Artist Statement
How do we reconcile with the ghosts of our past and envision a livable future in a world that keeps ending? Invoking Korean shamanic rituals and folk mythologies, my work summons the forces and agents that have shaped intergenerational pain and resilience in a speculative space. In that space, I cast haunting images and voices like potent spells. Animate objects, unnamed heroines, hungry spirits, and mythical beings are called upon in allegorical narratives and magical arrangements to summon a vision of fantastic fissures in patriarchal, colonial, and materialist oppressions. Together, my work attempts to counter-conjure a palpable presence of what has been repressed and erased from the dominant social consciousness. Working primarily in installation and research-based forms of inquiry, my practice approaches narratives, places, and bodies through a mode of listening—sometimes literal, often figurative—rather than through representation. In the absence of illustrative explanation, spectral presences arrive as vapor, superimposed images, ritual traces, and sonic resonance.
Biography
Yunjin La-mei Woo is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work engages contagion, haunting, and spiritual mediation through installation, sound, video, performance, and writing. Her practice explores how histories of gendered labor, colonial violence, and inherited stigma shape human and beyond-human relationality by tracing images of the infectious, insane, or supernatural. Holding the fantastic and the mundane as intertwined, she pays special attention to the everyday as a politically charged site where dominant ideology is not only affectively felt but also infected by visions of alterity and unruly presence. In this inquiry, she approaches mediation, divination, and possession not as deviations from the norm but as other ways of knowing and sensing the world.
Woo received her MFA in Sculpture from Seoul National University and her PhD in Communication and Culture from Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation, Conjuring Unruly Subjects: Allegories of Haunting, Mothering, and Mediating, is a creative autoethnography that explores the stigmatized practice of female mediumship in both its supernatural and ordinary forms through haunting narratives and images of transgenerational trauma and historical violence. Her creative work and writing have been exhibited, screened, and published nationally and internationally. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Fine Art at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she teaches visual art and research-based creative practice.
Lineage Biography
I was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1984 to the third daughter of a woman who birthed nine daughters in the hope of finally having a son. My grandmother—who was born into the period of Japanese Occupation and survived WWII, the Korean War, and subsequent military regimes—was initiated as a mudang, a Korean shamanic priest and ritual healer, after fulfilling the expectations of continuing the patriarchal family line. While her husband was often away for long stretches working in colonial gold mines under Japanese rule, she gathered crabs and seaweed from the shoreline and took in needlework to feed their children, work she carried out until she was initiated as a mudang in response to a prolonged period of sinbyeong—a shamanic illness understood as a calling.
Coupled with misogyny toward female spiritual leadership, the stigma of premodern superstition attached to her work was enough to make our maternal family feel secretly stained and contaminating to others. Although it was her mudang work that provided for her younger children, it was something we didn’t talk about even amongst ourselves—as though, if we did, we would be exorcised and shunned for failing to embody the ideals of the supposedly enlightened modern Korea we were expected to inhabit. It is commonly believed that a mudang’s work is inherited by her spiritually chosen descendant through the maternal line, but the popular discourse around it also implies the possibility of “catching” it through close proximity, as if it were a contagious disease that would pull you down into purported moral wickedness and a lower-class status. This sense of secrecy, along with an affinity with the invisible that I grew up with, has profoundly shaped my creative and intellectual inquiries into the unspeakable to this day.
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