Mapping a Mobile and Embodied Grief: Adaptable and Portable Mourning Practices in A young Yu’s Mourning Rituals

This article discusses A young Yu’s single-channel video artwork Mourning Rituals (2022) and the way it examines loss across personal, ancestral, historical, and geographical registers and suggests that mourning rituals in our contemporary world must be adaptable and portable. A 22-minute performance-based work, Mourning Rituals reimagines the Korean ssitkimgut ritual, during which the spirits of the deceased are cleansed and guided into the afterlife, reinterpreting and regenerating it for contemporary, diasporic contexts. Considering mourning as an embodied practice, Yu maps grief and mourning across four locations with personal and political significance. Interweaving scenes from these filming locations throughout the looped, non-linear video allows the work to also reflect the complex ways grief and mourning unfold over time.