MULTI MEDIA RITUAL PERFORMANCE :
DIALOGUES BETWEEN CINEMA AND KOREAN SHAMANISM

By
(ALEX) YOUNG-HWA CHO

Major Study— Creative Writing (BA), Chung-Ang University, Korea 2003
Minor Study— Film Studies (BFA), Chung-Ang University, Korea 2003

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTERS OF APPLIED ART
in
Media Arts

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2009

© (Alex) Young-Hwa Cho 2009

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ABSTRACT

“Mu-dang’s Cinematic Shrine” is a multimedia installation that is the result of a
convergence of two different methodologies and explorations: cinema and Muism –
Korean shamanism. This convergence makes apparent the recent divergence of forms and
themes in my art practice since beginning my MAA Program. My thesis essay
investigates three main concepts: 1. how medium and message are integrated to evoke a
sense of numinosity and the liminality associated with the life-death continuum; 2. what
my role is, as an artist, in creating a transformative space and language; and 3. how the
space and form of my cinematic installation enhances audience interactivity, vis-à-vis the
conventional cinematic apparatus.

For this inquiry, I juxtapose the role of an artist to that of a Korean shaman, a mudang.

My role as a media artist mimics a mu-dang’s spiritual role and ability: the

channeling and creation of perceptual transformation and the facilitating of alternative
storytelling. This idea and practice is informed by the experimental and sociopolitical
cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha and the experimental multi-media installation, performance,
and theories of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Their theoretical investigations and writing on

time, space, memory, identity, and language have influenced and inspired my own critical
thinking and media production.

This thesis essay intertwines their practice and theory

with my own art practice in a ritualistic multi-media exploration.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………
TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………………
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………
DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………

ii
iii
iv
vi

1. INTRODUCTION

The paths of a mu-dang (Korean shaman)…….……………………………..…

1

2. THE BODY OF MEDIA RITUAL
Overall Description ………………………………………………………………

5

I. Sculptures:
Transformative space from the personal to the public……..……….……………

7

II. Sounds:
Subversive noises and voices .……………………………………………………

13

III. Videos:
Visual numinosum and liminality beyond binary visions.………………………..

27

3. CONCLUSION
Lessons of Cinema Experiments, Shamanism, and ‘Others’………………………..

36

WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………….

38

WORKS CONSULTED………………………………………………………….

40

FILMOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………...

42

APPENDICES
I.

The story of my grandmother, Sam-sik Kim…………………………...
— Once upon a time…
II. The story of my self……………………………………………………
— Listen to the present day
III. English and Korean poems……………………………………………..
— Grandma and Her Healing Hands and 약손할매
IV. An ancient Korean poem………………………………………………..
— 공무도하가 (Kong mudoha ka, ‘Song of the Konghu Zither’)
V. Media Documentation…………………………………………………..
— MAA Graduation Exhibition Photos and attached DVD

44
48
53
56
59

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First of all, I would like to acknowledge my supervisors, Peg Campbell (Associate Professor
and Head, Film, Video + Integrated Media, ECU) and David Khang (Sessional Faculty,
Visual Art + Material Practice, ECU) for their great amount of patience, empathy and
knowledge for my personal storytelling and media experiments during the past two years.
They both covered a broad range of topics and forms: from gender and ethnicity politics to
media performance and innovations in the cinema apparatus. Also, for my written thesis, I
am grateful to Karolle Wall (Associate Professor and Coordinator, Writing Centre, ECU) for
her consistent moral support as well as her comprehensive interdisciplinary knowledge.
Since my preparatory year at Emily Carr in 2006, she has been a true mentor for my English
thinking and creative writing. In addition to Karolle, I have two other writing advisors for
this written thesis, and they are Kathleen Oliver (ESL Coordinator at ECU) and Mark
Pepevnak (Writer and Translator). They generously gave their time and effort for my happy
struggles with English and Korean ways of thinking and writing. Dennis Burke (Associate
Professor, Media Arts, ECU) also graciously provided a thorough review of Chapter 2,
Section II – on sound – which is a central component of my thesis project and sound
experiments.

I am also grateful to my many genuine collaborators who worked on my multimedia
installation. Raphael Choi (BMA, Film, Video + Integrated Media, ECU/Sound Design,
VFS) is my sound collaborator and without him, a prominent component of my work – the
sound experiments – would have been impossible to create. My graduate program peer and
former video editor, Victor Ballesteros Fuentes (MAA candidate, Media Arts, ECU) helped
me a lot to keep a fresh and productive perspective in my video editing. Dr. Bruce Fulton
(Associate Professor, Asian Studies, UBC) is the English translation collaborator for my

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language play sound boxes, and his translation gives a unique poetic value to my poem
(약손할매) and the ancient Korean poem (공무도하가). Si Nae Park (PhD candidate,
Premodern Korean Literature, UBC) guided me to precious resources about the historical
reading of ancient Korean literature in English.

For my media experiments, Dinka Pignon (Artist, Education Coordinator, VIVO Media
Arts Centre), Brady Marks (Artist, Instructor in Pure Data Media, VIVO/MSc SFU), and Rob
Symmers (Artist, Instructor in Kinetic Media, VIVO) have been my personal advisors and
collaborators outside of Emily Carr. Their inspiration and conceptual and technical advice
encouraged me to explore and experiment with new forms of cinema. Additionally, Sumi
Kim (Designer, Industrial Design, Kookmin University/Computer System Technology,
BCIT) helped with designing ideas for the new screening place, and her ability as a designer
has influenced me to accommodate and negotiate my audience’s spatial reception.

For my research on Korean shamanism, and anthropological and ethnographical
perspectives, I acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. Kyoung-Mann Cho (Associate Professor,
Cultural Anthropology, Mokpo National University, Korea) and Dongkyu Kim (PhD, Asian
Studies, UBC). I would also like to thank my friend, Jee-ho Lim (I Ching practitioner) and
his mother, Ok-sung Choi (a mu-dang), who helped me to get through the mentally and
physically difficult time working with the personal storytelling about my grandmother’s
shamanness. They performed Kut (Korean shamanic ritual) to conjure my grandmother’s
spirit so that I could re-connect with my grandmother and regain my confidence in telling her
life story.

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DEDICATION

Dedicated to my grandmother, Sam-sik Kim and my mother, Yun-im Shin and their lives
Dedicated to my family and relatives who support me with their true love and compassion
Dedicated to my friends, spiritual mentors, school peers, and instructors with their genuine
cares
Dedicated to Korean shamans who nurture sisterhood in Korea with their indigenous wisdom
Dedicated to all people in the world whose naming falls into the category of ‘Others’

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INTRODUCTION

The paths of a mu-dang (Korean shaman)

Prior to this thesis project, I was a documentary filmmaker in Korea.

My art practice

was primarily related to traditional documentary filmmaking and journalism. I worked to
expose and bring to light a broad range of social issues – poverty, labour rights, sexual
violence/prostitution, discrimination against women, queer, and socially-marginalized
groups in Korea.

Marxism, Feminism, and gender studies were the main theoretical

filters, and I was more concerned with telling a ‘political’ cinematic story about various
minority groups’ plights, rather than making cinema ‘politically’ by recovering and
representing the socially-inaudible voices of the underrepresented. Cinematic
experiments in style and form were obviously less vital than the theme, the propaganda of
my films.

In 2006, I moved to Canada, and this geographical migration affected my position and
identity.

Every day, what I saw, heard, understood, and communicated with other

people needed to be negotiated in the context of the native and the foreign.

My

nationality, citizenship, native language (Korean), original ethnicity, and culture are
constantly in need of negotiation with my status as a foreigner, my second language
(English), and the multicultural ethnicities and values in Canada.

In this context, the

form and style, the way of communicating was more important than the theme itself; the
content of communication, and language became one of the most prominent topics in my
work.

This is where my aspiration toward experimental cinema took a significant turn.

The film apparatus, the cinematic language structure, became important in order to

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convey my ideas, opinions, and values about minority groups, ‘The Other’.
Experimenting with a new form of cinema developed the connection where I could
communicate my personal experience and my emotional response to living with a second
language to people who are experiencing being in a minority position, but lack a voice.

In this context, my research project follows my personal tracing of a suppressed family
history: my grandmother’s lifework as a mu-dang, a Korean shaman. My new approach to
storytelling was developed in order to make sense of my grandmother’s complex
otherness as a closeted mu-dang and addresses a cultural consciousness of spectatorship
in cinema, where the personal narrative becomes collective ritual. In my
installation, Mu-dang’s Cinematic Shrine, my grandmother’s life story as a mu-dang is
shown through several vignettes, although there is no direct reference or signifier to
indicate her status as a mu-dang.

This partial revealing allowed me to consider the

conventional film and television media’s caricatured representations and
underrepresentation of Otherness – and how such a subject negotiates her/his being and
agency.

Keeping the nature of the closeted and othered identities of mu-dangs, I am not overtly
or literally representing the emblems of Muism. 1

1

However, I have chosen to portray the

Some Korean anthropology scholars define Muism as a religious phenomenon that has
the mu-dang, Korean shaman, at its core (T. Kim, 25). However, the definition of
Muism is varied and still in continuous debates since Muism partly shares the concept or
attributes of a religion with other so-called ‘master religions’ such as Christianity,
Buddhism, or Muslim; however, Muism or shamanism, in general, has been notoriously
difficult to define within a singular category in anthropological or ethnographical work
fields (H. Kim, 10-14). This multifaceted nature of Muism, and shamanism, in general,
is associated with the complex identity of my grandmother’s closeted shamanhood. My
grandmother, Sam-sik Kim did not want to become a mu-dang, yet, after several incidents,

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marks and the references to the number three as that number is a vital signifier and
symbol for the dialogic relationship between life and death, between the native and the
foreign, and between the dominant and the subordinate. I consciously chose to use three
media components:

sculpture, sound and video.

organizing principles were considered:

As I developed my project, further

triptychs, triangles, and trilogies. These mental

associations inspired me to build a narrative based on three figures from three connected
generations:

my grandmother, my mother, and myself.

