SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- re.riddle is presenting Mago Leymusoom, a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Heesoo Kwon that began on September 22 and will continue through October 31, 2022.
"Where investigation of ancestral healing, queer bodies and the metaverse converge, we find a roadmap to the work of Heesoo Kwon."
In her solo exhibition, Mago Leymusoom, Kwon reclaims the matriarchal origin story of Magohalmi (마고할미 or Mago 마고), a powerful female deity from Korean shamanic mythology. Mago is the creator, progenitor and sovereign of humanity, nature, and all geographical formations. However, during the patriarchal period of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), there was a shift in the imaging of Mago to that which was reductive and debased. The celestial creator became a marginal deity and in some folk tales recharacterized as a monstrous troll-like caricature. From Lilith of Judaic mythology to Medusa born out of Greek mythology, the demonization of feminine archetypes has its roots in the history of patriarchal culture.
Kwon peels away patriarchal retellings of this Korean ecofeminist deity by seamlessly infusing it with Leymusoom, her autobiographical feminist religion and queer digital utopia initiated in 2017. Through a deeply personal exploration into her female lineage, Kwon simultaneously reclaims the story of Mago with her own body, linking herself and the divine to the power of her female ancestry. She realizes the Mago myth via her mother as well as her own avatar in the Leymusoom shrine (her home studio in SF at the time of production). Conceptualizing a parallel framework, Mago creates the world through giving birth, whilst Kwon’s mother gives birth to her, expanding the universe in the process.
Mago Leymusoom reveals itself at a time when agency is actively being stripped away from childbearing bodies. What institutional mechanisms and knowledge structures that yield power on to social bodies may be discerned from Kwon’s investigations? Moreover, what power can we find in Kwon’s Leymusoom, which seeks to unbind female ancestors and contemporaries alike from narrow classifications through a process of what she refers to as “molting”? Purposefully, the term “molting” in Korean can also be translated as ‘to break from tradition’ – and in the context of Kwon’s female ancestors – becomes a gesture of empowerment. Using lenticular light boxes, photography and digital collages, Kwon invites all to initiate their own relationship to Leymusoom, centering themselves as they undergo their own metamorphosis in the metaverse.
Analogous to the ways in which Mago perpetually creates, evolves, and equilibrates, Kwon’s Mago Leymusoom asks us to examine the discursive traces and systems established by the past so we may rewrite our own history of the present.
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 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 in order to shed off the burden as a Korean woman and redesign her feminist/queer life. Kwon received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley (MFA, 2019). Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally throughout the United States, Korea and Europe including BAMPFA, Berkeley; Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Berkeley; Ryan Lee Gallery, New York; 47 Canal, New York; Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco; Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK; Blinkers, Winnipeg, Canada and WMA, Hong Kong. Kwon is the finalist of the Queer|Art|Prize of recent works in 2021 and the SFMOMA SECA award in 2022. In 2022, Kwon was appointed as Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco's Artist-Curator, where she expands her community-based projects by curatorial practice, overseeing the exhibitions, public art interventions, and multi-year commission projects.
Andrea Nitsche-Krupp is Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where she is currently co-curating the 2022 SECA Bay Area Art Award exhibition (opening December 2022). She recently worked on the touring retrospective of Nam June Paik (2019-2022) co-curated by SFMOMA and Tate Modern, a survey of the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (2021). Prior to SFMOMA, Nitsche-Krupp was assistant curator of the Kramlich Collection, San Francisco, and previously provided curatorial support to exhibitions at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York; the Bibliotèque nationale de France, Paris; and the Drawing Center, New York. She has contributed to publications for the Tate Modern, London; the Katonah Museum of Art, New York; the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; and served as editor of Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture. Nitsche-Krupp has a PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
