LACE Presents: Artists’ Film International
Saturday, August 2, 2025, 2–7 PM
Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles, CA
3910 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Limited free parking available on site
LACE is proud to present the 2025 edition of Artists’ Film International (AFI’25), a touring film program which is collectively curated and presented by sixteen international arts organizations and convened by Forma. AFI’25 introduces the work of talented moving image artists to worldwide audiences, and will be live over 300 days, with exhibitions, screenings and public programs hosted across four continents.
This year the AFI partners have commissioned or selected recent artists’ films which respond to the theme “Dream States.” AFI’25 delves into the transformative power of dreaming as a space for processing the past and envisioning alternative futures. Exploring the dynamic relationship between personal and political landscapes, AFI’25 investigates how individual consciousness and external realities converge to drive change. The program looks to films that explore how the emancipatory quality of dreams and altered states of reality can reshape the physical and psychological boundaries around us, challenge established norms, and confront the status quo.
LACE’s selection for AFI’25 is Leymusoom Garden: New Sun (2024) by Heesoo Kwon. Kwon’s oneiric visual language and unique animation style allow her to create memoryscapes of personal and community liberation. The film rewrites mythical matrilineal histories through utopian and whimsical abstractions of time, space, and memory to ultimately bring forth healing and transformation.
Following the screening, LACE’s Curator and Director of Programs, Selene Preciado speaks with artist Heesoo Kwon to learn more about her art practice. Light refreshments are provided.
About Leymusoom Garden: New Sun, 2024
Leymusoom Garden encapsulates Kwon’s spiritual journey and life trajectory from late 2022 to early 2024. Created in the digital realm, Leymusoom Garden incorporates 3D-scanned models of her grandparents’ land in Gongju-si, South Korea, alongside her home studio and garden during the production period, located on the unceded ancestral land of the Ramaytush Ohlone people (now known as San Francisco). Through this sanctuary, Kwon reflects on the complexities of relationships and life values, embracing acceptance and healing as she navigates unexpected losses and transformative transitions in her artistic journey.
Exploring Korean shamanistic perspectives through the myths of Dokkaebi (mythical creatures from Korean folklore) and Mago, alongside the Indigenous creation story of Skywoman, enabled Kwon to confront her maternal family history and personal experiences. Magohalmi (마고할미 or Mago 마고) is a powerful female deity from Korean shamanic mythology—a creator, progenitor, and sovereign of humanity, nature, and all geographical formations. In Leymusoom Garden, Mago is reimagined as Kwon’s paternal great-grandmother.
About the Artist
Heesoo Kwon (she/they) is a Korean-born multimedia artist who considers art-making a socio-ritualistic, archival and auto-ethnographic practice. Employing 3D animation, modeling and artificial intelligence technologies as procreant, shamanic tools, she engages in the queering of familial relationships, the rewriting of mythic matrilineal histories, and the building of decentralized worlds and memoryscapes, as seen in her autobiographical feminist religion Leymusoom and her Firefly series of AI-augmented childhood photographs. In Kwon’s heterotopic hyperspaces, she abstracts (conceptions of) time and memory, transcending the burdens/legacies of sacrifice, trauma and patriarchal violence to offer instead transformative modes of liberated existence, love and community.
Selected exhibitions include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Buk Seoul Museum of Arts, Seoul, South Korea; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands; EFA Project Space, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose, San Jose, CA; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Blinkers Art & Project Space, Winnipeg, Canada; West Den Haag, Netherlands; and WMA Space, Hong Kong. She was awarded the 2023 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia and the 2025 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.
Photo: Breno Aragon
About Artists’ Film International 2025
Artists’ Film International was established in 2008 by Whitechapel Gallery in London and since its inception has seen 32 international venues collaborate. AFI is an alternative, lateral programme that exemplifies non-hierarchical, borderless and collaborative curatorial models.
Responding to urgent global topics, the programme cultivates collective practice and cross- cultural dialogue, fosters the exchange of ideas and perspectives, and provides wide reaching visibility for artists.
Convened by Forma, Artists’ Film International 2025 is co-curated and co-presented by fifteen arts organizations across four continents. AFI’25 celebrates artists’ moving image work centering on the theme of Dream States.
SUPPORT
This program is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special thanks to our friends at PRS for their support while LACE’s Hollywood gallery is under renovation.