My ancestral 2 lineage

represents the inter-conversions and religious practices among three different
spiritualities: Muism, Buddhism, and Roman Catholicism. These three spiritual practices
share some symbolic similarities associated with the number three: “Samshin” (Three
female divinities) in Muism, “Triple Gem” (Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha) in Buddhism,
“Trinity” (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit)in Roman Catholicism. 3

she was forced to accept her shaman path (cf. Appendix I). After her initiation as a mudang, her identity and work as a shaman became an ‘open secret’ or ‘family shame’ in my
family. Muism has been considered to be the ‘most firmly held system of folk religious
belief’ in Korean history (T. Kim, 25). Ironically, being a mu-dang in Korea has been
associated with social marginalization or conventional class stigma (Kendall, Shamans
and The life). This kind of cultural and historical irony gave my grandmother the
complex nature of her identity as well as a hard life. Therefore, her life story as a mudang in my work is difficult to represent simply or with a few facts that can limit
understanding of all the multilayered contexts around her identity.
2

Sam-sik Kim (February 16, 1934 - December 12, 2005) is my paternal grandmother.
She was a mu-dang for more than 30 years, until she converted to Roman Catholicism.
Her body-governed spirit was descended through my father, who could not be a shaman,
himself, owing to traditionally-accepted conventions. Thus, the connection between my
grandmother, my mother and me is conditioned by the patriarchal order in Korea, yet the
dynamics of our agency as related women ties us together.
3

Here is an interesting contrast which illustrates how engendered holiness manifests in
different religions. In Muism, Samshin is associated with three grandmotherly figures
which protect and nurture life, and it represents the prominent figure for traditional
womanhood in Korea. It is also one of the most essential divine figures in Muism and
shamanhood. This female-governed domain in the holiness of Muism contrasts with the
Trinity in Roman Catholicism, in which not only the Father figure, but the Father-Son
paring is central to this divine trinity. Buddhism is less explicit regarding gender

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The body of my work also consists of three different media components: the
physical sculpture composed of three audio components that are separated from two video
projections. This multimedia installation explores the symbolic associations of the
number three, and that number is ritualized in my installation.

Through the three

components – sculpture, audio, and video – the themes and forms of my thesis project
involve dialogic and interactive relationships and originated in my thoughts on the
affinities between shamanism and the cinematic apparatus:

the sense of enchantment,

the dream-like mediation of reality and the metaphysical, coupled with
suspense/anticipation. Based on this concept, I analyze and reconstruct the architecture
of the theatre space (the cinema), the content of cinema, and spectatorship.

This infers

the three-component relationship between the cinematographic content, the movie theatre,
and spectatorship. My desire is to create a new form of cinema through the spatial- and
time-based aspects of my installation, just as a shaman creates a transformative space and
time through her ritual. 4

In brief, this thesis essay outlines my intentional developments and research process on
Shamanism, languages – cinematic semantics as well as Korean and English – identity
politics, and the interactive discourse of Otherness. I narrate this written thesis, reflecting
on the cinematic experiments in my installation, Mu-dang’s Cinematic Shrine and these
critical experiments are grounded in the critiques of conventional film screening and film
production.

naming; it is effectively neutral. The various images of Buddha in different Buddhist
schools can be represented as both male and female. Pali Dhamma (Sanskrit Dharma),
which refers to ‘ultimate truth,’ and Sangha, which identifies the monastic communities
that are in service of or practicing Dhamma, are examples of gender flexibility.
4

In contrast to many shamanisms including Siberian shamanism, Muism is the
provenance of women and mu-dangs are overwhelmingly female.

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THE BODY OF MEDIA RITUAL
Overall Description

As described earlier, my installation piece consists of three different components: a
three channel sound work and a two channel video work with three different sculptures.
These components create separate material and space for each medium: the sculpture, the
sound, and the visual, and this separation allows my audience to experience the different
elements of cinema individually. The sculptures reposition my audience’s spectatorship
from the traditional screening space (movie theatre) to a new physical space (my
installation). I change the physical space and separate the audio and video outputs
which are usually synchronized in traditional cinema. This separation of audio and
video results in distinct, independent narratives for each medium.

The audience, with this separation between audio and video installation components,
needs to choose initially between listening and watching.

Based on this first choice,

they must then decide which sound (among the three) and which image (between the two)
they will focus upon first.

After this initial appreciation of each of the different aural

and visual components of the installation, the audience may want to position themselves
either in synch with the sound and video or not.

There are two options that I present to my audience as a choice for the way in which
they engage with the work.

The audience members can choose the degree of control

they may wish to exert in my installation/screening space. One may focus on the
disjunction between the audio and video components.

Another may synchronize the

audio and video, contextualizing them within the overall installation/screening space.

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In the first option, the physical separation of the audio allows audio pieces to function as
three related yet independent aural sculptures, rather than being subordinate to the
pictorial imagery as it often is in conventional cinema.

Meanwhile the video imagery

can also be seen as two separate silent film works with each of the audio and video pieces
becoming mini-narratives.
If the audience wants to choose to synchronize different visual and aural narratives,
they may create their own mini-narratives by synching sound and video in different
configurations. New narratives, created by the audience, can be delivered not as a
filmmaker’s personal creation, but as cinematic, interactive “co-creations” 5 between a
filmmaker and audience.
In short, the integration of three separated elements of cinema – visual, aural and
architectural – depends upon the audience’s interactive choices and responses for the
synchronization in a new cinematic space.

This separation and integration is designed as

a multi-media ritual performance.

5

Here, I appropriate the design terminology, “co-creation” which usually includes the
mutual production or inter-relational participation in problem solving led by physical
interactivity between designers and users. In my own use of the term, “co-creation” does
not include specific interaction that the audience can physically produce and add to my
film work but refers to the change in audience perception from their choices rather than
by the traditional spectacle.

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I. Sculptures:

Transformative space from the personal to the public

There are three cardboard boxes in the middle of the installation space, situated in
between two video projections. From a distance, various inaudible sounds emanate from
the boxes. On either side of these sound boxes, are the projections. One video channel
is projected down from the ceiling, as a circular image that projects onto the surface of a
milk-like, opaque liquid that is contained in a rubber tub that is approximately a meter in
diameter; the other video is projected onto the gallery wall as a rectangular screen several
times larger than the tub.

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“Introducing the performance aspect to projection is to present a possible alternative to
the projected image that continues to remain flat and two-dimensional.”
— Theresa Hak Kyung Cha quoted in Lewallen’s The Dream of the Audience

Sculpture is foundational to every medium used in my installation.

The video

projections are physically manifested through three different sculptural elements:

three

shipping boxes for the audio work, a rubber tub as well as the liquid medium for one of
the video projections. They physically reconstruct an ‘unconventional’ cinematic
screening space. Rather than passively viewing in a traditional movie theatre, the
installation design encourages the audience to physically move around the various
sculptural elements.

This physicality increases active participation and interactivity

beyond traditional film spectatorship.

The sculptural part of my installation was produced in line with critical reading on the
traditional cinema architecture and its spectatorship.

While the traditional film

apparatus is located in a physically crowded public space – jammed with movie-goers, it
promotes a highly individualized and privatized gaze at the same time.

Like Roland

Barthes, I believe that we need to move away from ‘cinematographic hypnosis’:
How do we enter [a movie theatre]? With one exception— a more and more
frequent one, it is true— of a specific cultural quest (when a film is chosen,
sought, desired, the object of a genuine anticipatory anxiety), we go to movies
through sloth, out of an inclination for idleness. It is as though, before even
entering the theater, the traditional prerequisites for hypnosis were met: a
feeling of emptiness, idleness, inactivity […] In its human condensation, its
lack of ceremony (contrary to the ritualistic “making an appearance” in the

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theater), the relaxation of postures – how many spectators slip into their seat as
they slip into bed, coat and feet on the seat in front of them […] For such is the
narrow space where the filmic paralysis, the cinematographic hypnosis takes
place... (Barthes 1-3)

Indeed, the hypnosis is facilitated by the physical immobility of film spectators in a
traditional movie theatre.

Wanting to critique the traditional screening space, I have

been experimenting with the production of new, alternative screening spaces.

The physicality of sculpture may lead the audience to ask questions as to the location
of the rituals depicted, seen, and heard through the installation: where, when, and how
these events happened, or are still happening? This type of spectatorship takes my
audience away from the voyeuristic and privatized gaze of the conventional spectatorship.

This type of ‘listening and watching cinema’ is rooted in critical thinking about
traditional film spectatorship, as well as dialogic relationships between different
geographies and cultures.

The overall design of my installation is imbedded with

discourses between the native and the foreign, the present and the past, and the virtual and
the physical.

It is also contextualized between the local and the global, tensions from

which are often harbored in between ethnography and anthropology. These tensions of
the socio-political and geographical multiplicity are imbedded in my work as suggestive
questions and negotiated gestures, rather than direct commentary.

The dynamics between national and international identity and systems are signified
through the selection of installing three cardboard boxes, which encase and contain the

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sound sources. On each box, two different post marks are stamped in Korean and
English, with official stamps from the Korean and Canadian national postal services.
The stamps mark the nation of origin and the nationalities of the shipper and receiver, but
perhaps more importantly, the narratives of nationalism implicitly at work.

To be

specific, they signify the nationalities or nationalism of an author (myself), the audience
(in Canada), and the narratives (in audio and video work). The postage stamps not only
evoke a sense of travel, but they also suggest the culturally-translated and negotiated
positions of diasporic existence.

The gallery installation space in which this work is

viewed is physically in Canada, but it is virtually overlapped by the Korean time and
space that is delivered through the ‘foreign’ post boxes.

The boxes themselves are in

dialogue between different times and spaces, composing tacit questions to my audience:
“Do you recognize the stories that you are hearing and seeing?” “Where do you imagine
as the site, place, and time of the sounds and views before you?” “How many languages
do you recognize?”

These questions are connected to the language play in the sound

installation, which I will discuss in chapter 2, section II.

These shipping sound boxes refer to some of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work: sound
work, mail art, and video performance.

Cha’s work is an essential reference to my

experiments of screening space, sound work – especially language play – and new
spectatorship.

My art practice and theoretical explorations are significantly inflected by

Cha’s work regarding space, memory, identity, and language. 6

6

She was a Korean-born

In the late 1970s, Cha was one of the leading contemporary international cinema
experimentalists and performance artists. Her family fled to United States due to the civil
war in South Korea during the 1950s, and many of her works stem from the theme of the
Korean diaspora experience. She was murdered by a stranger in New York City in 1982,
shortly after the publication of her novel Dictee. However, from 2001 to 2003, The
Dream of the Audience, a touring exhibition organized by the Berkeley Art Museum

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and American-based cinema artist, theorist, and writer.

