Heesoo Kwon, Leymusoom Garden: Following Naked Dancing and Long Dreaming 

Heesoo Kwon, Leymusoom Garden: Following Naked Dancing and Long Dreaming 

In her first solo museum exhibition, Leymusoom Garden: Following Naked Dancing and Long Dreaming, Heesoo Kwon explores her spiritual journey connecting Korean shamanistic and indigenous perspectives to the land with her female ancestors. Her multimedia installation extends the queer feminist utopian digital space of Leymusoom to the mysticism of the garden, deepening her connection to the land and women’s freedom and desire. 

The newest video piece, Leymusoom Garden, explores the Korean shamanistic worldview, the Dokkaebi folk myth (Korean: 도깨비), the Mago creator myth, Skywoman myth, Kwon’s female ancestors, and her community from the Leymusoom Collective and the Dong Ji Collective. The exhibition emulates the garden at her maternal grandparents’ home in Gongju-si, South Korea and the land she currently lives on in the unceded Ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people. The garden becomes a sanctuary for Kwon to confront generational trauma by collecting oral histories from elders, clearing out the weeds of past traumas, and sowing new seeds that will flourish.

Positioning herself as an artist, activist, archivist, anthropologist, and religious figure, Kwon builds feminist utopias in the digital realm that liberate one from personal, familial, and historical trauma rooted in patriarchy. Central to her practice and substantial bodies of work is Leymusoom, an autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017 as a form of resistance against misogyny as an ever-evolving framework for investigating her family histories. Kwon utilizes technologies such as digital archiving, 3D scanning, and animation as her ritualistic and shamanistic tools to regenerate her female ancestors’ lives without constraints of time and space, and to queer her past, present, and utopian dreams. Leymusoom becomes a practice for her to reimagine time, boundaries of love, sacrifice, violence, and trauma.

The exhibition invites audience members to envision their ancestries, autobiographies, and bodies as interconnected to the land.

Leymusoom Garden at the ICA San José has been made possible thanks to lead sponsorship from the Ronald Whittier Family Foundation, along with additional support from the SJICA Board-directed 2020 Fund and Micki Meng Gallery. Programs and exhibitions at the ICA are made possible with thanks to generous support from the City of San José’s Office of Cultural Affairs; along with significant support from Applied Materials, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Lipman Family Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; along with additional support from SVCreates. In-kind support has been provided by Kelly Moore Paints. Curated by Zoë Latzer, Curator and Director of Public Programs. 

Special thanks and love to whom helped to build this garden: Andrew Sungtaek Ingersoll, Julie Moon, Danna Kim, Youjin Han, Kazumi Chin, Jane Kang, Robert Borsdorf, Dong Ji Collective, Leymusoom Collective, and Kwon’s family. With thanks Chung Hyun Kyung for the inspiration for the title in their essay “Following Naked Dancing and Long Dreaming.”