the playground, interspersed with ceremonial events such as her parent’s wedding day, Christian ceremonies, and Doljanchi (traditional Korean birthday celebration). Kwon’s avatar appears as an absurdist apparition–unclothed and unburdened by the patriarchy of gender-based dress codes–jumping on the dinner table or standing in the pews at church. Kwon travels back in time to her childhood and appears to disrupt and mock patriarchy while her ancestors enact engendered expectations. Appearing alongside Kwon’s avatar in the video is a female reptilian figure who acts as the guardian of Kwon’s maternal ancestors. This figure is the embodiment of Leymusoom, Kwon’s autobiographical feminist religion to which over 150 people have converted so far. In creating Leymusoom’s snake-like physique, Kwon references two opposing origins; in Korean shamanism, snakes are believed to hold divine powers; and in the biblical Book of Genesis, wherein Satan, in the guise of a serpent, tempts Eve to commit humanity’s original sin. Leymusoom’s communing with Kwon’s female ancestors challenges the past and present to reimagine a nurturing matriarchal universe.
Technology is central to Kwon’s conception of a digital feminist utopia, employing 3D animation, digital archives, video games, and the metaverse, as a ritualistic and shamanic tool to queer, make fluid, and decentralize both imagined and real worlds. For Kwon, the creation of her digital realms is also a powerful act of reclaiming the online space as one of liberation, tenderness, and resistance from the forums where women often face misogyny, degradation, and threats. Kwon’s unique visual language takes on a deliberately lo-fi, post-internet aesthetic, her self-taught practice allowing a kind of freedom in her creation of digital utopias.
Heesoo Kwon is a multidisciplinary artist from South Korea currently based in the Bay Area, California. In 2017, Kwon initiated an autobiographical feminist religion Leymusoom as an ever-evolving framework to explore her family histories and undergo communal feminist liberation. Kwon received a Business degree from Ewha Woman's University (BA, 2015) and received the Female Inventor of the Year Award from the Korean Intellectual Property Office in 2012. After realizing herself as a product of Korean patriarchal society and the misogynist commercial field, she started to make art to shed the burden of being a woman in Korea and redesign her queer feminist life in order to rebel against patriarchy both socially and within her home. Kwon’s shift towards art was greatly informed by Women’s Studies that she was exposed to while at Ewha Woman's University. The development of the religion Leymusoom can also be seen as a way for Kwon to call into question the staunch Christian values that were impressed upon her growing up.