Hell is Rising, Blessed are the Fallen: An Interview of Golpe Civil’s Loucifer

Jacket: Lou de Bètoly


photography by Joseph Kadow
photography assistance by Oskar Ott
styling by Hakan Solak
hair & makeup by Lee Hyangsoon
talent Anarchist Sound System
interview by Janna Shaw

In an exclusive interview and photoshoot for Autre, Anarchist Sound System a.k.a. Lou Desamaison-Cognet, musician and founder of Golpe Civil, unveils the complexities of modern society, critiquing a world immersed in electroslavery. Lou a.k.a. Loucifer shares insights into his own psyche as well as inspirations for his collective: from his collection of Nietzsche texts and the occult, to the visceral impact of recent love, loss, and sobriety.

 

Jacket: Lou de Bètoly

 

It was a rather mysterious assignment: could I interview a Satanic musician, producer, multi-disciplinarian artist and activist railing against a new world order? “His name is Louicifer, he’s into blood, pain, and beauty.” It was an immediate “Yes” from me. From our first correspondence, I knew Lou was a character from up my own winding back alley. It wasn’t so much the initial introductory greeting, it was the introductory email’s sign-off. Instead of the normal accolades, salutations, or questionable bisous, it was a pointed manifesto of meat: elegantly and adamantly, unabashedly transcribed, coming from not one place above, rather emanating from deep below:

“In a society governed by judgment and the elimination of acceptance, GOLPE CIVIL aims to reveal the most hidden secrets and flaws of this dirty, hypocritical, self-centered system.… We are the underworld: opponents who preach a new world, free of submission; clarity, culture for all, and rebellion. We are not only a record label, we are an experimental project created to fight corruption, false doctrines, and global manipulation.”

Who is Golpe Civil? It’s an Anarchist Sound System. It’s hell’s privately broadcast radio station. It’s a collective group of artists, primarily musicians, railing together to express their insides, no matter how unsettling it may be to the inhabitants of our planetary purgatory. But for the residents who find themselves living in their own version of hell, the rather frightening sounds of Anarchist Sound System may come across as rather benevolent.

Back to Loucifer (or Loucy as they endearingly allow their friends and demon-empathizers to summon them): the music they are creating for A.S.S. is not all electronic manipulation with high intensity BPM. Satan incarnate has side projects, of course. BLASPHEMIA is an experimental noise project based upon an apotheosis mindset, created alongside their girlfriend Darken (more on that dynamic later). NO INJURIES navigates a more delicate soundscape, featuring grand pianos with lots of Amen breaks. Satan has style and a flair for the dramatic, no surprise there.

One late & rainy night in Berlin, we exchange Telegram handles. Fallen angels prefer not to be cellularly traced, but at least they’re open to written communication. I half expect our interview to be conducted through bloody ciphers, of which, with Lou, I was admittedly not necessarily all that opposed...

Full Look: Vintage Levi’s

JANNA SHAW: Good evening Liege Loucy, you’ve been expecting me. I write to you from a very rainy, very dark Berlin. I’m listening to BLASPHEMIA, getting acquainted with you. What are you up to?

LOUCIFER: I imagine Berlin exactly the way you just described it. That’s the Berlin I love so much. The melancholy reflects onto the city during this time of year. There’s a cold, mysterious atmosphere, which I find very inspiring. Every day I am missing Berlin. My family came into Sao Paulo today, so I spent the day with them. They just left.

SHAW: I much prefer Berlin when it’s cold and grey. The Brutalist architecture makes more sense, and so does the general German attitude. Summer is too hot and happy. No one knows what to do with it. How was time with your family? Do they listen to your music?

LOUCIFER: Time with my family was very nice. We went to a restaurant and talked about how things will become December as I will leave Sao Paulo. In February, I am planning to move back to Berlin, so I have a lot of things to organize. My mother hates my music—she simply doesn’t understand it—but my father loved my music. He was always very atypical about his world perception. He pushed me hard in my music experimentation journey. Both of my parents have, actually. They are very nerdy, philosophy lovers. They understand the unconventional as long as it’s harmless. I admire them for unplugging me from a strict, basic vision.

SHAW: What do you think you’ll miss about Sao Paulo? I hear there’s a good underground scene. With your move to Berlin, you’ll be going from one underground to the next. Which do you prefer?

