He Jin Jang
He Jin Jang is a Seoul-born, multi-city-based choreographer, researcher, curator, and essayist whose transdisciplinary practice spans choreography, critical somatics, Korean indigenous medicine, and post/decolonial thought. Rooted in the body as a site of political, ancestral, and speculative knowledge, her work moves across performance, text, ritual, and installation—often in fluid collaboration with artists and thinkers. She engages deeply with themes of invisibility, refusal, ritual, and resilience, approaching choreography not as product, but as method: a form of sensing, remembering, and unmaking. Jang’s works have been presented in over 30 cities worldwide—including at Seoul International Dance Festival, MODAFE, Platform-L Live Arts Program (KR), National Museum of Contemporary Arts (RO), Musikfestival Bern (CH), New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Movement Research (US). Her projects have been supported by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Arts Council Korea, and Korea Arts Management Service among others. International fellowships and residencies include the Saison Foundation Online Artist-in-Residence, DanceWeb (AT), Laboratorio Condensación (MX), Movement Research, and Fresh Tracks at New York Live Arts (US).
As a dramaturg and curator, Jang has co-curated Brick-Break Platform (Arts Council Korea Theater), Seoul International Choreography Workshop, and Choreo-Lab (Korea National Contemporary Dance Company). She has provided dramaturgical and advisory support to artists and institutions including Ae-Soon Ahn, James Cousins Company (UK), Seoul Dance Center, and the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company. As an educator, Jang has taught for over two decades across Korea, the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. From 2011–2014, she served as Assistant Professor at Hollins University (US), where she was honored with the Webb Bierley Teaching Fellowship. Her teaching and mentoring credits include University of Michigan, American Dance Festival, University of the Arts Philadelphia, University of Calgary, Centro de Producción de Danza Contemporánea (MX), Movement Research, and the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program. In Korea, she has taught at Seoul Institute of the Arts, Sungkyunkwan University, Kyunghee University, Korea National University of the Arts, and more. She served as Choreo-Lab Mentor at the Asian Cultural Center (2019–2021) and continues to advise emerging artists in transdisciplinary contexts. Jang is also a certified educator of the Franklin Method®, a somatic practice based on Dynamic Neuro-cognitive Imagery™, which informs both her teaching and creative practice.
Currently based in Singapore, she is a fellow of the Artistic Director Academy at T:Works and a core member of the choreographic collective Tangerine. Described by Dance Magazine MOMM (KR) as “a daring and candid choreographer,” Jang creates work that lingers in the thresholds—between gesture and disappearance, grief and survival, body and memory. Her performances, films, and essays serve as lucid rehearsals for other ways of being—with and through the invisible.
PRACTICE STATEMENT
My practice unfolds at the intersection of choreography, somatic research, and ancestral memory. I approach the body not as an object of form but as a porous site of historical sediment, speculative worlding, and soft resistance. Choreography becomes a method of mourning, refusal, and speculative survival—a way of sensing what history has failed to name, and surviving what systems refuse to hold. I am drawn to states that precede form: gestures before they are named, bodies before they are seen, knowledge that persist in whispers. What can choreography do when it is no longer tasked with display? What becomes visible when we turn toward what is disappearing, unformed, or unspoken? Through a methodology I call soft rehearsal, I investigate how the body can hold, process, and transform experiences of grief, biopolitical violence, and inherited trauma. My tools include guided movement meditations, improvisational scores, ritual reenactments, and sensorial readings—practices that create space for the body to rehearse not to perfect, but to remember, refuse, and reimagine.
My current PhD research focuses on Eunhyeongbeop (the method of becoming invisible), a traditional Korean healing principle, reinterpreted as choreographic score and political cosmology. I explore its resonance with contemporary precarity, transindividual mourning, and invisible forms of care. Invisibility, for me, becomes not a site of erasure, but of embodied strategy—of survival. I engage with somatic conditions that resist articulation: proto-movements, disappearing gestures, sensorial echoes of ancestral care. Across live performance, film, and text, I activate Korean indigenous knowledge not as metaphor, but as living somatic material with contemporary urgency. Ultimately, my research-performance practice is less concerned with fixed outcomes than with what lingers in process: the ghost in the breath, the protest in the pause, the ritual in the repetition. It is through this porous approach that I seek to contribute to evolving discourses on postcolonial embodiment, feminist care, and sensory futures.