Prologue to Longing Energies: She tells you as she wakes up from her dream, 2023
video with stereo sound, 9 mins 23 sec

Trailer video made for the project presentation at Free Lunch Series, Art Hub Copenhagen, 2023.

Integrating interdiciplinary resarch, the work delves into Korean animist social culture through seaweed soup and the practices of haenyeo—“sea women” freedivers, who harvest seaweed and marine life while navigating an eerie seascape overshadowed by the massive contrete domes of nuclear reactors.

For generations, these mothers and grandmothers have dived without breathing apparatus, harvesting marine life with hand sickles, stone belts, and nets. Their survival depends on mutual reliance, forming a self-sustaining sisterhood grounded in embodied knowledge and a symbiotic relationship with the sea.

In Busan, however, where haenyeo dive beneath the shadow of nuclear infrastructure, the sea tells a different story. Pollution, climate change, and radioactive contamination have devastated marine ecosystems, while exposure linked to nearby nuclear plants has resulted in severe health consequences, including thyroid cancer among many divers. As younger generations no longer continue the practice, haenyeo culture is receding alongside the wild sea it once depended on. What was once a shared and sacred space has become territorialised—reconfigured as a capitalised field for aquaculture and extraction.

Yet the sea remains a site of transformation, where energies, rituals, and dreams persist. It sustains life through practices such as seaweed soup after childbirth, marking cycles of birth, recovery, and longing. At the same time, humanity’s atomic fission—splitting the invisible building blocks of matter—quietly mutates the world, unsettling the balance of existence.

Beneath the looming concrete domes of nuclear reactors, haenyeo continue to offer prayers to the sea and to the Dragon Queen, the goddess of the ocean, seeking protection during their dives and the flourishing of underwater life. These gestures attest to a fragile coexistence between life, destruction, and ongoing transformation.

top: Four massive domes of atomic fission reactors come in sight. Two new reactors are under construction.
left: A view through a window in Soon-ja's working room.
right: Haenyeo, Soon-ja Kim lives in Busan. She was working with dried Sea Mustard while I interviewed her. All images are from a fieldwork in Busan in 2023.