LOUCIFER: The scene in Brazil is really another dimension. It feels like it’s stuck in the ’90s, but in a very good way. There aren’t many clubs here—especially not techno clubs. The scene is all about illegal raves, finding the best abandoned warehouse, placing huge sound systems, and just destroying people’s minds. Berlin is a very structured scene. The underground has been feeding the city for years and years, attracting millions of tourists every day creating evolution for itself. Berlin is an established home for independent artists, businesses, clubs, agencies, etc., while Brazil is a newborn baby in comparison. It still has its innocence, but also a boldness to explore what has not been. It’s a wild country, and Sao Paulo is the center of it.

SHAW: What else is on your mind?

LOUCIFER: Tonight, I’m working on BLASPHEMIA music videos. We are going to release the project at the start of December. It’s a lot of work, but we are super happy with how it’s going. My girlfriend Darken (my BLASPHEMIA counterpart) and I broke up recently, but BLASPHEMIA is our baby, and we will continue to work on this project. Our love is infinite, but the reality is we need to split in different ways to finally meet and be together again. We are not at the same checkpoints, and we want to follow up on some of our own personal goals and projects independently.

SHAW: From the snippets I’ve seen of your project together, the Dark Arts are most certainly at play in BLASPHEMIA...

LOUCIFER: Yes, for the visual inspiration, the source comes from our BDSM background. Darken and I are both tattoo artists and art lovers. She brings the elegance and the sharpness, and I bring the raw, maniacal support to the visuals. We love to think as one, and we managed to fuse into BLASPHEMIA together instantly. We do everything together. It’s the first time in my life I’m editing/cutting videos, playing around with VFX, syncing... I’m in love with it. It’s exactly like Ableton: a bunch of rectangular clips and automations, a lot of time structure, visual guidances and so on. It’s a plug-and-play intuition. I am neurodivergent and when I get excited about something, I have an unstoppable necessity to understand every single detail of anything in the realm of my new chosen interest.

SHAW: Were there certain books, movies, artists, characters that led you to explore the notion of Satanism?

LOUCIFER: I first got into Satanism because of my name and birthday: I was born 09/06/96, my name is Lou Desamaison-Cognet, which translates to “Lou from the Broken House.” I lost my father when I was 21 years old, and my world felt apart. We had a really horrible time. He was diagnosed with bulbar sclerosis, the hardest one. I flew from Berlin to Zurich to help my mother care for him. He was a difficult man, but a warrior that refused to be defeated by anything. This led him to refuse help from the hospital until the last few days of his life. At that point, he had to, because of the euthanasia process. Watching someone you truly admire for four months, dying rapidly... This was his worst nightmare, being a prisoner of his own body. After watching that closely, everything changed for me. I had always been the kid with “no filter” but when this happened, filters quite literally did not exist. Nothing existed for me, except my creative bursts. Growing up, Nietzsche was everywhere in my life. Spinoza was my father’s favorite and Sartre is my mom’s crush. So, I had the privilege of growing up out of the box and experiencing life in my way. My friends always called me the Devil, because of my hyperactivity. But one day, I looked up Satanism on Google and found the [The Eleven Satanic] Rules of the Earth. I read them and identified with everything written in it. I live my life according to them. The interest grew bigger and bigger. I began to reread all my Nietzsche and Machiavelli books, and found an author called Michael W. Ford, which complemented the ‘Self’ section of my brain. My favorite artist of all time is a genius, Satanist, and huge AIDS activist: Diamanda Galás. She was and is ahead of any generation, in terms of music and artistic talent. She has had the most important impact on my actual music vision.

Full Look: No Faith Studios

SHAW: I find that we are currently in a world devoid of all ritual, sacrifice, and purpose. I think Diamanda would agree that we are collectively straying from religion, yet I think a lot of our human experience is lost when we totally ignore our desire and need for some kind of worship.

LOUCIFER: I can’t disagree with you. Today’s world has become a very lost civilization. The electroslavery is getting out of control. People are struggling to believe in their own lives; they’re choking from it. How can we be satisfied if everything created these days is made to keep us exactly where we are? Today’s worship is Instagram, TikTok, and all that bullshit. It’s far easier to create an online avatar than craft every day a new, expanded version of yourself. Everything is accessible by sight. Too many options to choose from. We have created a void that is very hard to fulfill.