I resonate with not only her

identities and life experiences as a Korean woman artist of the diaspora, but also am
moved by the multi-layered nature of her work. Her work gathers the multilayered
linguistic system—both in (literal and artistic)— and multiplied cultural and conceptual
contexts.

In her mail art work, her audience is invited into a lost space, time, history,

and culture, but the invitation is subtle and poetic.

The audience needs to explore the

subtle and ambiguous language plays of Korean, English, and French that are delivered
by mail envelopes. The messages on the inside and outside of the envelopes have
evocative emotional calls for a lost time and space.
displacement.

They signify the emotion of cultural

But it is not a fixed, singular narrative, but a continuing dialogue on the

plural facets of emotions of being an ‘Other’ in this world.

This delicate plurality and

fluidity of her work unfold the transformative spaces for the audience’s open senses and
interpretations about being ‘Others’.

Another important material and sculptural element of the installation is the bathing
tub. It is a tangible, immemorial motif of my grandmother, and her closeted identity and
life story as a shaman.

My cousin and I video-graphed the bathing vignette in August

2005, but it becomes the present when the video is projected into the tub. The tub is
filled with a milk-like, white liquid, and a video sequence of my grandmother’s life and
death is projected onto the opaque surface of this liquid. The white colour of the liquid
enables the reflection of the video projection, while its materiality suggests meanings that
are connected to the visual image that is projected onto it. The milk-like feature not
presented the full range of her work: performance, video, film, artists’ books, mail art,
works on paper and cloth. In the published book that accompanied this exhibition, Trinh
T. Minh-ha and other writers in Berkeley wrote in-depth essays about Cha’s multilayered
and interrelated work from French film theory to Korean history. (Lewallen 33-50)

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only connotes my personal shamanic inheritance from my grandmother, but it also
represents the ancestral linkage between my audience and their ancestors. Most of us
have been fed by either mother’s milk or a processed substitute, and the symbolic use of
the material implies the relationship to a person who helped us into being and who we can
all archetypically call ‘ancestor’. This connoted ancestral linkage is either buried in the
past or carried out to the present by the choice of our remembrance.

Thus the milk-like

liquid in the tub serves as a trigger for the participants’ own memory and becomes the
agency that allows them to choose to forget or to remember.

When the video is projected on the surface of the white liquid, the rippling movement
of the liquid generates blurred images.

This optic quality paradoxically helps viewers to

focus on the shaky, handheld video images and enhances the dreamy quality of
remembering.

The liquid in the tub literally has a depth to it, and the fluctuating hand-

held video imagery that is projected onto the liquid surface seems to enhance this sense of
depth.

This lively dream-like visual quality intends to evoke a sense of liminality 7 and

to mitigate the traumatic visual scenes that juxtapose the life and death of my
grandmother. (Cf. p. 34)

7

My understanding of the concept of liminality is based on the work of Victor Turner,
who considers it to be ‘a marginal, transitional, ambiguous state.’ Cf. “The attributes of
liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous, since
this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that
normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor
there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom,
convention, and ceremonial. [...] Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being
in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an
eclipse of the sun or moon.” (Turner 95)

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II. Sounds:

Subversive noises and voices

As the audience approaches, they soon realize that the different ambiguous sounds they
hear emanate from three cardboard shipping boxes with Korean postage. Once the
audience members bend to get closer to the boxes, they can better hear the separate audio
pieces: ‘A Noise Flow,’ ‘A Personal Voice/Music Box,’ and ‘A Collective Voice/Music
Box.’ The audience may vary the levels of the sound mixing faders on the latter two
boxes, which control Korean and English language outputs/levels.

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“Speech…creates a bond of coming-and-going which generates movement and
rhythm…life and action.”
– A Hampate Ba quoted in Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, and Other

In attempts to embody a way of critically engaging with film theory and praxis in my
own art practice, I have built a sound installation which is physically separated from the
visual. I push further the avant-garde notions of the disjunctive and autonomous
position of the film sound track through a sculptural reconstruction of filmic sound and
image.

As I described in the section on sculptures, my sound work is situated inside three
cardboard shipping boxes, and the audience listens from three different sound sources.
This sound design is an attempt to experiment and to reevaluate on the relationship
between sound and visual.

Although different kinds of film sound sources generate

various types of information as sound narratives by themselves, they are mostly
considered “secondary information” to confirm or to reinforce what we see in film. For
example, the dialogue or speech of actors or interviewees are considered “more direct”
sound information than other sound sources such as room tone sound or incidentally
recorded sound.

The economy of constructing sound information is based on the

subordinated position of sound to visual in film production and reproduction.

In

mainstream films the hierarchal value system between visual and sound is intensified by
not only filmmakers’ image dominant filmmaking but also audience’s visual oriented
reception. I am conscious about this subjugation of sound to image in the film apparatus
as a metaphor of “Others.”

The awareness on the ubiquitous presence of film sound

remains on a subconscious or unconscious level like a haunting ghost as “Others”, the

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minority groups in our society become invisible and unvocal from social consciousness.

In order to bring an attention to the marginality of “Others”, I choose to experiment
with sound in my installation. I have produced three different independent sound
narratives that are separate from the video imagery.

I present options for my audience to

explore non-hierarchal relationship between sound and visual.

When the sound sources were recorded, there was no specifically articulated sound
design for the sound recording but arbitrary capturing of sound through built-in
microphone in my camera.

They were not intended to serve as main narratives in my

film when they were recorded but purposely edited to orient my audience to certain times
(the past and the present or timelessness) and spaces (the native and the foreign) without
synched relationship with the visual.

In addition, the independent relationship between

audio and video in my work is navigated by my audience’s special attention and
awareness on each different sound and video element.

The location sound that Raph Choi, my sound collaborator, and I mixed is designed to
conjure a spatial and temporal sense of presence that the audience can experience and
interpret about the past event.

On the other hand, the vocal and musical sound are

intended to evoke a mood of timelessness. (cf. pp. 29-31) Typically the location sound
sources have been reassembled as musical elements to lead listeners to different times and
spaces.

The sound sources vary from the water sounds of my grandmother’s bathing,

the cricket noises of my grandmother’s backyard to the sounds of the mortician’s washing
ceremony on my grandmother’s body.

We also mixed sound materials that were

recorded in public places yet in different locations: such as Seoul Metro in Korea and

16

Vancouver Skytrain in Canada, evoking a sense of travel. It is my intention to
metaphorically mimic the shaman’s ability and role to evoke ‘travel’ and to tell the stories
about ‘the forgotten.’ 8 The suggested temporal and spatial mobility through different
location sound narrative become a metaphorical device for the shaman’s general psychic
ability to travel through different spaces and times.

I do not explicitly explain what was the forgotten and abandoned in my grandmother’s
life story as a shaman.

On the other hand, implicitly, I bring my film audience the sense

of ‘returning of the forgotten’ through shedding a light on the noise that has been
forgotten in film/television production and spectatorship. Roland Barthes critically
reflects on the forgotten qualities and values of sound:
For the most part, in commercial productions, the sound formula cannot
produce an aural fascination. Meant to strengthen the verisimilitude of an
anecdote, sound is merely a supplementary support of representation: it must
integrate itself docilely with the mimed object; it is in no way detached from
that object. And yet, it would take very little to peel this sound strip off: a
sound slightly out of synch, or amplified; a voice whose graininess grinds
right up against our ear—and once again the visual fascination gets hold of us.

8

There are a number of different ways of understanding shamanism, and what follows is
my particular interpretation. Most shamans throughout the world have the ability to
channel their clients’ different states of mind: consciousness, subconsciouness, and
unconsciousness. After their psychic traveling, a shaman recognizes what kind of
memory has remained in their clients’ minds, where and when the facts of the memory
took place, and how these facts in the past still mingle together with a clients’ present
mindset. This kind of memory travel eventually leads to healing events that are performed
through the shaman’s storytelling. Healing enables us to return to the stage of balance
between chaos and the cosmos. To let this shamanic healing take place, we do need to
remember some facts, experiences, or truth that we voluntarily and involuntarily forget
for some reason. A shaman’ job is to clarify the reasons that let us remember and forget.

17

(Barthes 2)

Barthes critiques a visually-oriented film apparatus. I too question why and how certain
types of media communication patterns become ‘primary,’ ‘general,’ ‘normal,’
‘acceptable,’ or ‘inevitably dominant’ in film/television production, reproduction, and its
spectatorship.

Also I wonder how this conventional idea controls and affects the

film/television audience’s perceptual and philosophical identification with mainstream
media mediation.

Applying these questions to my installation work, I situate two different voice/music
sound boxes on the left and right sides of the noise flow box. The way I position the noise
flow box in the central position between the left and right commentary music boxes is an
attempt to invert the conventional, 5.1 surround sound system in a movie theatre.

In the

sound design for typical movie theatres, three speakers are positioned in front of the
audience seats, and two other speakers are behind.

The middle front speaker is

exclusively reserved for dialogues or voice-over sound which refers to a higher category,
speech or words, in film space.

In conventional film production, these kinds of sound

sources are meant to be highly informative and purposeful to maximize fidelity of film
sound to the cinematographic image. I posit that the subjugation of sound to imagery is
increased in conventional customs of the film industry, and that the location of the middle
front speaker in 5.1 surround sound is intensifying this subordinated quality of sound.

In such a space, the spectatorship is mostly led to a confrontational experience of highdefinition and purposefully visual oriented sound sources.

Relatively more independent

sound sources of film visual narrative is often not desirable to mainstream film and

18

television industry so that they becomes peripheral to this traditional theatre space.
Therefore, by situating the noise flow in this middle front speaker, I designate the value
of marginalized sound sources from low-definition to high-definition, from background to
foreground, from the margin to the centre, and from ‘secondary’ to ‘primary’. The
peripheral sound is no longer designated for supplementary information to visual but a
main sound narrative, replacing dialogue and voice-over sound sources which are usually
the focal point in a 5.1 sound system.

The content of the noise box and its position in

my installation suggests to my audience different ways of thinking and perceiving sound
in and through a ‘film space.’

