K-COSMOSIS 2023 

Media:  suspending sacred textiles, hybrid altar, large-scale projection, experimental 3d animation, procedurally-generated particle simulation 

K-COSMOSIS explores the blended nature of cosmologies within Korean metaphysics. Weaving an intricate tale of relationality, the piece brings together multiple narratives across time and space, celebrating a multifaceted understanding of history, identity, ideology, and mythology. 

Tracing the history of spiritual and ideological practices within Korean contexts, the piece moves from ancient animism and shamanism to Buddhism, Confucianism, and finally Christianity, contemplating how belief systems have adapted to modernization, urbanization, and the rise of industrial capitalism. In exploring the narratives that come to shape our reality, the animation focuses on process—how ideas pass through one another, how they merge, and how something new emerges through hybridization. 

Using particle simulation as both a visual and conceptual method, K-COSMOSIS expresses this ongoing process of mixing, where identities and belief systems are never static but always in motion. Viewers experience the synthesis of a divided yet intra-related universe, where perceived boundaries are blurred, and things and thoughts are not independently formed but emerged out of entanglement with a plurality of others. 

Informed by the Feminist and Queer philosophies of quantum physics, the piece uses procedurally generated particle systems to imagine the world through an ongoing blending. The piece envisions the world through osmosis rather than duality, reimagining identity as ever-shifting and inter-constitutive.

Where boundaries between ideologies and identities are rigidly drawn, K-COSMOSIS subverts these divides, highlighting the inherent relationality and inter-subjective nature of our reality. Viewers experience thought and matter as non-linear and inter-constitutive, where multiple dimensions of meaning haunt one another to construct the fictions and frameworks that dictate our experience of reality.