I conducted the following interview with two of the participating artists in the Song of the Wind project by email in September 2024. The artists are Joshua Ezekiel (AKA Zeke) Sales, Filipino community artist and activist, still at an early stage of his career, and Yeongran Suh, an experienced choreographer and practice-based researcher engaged in anthropological inquiry, working between Seoul, South Korea, and Copenhagen, Denmark. Their reflections speak to the values of this experimental project and those of its director, Sunyoung Oh, who aimed to bring together a wide range of creative thinkers, including visual artists, architects, ecological activists and researchers with residents and migrant workers on Yaksan Island to address the social and ecological issues of the locality. As well as offering insights into their individual practices, Zeke and Yeongran provide examples of how their responses to the unique circumstances created by Song of the Wind encouraged them to extend their thinking through dialogue with others, embrace risk, find the courage to engage in spontaneous acts of collaboration and elicit the participation of others. 

Zeke Sales was one of the project’s six non-Korean artists-in-residence recruited through an open call that attracted around two hundred applications. The rigorous selection process he faced aimed to identify participants with relevant ecological perspectives and a wide spectrum of previous experiences of social engagement. The interview primarily explores the themes of Zeke’s performance series and his collaboration with Yeongran, but during his residency in Yaksan-myeon, he also collaborated on a postcard project led by Portuguese architect and researcher Daniel Duarte Pereira, which involved another artist-in-residence, Thai urban planner and photographer, Wan Chantavilasvong.  For this, Zeke engaged with Filipino migrant workers who were temporarily resident on a nearby island, helping them translate their experiences into visual and written narratives. The postcard project also involved village elders and local schoolchildren, enabling them to share their thoughts on life in Yaksan with friends and family in other regions and abroad, inviting reciprocal exchange.

Yeongran Suh was among a number of Korean artists invited by Sunyoung Oh to participate in Song of the Wind. The pair had previously worked together on two earlier projects: Critical Reading: Functional Dissonance (2020–21),¹ where Yeongran was a key contributor to its online forums of discussion, and Look Who’s Talking (2022–23),² a website promoting the idea of the social role of art and artists. For this, she teamed up with climate researcher Thore Jürgensen, to instigate conversations with politicians and environmental activists exploring the positive and negative aspects of atomic energy.  

Yeongran conducted a preliminary visit to Wando in 2022, during which she was able to explore the project’s direction and its local context. Although she was ultimately unable to commit to the full duration of the Wando residency, she returned in 2023 to collaborate with Zeke in the final phase of his performance series.

Tessa Peters: How would you describe your creative practice and approach?

Zeke Sales: I always ask myself: How can I become as close as possible to a particular place and share my research with its community in a specific moment? And rather than seeking answers or conclusions, how can I devise and share pertinent questions? My research results in both embodying a sense of place and embedding the body into a place; it includes merging deep time manifestations of the landscape with local life and individual microhistories. 

As a self-taught gardener, many of the materials I assemble for a performance are informed by ecological understandings arising from my work with different agricultural communities. Before I started working in performance art, my research interests already involved food systems, housing and the methodology of counter-mapping,³ but I’ve become increasingly interested in embodied ways of knowing. I started to garden during the lockdown and find it similarly choreographic to performance art; it’s also an activity that takes place within a spatially fixed or limited setting. My involvement with the land brought nonhuman social contact. It gave me a different outlook and – even more than my engagement with urban farming – it has drawn me into a deep and humbling experience of learning with the mountains, rivers and various farming communities in the Philippines. 

I recently conducted a workshop with colleagues from the Participatory Food Systems network, including Gatari Surya Kusma,⁴ at the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS 13, 2024) in Indonesia.⁵ Participants were encouraged to ground themselves with the question of what soil is for them, personally and geologically, and to consider how they relate to the soil in the place they are from, or through what they do in their respective disciplines as a way of mapping. The participants were advised to find a place in the venue – an abandoned house in a village – and to work with the space using elemental matter from the village (e.g. water, plants, silt) to mediate their insights for negotiating territories from a de-facto porousness. People demarcated their spaces, installing mini monuments, creating performances, and explored the spaces of others sharing their thoughts, and it was necessary for me to let go of my role as facilitator and mapper in order to respond to the situation more freely. The workshop also turned out to be an embodied mapping workshop, with the map traced at the site by participants whose bodily imprints remained in the venue as a trace. In its essence, the map represented more than just the record of an event: it was a structure, something unfinished, a trajectory for collaborative research or a collective reflection of experience. Similarly, the Amihan Performance Series that I conceived of during the Song of the Wind residency in South Korea last year had this elasticity of an open or unfinished end.