SHAW: What led you to create the Golpe Civil collective?

LOUCIFER: I’ve been three times to rehab, back and forth. I had to lose so much to finally be where I am today. Sober and satisfied with my life, I’m giving every particle of my being to myself and my art. I realized that nobody will give a shit about you, let alone love, trust, or respect you if you can’t first do that for yourself. I wrote my Rehab EP in rehab, and created Golpe Civil there too.

SHAW: In your Rehab EP, you penned it as a call to dismantle the notion that drug usage is liberation. What does the reality of sobriety feel like for you?

LOUCIFER: Being sober gives me indescribable access into my own database. It is the most beautiful gift I could have given myself. When enslaved by substance abuse, you tend to settle for the convenient. Even if just subconsciously, you look for every alternative: excuses you can find to justify poor decisions, dismal behaviors, lack of goodwill, and a limitless amount of self-destructive patterns. You eventually accept this, and it is tattooed in your brain as truth. I’ve lived amongst the agonizing torture of that which is habit constantly fighting to take over flesh and bones.

When you explore your consciousness with the bias of a certain molecule creating new neuronal connections, firing up certain parts of your brain and enhancing perception, touch, sensibility, performance, and all of the other aspects and allures of drugs, sooner or later, you will still be faced with yourself. And that self will reclaim every single bit of time that you took from it.

At a certain glimpse of the past, I chose to only see as far as my shadow would go. I leaned into it and left myself in disorder. I am an artist. My aim is to craft my essence, allow my soul to project frustrations, my hate, my passions, my broken heart, my analysis of what I represent and feel onto my sound canvases. And for that I have to live life fully. Art is discipline.

Full Look: GmbH

SHAW: Is it more inspiring for you to dream of & reflect on the past, or do you garner more by following forward motion?

LOUCIFER: I dream constantly. I feel like a clock’s needle bouncing between left and right. I would rather live in a limbo between both illusions of time. I implement nostalgia in my tracks. I myself am often in need of that. But nostalgic fragments are always submerged by the novelty experienced during my creative process. I am a Past romanticizer who finds counterbalance in passion for endless wave-shapes of the future.

SHAW: What is tattooed upon your eyes?

LOUCIFER: Golpe Civil. A civilian coup d’état.

 

Jacket: No Faith Studios

 

Romancing A Wound: An Interview of Estefania Puerta 

portrait and interview by Abbey Meaker


Estefania Puerta is a Colombian immigrant womxn whose interdisciplinary art practice transcends genre. Experiential installations featuring sculpture, video, scent, writing, and performance are steeped in layers of psychoanalytic theory, mythology, and profound insights into language, memory, ritual, and time. 

In early fall, after months of trying to connect, Estefania and I caught up on my back porch, listening to the trees, watching the light change. The pandemic made it challenging to get together, but she was also busy in her studio preparing for her upcoming solo exhibition Womb Wound, opening this Sunday, October 11th at Situations in New York. 

Hearing her describe this new body of work and the ideas investigated within it, I knew we had to sit down more formally—a perfect reason to delve more deeply into its transporting complexity. Her work evokes one’s own process of recollection which condenses, displaces, and plummets us abruptly into the forgotten (or misplaced) recesses of our past. 

ABBEY MEAKER: You’ve titled this body of work and your upcoming exhibition Womb Wound. You explained in a recent interview with Rachel Jones that this title represents an extended investigation of healing, of birthing something, being the holder and nurturer that then becomes wounded. This is definitely a universal paradigm: what does it mean to be rejected by a society that relies on those who have been cast out to sustain itself? And what happens when the rejected refuse the parasite?  

ESTEFANIA PUERTA: I’m glad you brought up the extended metaphors of wombs and birth. I am not thinking of the womb as an organ attached to a cis female but rather the womb as a place we all have within us, a place of making selves, of nurture, of “the animal within the animal,” and very much about a holding place and how that slippery sense of “holding” can become a place of containment, detainment, of being trapped. The wound aspect of it is that piece around finding a healing place within the wound and not an escape or sutured repression from it. 