In my installation, the two front left and right speakers (i.e., on either side of the
middle speaker) are reserved for dubbed voice-over sound sources, which are never
located in the stereo channel of a 5.1 sound system. The front left and right speakers in
conventional film theatre are reserved not for speech sound but for the emotional
interpretation of a narrative in film space. In contrast, I situate the voice-over sound
sources decentralized from the location of the middle front speaker to the locations of left
and right front speaker. These marginalized speech sound sources are related to
language play and translation (cf. pp. 27-28, 30-31), and they are mixed with music
instead of purely devoted to the conventional functions such as establishing mood.

The shifted locations of different sound sources that I intend, both with a noise box
and two voice/music boxes, are a formal inversion that is not obvious within the gallery
space.
English.

This inversion alludes to a discourse of language play between Korean and
The location of sound boxes becomes a symbolic agency that my audience

may read my intentions to criticize conventional filmmaking and spectatorship and their

19

connotation of ‘subversion.’

I seek to make a connection between ‘making political

cinema’ and ‘making a cinema politically.’

In this sense, the experimentalism of cinema

no longer remains ‘form for form’s sake’ but is connected to theme and its contexts.

In Euro-American avant-garde filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s, there were many
kinds of conceptual and formal inversions or experiments.

Avant-garde film makers,

musicians, and sound theorists have challenged the sensory discrimination between sound
and image and defied the privileging of purposeful sound over arbitrary noise or
generative sound source in film production.

Avant-garde filmmakers such as Jean-Luc

Godard produced films that position “the marginalized sounds” (silence, noise, or
nonrepresentational music, etc.) in the centre of their film sound tracks. This avantgarde sound experimentation blends the conventional categories of noise, music, and
words and values the highly autonomous status of sound, sound disjunction from imagery,
or a preverbal quality of music more than ‘systematically structured and highrepresentational’ sound tracks of modernist films (Turim 41-43).

Maureen Cheryn

Turim summarizes the features of the avant-garde sound track:
Not only does it radically depart from the use of sound to fulfill a narrative
progression of images and actions and from the structural uses as
reinforcement of thematic developments, but the avant-garde sound track [ . . .
has] audial characteristics as themselves worthy of attention, as the site of
creative activity and expression…the avant-garde sound track defies analysis
as an element of signification within a system, and forces us to consider the
radical plurality of the text. (Turim 35)

These avant-garde experiments are often referred to as subversive gestures, of ‘making

20

a film politically’ rather than ‘making a political film.’

Godard comments on his new

notion of ‘political cinema,’ and his ideas have been quite influential for experimental
filmmakers, especially those who tend to be more focused on critical thinking about the
cinema apparatus itself rather than the film content and historical and cultural context.

These two things (making a political film and making a film politically) are
completely different. As Brecht already said, it’s not important to know
what are the real things but rather how things are real.
reality.

The relation is in that

An image is nothing. It’s the relationships between the images that

matter. Why are these relationships important? Marxism indicates what is the
nature of the relationships between things. They are relations of production.
A machine is not or a worker is not important by themselves, what matters is
the relationship between the machine and the worker and the relationships
between that worker and the other workers who from their own positions have
relationships with the machine. (Cha, preface)

I agree with certain ideas of avant-garde filmmakers and their followers’ philosophy in
‘making films politically.’ In particular, I focus on their devaluation of purposeful
sound tracks in film/television and the revaluation of sound employing noise and silence
as well as voice/music as ‘the skeletal apparatus’ (Turim 33).

These marginalized sound

tracks in traditional filmmaking enable both filmmakers and spectators to be aware of the
film apparatus and traditional spectatorship.

My reading of this as an ‘alienation

effect,’ 9 as describe by Bertolt Brecht, suggests that it may be a potential strategy to resist

9

Translation of the German Verfremdungseffekt. The Marxist poet and theatre
practitioner, Bertolt Brecht, coined this literary term to describe the dramatic effect of an

21

the dominant methods of mediation in mainstream television and film industries.

In this context, my work is addressing the need to make a political cinema that is not
separable from ‘making cinema politically.’ I am referencing critical ideas about cinema
and the theories of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Their work explores

experimentalism with cinematic form, cinema author’s identity politics as a theme, and
spectatorship in various contexts around cinema. The main subject in most of Cha’s work
is language play among Korean, English, and French.

The literal sense of language

meets with the ‘media language’: cinema, ritualistic performance, and writing poetry and
theory. The experimental sound work and language play in Cha’s work are particularly
relevant to my critical ideas and intentions about the acoustic and linguistic qualities of
the film sound sources.

Trinh T. Minh-Ha, who shares similarities with Cha— in her life experience as well as
art practices— wrote in her essay on Cha’s multi-linguistic work: “Engaging language as
simultaneously seen and heard, her writing plays up the arbitrary relation between the
sound of a word, its visual spelling, its multiple referents, and its foreign mate in
translation.”

(Lewallen, 35)

Language, spoken and written, is fundamental to all of Cha’s work, and sound was the
most distinctive element of Cha’s performance (Lewallen 9).

Her words, voice, and

silence compose evocative poetry which touches all the historical, cultural, and political
contexts that are entangled with the diasporic emotional experience.

Her sound or

audience’s detaching and distancing observation or witnessing rather than a submissive
identification with “the realistic illusion” in a play or a work of literature.

22

silence work is filled with the figurative and plural voices of ‘others’ or ‘their otherness’
which had not been heard in singularly centered and determined language structures.
The boundaries—between signifier (a form) and signified (a theme), between the personal
and the public, and between political and non-political— are interfered with and blurred
by Cha’s words, voice, and silence.
Cha’s academic experiences factored heavily in her work--film theory,
semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism and literature all make
appearances. Though Cha took an intellectual approach to art making, theory
was not an end in itself. Instead, she used theoretical discourse to circle in
and out of a set of interrelated ideas, always finding at the center something
personal and specific to tell. Her experiences as an immigrant, of learning to
communicate in a foreign tongue and of living between two cultures, were
some of her most pervasive meditations. (Garcia)
As Erin Garcia summarized Cha’s investigations above, Cha’s evocative and conjuring
diasporic voice echoes for me the experience of shamanic voices. Many shamans use
chanting, songs, or eccentric sound performance to conjure the death or special spirits
with whom clients wish to connect. For my own sound work, Cha’s poetic voices were
a shamanic call. One of the most well-known of her books, Dictee, invited alien and at the
same time familiar emotions and inspiration to me, and, when I read the book, I
experienced something like a trance state of mind.

It is right after this experience, I

wrote down my poems in English, then in Korean. (cf. Appendix II, pp. 54-56)

My

sound collaborator and I have recorded and mixed the poems, and I named the sound
track ‘my personal voice’ and placed it in one of the voice/music sound boxes.

This personal voiced sound box is situated on the left side of the noise box.

When

23

my audience approaches this box, they hear a singular voice, my voice, reciting and
singing my own poems as well as the ancient Korean poem, Kong mudoha ka, ‘Song of
the Konghu Zither.’ 10

All of the poems express my longing and grieving for my

grandmother whom I deeply loved, lost, and now miss to the core of my being.
However, these emotions are a collective experience of human beings, and my intention
is that the visceral nature of this music will trigger a collectivity beyond the historical and
cultural differences among the audience.

On the other hand, the ‘public voices’ on the right side of the noise box begin with
collective, communal sounds.

At my grandmother’s funeral in December 2005 in Korea,

I recorded a Roman Catholic mass song and prayer which have very little to do with my
grandmother’s original identity as a Korean shaman, but with her decision (a ‘forced’
choice) to be baptized as a Roman Catholic in her later life. To create cultural
juxtapositions, Raphael Choi and I recorded a Roman Catholic mass in Vancouver.

This

Roman Catholic sound track has been produced to construct the same content yet two
different contexts of Christianity. This public voiced sound box is a counterpart to
Personal Voice/Music box. The Korean and Vancouver Catholics sang and prayed the
same Catholic song or prayer following the same order of the Catholic mass, and the
10

Kong mudoha ka is an oral story, preserved in Chinese written records, in which a wife
loses her husband to madness and witnesses his drowning while he attempts to cross a
river (cf. Appendix III with translations, pp. 57-59). The woman could not stop her
husband’s attempt to cross and sings to grieve her loss and express her love. A Chinese
sailor passing by hears this woman’s song and is profoundly moved. Upon returning
home to his wife, the sailor relates these events. His wife, in turn, plays a zither and thus
begins the ‘Song of the Konghu Zither.’ This historical poem is rich in its potential
reading and insight into Muism, song and literature in the ancient era: “The hero of Kong
mudoha ka is thought to have been a shaman who drowned himself while in a trance.
Perhaps the poem indicates the loss of the shaman’s efficacy and authority when ancient
Korea was transformed into a structured state.” (“Korean literature.” Encyclopaedia
Britannica.)

24

solemn mood of the music is delivered by the associations of a similar Christian ritual.
However, this kind of ‘collective voice/music sound’ and its effects are dependent on and
differentiated by the variations of the two diverse congregations’ own pace, melodies, and
pauses, which are based on each group’s cultural context.

Some melodies and tempos of

Korean Roman Catholic prayers sound more similar to Korean traditional ritual music –
which has many connections to Muism (Korean shamanism) – or to Buddhist chanting,
rather than to Roman Catholic prayer in Vancouver.

If a non-Korean speaker listens to

this Roman Catholic prayer they cannot hear the literal meaning of the prayer but only the
non-verbal, sound characteristics, which evoke a different cultural or religious association
to Western listeners.

Like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work, the play between languages

and their acoustic quality yields variations within the soundtrack, Collective Voices.
The meanings of languages (the signified) are determined by the various physical
qualities of sound (the signifiers), and the relationship between signified and signifiers is
not consistent or lineal, but undetermined and non-lineal. Furthermore, the direction of
the variation flows from the collective to the individual giving unique acoustic
characteristics to the personal voices among the group.

With the noise box in the middle, these two personal and public voice/music sound
boxes are matched through interactive ‘language controllers.’

Unlike the centre noise

box, the two boxes on the sides have two sound mixing faders paired together and
attached to each of them.

When my audience approaches these boxes, the pair of faders

is in the default position in the middle range, and the audience can simultaneously listen
to two different language plays of sound tracks: Korean from the left channel or an
English translation from the right channel. From here if the audience desires to move
the fader towards the left end, they can hear that the volume of the English is gradually

25

reduced while that of the Korean is increased. At the extreme left, there is only Korean,
and the audience only hears the single language channel.