Yeongran Suh: My creative practice begins with preliminary research: identifying and reading relevant texts, along with ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. Based on the research, I will either write up or develop the findings into performance works. In the case of the latter, the research is used to design the direction and methodology of the performance and to conduct physical and relational experiments with performers in the studio. I also share the research materials and artistic process with the audience in open workshops, using collective reading and writing, meditation and movement. 

A work carried out this way was titled Co-Weaving, on the Cracks of Concrete, July 2024,⁶which was supported by Seoul Art and Culture Foundation. For this, my inspiration came from reading about the current unequal distribution of elder and family care, and from attending conferences relating to both the climate and care crises over the past few years. These have been the nutrients for thinking about this work and forming its artistic methodology. In addition to physical experiments in the studio with collaborating performers, our team held open workshops on ‘Collective Reading’, ‘Practice Sharing’, and ‘Performance Space Design’. We discussed the topic with the audience and colleagues and reflected on how it affects our lives.  We found that those who participated in the workshop gained a deeper understanding of the related performance, and this resulted in further discussions relating to the themes raised by the work.

TP: Is it important to you that your work creates situations of interaction with active participants or collaborators? Or is it enough to provoke thought? 

YS: In my past works, I’ve mainly obtained information from interviewees through participatory observation and interviews, or I’ve drawn on established social relationships. However, in this type of ethnography, it’s not easy to compensate occasional participants or to maintain long-term relationships, and I had ethical concerns. I have therefore tried to refer to or learn from anthropological methodologies. 

When working with the climate performance activism collective, Becoming Species,⁷ we held many workshops to share our practices with others. Through that experience, we were able to strengthen our methodology and learn from new encounters with multiple actors. This also influenced my personal work, and I hope that meetings with the audience through workshops will spread related social discussions and ideas more widely, like a ‘movement’ or ‘wind.’ In addition, the workshop format has somewhat resolved the concerns of past ethnographic research methods by positioning the audience as collaborative researchers and dialogue partners within the piece. I share the collected materials and methods with the audience as a gift, and the audience indirectly affects the outcome of the work. I want to interact with the audience and learn and grow together continuously. I hope to make social change with the audience by creating a performance as a result of our work together and by sharing the process of creation. To this end, I also hope to create solidarity with groups that engage in a movement related to the theme of my work, such as environmental groups or women’s rights groups. For example, in my last work, I invited an ecological research group and a feminist research group, to which I had previously contributed articles or participated in studies, to workshops and performances.

ZS: I try to dispel the notion of an audience. I think there are more possibilities when people are engaged as more than spectators of a performance. I often distribute musical instruments or objects that make a sound, and I signal to people to create a score or atmosphere as part of a performance. This brings a field of what I think of as ‘entrainment’ to the space, allowing bodies to sync with and respond to the rhythms of their surroundings. For me it is an invitation to collaborate, to open up to and flow with the performance that is taking place, to elicit the sensory feeling of embodied movement before cerebrally engaging with what the performance is about. 

Before a performance, I immerse myself in local life and the landscape. As most of my performances are improvised, for me, this is a way of integrating myself and my body with a place through local elements such as the food, the air, even by playing sports, and this transmutes into rehearsing for the performance itself. 

During the Song of the Wind residency, I was paired up with musicians from the village who sing in traditional Pansori. Villagers also lent me instruments for me to practice with, and I learned a few songs that I was listening to before arriving in Yaksan-myeon. These were songs from the folk and psychedelic era of Korean music when its population was going through turbulent times, dating from the anti-dictatorship and social movements of the ‘70s and ‘80s. When I played some of these songs at social gatherings in the neighbourhood, people would be surprised to find I knew the song. Of course, I could not sing it in the Korean language, but I would say that this probably brought an atmosphere of nostalgia. It was significant to hear the local elders sing with their hearts and for me to let the strings reverberate in people’s homes.