 
“Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

“Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

MEAKER: Healing is an ongoing and sometimes unpredictable process, but ‘being healed’ of something implies a fixed state, yet all life forms are in a constant state of becoming. What value do you see in the act of nursing a wound, or ‘romancing a wound’ as you poetically put it, if it can never fully recover but instead continually evolves? 

PUERTA: Many of the ways in which I describe what I’m thinking about in the work just ends up feeling web-like instead of linear. Even thinking about the idea of romancing the wound—what does it mean to ease pain in a way that’s not healing it but enticing it into submission. I think healing is a constant state of becoming empowered in all the complexities that a wound offers, whether it be rage, sadness, pain, forgiveness, empathy, resentment, trauma, acceptance, etc. If healing is a portal into these complicated states then the wound is this fountain, a source, an opening and a flowing sting that keeps us in the simultaneity of being  animals and highly conscientious beings. I find that the wounds that I carry have also become what nurses me; they offer me a space to be truthful in the complexity of my experience being alive. The value I see in romancing a wound is thinking of it as taming a wild beast and knowing how to slow dance with it instead of trying to fight it away. 

MEAKER: You have said that this work is very personal, especially with regard to the family history and mythologies you’re mining. Even within this personal thread, the feeling of disconnect from family and the attempt to piece together fragments of an unknowable history is something I deeply connect with, albeit for very different reasons. 

PUERTA: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I feel like it's something that many of us, if not all of us, can relate to: the erasure of our own history and these glimpses we may have: moments of vulnerable truth that are obscured by a murky mystery. In my family there are moments of clarity that I have about the ways in which we exist—the characters in my family and the mystery about who they are, who they were. These histories get erased but manifest in other ways. I romance around these murky mysteries and create different signifiers to dwell with a bit. 

MEAKER: It’s interesting, the function of remembering. Memory has so much to do with one’s sense of self and the forging of their history. If we can’t remember, we create stories, stand-ins. 

PUERTA: Yes, for sure. But I think that’s the thing about the self referential vs the identity politics around it all. That is definitely a part of it and inevitable because we are all political bodies in this society. But I realized a lot of what I was dealing with was a personal, familial connection and the way that has been impacted by politics, but getting more into the heaviness around it. In some ways I feel like dealing with the political was my way of avoiding the familial and realizing that it’s something I actually want to deeply understand. I wanted to find a soothing place within that unknown. I’m always thinking about a family member and each of the pieces I make become homages to them and reflections in this really subtle way. There is a correspondence that I feel like I have with my family. In that they do become these mythological creatures to me that hold powers and different codes to a family history that then becomes a world.

MEAKER: Kind of a way to commune with ancestors.

PUERTA: Yes, but they are usually people that I have known or know. But they do still feel like ancestors to me because of that moment of unknowing them. There’s something about, especially older family members, that feel like they are both here and in some deep past that I don’t have access to. 

 
Detail of “Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

Detail of “Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

MEAKER: This familiar/unfamiliar quality imbues your work with a sense of the uncanny. The sculpture titled Mija is particularly reminiscent of a body. It has an interior architecture, a bone structure. It has the qualities of an organism in that it’s alive and dying. It has a vibrancy and vitality but also shows signs of decline: dying plants against glowing water, soft and fleshy material edged by muddy mop-heads. Can you talk about these provocative, paradoxical qualities? 

PUERTA: Thinking of the too-muchness of all these materials, the excess in both ways of fleshy softness and the raggedy edges. I think of the mop heads as a filter, both in their material, cultured significance and also as a proposal and simulacra of cilia and other filters that exist in nature. My dad was a janitor for the majority of my life and I have a lot of love and fond connections to this material; riding on the floor buffing machine that felt like a giant, gentle beast as my dad was its tamer, guiding it across the floor. At the same time, I feel that sharpness in how immigrant labor can be almost fetishized in the U.S, how immigrants are seen as the filters, the holders, the purifiers of what others do not want to deal with. How these mops literally hold the muck and grime and how I think of them as tendrils protecting the soft interior of this sculpture. The guiding term I was thinking about for this piece was “creature comfort” and thinking of bodies that need regeneration, that are not just beat down and exhausted but are actually resting, re-generating, feeding themselves, finding comfort. Some referential inspirations are the feminine grotesque and the goddess of fertility, Artemis. 

