C.Ryu and Kayla Tange Presents: Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng
KST Partner
Saturday, August 30, 2025
7:30pm – 8:30pm
KST’s Alloy Studios | 5530 Penn Ave.
Pay What Moves You: $25 – $40
Futurity of the Womb: The Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng is an experimental, 60-minute multimedia performance that reimagines Korean history through the lens of feminist mythology. Blending ritual, burlesque, speculative fiction, and mythology, the piece unfolds in four sections, interweaving live performance, video projection, and audience interaction.
Traditionally, kisaengs were enslaved Korean courtesans, forced to entertain those in power while mastering the arts. Futurity of the Womb is a time-traveling performance that redefines the kisaeng’s legacy beyond the constraints of history. The cyborg becomes a vessel for interrogating our codependence with technology and identity, reflecting on power manufactured by human limitations.
- Mudang Jenn Kim, a Korean-American shaman, invokes the first cosmic mother of Korea, MAGO, who was shamed for her larger-than-life power.
- Kayla Tange merges the kisaeng and abandoned Princess Bari to explore grief and adoption as a portal, dwelling in the space between the living and the dead.
- C. Ryu reimagines the gumiho, a nine-tailed fox demon that consumed men’s livers and hearts to survive, as a cyborg—alchemizing complicit desire.
Futurity of the Womb offers not a single narrative, but a timeline rewritten—a mythos where stories once censored emerge alive, electric, and here. This is not a return to history—it’s a reprogramming.
**Funding for the “Futurity of the Womb: Myth of the Cyborg Kisaeng” was provided by the Exposure Artists Program of The Pittsburgh Foundation. An additional thank you for the support provided by the Pedantic Arts Residency.
Photo Credit: Brendan Lott & C. Ryu
Content Warning: This event is for ages 18+ due to nudity, sex work, gore, and demonology storytelling.
Content Warning: This event includes strobing lights and loud sounds.
- ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Mudang Jenn is a shaman, ritual tender, and teaching artist guiding others to uncover the hidden energies within, awakening the body as both vessel and drum for spirit and ancestral memory. With roots as a traditionally initiated mudang and her lived experience navigating life as a diasporic shaman, she creates ceremonial spaces that honor ancestral traditions while confronting personal healing, transformation, and collective remembrance. Mudang Jenn has taught, performed, and shared her ritual work at institutions including RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), Columbia Theological Seminary, Recess Art, Creative Time, The Nicholson Project, and Canal Projects NYC. She has been featured in media outlets like HuffPost and Popdust.
C.Ryu uses translation as a tool to map forgotten histories – to reveal psychological shadows haunting | hunting the Korean diaspora – and performs contemporary translations of rituals for the living. Often conflating documentary and science fiction to showcase the warped nature in migrational storytelling, Ryu creates new media installations, performances, and photography to question who is allowed to have a voice. C. Ryu is a co-founder of Hwa Records and JADED (named 2022 People of the Year by Pittsburgh City Paper). Ryu has exhibited and culturally produced at Carnegie Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; LAPhil Insight; LA Art Show; Kelly Strayhorn Theater; and more.
Kayla Tange is a multidisciplinary artist and community organizer working across performance, video, and sculpture to interrogate labor, embodiment, and identity. Tange is also known under the stage name Coco Ono and has co-founded Cyber Clown Girls, Stripper Co-op, and Hwa Records. She also co-created Private Practices, an Asian sex worker collection atthe Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. She has performed or exhibited at Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Asian Pacific Film Festival, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Ford Foundation Gallery, and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. Tange has recently received the California Arts Council Grant through Los Angeles Performance Practice.