Mira M. Yang

Residency report
Mountain gods and peaks, accidentally doubled moons and suns, characters hatching out of golden eggs, forbidden love, a girlish prince and the strange wonders occurring under their reign, a woman who was formerly a bear, conversations under stars, a dystopic heatwave and its storms, primordial heron cries… are a few glimpses into the wonders that sprawled out at me at La Becque, from the place, its animals and people, and from a book of Korean oral folk tales that I brought with me, written down in the 13th century by the monk Ilyeon as a mystical supplement to official historical records.

I read Samguk Yusa at La Becque while projecting connections through landscape and mythology, amidst a place that looks vaguely similar to the one many of the book’s legends originate from: the mountain volcano lake Cheonji, Heaven Lake, which, bisected by the border of China and DPRK since the Pacific and Cold War, remains foreclosed or mostly reachable through myths and memories.

Reaching through history, time and place in translations and projections are methods I was able to further attune during my time at La Becque while working on: a vocal composition for a countertenor and a Pansori singer imitating birdsong in their respective repertoires and registers, for Karaoke Falsetto, shown at Manifesta 16 Ruhr; and the sonification of re-imagined dances by Choi Seung-Hee, building a pneumatic machine and architecture, for my exhibitions Ensemble at Kunsthalle Friart in Fribourg and Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris. — Mira M. Yang

Biography
Born in Germany, Mira M. Yang lives and works between Paris and Düsseldorf. Their multidisciplinary practice spans live performance, moving image, scenography, and objects, exploring questions of cultural hybridity, representation, memory, and the instrumentalization of canonized history. Through fictional spaces and storytelling, Yang visualizes social structures, collective memory, and new narratives within shifting identities. Their discursive scenographies probe transcultural relations between human and non-human agents, examining the “glitches” that emerge between experience and memory, reality and fiction. Yang’s work has been presented internationally, including at the 15th Gwangju Biennale, FriArt (Fribourg), Serpentine (London), Brücke Museum (Berlin), among many others across Europe and Asia.