 
“Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

“Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

MEAKER: I’m thinking about flowers: they are prized for their external beauty and arousing scent (how they satisfy us); yet once picked, the flower wilts, browns, drops its pedals, leaving only a rotting, stinking tuft that is hastily discarded by its once devoted admirer. 

PUERTA: We remember a beautiful flower but not the decaying flower. I’ve been thinking about the idea of a fruiting body. Fungus as a fruiting body, flowers as a fruiting body, the body having its own potential to fruit in these dark places. The operation of nature within all of that. Not just the appearance of it but what does it actually do and mean and how do we identify with these processes.

MEAKER: Your sculpture Enrejada is similarly dichotomous. Spilling out of a grid-like structure lined with ears made of wax, are tendrils of pink fabric, hair, and a coiled umbilical cord. This feels like a raw, traumatic memory. Bits and pieces disconnected and out of place, trying to find each other. The burden of remembering and forgetting. 

 
Detail of “Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

Detail of “Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

PUERTA: Hmm interesting, yeah, as you know, I am really interested in psychoanalysis and its poetic and very real history as it relates to hysteria and women’s experiences. Trauma is described as this type of repetition, a loop that you play over and over again but can never find the ending to it.  I do think this piece plays with that notion of repetition, the over emphasis of something that cannot be forgotten. But perhaps for me, the pain attached to trauma isn’t as present for me, I was thinking more of familial lineages (there is a spice blend in the sacks that my mother uses) and also what it means to be a sentient being. I made the ears during a time when I was in deep turmoil and a creative block. A friend read my tarot and saw an image of a tongue licking flowers and instructed me to get out of my head. I was talking myself in loops and what I needed to do was be present, to listen to the earth around me in a much more embodied way. As she read my tarot, I had this material in my hand with no purpose and instinctively started making ears, they felt beautiful and cathartic in my hands, they felt right and that just led me to other ideas of these pieces typically being seen as their primary sense of existence. We talk a lot about the gaze in a visual way, but what if a sculpture can hear you? What does it mean to have empowerment through another sense? To have auditory sentience and being-ness in the room and offer the act of listening to the “talker,” instead of the “viewer.” In that way, this piece actually feels really therapeutic or healing to me.

MEAKER: What has it been like making this work during a time of incredible tumult, fear, sickness, unknown, radical uprising? So much of what has been hidden has now come to light. 

PUERTA: It has been both my refuge and sanctuary, as well as the sharpest mirror reflecting the darkest parts of my soul. The part I may not have been ready to deal with. Making art always feels like you’re putting your hands into a void and hoping that whatever you’re holding onto or making gives something back to you that is nurturing. It was a hard, weird time to try to define what would be nurturing and whether it was even something worthwhile to define in this moment. And then coming back to the romantic and true feeling around art being its own space that, for better or worse, can keep us grounded in a different reality that isn’t always a hyper-politicized and materially cruel place. I realized that I am a valid person and that I am worthy of existence and expressing my existence. In that aspect, I feel so grateful I had this show to work towards; to have a mirror I had to constantly face, to ask the hard questions and get to the other side of it, where I feel more empowered than before. 

Womb Wound is on view from October 11 - November 15 with a reception on Sunday, October 11, 12-7 PM @ Situations in New York

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Ritualized Catharsis: An Interview of Hyon Gyon

text by Adam Lehrer

South Korean New York-based visual artist and painter Hyon Gyon’s Chinatown studio is hard to miss. Walking down Canal Street past the skateboarders that grind the rails along the bike path at the bottom of the Manhattan side of the Manhattan bridge, the markets that smell ripe of fish and assorted edible sea creatures, and the dizzyingly busy intersection of a diverse population, you finally take a right on Eldridge Street. Quite visibly from the opposite end of the block your eye catches an out-of-place looking two floor building with a massive sign that reads “Hyon Gyon.” The building looks more like a hut or a place of worship than an emerging visual artist’s studio. Considering Gyon’s aesthetic and work, that notion could feel rather deliberate on part of the artist. But talking to Gyon for any length of time quickly dispels that notion. Her studio is just an outgrowth of her practice, and her practice lacks any grand conceptual conceit. She channels energy into her art. What you see is simply what has come out of her.

