”UMMA-YA“, premiered in 2021, is one of the most striking works by the Brooklyn-based artist yuniya edi kwon. As in much of her work, the 35-year-old weaves instrument, voice and body into a seamless whole, drawing on the deep spiritual currents of Korean shamanic traditions and tonalities, interwoven with American experimental music. Through her interdisciplinary practice and cross-artist/cross-cultures collaborations, kwon blurs the boundaries between music, dance, theatre and ritual – embracing the fluidity of transition to forge entirely new forms of expression. At its core, kwon’s work is a deeply personal yet universal exploration of identity, transgender visibility, and cultural traditions.

On a crisp, clear morning, yuniya edi kwon sits in her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment in Brooklyn and speaks in a soft, deliberate tone about her instrument, the violin: „It’s the longest relationship I’ve had in my life”, kwon says. „I’ve spent more or less every day since I was probably 14 with this object pressed against my body and my heart and the two of us resonating together. In a way, I’ve grown up and grown with this instrument, and it’s been a companion and a partner, and more than that, it’s been a kind of extension of my mind and my spirit.“ What she loves most about the violin? „I love how complicated it is and how much baggage it has. I love that it’s impossible to look at the violin and not see or feel, at least in some part, the hundreds of years of culture, context and history. And at the same time, it’s an instrument that allows you to search for new things as well.”

Two Parallel Paths

yuniya edi kwon began taking violin lessons at the age of ten, initially to follow in the footsteps of her older sister. At the same time as studying Western European classical chamber and orchestral music, kwon was also playing in punk bands. „I was a young Asian-American queer kid growing up in the Midwest. There was a lot of angst and, you know, me trying to make sense of my experience, and the ways in which I felt misunderstood”, she says.

kwon is a second-generation Korean-American. Her parents moved to Minnesota in the 1980s. „For a long time, those paths, the energetic release and catharsis of punk and my education as a violinist, were parallel, and they never really touched or spoke to one another.”

It was at the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in Ohio, in her early twenties, that she first encountered artists from a variety of disciplines. Through these new encounters and collaborations, kwon began to broaden the scope of her own practice as a violinist. She studied jazz and improvised music, and began singing and composing for various ensembles. „It was through playing with the art ensembles and really experiencing firsthand what it meant to move beyond genre categorisation and instead connect to a real-time compositional approach, that connected and was like a conduit for many, many, many different kinds of lineages”, says kwon. A key source of inspiration for kwon was the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Chicago-based collective that has played a pivotal role in shaping American experimentalism and free jazz since the 1960s.

“Butoh cracked me open“

As yuniya edi kwon continued to expand her musical practice, another parallel path began to emerge – one that would become central to her artistic vision: movement and dance, ritual and ceremony. As a young person, she hadn’t really had many opportunities to explore dance and movement. „Most of the physical embodied activities that I was encouraged to do were sports. But I always kind of knew that I was a dancer whether or not I knew how to dance.” But then kwon discovered the Japanese dance theatre Butoh. „The first YouTube video of a butoh performance I saw was by a legendary dance group called Sankai Juku. And it just cracked me open. What I saw was so devastatingly beautiful and at the same time grotesque, horrific, sensual, playful, ecstatic, but also deeply spiritual and connected to the earth. These artists were embodying and becoming these energies, creatures and effervescent wisps that I had never seen or experienced before. They seemed to move their bodies in ways that felt so subversive. It really freed my mind and gave me permission to also move my body and to become and allow myself to be a channel or a vessel for different energies.”

Alongside this, she has immersed into a renewed reflection on her Korean roots. „I think my relationship to Korean-ness has been a bit fraught at times and complex at others. Growing up in the Midwest there was very little of my biological family and my exposure to Korean traditional instruments and performances was quite limited. And even later, as I came more into my queerness and transness, the idea of Korean lineage and ancestry felt inaccessible to me.”

The Fluidity of Korean Shamans

This changed when kwon discovered the remarkable history of queer and transgender shamans in early 20th-century Korea. After moving to New York in 2021, she wove these artistic threads together in her work ”UMMA-YA“. Created as part of her Van Lier Fellowship at Roulette New York, ”UMMA-YA“ was her first major solo performance, bringing together diverse practices: music, violin and improvisation with dance and movement inspired by Butoh dance theatre and the rituals of Korean shamans, all infused with her own autobiographical narratives.

What particularly fascinates kwon in her artistic practice are the cultural continuities of queer and trans communities worldwide. For her, connections can be drawn from the transgender shamans of Korea to the present day.

Shamans, as intermediaries between the living and a rich pantheon of gods and ancestors, have long played an important spiritual and cultural role. In a tradition that goes back thousands of years, the mudangs – Korean shamans – were primarily women, but there were also baksu mudang, a gender-fluid type of shaman in which men took on female roles and performed rituals. This early form of trans identity in Korea parallels the hijras of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as the two-spirits of Native North American cultures. During the Japanese military occupation of Korea, mudangs held a unique position, bridging different social classes. On the one hand, they served the Japanese occupying elite, working as entertainers, performing ceremonies for special occasions, and practising various birth rituals. At the same time, they served as healers and spiritual figures for the local Korean communities.

kwon: „Because of their fluidity they were able to be everything to many different groups. They were revered and also hated and despised and marginalised and fetishised and all these things that, you know, when we look at how queer and trans people are viewed and engaged with today, all around the world, I see such a distillation of that experience.” The discovery of Korean shamans provided kwon with an unexpected way to connect with her heritage. „It’s this kind of spiritual ancestry that can include, support and embrace me, creating affirming, inclusive lineages and rejecting limiting, cis-hetero-patriarchal ideas of bloodlines and biological ancestry.” In her work, yuniya edi kwon attempts to create a space in which she can honour the forms and traditions of shamans while refracting them through her own experience as a second-generation Korean-American in New York.