The polarity of the sliders is

the range that my audience can explore and negotiate between languages in my two
voice/music sound boxes.

In this context, the sound interaction becomes not only

functional—to offer non-Korean speakers a translation—but also political—to negotiate
two different language attributes and values: Korean, the foreign language and English,
the local yet also the global language.

Additionally, this negotiated interaction is derived from my questions about power
relations between author and audience in cinema and is answered by a mu-dang’s role as
a medium.

Having discussed the theatre space of cinema and the conventional

spectatorship in chapter 2, section I, I turn to contemplate the matter of translation.
When one translates from one language to another, one can suddenly realize how
inadequate the signifiers are to match to the signified and how uncertain their relationship
can be.

The translator needs to make sense of the historically and culturally

differentiated qualities and values in two different languages.
negotiated to be integrated.
negotiation.

Differences need to be

Then another question follows: who determines the

As a film author, I felt a strong desire to maintain the decision making,

particularly since this project is based on a subjective narrative.

This impulsive desire

sometimes disturbed me with suspicion and doubt about ‘non-Korean audience in North
America.’ There was a difficulty that I, a filmmaker, could not trust the audience’s open
reading/reception of my work —‘open’ does not necessarily mean a genuine and
substantive reception, and can potentially mean an ethnocentric reading in the wrong
context, and result in an adamant refusal of ‘other’ perspectives.

26

Nevertheless, this tension from the dichotomy between film author and audience has
been resolved through the mu-dang’s wisdom.

When a mu-dang performs in a public

ritual, she is in control of the ritual and the channeling to others’ psyches yet she remains
herself a medium rather than a manipulator or a creator.

Generally speaking, this neutral

and negotiating position of the shaman is considered to be a virtuous quality that a mudang can aspire to in Muism.

Similarly, I let go of the decision-making regarding

translation. The meaning of sounds and the connection between the signifier and the
signified are determined by my audience.

Although I prepare all the primary sound

materials and technical options for their choice, the audience performs a signifying
translation in the language play under their own control, and the ritualistic meaning in my
sound installation is available not by the text itself, or by my intention, but by the
audience’s interactivity.

27

III. Videos:
Visual numinosum 11 and liminality beyond binary visions

There are two video projections on either side of three sound boxes. One is projected over
the surface of an opaque liquid in a rubber tub, and the other is shown on the gallery wall.
They differ in shape and scale: a small circle of one metre diameter and a large rectangle
measuring approximately two by three metres. However, the video vignettes of life, death,
traveling, and rituals connect both projections and establish a thematic, if ambiguous,
relationship.

11

For my purposes, I define ‘numinosum’ to be a ‘mysterious, mystical experience of
archetypal Otherness that results from ritualistic or religious practice.’ Rudolf Otto coined
the term ‘the numinous’ in Das Heilige (1917) and his investigation of the concept
stimulated the thinking of many others, including Carl Jung. I believe numinosum can be
found through many, if not most, traditions of religion or spiritual practice. Cf. “There is
no religion in which it does not live as the real innermost core, and without it no religion
would be worthy of the name.” (Otto 6) Discussing Otto and Jung, Berman notes: “Those
who listen to storytellers and those who undergo shamanic journeys can both be said to
experience the effect of the numinosum, and Jung clearly regards the experience of this as
being fundamental to our survival...” (Berman 142).

28

It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.
—D. W. Winnicott, quoted in Epstein’s Open to Desire

In one of my video projections, the audience sees that a younger Asian woman washes
an older Asian woman, who is sitting inside a bathtub that looks identical to the
physically present tub, into which the video sequence is projected.

The sense of care-

giving suddenly changes into an antiseptic, clinical scene and, in front of a morgue’s
freezer, two Asian male morticians wash the elder woman’s body that was once alive and
washed by her grand daughter.

Here the audience sees the full array of life and death

introduced as a dramatic juxtaposition of ritualistic bathing scenes around the woman’s
body.

The paralleled life and death images are separated and paced by the images of an

elder person’s wrinkled hands that are my grandmother’s furrowed hands.

As a shaman

invokes spirits or ghosts, I conjure the full circle of life, death, and the lingering moments
in between, through this video sequence.

In contrast, in modern society, the materiality of one’s own body and its death are
institutionally medicalized and effectively censored in media mediation.

The daily life

of elders is rarely presented in mainstream media, and this omission makes their lives
seem trivial and ignores their deep wisdom that is beneath the surface.

Magical

shamanism is embodied not through an exotic portrait of shamans, but through the
enchantment of the elder woman’s daily living. In addition, the death of elders is
equally undervalued and underrepresented in main stream media.

Mainstream visual

representations typically employ a sense of immortality and dispose of unsightly scenes
of life and death even though they are essential parts of all human beings’ common
experience and existential conditions.

29

The underrepresented, invisible, or devalued imagery of elders and their death
critically and intentionally disrupts a universal reading of my visual documents.

The

video footage of my grandmother is documented as a private home movie, but it
generates an emotional impact for viewers who often cannot see such truthful moments in
mainstream film and television.

The milk-like screen in the tub blurs the imagery and

softens the edges of the images, not only desensitizing the traumatic scene around my
grandmother’s dead body but also inviting the viewers to explore beyond the façade of
the sensationalized realistic representation of her death.

Through the silent video

vignette, I lure my audience to engage with the precarious side of life and death as a
shaman does through her ritual performance.

Furthermore, I examine the position of a filmmaker (myself) and viewers in this particular
video projection. More likely, viewers of this video projection will literally ‘look down’ at
the tub screen on the ground. The physical location of the tub forms a hierarchical view
point. If my audience is aware of the connotation of their position, they can compose
questions around it. In a conventional screening space, viewing an object is not an individual,
private act but a public reading that generates the power of giving meaning. Due to the
conventions of seating in a movie theatre, we are not accustomed to question the position of
our spectatorship. The lowered position of the tub shifts the traditional relationship between
viewer and screen, and this shift is linked to the introspection of my camera position, as well.

The video camera also looks down at its object, my grandmother’s body. Some of the
footage is taken by Young-Hyeon Cho, my cousin, and this video footage was taken
randomly rather than purposefully. In this sense, it is not my point of view, technically.

30

On the contrary, the high angle position of the video camera seems to imply a difference in
status between my grandmother and me. When I edit this home movie footage, I see that
my position is separated from hers. I want to recognize that my grandmother and I are
Asian women in the same family, but ‘I’ am a young, ‘educated’ female filmmaker who
possesses the technology to record and edit video material and construct a narrative, while
‘she’ is an elderly woman interviewee who is nearly illiterate and whose body is naked and
becomes an object in front of my camera. Here the difference between my grandmother’s
and my positions is related to the historical tensions in cinema between an interviewer and an
interviewee or between the anthropologist and the ‘primitive,’ native informant.

In her book, Woman, Native, Other, Trinh T. Min-ha introspectively acknowledges the
tensions derived from the differences among women, genders of filmmakers, ways of
knowing, researchers’ positions and views. In this context, Min-ha’s own introspection and
investigation in documentary-making encourages my critical thinking about the positions of
viewing. Min-ha articulates the differences between anthropology and ethnography as well
as between writing and oral traditions. She argues that anthropology has adopted historical
valuations regarding these differences. ‘The Western white male anthropologist’s
missionary view point’ about ‘the African primitive native woman’ is not only criticized by
Minh-ha but also linked to her own introspection about her own related positions. She is an
insider as a coloured woman and differentiated from dominant outsider-researchers, but, at
the same time, she acknowledges that she also possesses her own privileged positions and
values over many other women. She is a researcher (observer not the object), a writer and,
with her camera, a recorder. Her way of interpreting, recording, and writing is necessarily
different from the Senegalese women’s way of knowing and living, and Minh-ha’s position is
prestigeous in hieatical view of history. My position as documentarian of my grandmother’s
life story is, I believe, parallel to Minh-ha’s position.

31

Minh-ha disapproves of philanthropic approaches and languages regarding ‘the native’ that
objectify the otherness of the native and obscure their dominant naming agency. I am also
conscious about my approaches to my grandmother’s images, identities, and life stories.
When I started to edit the video footage of my grandmother, I was highly conscious of guarding
this narrative from readings that sentimentalized or fetishized a tragic life story of a Third World
woman.

As Minh-ha seeks to negotiate between her privileged positions as a writer and a

documentarian – and her othered positions as a woman of colour from the Third world, I must
negotiate mine.

As a documentarian, I was usually involved in propagandistic documentary journalism

that was often constructed around the power of visual narratives. A highly informative
narrative conveys literal and pre-determined logics of meaning. This factual representation
and narration is primarily governed by imagery, and these kinds of images are inadequate to
highlight the numinous or liminal readings of Otherness. I engage with Otherness, as I
embrace my grandmother’s inherited shamanhood. This new role leads me to take on the
complex façade of shaman’s performance. In the Korean shamanic ritual, Kut, a shaman
seems to reveal the hidden abyss and suddenly conceals it again, and she performs many
different roles of spirits to initially evoke and entertain ghosts and spirits, only to coldly chase
them off at the end of ritual. These contradictory behaviours and tones are considered to be
necessary to flourish and guard our well-being in the vicissitudes of life and death.

Kut, itself is a drama, which is structured on the basic principles of 1) inviting, 2)
entertaining, and supplicating, and 3) sending off, the spirits… The shamans’
voices and miens change to conform with the various possessing spirits. The
sponsors appeal to, plead with, coax, bribe, reason and argue with, and sometimes

32

even chide, the spirits. A direct exchange takes place there and then. The spirits
get ‘entertained’ with food and drink, and very often given money for ‘fares,’ and
in return give the sponsors a blessing, a promise of future help and solutions to
their problems (Kim, H. Korean, 165)

Therefore, in order to accommodate a mu-dang‘s various roles in kut, in my installation, I
needed to change the way I produced my work, in order to invoke the sense of numinosum
and liminality. Lessening the dominance of visual information was the key for me to unfold
these values.

