Sharon Chohi Kim is a voice artist, performer and composer and a 2023 R+D artist. Her project Haenyeo delves into the intriguing connection between the dwindling population of Korea’s free-diving women – known as haenyeo – and the surge of industrial development and marine habitat destruction. Through a residency at Stomping Ground L.A., Chohi began drafting the initial concept, sound, and choreography to her captivating hydro-opera.
Haenyeo
This interdisciplinary performance will include vocalizations, movement and underwater sounds through hydrophones and electronics. This piece will musically explore marine animal sounds that compete with ambient noise from industrial activity, precipitation and natural disasters. I am interested in vocalists embodying women divers from the matriarchal society of Jeju Island in South Korea, called haenyeo, who free dive daily to harvest seafood. These haenyeo are known to perform rituals to their sea goddess in return for her protection while they dive. These women work to protect marine life as they follow strict rules about how much and when they harvest certain types of seafood. The number of haenyeo has decreased in the past few decades, as the ocean becomes more polluted by industrial development. In this hydro-opera, I would like to inquire into this symbiotic relationship between the jamnyeo and the ocean, and between humans and the earth, diving into themes of ecological conservation and marine habitat loss.
During the residency, I researched haenyeo life on Jeju Island and their violent and tumultuous history under Japanese colonization, American colonization and under their own Korean leadership. I reflected on the family stories that I had been told of my great grandmother whose husband was killed by her own South Korean soldiers during the war, and of my grandfather who had escaped North Korea.
I read about Korean shamanism, and of the haenyeo’s dependence on shamanic rituals for everyday life events and for protection during their daily ocean dives. I researched the decline of marine life as a result of industrialization, overfishing and climate change. I listened to the subtle sounds of various marine animals, as well as human-made boat sounds and sonar pings that interfere with the natural sounds of the sea. I pondered my own relationship to water as an individual physical body made mostly of water, and as a part of a community of watery humans who all live on a watery earth.
Videography by Argel Rojo. Video editing by Sharon Chohi Kim.
I started composing the hydro-opera for a choir of at least 8 voices to embody the haenyeo. I wrote six scenes, each scene part choral piece, part ritual and part performance art vignette. The scenes display the essentiality of water, and the interconnectedness of humans to each other and to other living and nonliving things on earth. I incorporated aspects of what I learned of Korean shamanism and ocean sounds into the music and movement. I composed the musical bones for each scene, recorded vocals and electronic sounds, and I started to choreograph some movement ideas. By the end of the residency, I had a conceptual and musical form for the opera, as well as starting points for staging and choreography.
About Chohi
Sharon Chohi Kim’s work as a voice artist, performer and composer includes immersive experimental opera, performance art, improvisation, sound art and site-specific space activation through movement and voice. As a Korean American female artist, she is interested in human connection across cultures and generations, transgenerational trauma of the Korean diaspora, and domestic and sexual violence. By engaging in the act of breathing as a right, she uses the voice and body as a direct channel of protest and resistance. She fills spaces with sonic vibrations, exploring relationships between people and the space in which they occupy, inquiring into healing between humans and the earth. Through improvisation, she explores human and non-human states of being, enthusiastically discovering new ways in which her voice can sound. Sharon Chohi has performed with the LA Philharmonic, the Industry Opera Company, Long Beach Opera, MOCA, at Walt Disney Hall, the Broad Museum, the Getty Center and Villa, in caves, tunnels, mountains, gardens, and in water.
