This project explores the conflict between fear and prejudice surrounding Korean shamanism and a longing for European culture through drawing, collage, textile, wearable soft sculpture and film. It begins with distorted perceptions of shamanism shaped by the media and the artist’s own memories of participating in a gut, a Korean shamanic ritual.
The project compares the ritual progression of gut with the dramatic structure of Western music theatre. Although the two forms share similar structures, the artist experienced gut through discomfort and fear, but Western music theatre through fascination and longing. This emotional divide reveals an internalised perspective that regards the artist’s own cultural roots as unfamiliar and threatening while idealising Western culture.
This conflict is visualised through the combination of contrasting pictorial languages and materials. Western aesthetics and traditional Korean visual languages are filtered through the artist’s subjective interpretation, emerging as hybrid forms in which beauty, discomfort and the grotesque become entangled.
A wall-mounted sculptural textile and two wearable soft sculptures function as surrogates for identity and the body, revealing a body suspended between fear and longing, discomfort and awe. Through grotesque aesthetics, the project questions both cultural prejudice and the blind idealisation of Western culture, making visible a process of critically reconsidering the artist’s own roots and desires.