While BUL (2023) is built upon the harmonic melodies and lyricism of pop songs, SWAN SONG (2025), the sequel, gear-shifts into dissonance and glitches as modality. Conceived as an instrumental opera and visualized as a silent film, SWAN SONG depicts an intergenerational encounter between a now world-weary BUL and her estranged human great-great-great-granddaughter, CY at the Salton Sea in Imperial County, California. Their transmission is expressed in a “monster language” composed of ancient and contemporary instrumentation and movement. BUL’s voice is expressed through the saenghwang, an ancient Korean free reed mouth organ said to echo a phoenix’s cry, while CY is voiced by the harmonica, an instrument that descends from the saenghwang. The soundscape merges the Korean folk tradition of pansori (musical storytelling) and the American blues, and evokes an imaginative ancestral lineage and dialogue between past, present and future. Music was made in collaboration with Alan Poma, gamin, and Yeore Kim, with choreography by Alexsa Durrans.

The final act features five performers enacting shifting poetics of relations by using the languages of synchronized animal movements (starling murmurations, ant death circles, locust swarms), pop culture (the wave, line dancing), traditional Korean dance, and also choreography that references and abstracts geopolitical borders between the U.S., Russia, China, North Korea, and South Korea. If BUL focuses on the agonies and ecstasies of the relationship between self and other, SWAN SONG complicates the desire to belong to something greater than oneself by asking: Where do the self and the collective body begin and end? Who defines a border? How do we become borderless?

SWAN SONG (2025) was presented at Human Resources LA as part of my solo exhibition BUL: When Fire Breathes Cloud in April 2025. The exhibition was supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

Cast: jas lin, Ruoyi Shi, Liessa Son, Christine Yerie Lee, Dallas Havoc, Chantel Murphy, Miles Brenninkmeijer. Production team: Christine Yerie Lee (Writer, Director, Producer, Editor, Props), Luke Im (Director of Photography), Alan Poma (Musical Director, Composer), Yeore Kim (Musician, Harmonica), gamin (Musician, Saenghwang), Alexsa Durrans (Choregrapher), Zenaido Zamora (Makeup Artist), Ling Tiong (Producer), Carlos Rosales-Silva (Producer), Aj Andrews (Research Assistant), Adam Lutz (AV technician, Art Handler).

For full video link, please contact lee.christineyerie@gmail.com