CONTACT
Yo-E Ryou
숨 오케스트라, Act 1-2 Breath Orchestra, Act 1-2 | 2024 | 10’10”
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist
Synopsis
Breath Orchestra, Act 1–2 takes the form of a score for breath, performed by a group of girls around the age of ten on Jeju Island, Korea—echoing the age when Haenyeo, the island’s women divers, traditionally began diving. Moving between the surface and underwater, the work unfolds through layered rhythms of breathing, pause, and breath-holding silence. Breath Orchestra is an ongoing series of sound, video, and participatory performance works rooted in the oral traditions and embodied knowledge of the Haenyeo. Rather than relying on written archives, the work attends to how experience is transmitted through repetition, sensation, and the body—carried across generations through practice. This video presents an early sketch of the project, developed through performance and sound studies. Fragments from this work later reappear in the Ellipses series and in the multi-channel installation, tracing a process of return and transformation.
About the artist
Yo-E Ryou lives and works on Jeju Island, South Korea. Working across sound, video, installation, performance, and drawing, she traces how embodied knowledge and ecological memory circulate through water. Rooted in hydrofeminist thought, her practice approaches water not only as a conceptual framework but as a lived, elemental condition that reshapes how bodies and environments remember and relate. Rather than producing singular narratives or fixed representations, she works with modes of transmission, where sensations move from body to body and take different forms through experience. Attuned to island geographies and tidal rhythms, her works unfold as evolving constellations rather than closed forms. She runs Unlearning Space, an artist-led platform for collaborative research and exchange. She received her MFA from Yale University.