Hsin Hwang
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Residency Notes
Residency Note｜Busan, Jeju & Andong, South Korea
During my residency in Busan, my research focused on women, ritual, and embodied forms of cultural memory. I visited the Busan Haenyeo Museum and traveled to Jeju Island to experience the daily practices of the haenyeo—women divers whose lives are shaped by breath, endurance, and an intimate relationship with the sea. Through a one-day diving experience, I encountered the physical rhythm of breath-holding and labor, allowing me to understand the ocean as a lived space where survival, care, and spiritual knowledge are carried by the female body.
Alongside this maritime research, I traveled to Andong to study traditional mask performances at Hahoe Village. These masks function not simply as theatrical objects, but as vessels for emotional transformation, role-shifting, and ritual release. Observing how performers move between identities through masking deepened my interest in the face as a site where individual emotion intersects with collective memory and spiritual belief.
Back in the studio, I produced an extensive body of drawings to investigate women, the sea, and ritual figures across cultures. Working with Korean paper (hanji) and traditional Korean pigments, I developed an intuitive visual language rooted in repetition, gesture, and material sensitivity. Influenced by both haenyeo practices and Andong mask rituals, these drawings gradually evolved into the Mask Series. This body of work merges Korean, Taiwanese, and mythological facial symbols, examining hybridity, transformation, and the permeability between the human and the spiritual.
Through this residency, lived experience, field research, and drawing became intertwined methods. The figure of the haenyeo entered into a visual and conceptual dialogue with masked ritual characters and, later, with the mermaid as a mythological counterpart. Together, they form an ongoing cross-cultural inquiry into how female bodies, labor, and ritual shape systems of belief and spiritual endurance.