The first performance that launched the Amihan Performance Series took place on the rooftop of the residency house. The name Amihan refers to the Filipino mythological goddess of the northeastern Monsoon that blows from November to March, bringing the cold winds from Siberia via Korea and then down to the Philippines. I assembled glass bottles, collected from nightly dinners over which the artists-in-residence regularly engaged in discussions for three hours or more. The bottles were tuned in a pelog scale to incorporate Southeast Asian gong-chime music like the kulintang together with the buk and janggu drums of Korea played by my fellow residents during the performance. This first performance was titled Over Half-a-Century Salvage, commemorating the 51st anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law in the Philippines. 

Over the course of the residency, I’d been tending the front garden of the residency house: watering, weeding and composting with kitchen waste and seaweed. My horticultural interests also extended to gathering macroalgae and forest material, such as the pervasive vine of chik (also known as kudzu) for my art practice. In the performance, the harvested vines were arranged around the village megaphone⁸ on the rooftop. The performance was mainly about sporing thoughts and feelings from what the Amihan Performance Series would be about, namely foregrounding memories of colonialism and national trauma shared by Korea and the Philippines. During periods of dictatorship in the 20th-century, in both South Korea and the Philippines, forest cover dwindled at a significant rate, brought about by aggressive modernisation schemes in the guise of strongman techno-politics. The performance aimed to evoke this memory and to commemorate the forests and people who had been ‘disappeared’ by the state (referred to as ‘salvaged’ in the Philippines) during militarist times. Most of the materials used in the performance were indeed salvaged.

The last of the performance series, titled Samunsan, took place at the summit and viewing deck of Samun Mountain on Yaksan island, and in collaboration with Yeongran Suh. This was a retelling of the myth of Princess Bari, in which the peasant ghost that lurks throughout the Pacific theatre’s colonial and postcolonial history seeks the healing elixir in the wilderness. The action took the form of a procession that moved southwards to the viewing deck of the mountain, facing the sea and other nearby islands. Because of its proximity to Jeju Island, we offered seeds to Yeongdeung Halmang, goddess of the sea and wind, to petition for earthly healing and liberation – from the personal to the planetary.

The scope of both performances was formed in the reading time I had during the residency. Certain thinkers, such as theologian Chung Hyun Kyung (1991) on Korean Shamanism, academic Paul Hutchcroft (2013) on periods of dictatorship of in the two countries, and Korean-Danish artist Jane Jin Kaisen on mythologies (Dzierżyc-Horniak 2024) became formative to my understanding for the performances. 

TP: What was your initial reaction to being invited to participate in Song of the Wind by Sunyoung Oh? And what were your hopes for the project?

YS: My initial reaction was excitement. I think it is a relevant and necessary project at the moment. I was very interested in its themes of local islands, seaweed, people living on the islands, social participation and ecological issues. I thought of people around me who were already researching topics that overlapped with Song of the Wind and wanted to introduce them. This is one of the characteristics of participating in curator Sunyoung’s projects – connecting people with similar interests and expanding networks. I tried to connect with and introduce scholars who study the influence of seaweed in Denmark or human ecology researchers who study the impact of geoengineering technology on the ocean. One of those attempts was successful with Kristina Grünenberg, an anthropologist who researches the lives of elderly people on Aero Island in Denmark. I was an artistic researcher in her project on day and night care services for the elderly in the city of Jinju, South Korea. Since Wando has a large elderly population living alone, we thought Wando could be a great parallel case study for our existing research. I hoped to learn more about the elders’ lives there and how they were intertwined with the sea and seaweed farming. Sunyoung invited us to conduct pre-research field work in October 2022, and the experience was even greater than I expected. We visited Yaksan-do, met elderly ladies in the community centre, and listened to their life stories intertwined with the sea as a common resource, seaweed farming and the village community.⁹ It was beautiful and inspiring. 