The magic is not from an invention but from an awareness about habitual or mundane
ways of thinking and feeling. The questions about my authorship and my audience’s
reception contribute to this awareness and that is the magic and power of cinema. For this
reason, Victor Turner discusses the structural affinities of different studies and practices that
utilize liminality: “Liminality, marginality and structural inferiority are conditions in

which are frequently generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works
of art.” (Turner 128-9)

The aesthetics of home movies exemplify the marginality and structural inferiority that
Turner identifies. There are consensual distinctions between structured video art and
unstructured home movies. Home movies imply ‘unprofessional’, ‘arbitrary’, ‘unorganized’,
and ‘unqualified’ values and aesthetics while video art is considered ‘qualified’ and the
‘structured.’ These two distinct terrains have different representational patterns and
semiotics as well as their own values. My intention to use a home movie record of my
grandmother to construct certain visual narratives is an attempt to explore the differences
between high and low art practices and between ‘qualified’ and ‘unqualified’ visual language.

33

I have edited these fragmented shots of daily routine out of unstructured family video footage
that refers to home movie imagery.

Through my intentional editing, I attempt to name and

visualize a language of Otherness which helps me to enunciate my grandmother’s closeted
shamanhood.

The other video projection exhibits a sense of travel and ritual; and runs parallel to the
first video projection. The collage of video images in this second projection assembles
sequences of travel and ritual.

It demonstrates various randomly shot scenes: the

subway scenery in Seoul Metro, my own ritual for my grandmother in Vancouver, the
Roman Catholic funeral of my grandmother, the playful image in my grandmother’s
pepper field, and my grandmother’s ashes from her cremation. The segmented images
of different time, space, and ritual actions fashion the suggestion of fluidity, and it is
similar to what shamans do with their storytelling.

The different events, characters, and

surroundings in several mises en scene intertwine to create a meditative flow and to
illuminate the space for the enchanted numinosum and transformative liminality.

Harvesting peppers, sharing light laughter and ease with loved ones, or reflecting on
moments in nature: there is an imagistic narrative in the second video projection that I name
as a melancholic celebration of life, death, and their transitions. The personal nostalgic
memory of my grandmother mingles around her ashen body and her absent spaces. The two
different kinds of religious rituals—Jesa, Korean traditional ancestral worship and the Roman
Catholic funeral—are symbolized as incantations for my grandmother’s presence and absence.
In brief, the second video projection communicates a celebratory eloquence juxtaposed to
images of life, death, and its intervals. Although the first and second video projections are
physically separated and screened on differently shaped screens and viewed at different

34

angles, there is a subtle thematic relationship between them, which exists as an option for the
audience to explore.

My video collage is inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s first film, Reassemblage (1982).
This ethnographic film documents the daily life of Senegalese women, while her
subsequent book Woman, Native, and Other (1989) provides a theoretical grounding for
the film.

In both her film and book, she critiques the traditional ethnographic

documentary-making of ethnocentric and andro-centric anthropology.

However, Minh-

ha is careful not to make sweeping and simplistic political accusations. Instead she
takes poetic visual lanuage as her political strategy.

Her spectators do not see any exotic

scenes or views of ‘primitive, African woman,’ but a full assortment of women’s life in
Senegal.

The everyday life, daily labour, nurturing of children, decay, and death are

equally depicted imagery, and they become an enthralling and multi-faceted flow –
women’s life in a small, West African village. Further, Minh-ha did not add her own
interpretation of these lives, but rather, her poetic voice-over questioned her role as a
filmmaker, and most of the sound in her film is independently separated from the visuals.
This disjunctive relationship between the sound and the visual gives more conceptual and
perceptual space for the viewer to see, think, and feel in different ways than could be
done through conventional ethnographic documentaries.

Her experimental language in Reassemblage poetically dissolves the binary divisions
of self and other, filmmaker and subject, First and Third World, and her political agenda
yields plural and fluid relationships and dialogue.

I call her filmic tactic ‘magical

realism of Others’, the resurrection of the minority groups’ own rhetoric. This kind of
visual language is linked to the shamanic performance through my two channel video

35

installation.

To sum up my video work, the magical values of visual storytelling come to life

through the recognition of the forgotten relationship between young and old, between life
(presence) and death (absence), between dominant and subordinated, and between
mundane and the fantastic.

These binary yet dialogic relationships exist everywhere

through many different forms in our daily lives, in special life experiences, or sought
through the cinematic apparatus.

The ubiquitous shamanic force blurs the sharpened

edges of ‘I’ and ‘You’ and shows us the way to the numinosum.

When our daily lives become mechanical and we find ourselves taking what
we have been blessed with for granted, what we need is the kind of experience
that will renew our enthusiasm for living again. This is what the ritual
offered on neo-shamanic workshops can provide and what people, judging by
its popularity, hunger for. (Berman 142)

36

CONCLUSION

Lessons of Cinema Experiments, Shamanism, and ‘Others’

My research led me to different ways of opening several kinds of dialogues, not only
through actual language, but also by opening up the languages of different media in
cinema—sculpture, sound, and video, and the languages of different contexts (Korea and
Canada). Cinema remains, for me, a magical language, like a shaman’s incantation.
As there are different realms or times that a mu-dang can travel through, there are
different elements synthesized in the cinematic apparatus: sound, image, light and motion.
Like a mu-dang conjuring and playing with the numerous spirits and ghosts in her
performance, I experimented with cinematic elements.

Through the sculptural elements

in my installation, I have examined how the interactivity of spectatorship can be enhanced
through shifting the architectural aspects of a typical movie theatre. I gained knowledge
of how the audio can be autonomous to the visual, and how acoustic values of language
can play with the semantic relationship between signifier and signified. In this way, I also
became aware of the cultural contexts and negotiations through language play, and I
invite my audience to this awareness through an interactive sound control. In addition, I
shed light on the underrepresented images of aging and death in mainstream media and
draw more attention to the full array of life, death, and our ritualistic agencies in-between
them.

I seek to name the different values and qualities of Otherness through editing

visual narratives out of marginalized home movie footage.

My experimental attempts at a new form of cinema disrupt the conventional ritual
aspects of film production and the spectatorship in which that encounter takes place. The

37

rituality of my multi-media installation occurs through different types of engagements
between gallery space and art viewer, between cinema and film spectator, between music
and listeners, and between multi-media performance and audience.

All the engagements

in my work are intended to connect the viewer to a new awareness and experience of
culture, history, and language, symbolizing shamanhood and Otherness.

When I started to open up my grandmother’s story as a shaman, it was only about her,
and I felt separated from her life story – as an observer, as a researcher, and as a
filmmaker.

Eventually, the research and filmmaking turned back to where I am, who I

am, and what I can do with my filmmaking. The negotiation among different cultures,
languages, media and receptions of cinema that I learned through my multimedia
installation are lessons gifted from my grandmother’s closeted shaman identity.

A

skilled and virtuous shaman controls not her clients’ minds, but rather employs her
psychic powers and media to communicate the untold stories and issues of people and of
the world. The heritage from my grandmother’s shamanhood and her Otherness vis-àvis mainstream cultures guided me in the process of developing skillsets and perspectives
as a filmmaker who will willingly seek out the languages of Otherness.

38

WORKS CITED

Barthes, Roland. “Upon Leaving the Movie Theater.” Apparatus—Cinematographic
Apparatus: Selected Writings. Ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. New York: Tanam
Press, 1980. 1-4.

Berman, Michael. The Nature of Shamanism and the Shamanic Story. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. DICTEE. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995.

---. Ed. Apparatus—Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings. New York: Tanam
Press, 1980.

Epstein, Mark. Open to Desire—Embracing a Lust for Life: Insights from Buddhism and
Psychotherapy. New York: Gotham Books, 2005.

Garcia, Erin. “Awakenings.” Afterimage 29.4 (2002): 13. 17 March 2009
<http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com.ezproxy.eciad.ca:2048/hww/results/getResults.j
html?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.21>

Kim, Hyun-key Hogarth. Korean Shamanism and Cultural Nationalism. Seoul:
Jimoondang International Publishing Company, 1999.

Kim, Tae-kon. Korean Shamanism—Muism. Trans. Ed. Chang Soo-kyung. Seoul:
Jimoondang International Publishing Company, 1998.

Kendall, Laurel. Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits—Women in Korean
Ritual Life. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985.

---. Ed. The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1988.

“Korean literature.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online.
18 Mar. 2009 <http://search.eb.con/eb/article-61967>.

39

Lewallen, Constance M., ed. The Dream of the Audience—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
(1951-1982), Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2001.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. “White Spring.” The Dream of the Audience—Theresa Hak Kyung
Cha (1951-1982). Ed. Constance M. Lewallen. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London:
University of California Press, 2001. 33-50.

---. Woman, Native, Other—Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington,
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

---. Dir. Reassemblage. VHS. Women Make Movies, 1982.

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. 1923. London, New York: Oxford University Press,
1967.

Turim, Maureen Cheryn. Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films. 1978. Ann Arbor, Michigan:
UMI Research Press, 1985.

Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process—Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine
Publishing Company, 1969.

40

WORKS CONSULTED

Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory Sound Practice. New York, London: Routledge, 1992.

Burke, John Gordon, ed. Print, Image, and Sound. Chicago: American Library
Association, 1972.

Choi, Won-Oh. An Illustrated Guide to Korean Mythology. 2004/2005. Kent: Global
Oriental, 2008.

Jung, Carl. G., The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious. 1959. New York:
Bollingen Foundation, 1969.

Kim, Hyun-key Hogarth. Syncretism of Buddhism and Shamanism in Korea. Edison,
Seoul: Jimoondang International Publishing Company, 2002.

Lee, Yong-Shik, Shaman Ritual Music in Korea. Edison, Seoul: Jimoondang International
Publishing Company, 2004.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. Framer Framed. New York, London: Routledge, 1992.

---. Dir. Surname Viet Given Name Nam. DVD. Women Make Movies, 1989.

---. Ed. When The Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics. New
York: Routledge, 1991.

---. Ed. Cinema Interval. New York, London: Routledge, 1999.

---. Ed. The Digital Film Event. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Philipson, Morris. Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics. 1963. Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms International, 1991.

Pinchbeck, Daniel. Breaking Open The Head—A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of
Contemporary Shamanism. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.

41

Ripinsky-Naxon, Michael. The Nature of Shamanism. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1993.

Seo, Dae-seok, Myths of Korea. Seoul, Somerset: Jimoondang Publishing Company,
2000

Sider, Larry, Diane Freeman and Jerry Sider, eds. Soundscape—The School of Sound
Lectures 1998-2001. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003.