All That Remains of Us: A Silver Shining Pearl

The piece yuniya edi kwon will bring to Monheim is tentatively titled ”silver through the grass like nothing“. It’s a work she’s been developing for some time, and after her solo performances in Monheim it will be presented with six musicians: Darian Donovan Thomas (violin), Joanna Mattrey (viola), Tomeka Reid (cello), Henry Fraser (bass), Dudù Kouate and Nava Dunkelman (both percussion).

”silver through the grass like nothing“ draws on the traditions of experimental music theatre and centuries-old ritual practices. kwon interweaves two central themes: on the one hand, she refers to the phenomenon of Śarīra: In Buddhism, Śarīra refers to relics, typically small pearls or crystal-like spheres, believed to remain in the ashes of deceased Buddhist masters. These relics are revered in several Buddhist traditions and are believed to have special healing powers. „These silver opalescent pearl-like objects are thought to be a distillation of someone’s teachings and wisdom and essence”, explains kwon. Her performance combines the tradition of pearl relics with a deeply personal story of suffering: since 2020, kwon has been afflicted by sudden, sibylline illnesses. „These mysterious illnesses temporarily disable me. Once I was unable to walk for six months. Another time I lost my eyesight for a while.” All the while, kwon endured medical trauma. She was neglected and not taken seriously. Doctors were unable to identify the cause or find a treatment for her symptoms, leaving her to face the ordeal on her own. „It was only through learning about the pearl relics that I started to make sense of these events. I began to think of this process of becoming a pearl as something that perhaps everyone has a relationship with, and not just those who are revered as spiritual masters, but that everyone is kind of in this process of creating something that they can leave behind to stay close to the people that they love. So, for me the pearl became this symbol or embodiment of the deep longing of the spirit to stay close to their loved ones.” From these reflections emerged ”silver through the grass like nothing“, a meditation on illness, grief and the body’s inexorable pull towards transformation. „The piece is a kind of created mythology using these elements: it’s a dialogue between the body and the mind as they merge into one pearl.”

”silver through the grass like nothing“ is conceived as an immersive soundscape, where voices flow into one another and conjured spirits emerge, with kwon acting as both messenger and message The ensemble mixes freely improvised and composed sections, navigating various ritual elements, while kwon sings and tells stories in Korean.

The Freedom of Collaboration

In addition to this new performance, kwon has collaborated with a wide range of artists and ensembles in recent years, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Du Yun, Tomeka Reid, Kenneth Tam, and Moor Mother. Along with abstract artist and performer Senga Nengudi and Degenerate Art Ensemble members Haruko Crow Nishimura and Joshua Kohl, Kwon is part of the collective Juni One Set. „The name Juni One Set was a nod to our cultural backgrounds as well as the kind of long-distance quality of our relationship because we’re all in different parts of the country. When we were working on pieces, we would usually have zoom calls at 12 o’clock west coast time, one o’clock mountain time, and three o’clock New York time, where I was. Juni means 12 in Japanese. One is one in English, and Set is three in Korean.” On stage in 2021, Juni One Set debuted ”Boy mother / faceless bloom“, an interdisciplinary performance that blends mythology and autobiography, drawing on diverse traditions of queer and anti-colonial artistic practices. Dance, music, poetry, ritual and sculptural installation converge in this work. kwon and Haruko Crow Nishimura engage in an interactive dance, creating a wordless dialogue that tells a story of transformation and transgression.

Collaborative improvisation is a recurring theme in yuniya edi kwon’s artistic practice. „I love collaborating with other artists and I take the responsibility and the privilege of bringing artists together for a project very seriously. For me, the most important thing is our shared human experience together. So, I want to do everything that I can to ensure that each individual has what they need in order to feel free and access their wild creativity.”

As well as being part of Juni One Set, kwon is also involved in tombstar, a free improvised music collective with Isabel Crespo Pardo (vocals), Lesley Mok (drums) and Zekkereya El-Magharbel (trombone). In 2023, she co-founded the sound and performance collective SUN HAN GUILD with composers and improvisers Laura Cocks, Jessie Cox, DoYeon Kim and Lester St. Louis. She is also currently collaborating with her partner, musician Holland Andrews, on the experimental opera ”How does it feel to look at nothing“, which, like much of her work, combines composition, improvisation, dance, theatre, and ritual to explore transitional states.

Whatever yuniya edi kwon is working on, one thing is certain: „I’m less interested in composing with a capital C, where I like to have this perfect vision and create this perfect score, which is then perfectly executed. I want the object of the work itself to be a partner in my life. It’s a dialectical process: the work feeds me, and I feed it, and we sort of grow together in this spiral.”

yuniya edi kwon’s art is as unpredictable as life itself.