My Journey to Mother+Peace
Given the Ecosystems generators’ assignment to choose an artist or activist in the local community to draw inspiration from, Dohee Lee came on top of my list. Dohee is a Korean shamanic ritualist, performance artist, and community organizer who does incredible work uplifting the voices and visibility of diverse immigrant and refugee communities.
In early 2021, I only knew Dohee from witnessing her lead a grief ritual at a From Bay to Atlanta rally held in Madison Park; a local vigil and ceremonial space held by Korean facilitators and artists to help the community gather and mourn the lives of eight Asian womxn who were murdered on March 2021. This piece of news followed months of anti-Asian sentiment and violent attacks exponentially increasing since Trump’s detailing of the “kung-flu virus” during the rise of the COVID pandemic.
It was a tense time for our community and, through the healing power of drums and Dohee’s encouragement to stomp, shake, scream out loud in a circle with other Asian womxn, we were finally given the permission and safe space to move through the rage and grief that desperately needed to be felt and released.
I remember the catharsis, the feeling of elation of being a part of something. The “this is it” feeling, the shift of being alone and isolated being transmuted to community resilience and power. And it left me with this impression of the power of community gatherings and rituals that bring about expression and movement, spaces to feel our body, our connection to the land through our feet, and our connection to our ancestry.
Dohee was our guide—drumming to set a vibration deep enough with its embedded intention to remember our impact, as if every individual weight of each stomp on the Earth could shake the whole world into believing that “We matter. We exist. We are here.”
And it was this embodiment that I took with me throughout our interview and my artist journey. I knew when Dohee agreed to be my subject for this project that whatever I was to create would have this intention: May we all find a rooted sense of belonging to the Earth.
“Our eyes met each other and the great Spirit of our ancestors joyfully spoke about Soul work and the interconnectedness of all things.”
I received weeks of training on research and interview skills through Julius and Marisa from The Forum Collective. After researching Dohee’s artist background and activism work, I prepared my list of questions and set the intention for the interview: a ritual that would start with a tea ceremony.
In our interview, we dropped in instantly.
Our eyes met each other and the great Spirit of our ancestors joyfully spoke about Soul work and the interconnectedness of all things. We explored the relationship between art and healing, the power of ritual, the importance of decolonizing the body and reconnecting with our ancestors as asian diaspora, amongst other things. I honestly felt like I blacked out through the entire thing. Our High Soul Channel was on and our humans were just drinking tea. At the end of the interview, I had so much energy moving in my body, Dohee and I went outside of her work studio at the Headlands Center of Art and we shook the energy right out onto the earth.
I remember the courage and the feeling of surrender I was leaning into. The questions I worked with were things Dohee had seeded in our conversation:
What does it look like to separate patriarchy within our traditions?
As Asian diaspora, children of immigrants, living in a land that isn’t our ancestral home, losing our ancestors' languages generation after generation, how can we bring back matriarchal wisdom?
How do we reconcile all of these differences without running the risk of feeling ashamed, confused, apathetic, disembodied, indifferent, resentful?
To this day, I am so appreciative of my one-on-one time with Dohee and the transmission of ancestral wisdom that passed so freely. I suppose I knew from then it was up to me to integrate these lessons into teachable life experiences in my own creative way.
From there began the next phase of the Ecosystems journey: to feel, integrate, and create.
~Tiff Lin
Keep on the look out for the Dohee Lee interview soon!