WOO SEOBO

WOO SEO BO

BIO
bocmkim@gmail.com
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WOO SEO BO is Bo Kim, a Korean American artist from Los Angeles County, California. Trained in Korean folk dance and drums from a young age, they primarily work in performance and sound, often engaging its performative and acoustic lineages. They create research-based work interested in infrastructures of power, such as politicized invocations of folkness, gender, digital life, and collective ecological beliefs.

This work has culminated in the form of live performances, experimental films, and multimedia installations, most recently as solo exhibition “Bo Kim: BURN” (Sept 11-18, 2025) at the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum. They are the recipient of artist grants from nonprofits Long Beach Arts Council and Arts in Action.

Education

University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, BA Media Arts, American Studies & Ethnicity
2024

Lee JaeEun Korean American Youth Performing Artists
2018-2020

Joo MyungSook School of Korean Dance
2012-2018

Exhibitions

Bo Kim: BURN
SOLO EXHIBITION
Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum
Erin Stout, Chief Curator
Sept 11-18 2025

From the Outside In
THESIS EXHIBITION
School of Cinematic Arts Gallery
May 6-9, 2025

Advanced Sound Art Showcase
GROUP EXHIBITION
School of Cinematic Arts Gallery
Mar 26, 2024

Advanced Techniques of Spatial Representation Showcase
GROUP EXHIBITION
School of Cinematic Arts Gallery
Dec 10, 2023

Sonic Media Art Showcase
GROUP EXHIBITION
School of Cinematic Arts Gallery
May 11, 2022

Grants, Awards, & Scholarships

AAM Scholar
American Alliance of Museums
May 2025

Kundiman & Rowan Scholar
University of Houston
May 2025

Mobilize! Grant Recipient
Arts in Action
2024

Ninfa Sanchez Memorial Scholar
Honors, USC American Studies & Ethnicity
2024

Project Microgrant Recipient
Long Beach Arts Council
2023-2024

Dornsife Continuing Scholar
USC Dornsife
2023

Innovation Scholar
Chinatown History Project
2021

First Place in Dance
5th Competition of Korean Traditional Performing Arts
Oct 2019

Contributions & Collaborations

Irrational Exhibits 13
Power of the Powerless, Kim Zumpfe
PARTICIPANT PERFORMER
The Bendix Building
Oct 26, 2024

Speculative Ecologies Intensive
Suzanne Lacy, Lauren Bon
STUDENT ARTIST
Metabolic Studio
Mar 2024

Where You Stand: Chinatown 1880 to 1939 with Metro Art
Old Chinatown Prototype
CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER
Union Station, Los Angeles
2021-2022

Curatorial & Museum Work

Assistant Director
Defunkt Press
“Chapbook Contest”
2025 - Present

Director
The Night Aquarium
“Staging Subjectivity” Sept 20 & 27
2025 - Present

Guest Curator
Voidwave Radio
“Alan Nakagawa” Mar-April 2025
“Kai Kubota-Enright” Jan 2026

Museum Educator
Pacific Asia Museum
“Spotlight Tours” 2023-2024

Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern
Hammer Museum
“Made in L.A. 2023” Oct-Dec 2023 (Artist Selection Contribution)
“Only the Young” Symposium Apr 12, 2024 (Program Designer)
“Hammer Projects: Vamba Bility” Jan-May, 2024 (Researcher)

Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
“HOBOLLYWOOD: Thinh Nguyen” Feb 2023 (Program Lead)
“Beatriz Da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics,” Sept 2024 – Jan 2025
(Archivist & Researcher)

Last Updated 12.07.2025

SELECTED WORK

BURN/燭 (2023 & 2025)

Digital Video, 3:00

White candles, dolsot, incense, incense holder, mevius cigarette, sokchima, organza, safety pins, translucent sewing thread, projector

Dimensions vary

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Photos by Tatiana Mata, 2025

With grant support from Arts Council for Long Beach, 2023-2024

BURN reflected on the tensions between my practice of mugyo, or Korean shamanism, and the internalized colonial gaze, questioning where the boundary lies between documenting mourning traditions and self orientalism. In Korean tradition, public performance is central to the mourning process. How is that refracted as a diasporic performer, and for whose benefit?

