The Way of Being

Erasing Folk Tales

Three single-channel videos, 2023

This subseries challenges the ideological violence embedded in traditional Korean folktales that are still recommended as required reading for children. By deconstructing books such as Kongjwi and Patjwi, Princess Pyounggang and Stupid Ondal, and The Fairy and the Woodcutter, the artist confronts the patriarchal, moralizing, and often misogynistic messages within.

Each video work reenacts a ritual of resistance—physically and symbolically dismantling the texts. The process becomes a reclaiming of childhood, identity, and narrative authority.
The narration in each video represents my younger self.

Kongjwi and Patjwi
Single-channel video, 4min 18sec

This is the Korean version of the Cinderella tale. As a child, I encountered it through various books and comics, and for a long time, I lived under a strong conviction shaped by its narrative—a belief about the kind of person I should become. Now, an alternative self approaches that younger version of me, speaking gently to the forces that once shaped such convictions. It is a story of revisiting and rewriting what was once accepted without question.

Princess Pyounggang and Stupid Ondal
Single-channel video, 3min 25sec

As a child, I imagined a warm, peaceful scene: a kind woodcutter living with a heavenly fairy and their beloved children. I held onto that picture without knowing the deeper truth—that this tale is riddled with violence, coercion, and irreparable loss. What I once saw as comforting was, in fact, a story of control and abduction. This work is my younger self's attempt to rewrite that tale, reclaiming what was taken through silence and myth.

The Fairy and the Woodcutter
Single-channel video, 3min 52sec

There was a time I resented Ondal deeply. Princess Pyeonggang seemed to be the perfect image of royalty, and it angered me that someone like Ondal was her chosen partner. But I didn’t see what lay beneath: that Pyeonggang herself was far from ideal, and that the figures around her—Ondal and her father—were far more brutal than I could have understood as a child. This piece is an analysis from that younger self, finally allowed to question the roles, the violence, and the expectations forced upon them.