Inside that studio is a visual world perhaps even more rarified and indicative of Gyon’s work than the locale’s exterior. The first floor is half work space and half gallery displaying several of Gyon’s large-scale and quite spectacular paintings that combine the markings of abstract expressionism and traditional Korean shamanistic imagery alongside Gyon’s scattered work materials. The room is accented by vibrant Korean carpets that cover almost the entirety of the floor. Upstairs, Gyon maintains a sizable collection of art and design books and has been stockpiling an assortments of garments that Gyon has taken to painting, deconstructing, and refashioning. At the center of the artifacts and tasteful junk is Gyon herself: ethereally beautiful, petite, and adorned in a sparkly pink top over a Rolling Stones t-shirt, she abstractly resembles the ideas that flow out of her in her work.

Gyon was attending university when she decided to be an artist professionally. Initially interested in fashion and having even worked at a studio that designed traditional Korean garments, Gyon’s decision to work in the fine arts was catapulted by the death of her grandmother. When Gyon’s grandmother passed, her family took part in a gut (pronounced: “goot”) ritual for her; in these ceremonies, a Korean shaman leads a series of sacrifices, physical gestures and prayers to the gods that theoretically enable a peaceful transition for the human spirit to leave the physical plane and enter into the spiritual plane. But in a more tangibly relatable manner, the gut ritual serves the purpose of allowing the deceased’s loved ones to move on. To purge negativity. To experience catharsis. That ritualized catharsis had a deep impact on Gyon, and she knew then that she had found her subject manner. “It’s hard to describe what happened to me,” says Gyon referring to her catharsis felt during the gut ritual. “Something in me had changed. I knew that I wanted people to experience emotion through my work.”

Gyon focuses on bold paintings and abstract sculptures with textile elements that use the faces and bodies of monstrous characters, or “incarnations” as she calls them, that are emblematic of specific emotions from the wide scale of human feeling. After working and developing her practice in Japan for 13 years, Gyon moved to New York in 2013 on a residency supported by her new dealers at Shin Gallery. The residency first resulted in a pop-up show entitled Hyon Gyon and The Factory that referenced Warhol and saw Gyon producing at truly Warholian (or should we say Herculean?) rates. This year, Shin included Gyon’s work alongside titans like Balthus and Salvador Dali in a group show entitled I Wanna Be Me that used its Sex Pistols aping title to celebrate utterly personal expression in a world of appropriation. But the greatest testament to Gyon’s talents at this juncture was her first eponymous Shin Gallery solo show that ran over the summer. The centerpiece of the show was the sculptural Headpiece that saw Gyon applying oil paints to pillows. Every pillow was its own face unlike any of the other faces and, according to Gyon, each represented a human emotion. The stacking of the pillows on top of one another and fashioning them to collide into one another was emblematic of any single human being’s psychology: chaotic and disorganized but still working together to create a definable whole. While so much of the conceptual art world explores the anxiety and paranoia that technology has unleashed upon the world populace, Gyon looks toward a concept that is, if not divine, than spiritual. Her work is awake and tapped into something that lives above the cacophony of daily existence. I had to talk to her.

LEHRER: What were you going through emotionally while in university that led you to transition into creating art works?

Gyon: During my first master course, I was working through my own personal experiences with my grandmother having just passed and that prompted me to focus on my work. I was enjoying making art, but really didn’t know what I wanted to make and I wasn’t sure what my subject matter would be. I was looking for something. We held a a “gut” ritual for her and that had a big impact on me.

LEHRER: Obviously having your grandmother pass away is an emotional event, but what was it about the ceremony specifically that you connected with making artwork?

Gyon: I was not very close with my grandmother.  I was not a good grandchild. I did very bad things to her. I regretted this. After she passed away, I couldn’t do anything for her. It made me so sad and I wanted to meet her again. 

LEHRER: So you felt making art somehow would connect you to your grandmother in the way that you couldn’t while she was alive?

Gyon: Yes. During the Guy Ceremony, I felt I could meet my grandmother, like I could talk to my grandmother. I had such negative emotions in my mind and after the ceremony, they were gone. Not completely gone, but my emotions changed.

