前生 = 전생 = 전 생 = Past Life = Pancake Life version 3 (2026)

02.08.2026

Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, los angeles, ca

Photo credit: AUDREY MEDRANO & Jessica fuquay

✨The translation in the title are translations that are correct and incorrect. I am creating riddles with the different ways of translating Korean using sonic mispronunciation.

✨전 (JEON) past or korean pancake
✨생 (SAENG) life

✨ “前生 = 전생 = Past Life = Pancake Life” Version 3.0 (2026) is a version of my past life | pancake life performance that is an experimental pansori between left behind tapes of my grandmother’s trained 唱 |창 (chang: a korean singing methodology) in tandem with my own vocal storytelling using a looper. Pansori is Korea's traditional opera style that is made up of a singer and a storyteller, interweaving human tales with song.

✨ This noise duet or pansori is a sound bridge between the afterlife and the living. Ryu is still co-creating with her grandmother even if 혜정 임도순 is not here.

✨ 혜정 임도순 passed onto her next life in 2018. 혜정 임도순 performed her singing in the 1980s and 1990s in Daegu, South Korea and she kept the recordings in perfect conditions with great pride. The video played on stage was filmed by Ryu on the way to her grandmother’s funeral.

✨A sonic rumination on past lives through the lens of C. Ryu’s maternal linage of her grandmother’s unfinished dreams of being on stage as well as Ryu’s own past life visions, this non-linear performance uses time-bending storytelling as a methodology to unravel misplaced diasporic longing and the pitfalls of translating migrational dreams.

✨Roots in the sky
✨when a tree swims
✨fire blossoms