Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Video, Installation, Digital art, Photography
Website: heesookwon.com
Heesoo Kwon (b. 1990, Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, California. She earned a BA in Business from Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul (2015) and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley (2019). Before turning to art, Kwon was recognized with the Female Inventor of the Year Award from the Korean Intellectual Property Office in 2012. She joined California College of the Arts as an Assistant Professor in Animation in Fall 2023.
Kwon’s transition into artistic practice grew from a critical reckoning with the patriarchal and commercial systems that had shaped her life in Korea. Women’s Studies education and her time at UC Berkeley deepened her commitment to feminist practice, leading her in 2017 to initiate Leymusoom—an autobiographical feminist religion she developed as a framework for exploring family histories, queering familial relationships, and imagining communal feminist liberation. Her work is held in the permanent collections of KADIST (San Francisco), Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography (Amsterdam).
Kwon has received significant recognition including the 2023 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award, a 2022 grant from the Hewlett Foundation’s 50 Arts Initiative for media arts, and the 2025 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. In 2025 she was an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County.
Kwon works across 3D animation, lenticular lightbox photography, video, and installation, employing digital technologies—including 3D scanning, Adobe Firefly generative AI, and metaverse platforms—as what she describes as shamanistic tools for visualizing spiritual interactions with her ancestors. Her practice is rooted in auto-ethnographic and archival methods: she scans and digitally transforms family photographs and home videos, inserting avatar figures from Leymusoom as protective deities who move across time, appearing only from certain viewing angles in the lenticular works. The result is art that holds memory and mythmaking simultaneously, reconstructing childhood environments and matrilineal histories through a distinctly feminist and queer lens.
A recurring visual metaphor throughout her work is the snake shedding its skin—a symbol of metamorphosis and rebirth free from inherited patriarchal burden. Whether through the shifting imagery of a lenticular print, the durational immersion of a video installation, or a ritualized live performance, Kwon’s practice treats artmaking itself as a spiritual act. Leymusoom functions as both personal cosmology and communal invitation, drawing on Korean shamanist traditions, the Mago creator myth, Dokkaebi folklore, and the artist’s own matrilineal archive to imagine utopian worlds void of misogyny.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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