ZS: Participating in Song of the Wind was such a profound experience for me. The proposal I submitted for the project was research-oriented and focused on seaweed and marine cultures. I was doing fieldwork about extractive tourism¹⁰ and farming on the island of Palawan in the Philippines when I received the email inviting me to an interview. I quickly arranged a place where I could get stable internet and jump on the call. As I had been involved in volunteer work learning about farming communities, I was eager to experience this in the residency with seaweed farmers and expressed my enthusiasm; the questions I was asked were mostly research-oriented as well. I had grown up and spent most of my life in the city and had only recently started immersing myself in rural areas. For me, the sea was uncharted territory, but I recognised the residency as a vital start in surrounding myself with people doing related work.

TP: What was your approach to collaborating for your Song of the Wind performance? 

YS: Our collaboration had three phases, and I had three different approaches or roles. We were first introduced by Sunyoung by email and then Zeke and I had an online meeting. When I first replied and attended the meeting, I did so as a Korean artist colleague who shares a similar interest in Korean shamanism and traditional performing arts. I wanted to share my knowledge and experience in the field from my previous research.

I later found that Zeke had already undertaken deep and broad historical research about Korea regarding socialism, social movements and mythology. He also introduced his idea of creating a performance in Yaksan-do as an outcome of his one-month residency. During that (second) phase, I was a listener or dialogue partner for his performance ideas, which had multiple layers of mythological, symbolic and historical meaning and metaphor. It was a pleasure to see Korean history and mythology from his perspective and to see how he connects it with his traditions and stories in the Philippines.

In the third phase, we met physically in Yaksan-do. At that time, I was a collaborative performer in the project. I tried to absorb and understand his thoughts and the structure of the performance; I was able to interpret it in my own way and improvised myself into the scenes. 

My brief collaboration with Zeke allowed me to see aspects of what was for me familiar Korean mythology from different perspectives and coincidentally reinforced my interpretation of aging. 

ZS: I’d first encountered Yeongran’s work in the text Critical Reading: Functional Dissonance, published by Project 7 ½. Her fascinating chapter was about traditional agriculture, dance and matriarchal wisdom in Korea and the Malay region. Before the residency in Yaksan, I was already looking at the vital role of Korean Shamanism in resisting the amnesia brought about by modernisation processes, and reading about rituals such as the gut, which incorporates music, dance and food in such colourful fashion. Since I would be staying in rural South Korea for a month, I knew I would encounter these ideas, whether as a subject, spirit or maybe in a living person. From looking at other examples of Yeongran’s work, I discovered that she is also an activist, choreographer and performance artist. I messaged Sunyoung to say I would be interested in engaging with her research, and she told me that, coincidentally, Yeongran would be back in Korea from Denmark during the period of the residency, and so the stars appeared to be aligning for us to collaborate. 

Working with a modality of performance that is place-based, drawing on my gardening and agricultural experiences, offered fertile ground to look into cultural aspects of Korean shamanism. The performance also intended to express a s/pacific¹¹ historiography of displacement from North to Southeast Asia brought about by colonial forces; these ideas were embodied in my role of a dispossessed wartime ghost. The performance collaboration with Yeongran created a dialogue between the Korean shamanic myth of Princess Bari, the bird-like deity Amihan of Philippine mythology and Yeongdeung Halmang, the Korean goddess of the wind and sea. The first is a story of banishment from the royal family, with Princess Bari rejuvenating in the wilderness to discover an elixir to heal the world and those who banished her; while Yeongdeung Halmang is the goddess of spring and sustainer of all creation in Jeju. At the top of the mountain, we faced southwards – representing the winds of Amihan blowing from Yaksan to Jeju and going south to the Philippines. In the performance, Yeongran played Princess Bari emerging from the wilderness, me a peasant ghost, and everyone with us in the mountain – including the lichens, seaweeds and other species – experienced the drumming, singing, walking while tracing the sun’s arc.

Before the performance, we were both excited about how things might go. Yeongran had never been to this site before, so I only shared pictures when we were developing ideas for the performance. The performance resembled a gut, a ceremony which included seaweed and foodstuffs. It was my first time seeing Yeongran perform as well, and I was amazed by her spectacular gracefulness throughout. Before the performance, my sandals gave their last breath. I think it was the agency of the land that brought this final suggestion for me to traverse through the thorny weeds and complement the gut with the aspect of pain. Everyone shared invaluable reflections at the end of the performance.

