Heesoo Kwon

About

Heesoo Kwon (b. 1990, Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. Positioning herself as an artist, archivist, anthropologist, and religious figure, Kwon builds feminist utopias in the digital realm that liberate one from personal, familial, and historical trauma rooted in patriarchy. Central to her practice and substantial bodies of work is Leymusoom, an autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017 as a form of personal resistance against misogyny and an ever-evolving framework for investigating her family histories. Kwon utilizes technologies such as digital archiving, 3D scanning, and animation as her ritualistic and shamanistic tools to regenerate her woman ancestors’ lives without constraints of time and space, and to queer her past, present, and utopian dreams.

Kwon earned a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in Business Administration from Ewha Womans University. She is an Assistant Professor in the Animation department at California College of the Arts. She has had solo and group exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Artists' Television Access, San Francisco, CA; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Gray Area, San Francisco, CA; A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY; 47 Canal, New York, NY; Blinkers Art & Project Space, Winnipeg, Canada; West Den Haag, Netherlands; CICA Museum, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea; Alternative Space Loop, Seoul, South Korea and WMA Space, Hong Kong. She has also participated in international projects, biennales, and festivals, as such CineMigrante Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina; ART CITY Bologna 2021, Bologna, Italy; Sheffield DocFest Arts Programme 2021, Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK; 20th Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival, Seoul, South Korea; Feminism Media Artivist Biennale, I-GONG Alternative Visual Culture Factory, Seoul, South Korea; 3rd MINIKINO FILM WEEK - Official 2017 Final list, Bali, Indonesia and the ASIA DIGITAL ART EXHIBITION 2022, Beijing, China. She was recently awarded the 2023 SF Bay Area Artadia, the 2025 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation and the 2022 50 Arts Commission for Media Arts from the Hewlett Foundation. She was a finalist for the 2021 SECA Award at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the 2021 Queer|Art|Prize at Queer|Art.