Turner, Victor, ed. Celebration—Studies in Festivity and Ritual. Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982.

Weis, Elisabeth and John Belton, eds. Film Sound—Theory and Practice. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985.

Zettl, Herbert. Sight, Sound, Motion—Applied Media Aesthetics. Belmont, California:
Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1973.
김열규 외, 한국의 무속문화, 박이정출판사, 1998

김영일, 한국무속과 신화의 연구, 부산: 세종출판사, 2005

최용수, 아시아의 무속과 춤 연구, 서울: 민속원, 2005

42

FILMOGRAPHY

How to Draw Happiness
– A biographical documentary on Korean Canadian Visual Artist, David Khang
(DV, 24min, colour, 2008)
nationally broadcasted in South Korea
won second award in Seoul Prize of Korean Broadcast System

Mu-dang’s Shrine
–One of the Sindang series (Muti-media installation, 2008)
Exhibited in Mediafesto, Emily Carr University, Vancouver, Canada

Salpuri Dance —Korean Traditional Shamanic Dance
— A puppetry and stop motion animation (DV, 8min, colour, 2007)
Web-broadcasted by the Digital Diversity Competition of Radio Canada International

Quick Market on the Run
—A news documentary (DV, 5min, colour, 2004)
internationally distributed by Video-Out, Vancouver, Canada
broadcasted in In-cheon through i-TV, South Korea

Defamation of Character; The 'Hidden Card' for Perpetrators of Sexual Violence
—A news documentary (DV, 9min, colour, 2004)
internationally distributed by Video-Out, Vancouver, Canada
broadcasted in In-cheon through i-TV, South Korea

Threat of Murder
—A news documentary (DV, 6min, colour, 2004)
internationally distributed by Video-Out, Vancouver, Canada

43

Sure, I’m Fine!
– A Short Film (DV, 16min, colour,2004)
internationally distributed by Video-Out
exhibiting on Korean Queer web site, HAPPYEBAN and HAPPY2VAN
screened at 2nd Pusan Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
Pusan, South Korea
screened at 6th Korean Queer Culture Festival, Seoul, Korea
screened at Feminist workshop by Taegu Solidarity for women’s Emancipation of Korea,
Taegu, South Korea
screened at 9th Chonju Human Rights Film Festival, Chonju, South Korea
screened at Feminist camp by Solidarity for women’s Emancipation of Korea
Daejeon, South Korea
screened at Benefit by Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights of Korea,
Seoul, South Korea
screened at 4th Rainbow-fish Queer Film Festival’ of Chung-Ang University
Seoul and An-sung campus of Chung-ang University, South Korea

Klein's bottle (First edition) and Draw a line (Second edition)
– Short films (16mm, 10min and 4min, colour,2000)
Screened at An-sung campus of Chung-ang University, South Korea

44

APPENDIX

I
Once Upon A Time…
— The story of my grandmother, Sam-sik Kim

In a dreamlike scene, I am seeing a five year-old girl secretly watching her
grandmother’s early morning prayer.

Before the sun rises, hal-mae (‘grandmother’)

lights the candles in the shrine in her closet. I hear her voice chanting and the soft, low,
and warm sighs in intervals.

The mysterious rituals, in front of her closet shrine, tugged

on my curiosity and walked with me into the unknown.

When I enjoy the dream world,

the joy and pleasure of enchantment from her ambiguous shrine lullabies me at dawn in
the rural neighbourhood of my childhood days with my grandmother.

In the summer of 2008, I made a request to my friend’s mother, Ok-sung Choi, who is
an openly practicing mu-dang, to conduct a small shamanistic ritual calling my
grandmother, Sam-sik Kim. At that point, I was in great suffering caused by the active
stage of my chronic illness, and Jee-ho Lim and Ok-sung Choi suggested to me that I
might get some answers and guidance from my grandmother.

So I asked them to

mediate a small ritual to conjure my grandmother’s voice. Ok-sung Choi channeled my
grandmother, a senior mu-dang and spoke my grandmother’s voice, the voice of a
closeted mu-dang from the ‘world of the dead.’

During the ritual, they channeled my grandmother’s voice and it was extremely angry
and resentful.

The voice pointed to my poor health as a message to the entire family.

She spoke of so many abandoned, hungry ghosts in my patrilineal blood line that I

45

realized she and my family have gone through many sufferings and traumas.

My grandmother’s voice told Ok-sung Choi that she did not want to convert from
Muism to Roman Catholicism as much as she did not want to choose her initiations as a
mu-dang at a young age. However, there was a tacit and forceful consensus in my
patrilineal lineage, and she could not help choosing her religious practices as well as her
life choices and had to follow other family members’ will and wishes. She was
mourning that all of her sacrifices were forgotten. My family has been remembering
memorials for her yet it was not in a way that she wished and wanted to be respected.
My grandmother was chosen and forced to be a mu-dang, and she practiced Muism for
over thirty years.

During three decades and more, her life had been associated with a

family secret, shame, and trauma. In the final stage of her life when most of my family
changed their religion to a more acceptable and desirable one for contemporary life in
Korea, she was made to convert to Roman Catholicism .

She was a person who was

constantly expected to sacrifice, and her sacrifice was taken for granted as her own choice
and will.

My grandmother was a mu-dang whose body-governed spirit was patrilineal –from her
husband’s side (my grandfather’s side) of the family.

The spirit is named Chosang Shin,

an ancestral god that is passed on patrilineally, although manifested and embodied only in
women (Hyun-key Kim, Korean, 116, 144).

In other words, the daughters (like myself),

who were born to the paternal lineage, or more likely wives (like my mother and
grandmother), who married sons in this lineage, can be chosen as a vehicle or a medium,
a mu-dang for the patrilineal ancestral worship and celebration.

Through fragmented

conversations, where I discovered this family secret, I realized that my grandmother was

46

initiated as a mu-dang when she was in her early thirties. She and other relatives told
me that she did not want to be a mu-dang. However, when she lost her last son in an
accident when he was 4 year old, a dramatic loss of family property followed.

She heard

the spiteful ancestral voice saying that the catastrophes were warnings and future
misfortunes would arise if she did not choose to be initiated as a mu-dang.

This

shamanic call was a forceful trauma, not only for my grandmother, but also for my
mother, for me, and the rest of our family.

We, the descendents of this mu-dang lineage

– potential mu-dangs of the future– can be forced and chosen like my grandmother was,
and be told by patriarchal leaders of our communities to sacrifice our freedoms and
lifestyles in order to become a spiritual medium.

I often ask the question: “If there was no stigma associated with being a mu-dang in
Korean culture, would my family appreciate and respect my grandmother’s shaman
identity just as we honoured her Roman Catholic name and identity as Theresa Kim?”
Obviously this question is an attempt to make sense of her closeted shamanhood, and it is
connected to the historical and cultural context of Muism.

Muism is most often confused with Japanese, Chinese, Siberian shamanisms or
shamanistic practices. Certainly, there are similar and shared traits among these many
shamanisms, as these nations and ethnic groups above have exchanged and intermingled
with each other’s historical and cultural origins and variations.

Geographically and

historically, Korea is connected to these influences, and Muism is no exception; however,
it has quite different features from other shamanisms in Asia especially when it comes
into its gender identity context.

47

Siberian shamanism is predominantly performed by male shamans, while Korean
shamans are mostly female.

Muism is considered and has survived as a women’s

domain in the patriarchal system and history of Korea. Therefore, it is reasonable and
necessary to investigate Muism in the context of women’s minority identity, the otherness
or other minority groups’ identities which are often invisible or underrepresented.

For my grandmother’s story, it is necessary to see it interconnected with her doubled
Otherness as a shaman as well as a woman.

In addition, when I open up this ‘personal

Otherness’ to a North American public in which Muism has little or no references and
knowledge, my grandmother’s otherness is complicated by one more layer of otherness –
her Asianness. Therefore my thesis project stems from her personal story, which is
invariably associated with Otherness and a minority group’s identity.

It is my hope that these marginalized or ‘othered’ identities have been well-presented
and practiced with my full respect and attention, as well as that of my audience.
choose to believe that my audience’s open mind will contribute to honouring and
celebrating ‘Others’ through this multi-media ritual performance.

And I

48

APPENDIX II

Listen to the present day
— The story of myself

It starts from a personal attempt to recognize what has been buried— my
grandmother’s identity as a shaman and her stigmatized life story.

This personal attempt

is intertwined with my new identity as a Korean diaspora artist in North America. My
sense of self and citizenship has been accepted not in the mainstream in North America
but as “a special norm” in the specialized cultural ghetto seen as Chinese or Japanese
culture.

In my own cultural experience, many Korean immigrants and international

students around Vancouver are abandoned and ignored in many ways under the larger
nationalities: Chinese or Japanese which have often been appeared as “Asian
Imperialism” in East North Asian history.

That is why, when I met Theresa Hak Kyung

Cha’s reading for the first time, I finally felt that I have an access to the language that
speaks about “myself.” Truly, in the moments of access, I felt “channeled” in certain
mental states to shine through the invisible ghost identity of myself. Her poetic voice
healed the heavy feelings and emotions that I carried deep inside much more than any
other sociopolitical terms in academic texts. It was a call for me to re-originate myself
from the sense of disorientation to the sense of connection, and, since I heard Cha’s voice,
I often use her empowered language to articulate and voice my missing identities and
cultural contexts: the personal and at the same time relational notions of “self” and
“nation.”

However, I had to be concerned with or to be conscious about my emphasis on my

49

nationality as a Korean. In certain contexts, it could sound too nationalistic to be
exclusive to non-Korean people. Also there are many Korean people who I do not
identify myself with such as homophobes, sexists, racists, extreme patriots, or redcomplex neo-liberalist hyper-capitalists in South Korea. Holding my nationality seems
like grabbing a double edged sword with bare hands. I need the sword to guard myself
yet the sword can get another hurt. One point I found myself very split and agonized
with my political agendas without knowing how I could make my language not defensive
but resourceful in order to open up the multi-faceted life experience and culture in the
new land of North America.

The key to get out of the split world inside myself and to heal myself was to go deeply
back to the origins that my political agendas were derived from.

I had to ask myself the

reasons why I have been so voluntarily obsessed with the political enlightenment and
revolutionary changes in societies, cultures, and language system. No one asked or
forced me to tangle up to those heavy political boundaries yet I could not just let them go
away from my life.