LEHRER: Your artwork is obviously very emotional. I was curious, I read that as a child, you liked burning textiles and that this became a part of your process later on. For you, was that destructive act also a creative act?

Gyon: Mhmm

LEHRER: Could you explain that a little bit?

Gyon: As a kid, I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to play with my friends. I just wanted to be alone. My mom had a lot of fabrics and I wanted to do something with them. Draw, paint, write. But, I used a lighter. It didn’t work. It all burned

LEHRER: I’ve read articles about the fashion designer Margiela when he was still around.

Gyon: I love him

LEHRER: When people asked why he sent ripped clothing down the runway, he said for him ripping clothes is just another creative act. It’s like you’re destroying something to create something else. 

GYON: I use that process, always. When I make a painting, I’ll destroy it, remake it, destroy it. It’s much better in the end. 

LEHRER: Your work has been broken down into these five different ideas: Incarnations, hair which I guess is a metaphor for life and how life can continue after death, the stigma of the shaman lifestyle of being ostracized or put away from your community, but called upon for important funerals and things like that, and catharsis. That sounds very specific. What sort of lead you to focus on these five ideas?

Gyon: I don’t think it’s so specific. It’s about life and death. Happy or unhappy.

LEHRER: So many contemporary artists now are dealing with the paranoia surrounding the digital age and surveillance technology. But your work is still dealing with the big themes of life, death, and spirituality. Obviously you have have a laptop and Wi-Fi, but do you feel yourself consciously disconnecting from technology to get in touch with your work?

Gyon: I’m not a huge technology person.

LEHRER: That helps

Gyon: I have to use laptop, i have to use iPhone. Instagram brought you and I together, it has a power. It’s so amazing. I use it, but I am very human.

LEHRER: Are you religious or just spiritual?

Gyon: I don’t have any religion. Shamans aren’t about religion, they are spiritual. 

LEHRER: Right, and they can be like medicine men too? Healers? 

Gyon: Yes, healers. That’s why I’m interested. I’m not very interested in religions. I mean, I used to go to church and used to go to Temple. You know, the Temple is a very interesting place in Chinatown. 

LEHRER: I was wondering, too, because your work does have elements of abstract expressionism and also some figuration to it, were you influenced at all by the conventional schools of art history? Are you trying to blend these concepts of ritual with the traditions of art history?

Gyon: Blend. Everything is hybrid. I always use juxtaposition—so high culture and low culture. I am always trying to juxtapose emotion and culture. My work does not just focus on shamanism. 

LEHRER: Yeah, because it still is in the context of contemporary art and art history and things like that. So for some of your work, Headcount for instance, when I first saw it I was amazed by the way it almost implies an explosive imagination. How do all those faces and characters appear to you? And how do they flow out of you?

Gyon: They just came out. And each piece is different, with different faces. I didn’t make them as a portrait, I just filled them in with emotions. I was transformed by other people. It just came out. 

LEHRER: Do you think that they’re all feelings? 

Gyon: Yes. I don’t know, it just came out and I can’t explain why. I made it by myself. 

LEHRER: You don’t use assistants or anything? 

Gyon: Some people helped me with the sewing and stuffing the cotton, but basically I do it by myself. 

LEHRER: That’s what’s so interesting about art criticism is that sometimes we take meaning from the work that’s so much different than what’s intended. 

Gyon: So different, yeah. And I really hate that people want to know what the meaning of the painting is, of these characters. It’s too much for me. I really don’t want to explain everything, every marking

LEHRER: One thing I did want to ask you though is you used to design traditional Korean garments? When did you notice the potential in those fabrics for other creative purposes? 

Gyon: I always loved clothing. I always loved the fabrics. I wanted to be a designer more than a painter. I don’t know why I’m a painter. That experience was really amazing. I didn’t even want to be an artist because I thought that it was impossible to live as one. I just went to the interview and had no idea how to make the clothing, I still can’t do it, but the designer hired me because I was really good with using color and good at drawing. And so that’s how I started working there. It was amazing. Amazing. I didn’t know how beautiful the traditional Korean dresses were. I’m very proud of it. It’s super inspiring. I mean, that’s why I went to Japan, because I wanted to study fashion. 

Follow Hyon Gyon on Instagram. text and interview by Adam Lehrer