EunSun Heo
a piece of cotton
8 November 2023
EunSun Heo is a Korean visual artist who strokes emotions with performance. She is mainly interested in bringing out the age-old emotions in the space experienced in the everyday life of the past and expressing them as visual images. She participated in a number of group exhibitions and festivals in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, Belgium, and Germany with the start of the PANASIA Performance Festival in 2014, and she continues to work on videos, installation, and photography, focusing on performance work, along with various experiments covering complex genres.
In the past, there was a custom in Korea where a woman made a blanket to cover with husband when she got married. My grandmother also made a blanket for marriage by herself. I have often used the cotton blanket I received from my late grandmother for performances, and after the performance, I have continued to wash and transform the used blanket to express it in a different form of artworks. An old blanket symbolizes a woman’s life. There are many old feelings in it. The performance shows the social gaze that can be commonly felt in everyday life as a woman and the weight of life accordingly. At the end of the performance, the blanket used as an object is washed again and modified into another form to be preserved.
EunSun Heo was funded and supported by Performance Art Week Aotearoa for their tour of New Zealand.
Images by Tom Shackleton