QUEER|ART|PRIZE 2021 RECENT WORK FINALIST

Leymusoom Universe (2021) by Heesoo Kwon

Heesoo Kwon is a visual artist and anthropologist from South Korea and is currently based in the Bay Area, California. Kwon received her Masters of Fine Art from UC Berkeley in 2019. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions 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; Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco; Slash Gallery, 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, finalist in the 20th Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival, finalist of the Sheffield DocFest Arts Programme, and the Roselyn Schneider Eisner Prize for Photos and Art Practice from UC Berkeley.

Leymusoom Universe (2021)

Leymusoom Universe is a digital archive and a feminist utopia, reincarnating Kwon’s female ancestors’ lives and Leymusoom communal spaces without constraints of time and space. Leymusoom, an autobiographical feminist religion initiated by Kwon in 2017, is as an ever-evolving exploration of her family histories and feminist liberation through 3D animated videos and interactive games of real and imagined worlds, populated by avatars of her female ancestors, living in 3D environments from actual locations or spaces from her life and family history. The digitized places where Kwon and and her family’s memories are embedded become portals for hyperspace travel, inviting the users to explore memories and her envisioned utopian world. Learn more here.