Heesoo Kwon

March 5, 2025

Heesoo Kwon (b. 1990, South Korea) is a multimedia artist based in San Francisco, CA. She received an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Animation department at the California College of the Arts. Kwon’s work has been shown at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Buk Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, KR; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, NL; EFA Project Space, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose, San Jose, CA; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Blinkers Art & Project Space, Winnipeg, CA; West Den Haag, The Hague, NL; and WMA Space, Hong Kong, HK. She is the recipient of the 2023 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award and the 2025 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.

Can you tell us a little bit about Leymusoom?

Leymusoom is a term I invented. The inspiration comes from the Korean word for “a gender.” I played with the pronunciation and reversed the order of the sounds.

I started Leymusoom in 2017 after moving to Berkeley for my MFA at UC Berkeley. It was my first time living abroad and making art in a community setting, with mentors and other peer artists. I experienced a lot of culture shock—so many interesting, liberal ideas that I had never had the chance to explore before. It was the first time I saw myself from an outside perspective, understanding where I was coming from and where my family was coming from.

I realized that I was born into Catholicism, but I also came to understand that patriarchy had functioned as my religion too. It was something untouchable, something I was expected to follow without question. If I raised doubts, I became the weird one. That became the starting point for framing Leymusoom as a religious practice—highlighting the impact of patriarchy as a belief system in my life.

It seems that Leymusoom initially began as a personal or spiritual practice, almost like a way of life. How did the concept of Leymusoom begin to manifest in your artistic practice?

I think my background plays a big role—I come from a business major and had never made art before college. When I first started making art in my bedroom in Seoul to prepare my MFA portfolio, I didn’t learn how to make art from teachers. I had to figure out what would be the best way to visualize and realize my ideas.

I began by creating video pieces, performing alone or in front of my family, editing videos, and making sculptures with found objects. My process has always been fluid. I’m very open, and I follow the direction Leymusoom leads me.

In your project Ritual for Metamorphosis, you incorporated avatars of your female ancestors into your family archival video for the first time. Can you share the background and inspiration behind the creation of these avatars?

I found video footage that my father recorded of one of our family gatherings. Watching the video, I felt the urge to jump into the scene and change the dynamic of what was going on. I saw my mom serving people, holding her rice bowl, eating, and working at the same time—no one told her to sit and join them. I was so mad, that I wanted to jump into the monitor and say, “What are you doing?”

At first, I thought about doing greenscreen acting, but it didn’t feel genuine. I’m not an actor, and something felt wrong. Then I thought about 3D modeling myself, and I liked that idea. Korean shamanism is a big inspiration for Leymusoom, and in Korean shaman rituals, they create paper dolls as vessels for spirits. I saw the 3D avatar of myself as that vessel. My physical body remains here, but the 3D model allows me to time travel. It becomes like the paper doll, moving for me and exploring the past.

In Korean shamanism, there’s a term that translates to “picture mirror.” Shamans describe seeing images of the past and future as if they appear in a mirror. I see the monitor as my “picture mirror.”

Your recent show at Huis Marseille features works that were expansions from Premold and Leymusoom Firefly. How have these projects evolved in this exhibition?

As an artist who describes myself as a shaman connecting Leymusoom utopia to my real world, I often say that technology—both hardware and software—is my shamanic tool for visualizing spiritual interactions with my ancestors. I feel a responsibility to engage with emerging technologies because they are my new tools. I use Adobe software frequently, and when I heard about its new AI-generated tools in Photoshop, I wanted to explore how my practice could relate to them. I was already working on my family archive for another show, so I took a photograph and used AI to extend the image beyond its original frame. The first photo I experimented with in Firefly was from my childhood living room. I asked AI to generate what might be on the other side of the room, and it actually extended the viewpoint of the photo in a way that was surprising to me.

The Huis Marseille exhibition expanded on my Spirit House exhibition at Cantor. I was invited to Huis Marseille right after finalizing Spirit House. Working with Aleesa helped me to deepen my understanding of how to present images in a physical space and the kind of feeling or impression I wanted to evoke for the audience. Before that, my photos mostly existed on a monitor as digital files. Printing and presenting them physically was a new challenge, but I learned a lot. I see Shadow Self at Huis Marseille as an expanded version of Spirit House.

For Shadow Self, we dedicated a room to my childhood home in South Korea. I wanted to create an immersive experience—one side of the room showed a photo from the living room looking toward the kitchen, and the opposite wall showed the reverse perspective. The audience stands in the middle, surrounded by these views. I have vivid memories of my childhood home, but many details are unclear, like dark spots in my memory. I was young and short, so my perspective was always from below. I asked Firefly AI to help “fill in” these missing memories. In a way, the AI-generated data became like fireflies, illuminating those forgotten parts using other people’s data.

Recently, I saw a post on your Instagram about a Leymusoom first-generation reunion. It seems like this practice of world-building has really fostered a community. Can you tell me more about this aspect of community building?

Thank you for remembering that post! The reunion included friends who helped create Ritual for Metamorphosis—some of them were part of the film, while others taught me 3D animation. Most of them were UC Berkeley undergraduates or exchange students from Japan. They literally witnessed the beginning of Leymusoom. When I first met them, each connection happened through different channels—some reached out to interview me for a class, and others just started conversations with me randomly. Even though we met through different circumstances, we genuinely became good friends. They were incredibly supportive of my project, and we simply loved spending time together.

That, to me, is the core memory and value of the Leymusoom community. Because my work is autobiographical, the people in my art—those who help me—are my real friends. I don’t draw a boundary between work and life because, for me, they are constantly influencing each other. My focus shifts between both, but they always remain interconnected. The way I meet new friends and community members is truly part of the Leymusoom practice. Many of them feel inspired by my work and want to start their own versions of Leymusoom—whether that means improving communication with their parents, working on their relationship with their mother, or visualizing their personal experiences through artistic means.

It’s a fluid process because Leymusoom is an extension of who they are. Over the years, I’ve met more than 300 people who have engaged with the practice, and I recently counted 30 collaborators I worked within just one year.

To conclude, what’s next for you? What are you working on?

I was invited to be part of the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum this year. It will be an expanded version of the Huis Marseille installation. The Spirit House exhibition is also traveling to the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington and will open in July.

I was also invited to be part of Artist Film International, working with LACE. I also have a solo exhibition at the East Side Arts Alliance and Cultural Center in Oakland. I’ll be working with neighbors and community archive photos to expand my Firefly series.

Heesoo Kwon

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