Bosong Kim

Biography

Bosong Kim is a fourth-year PhD student with a BA in Dance Theory from Korea
National University of Arts and an MA in Interdisciplinary Program in Performing Arts
Studies from Seoul National University. Her passion for theatre arts goes back to
when she started dancing at age eight, which led her in the present to working at the
intersection of theatre and dance as foundational to her research, with an emphasis
on the body and its corporeality as subject and conducive to culture, politics, and
identity.

Her project in the program explores how non-Western subjectivities are formed
under postcolonial capitalism through looking at dance as embodied tradition. It
casts a new light on the ontology of tradition in the non-west, which acts as a crucial
anchor to ground the sense of who we are in today’s globalized and
transnationalizing world, as well as an important axis in identity politics besides race,
class, sex, and gender.

The project looks at contemporary dance performances of South Korea, using
theorization of the body as lived tradition and analyzing how those bodies are
labored, aestheticized, and commodified under the conditions of capitalist modernity.
While enmeshing discourses in cultural studies, dance/performance studies, and
postcolonial studies, it utilizes movement analysis to render a more lived, somatic,
and affective conditions of the contemporary non-Western subjectivity. The project
also focuses on the representations of tradition and heritage in the performances,
which transforms and functions in the dynamic web of nationalism, global citizenship,
capitalism, and anticolonial resistance, theorizing how body and culture becomes a
spectacle and its relationship to formation, circulation and consumption of identities.

Born and raised in South Korea, Bosong had multicultural experiences during her
diasporic years in Los Angeles. She practiced various forms of art including
architecture and popular music before pursuing theatre and dance academically. She
has worked in performing, researching, and administering performing arts; aside
from specializing in Korean Dance, she performed ethnic dances of China, Japan,
and India at the National Assembly and university theatres in Korea. She participated
in a comparative study of court dances of East Asia in addition to staging
performances of overseas artists as an assistant researcher at The World Ethnic
Dance Institute. She also worked as an organizer of the Seoul International Dance
Competition where she interacted with artistic directors, choreographers, and
dancers from all around the world.

Research

Representations of tradition in dance performances, theorization of the body as a material heritage,
culture and body as commodity and spectacle, working at the intersection of Dance/Performance
studies, Cultural studies, Postcolonial studies, and Korean studies.

Education

BA, Dance Theory, Korea National University of Arts (Seoul, South Korea)

MA, Interdisciplinary Program in Performing Arts Studies, Seoul National University (Seoul, South
Korea)