ABOUT

Soojin Pray’s practice begins with the body as a site of transmission. For her, the body is not simply an instrument of performance or an individual biological form. It is a living archive in which movement training, cultural memory, repetition, fatigue, breath, and relations to place accumulate over time.

Her work draws from Korean traditional dance, martial arts, mask traditions, ritual structures, and a body-cosmology that understands the human body as a microcosm connected to nature, time, energy, and unseen worlds. These references are not used to reproduce a fixed image of tradition. Instead, Pray asks what traditional structures once enabled—protection, mourning, transition, attention, and relation—and how those functions might be reconfigured through contemporary artistic practice.

Sites are active participants in this process. Mountains, rocks, coastal landscapes, weather, sound, and changing light are not treated as neutral backdrops. They shape the rhythm, scale, and ethical conditions of each work. A ritual action emerges through the relation between the artist’s trained body, the memory carried by a site, and forces that cannot be fully translated into language or data.

Digital media enters after and within this encounter. Cameras, moving images, projection, and media walls do not replace the event that occurred in a specific place and time. They create a ritual afterlife: a way for fragments of movement, sound, duration, and absence to circulate beyond the original site. Pray calls some of these fragments digital relics—not because they preserve an untouched original, but because they carry partial traces of an encounter that has already passed.

Her ongoing project We, We Wish centres on figures who guard, heal, or remain with what has been forgotten. Its first completed chapter, The Tutelar Guardian of Forgotten Tales, began with a dawn ritual at Seonbawi Rock on Inwangsan Mountain. Across twelve ritual scenes, a masked body performs gestures of invocation, protection, mourning, purification, boundary, and return. The work does not reenact Korean shamanism. It constructs an artist-led contemporary ritual through which erased feminine memory, embodied knowledge, and the memory of place can be sensed again.

In an era when artificial intelligence and data systems increasingly organise how the world is recorded, Pray asks what the body can hold that data cannot: temperature, effort, vibration, inherited gesture, silence, and relation. Her work does not oppose technology to tradition. It examines how digital media might carry embodied memory while remaining accountable to what cannot be fully captured.