TP: What challenges did this collaboration raise for you?

YS: The fundamental challenge for me had been to figure out how to participate in the Song of the Wind project as a parent-artist, and this collaboration was a way to solve the problem. At first, I couldn’t be in Yaksan physically due to the fact that I’m a mother who has to travel with my kid. The Korean bureaucracy has concerns about artists travelling with families who are involved in public projects supported by government funding for fear of the danger of corruption. 

At the same time, I wasn’t confident about taking up a one-month residency with my son in a new context without extra carers. So, I thought it was impossible to participate in the project. But thanks to this unexpected invitation by Sunyoung and Zeke, I had the chance to participate in a more spontaneous way. All three artists-in-residence at the time and curator Sunyoung understood that I would be there with my son. Without their support, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to join for the two days that I did.

ZS: I felt a little intimidated knowing that I had the opportunity to collaborate with Yeongran, who is a well-known choreographer with in-depth knowledge of Korean traditions, but of course, I was also really excited about the opportunity. In collaborating with Yeongran, I was fortunate to have someone who would bring criticality to my ideas and who could supplement my limited knowledge of Korean traditions. 

There were a few uncertainties about how to go about things on the day of the performance. There could only be one attempt, without any rehearsal, and since it was being filmed, we knew the only option would be to keep things moving. Neither were we able to spend time with the cinematographer prior to the performance, and so I couldn’t explain to him how the performance might go: which parts were important, etc. I’d not previously thought of directing the documentation of my performances; I’d always accepted the practice of people randomly documenting using their phones. What actually took place happened by chance, I even bumped to Jaehoon Choi, the camera operator during the performance. He hadn’t been warned about all the running that would take place in the performance, and he closely trailed me and Yeongran with his heavy equipment and black outfit under the sun. I was a bit worried that the space we covered might be too wide and that it might be too draining for both Yeongran and Choi. Yeongran, however, was as graceful as a leaf gliding in the wind, while Choi was exceptional in his craft. 

As I ran through the field in my bare feet, I knew that things were definitely out of my control. I raced through the tracks in so much pain that I reached a state of penitence, helping me to channel the wounded experiences and wartime struggles for self-determination. It was after this performance that I reflected on my former ambivalence towards the documentation of performances, and its importance for publication in today’s art economy, which stands in contradiction to the limitations of the memories of those who witnessed and participated in an event. Both give a vantage to the performances in their specific ways, and although the act of filming can be vampiric, it is also useful for disseminating the effects of a performance in different spaces.

TP: What did you learn from the experience?

ZS: I became aware that the impact of what was happening in the Amihan Performance Series didn’t necessarily need to be experienced in the moment – that these things could be launched or take flight at intervals, with breaks and rests. And I could orientate these ideas towards the south, perhaps ending up on other islands in Southeast Asia, framing all this through monsoonal swerves of time. 

My birthday coincided with the Song of the Wind residency, and so I felt things were generative, not just in terms of art but also in terms of having to launch these ideas in my life cycle. I also attempted to relate my research to my everyday experiences, like observing the sky at night and seeing dried seaweed as a group of stars. I looked at the taxonomic history of kudzu and Phytolacca americana, which were botanical elements that were incorporated in my performances, tying them to diasporic imaginations and ontology. I have written a diary report about this that can be accessed through the Song of the Wind website.¹² The whole experience was life-affirming. I learned the most through eating with my fellow artists-in-residence and locals, and by creating organic compost to return to the land.

YS: Participating in three projects devised by curator Sunyoung Oh has taught me many things. During the research process of Song of the Wind, it was meaningful to meet and become entangled with members of the local community in Yaksan, as well as the other participating artists. There are not that many art funds and projects that first and foremost support research. I have found Sunyoung’s projects to be precious in allowing me to focus on the encounters that occurred during the process and on what I have learned from them, over and above the results of this work. Through these projects, I have been able to meet many like-minded Asian artists. Whereas most of the performing arts in Korea are centred around Western Europe, I was happy to meet Asian artists and scholars who share my interests in tradition and history through online lectures and introductions. Through encounters with artists such as Zeke, I have found inspiration in the artistic attitudes and methods of others.

 

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