Leymusoom Ssitgimgut

On March 16, 2021, eight people were murdered in a series of mass shootings that occurred across three spas in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent. Leymusoom Ssitgimgut honors the victims and prays that the spirits of the dead may forget all their grudges and are reborn to live their second lives in the Leymusoom digital feminist utopian world.

The work is inspired by how the Korean shaman invites the dead ones to possess the shaman's physical body and enact their life history. When the spirits come, the shamans experience the spirits’ moment of death because it is the latest and strongest memory the spirit has. By expressing the spirits’ death and life histories through their body, the shaman reenacts the spirit’s story and creates healing.

In Leymusoom Ssitgimgut, my 3D avatar goes through eight deaths and each of the eight victims gets their new 3D body. With their 3D bodies, they entered Leymusoom digital feminist utopia where the 3D avatars of me and my female ancestors get along without any burden of patriarchy, misogyny and the limits of time and spaces.

  • Heesoo Kwon
    Director
  • Heesoo Kwon
    Writer
  • Kim Miyoung
    Writer
  • Heesoo Kwon
    Producer
  • Heesoo Kwon
    Key Cast
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    레이무숨 씻김굿
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short, Web / New Media
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes 41 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    March 31, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    100 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    Korea, Republic of
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Heesoo Kwon

Heesoo Kwon is a visual artist and anthropologist from South Korea currently based in the Bay Area, California. Kwon initiated an autobiographical feminist religion, Leymusoom, in 2017, which mines the depths of personal cosmologies and Korean shamanism to sculpt a virtual confessional space of deep introspection.

Kwon received her Masters of Fine Art from UC Berkeley in 2019. Her work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at Et Al and Studio 2W, San Francisco, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Berkeley and CICA Museum and Visual Space Gunmulsai, South Korea. She has participated in group exhibitions at the CICA Museum; BAMPFA, Berkeley; 47 Canal, New York; Slash Gallery, San Francisco; SOMArts, San Francisco; and Site gallery, Sheffield, UK, among others. In 2012 Kwon received the Female Inventor of the Year Award from the Korean Intellectual Property Office. Her other accolades include the Young Korean Artist Award from the CICA Museum, the finalist of the 20th Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival, the 2021 Sheffield DocFest Arts Programme, and the Roselyn Schneider Eisner Prize for Photos and Art Practice from UC Berkeley.

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Director Statement

Beginning in 2017 I created Leymusoom, an autobiographical feminist religion founded on the idea of building a digital feminist utopia with 3D virtual avatars of my female ancestors where they can live second lives without the burdens of misogyny or patriarchy. Through the generation of videos, images, games, and digital landscapes, I am building an ever-growing interactive archive as a form of religious ritual that both records the life stories of my ancestors and allows them to live in reimagined ways.