In my own contemplations, I found that it started from my personal

experience to be an outsider from many different kinds of mainstream frames. It threaded
from my childhood when I observed that my grandmother was a very popular person in
her village and helped the villagers yet, at the same time she had always been in trouble
with all sorts of dirty things: stigmas, shames, condemnations, abuse, and violence. My
family went through the turmoil and the trauma of “being different”, and the way we
managed this ugly heavy reality was by ignoring the way she lived as much as we could.
As a child, I did not understand what was really happening at that moment and why
things happen that way, but I knew and felt what it feels like to be excluded, ignored,
alienated, and bullied yet not to have language or means to speak out.

The social

50

attentions, empathy, and support, which I, my grandmother, or my family really needed in
my childhood are the real reasons to speak about others who may experience or have
experienced the same thing in their own private lives.
In this context, my idea and motivation to seek the affinity between an artist and a
shaman operates.

In my own interpretation of the world, there are many blocked social

communications, ignorant systematic conformities, and violent realities in many different
social structures and history, and they are born from, practiced, and reinforced by each
human being’s personal and impersonal apathy or indifference.

In addition these

apathies in “sick modern civilizations” gracefully justify its madness through their use of
logic and media.

In my personal philosophy, the structured logic and media in our

civilizations come down into the history and conform “the mainstream language.”

This

type of language programs most “civilized human beings.” The aggressive mainstream
language system certainly lacks and limits the human beings’ innate abilities to make
harmony between nature and culture or to transcend all kinds of linguistic systems in the
mainstream.

When an art becomes a means of awakening and a healing method or

methodology from this kind of systematically manmade madness, that is the spot that I
want to posit my role as an artist and aim for through my art practice. In my analogy, it
is metaphorically paralleled with a shaman’s task to do healing performance and
storytelling to help her clients’ devastating life crisis and disorders in their mind and body.
And, interestingly enough, an artist and a shaman share one more similar thing in their
own language.

They speak through what has been forgotten or concealed in one’s own

mind or societies yet they use different language than conventional one. In fact, most
often, their language has appeared twisted, alienating, or peculiar, yet it shines through
and heals through “the truth”: we are given this body and mind—the internal and external
worlds— to live a certain limited time, we share together many different kinds of

51

activities and meanings of our lives, and we need to learn how the harmonic co-existence
of every different part of existence can be done under the umbrella of compassion and
wisdom.

However, on the surface the connection between an artist and a shaman can be
superficially interpreted to have exotic and psychedelic artifacts in what is seen as an
eccentric practice.

In that point, observing the way of my grandmother’s living taught

me through her presence and absence that the extraordinary transformation is in the
everyday and the ordinary.

As I described in my written thesis, the magic takes place and is embodied within the
small things that we take for granted and are forgetfully buried deep in our internal world.
The desire to seek exotic objects or fantastic external conditions needs to meet with the
internal inquiry of how we perceive, conceptualize, and evaluate all sorts of events and
relationships happening in this world. Also this inquiry should not be a mere intellectual
inquisition but an empathetic journey to bridge the connections between private and
public, between body and mind, and between cognitive and emotional spheres in one’s
own consciousness.

When I was videographing my grandmother, she knew that not much time was left in
her life, and a few weeks of “special attentions” to her is all she could appreciate after
seventy years of long hardship and silence. Yet she chose to be at her place in a rural
area in Korea rather than in a hospital in a metropolitan city, to sustain the ordinary life
she was used to living. She was making her physical functions relying on Morphine that
her doctor prescribed, and her swollen and drugged body was heavy to carry around yet

52

she got up at dawn as she did for her whole life and constantly insisted that she needed to
do daily labour as regularly as she did before she was diagnosed as a terminal cancer
patient.

She prayed for her loved ones in early morning and late night, she made meals

for her granddaughters, and she went to the pepper field with her villagers during the day
time even though she could not take a shower by herself when the painkiller was too low
to make her body function. To me, these kinds of activities seem very trivial compared
to the death and bodily sufferings that she faced. My cousin and I tried to persuade her
that she should drop those trivial activities and treat her last precious moments in a
special way.

However, for my grandmother, life and death are not separated at all so

that none of them needs to be typically specialized in such a way.

She likened life and

death to the air or weather that we always have yet forget. She knew that there was no
need to make a big deal of the existential events of all beings but there was a special need
to be aware of the undifferentiated meanings and values of those taken-for-granted things
in our lives.

Her frugal and humble attitudes and great faith and devotion to simply

being in this world and connected to other people are the magical values that I learned
about how I could be truthful an artist or a shaman.

She did not tell me the lessons but

showed me through the example of the way she lived her life.

I look introspectively

into myself how I have been loudly telling lessons to other people through my political
agendas but haven’t known and practiced much about just being patient and making
things change through examples of my art and life.

The media experiments that I did for

my thesis project are the passage and ritual to be sensitive and open enough to what we
can experience through and learn from our lives.

It is how we exchange those

experiences and meanings in our societies through media mediation that I want to
continue to work.

And, in my very wish, the lessons from my grandmother to be

truthful, empathetic, and patient are alive and embodied in those experiments.

53

APPENDIX III
English Poem
Grandma and Her Healing Hands

Grandma, my grandma,
My mudang grandma,
A closet shaman in rural Korea.
Touching her neighbours with her hands
Healing them through her hands
Through the skin of her hands
Through their skin with her hands
Breathing out toxins, life-forced pain and hurts
Breathing in nutriments, life-giving herbs, tonics, essences
I follow my breath to her hands
Grasping for hope in her life
Letting go of life for death
Hopes to reach for
Loves to long for
In her hands
With her hands
Through her hands
The force of life is flowing through her hands
Life and death
Lightness and depth
life
touch
breathing
of her hands
of my breathing.

54

Korean Poem
약손 할매

할매, 할매, 내 할매
촌구석에 숨죽인
벽장
안
무당
손금을 읽었다던가
병든 사람 만졌다던가
이제는 그 모두가 잊은 세월
이제는 할매 더러 무당이라 부를 이 없고
울 할매 서역만리 황천길 가실제
할매 납골묘에 새긴 이름
무당 할매 아니라 김 데레사 였더니
가신 할매 보고프면
우째 그이 불러보까
무당 할매가
김 데레사가
할매, 우리 할매
어린 내 가슴 보듬던
할매 손은 약손, 할매 손은 약손
약사보살을 모셨던가
할매 손은 약손
우리 할매 손은 약손
아픈 데를 만져주랴
슬픈 데를 쓸어주랴
맺힌 데를 풀어주랴
한/숨을 쉬고
한/숨을 뱉고
숨길 따라 흐르고
손길 따라 흐르던

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그이를
이제는
어이 불러볼까
김 데레사가
무당 할매가
살고 죽는 천지간이
할매 약손 따라 흘러흘러서
이제는 잊혀진 세월이라도
황천 유랑길 할매 따라 돌아돌아서
어느 세월 아린 가슴 우에
살포시
다시 얹어오소
내 할매
약손 할매
우리 할매요

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APPENDIX IV
An ancient Korean poem

공무도하가 (公無渡河歌)
님아, 님아, 내 님아, 그 강 건너지 마오
님아, 님아, 내 님아, 그예 물을 건너시네
아, 강물에 휩쓸려 돌아가시니
아, 가신 님을 내 어이할꼬

Song of the Konghu Zither

(Translation 1)
Love, my love, do not ford that river
For if you do I will be left behind.
Love, my love, do not ford that river, I say,
But you do it anyway.
swept away and drowned!
Love, my lost love, I am left behind
what now can I do?

(Translation 2)
Love, my love, I tried to stay you.
Love, my love, you tried to cross
Love, my love, you were swept away and drowned.
Love, my love, I am all alone.
Stop, love
But you went, love.
Swept away, my love.
And now I am alone.
Stop, love, do not cross.
You went, love, you tried.
The river took you,
Leaving me behind.

(公無渡河)
(公竟渡河)
(墮河而死)
(當奈公河)

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(Translation 3)
Love, my love, ford not that river, forsake me not,
Ford not that river, I say, but you ford it anyway
No, no! Swept away and drowned!
Love, my lost love, I am forsaken—what now?

(Translation 4)
Love, my love, ford not that river
Love, my love, you ford that river
Oh no! Swept away and drowned!
Love, my lost love, what now?
Love, do you really mean to cross that river and leave me all alone?
Love, you are really crossing that river and leaving me all alone.
Oh no, you can’t swim—come back to me!
Love, you’ve gone and drowned, and now I’m all alone.
Love, I told you—told you not to ford that river.
You left me, love—left me when you entered that water.
You left me, love—you were swept away and drowned.
Here I am, love—here I am all alone.

To explain the historical context and significance of this poem in ancient Korean
literature, the following overview of Korean literature from the Encyclopaedia Britannica
is instructive:
From the earliest times, poetry and music have played an important part in the
daily life of the Korean people. This love for song and dance impressed the
ancient Chinese, whose observations are found in their early records. Ancient
Korean songs, closely allied to the religious life of the people, were performed
at such rites as the worship of heaven in the north and the sowing and harvest
festivals in the south. These songs were transmitted orally and were thought to
have magical properties.
Three songs are handed down in Chinese translation: Kuji ka (or Yong

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singun ka; “Song for Welcoming the Gods,” in the Samguk yusa), Hwangjo ka
(17 BC; “Song of Orioles,” in the Samguk sagi), and Kong mudoha ka (or
Konghuin; “A Medley for the Harp,” in the Haedong yoksa). The Kuji ka is
related to the myth of the founding of the Karak state, but it appears to have
been a prayer sung at shamanist rituals. Some have interpreted it as being a
song of seduction sung by women. The Hwangjo ka, attributed to King Yuri,
seems to be a fragment of a love song. The hero of Kong mudoha ka is thought
to have been a shaman who drowned himself while in a trance. Perhaps the
poem indicates the loss of the shaman's efficacy and authority when ancient
Korea was transformed into a structured state. The story also includes other
characters such as the sailor, his wife, and her friend. Another song, the Tosol
ka (AD 28), is mentioned in the Samguk sagi as the beginning of secular poetry,
but the poem itself has not survived.

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APPENDIX V

MEDIA DOCUMENTATION
Graduation Exhibition Photos and Attached DVD