Paper Short Abstract:

This paper investigates the transformative potential of magic within Korean shamanism and its diasporic expressions, focusing on Meesha Goldberg’s Daughterland (2022). Presented during Gyopo’s event, “Between Worlds: Art and Shamanism in the Korean Diaspora,” this multimedia work, spanning endurance performance, experimental film, poetry, and painting, enacts magic as an everyday practice rooted in Korean shamanic traditions. Drawing from Koo Chaweon’s Spellbound: A New Witch’s Guide to Crafting the Future (2022), I propose the alchemy of fermentation as a diasporic and indigenous magic, decolonized from supernatural spectacle. Daughterland demonstrates the unseen yet powerful relational magic of engaging with the land, ancestors, and the mundane, reshaping the boundaries of diasporic indigeneity.

Paper Abstract:

This paper centers on the transformative and relational magic inherent in Korean shamanism and its diasporic manifestations, with a focus on Meesha Goldberg’s Daughterland. Presented during Gyopo’s event, “Between Worlds: Art and Shamanism in the Korean Diaspora,” Goldberg’s work, integrating endurance performance, experimental film, poetry, and painting, brings forth an intuitive and everyday magic that resonates deeply with shamanic traditions. Unlike explicit performances of shamanic rituals, Goldberg enacts a quieter yet equally potent form of magic, weaving together themes of ancestry, land, and diasporic belonging.

Grounded in Koo Chaweon’s Spellbound: A New Witch’s Guide to Crafting the Future (2022), I propose the alchemy of fermentation as a central metaphor for diasporic magic, an indigenous ontology that transforms and sustains through relational practices. This alchemy reimagines magic as embedded in the mundane, dissolving its reliance on visibility or spectacle. Through intuitive connections between ancestral histories, sacred landscapes, and embodied acts of creation, Daughterland disrupts binaries of “original” and “copy” associated with mimesis. It demonstrates the “in-the-making” nature of magic as an active collaboration with land and ancestral spirits, reframing indigeneity and diaspora as intertwined processes of becoming.

By addressing the growing popularity of Korean shamanism in Western artistic and academic contexts, this study critically intervenes in its framing as “ancestral magic.” Situating Daughterland within this discourse, I argue that diasporic shamanic arts illuminate the power of magic to transform relationships with self, community, and place, offering a new understanding of indigeneity as an ongoing, relational practice.