In a diasporic context, these performative aspects of grief come into tension not only with internalized colonial gaze, but the internalized male gaze as well. The underlying compulsion to perform desirability even while grieving, even while practicing tradition, become distorted and undistinguishable.

All objects are those regularly used in my own mundane practices of mugyo and dance. In the former, incense and candles are burnt during prayer to ancestors and the deceased on a daily basis. The latter supplies the white sokchima used, undergarment dresses used in Korean traditional dance performances throughout my girlhood and adolescence.

Conceived as an performance film, BURN features the actions of three “characters.” Two draw their inspiration from the recurring characters of talchum, a masked folk drama, which originally was used for mugyo purposes as well. The first character mirrors the bridal makeup of the kaksi (young woman or bride) mask, and the final character dons an actual yangban (aristocrat) mask.

The digital file was originally created in 2023, and ran through a Processing algorithm I coded to randomly generate new combinations of the video with footage of my grandmother in her apartment, before being projection mapped with live effects in TouchDesigner. The final work was installed in 2025 without these additions.

My Brother’s Memory Palace (2025)

Experimental Documentary Short, 20:00

Vimeo link

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With grant support from Arts in Action

My Brother’s Memory Palace (내형의기억궁전) was created to grapple with my experience with memory loss, and qualms I was exploring with memory fetishism in the canon of diaspora fiction. Rather than “recovering” or “preserving” against cultural amnesia as incomplete, I wanted to explore amnesia as a whole and self-contained experience of being.

Playing a modified version of myself, the main character has a documentary crew follow them to digitally recapture on video the forgotten cultural upbringing they feel they are owed, mobilizing the past of others as a simulation for their own identity or relationships.

We shot both unscripted and improvised scenes with real people and locations from my life, some unaware I’m playing a character. These scenes are strung together in the form of a hybrid documentary, bringing together pursuits of “true” cultural reality and filmed reality.

Inspiration for the latter comes from the hybrid documentary works of Nathan Fielder, Jerrod Carmichael, and William Greaves, and the spontaneous cinema methods of South Korean 1980’s film collective Kaidu Club and Iranian New Wave cinema.

The work was developed, shot, and edited over the course of a year. I developed, directed, and acted in the film.

The birds, 5:00, (2024)

The birds is a speculative work of acoustic ecology, inspired by Peter Alagona’s “The Accidental Ecosystem” which posits urban animals also as wildlife, cities also as environments, and Bernie Krause’s “The Great Animal Orchestra” which finds animals orate “around” each other to be heard during simultaneous conversations. It was created in response to the impacts of noise pollution on organisms surrounding high development in my area.

Over the course of several months, I created field recordings of local bird gatherings, focusing on three areas of observed sonic activity of varying insulation from adjacent high-traffic streets and construction sites. I hypothesized that because these huge urban sonic patterns were so erratic, they might be more difficult for birds to predict, and thus speak “around.”

Thanks to the arrival of spring rain, I was able to compare recordings during peak noise pollution to those taken during a complete cease in urban activity. New and different birdsongs could suddenly be heard. Where birds had previously been restrained in locales, free exchange across major trees previously divided by the sound barrier of traffic could be discerned.

These recordings were then composed and arranged for both 5.1 Surround Sound and multi-speaker formats. In the latter installation, eight speakers were arranged in a formation enclosing listeners into corners which were delineated by passing lanes of sound, emulating the experience of birds separated by sonic borders.

The directional elements of the installation were arranged according to the the spatial practice of pungsujiri, or Korean geomancy, which I was thinking about as a reflection of Korean ontological understandings of place. In its practice, one receives energy from the combination of nearby land features and the cardinal directions.