Mugwort Rocking (MSC III), 2026
Video Performance, 7 minutes, single-channel video
Mugwort Rocking tells the story of two future Musok healers—personifications of the plant mugwort and the root astragalus—who perform a ritual of rocking to create alignment between bodies, plants, and the cosmos. The film points to ancestral practices in which smoke and steam from plants mediate the transfer of healing energy. Here, rocking becomes the mediating pulse: a rhythmic movement that sets smoke and steam into motion, enabling their circulation, guiding their passage, reorganizing energy fields, and aligning their capacity to transform.
In contrast to their violent reduction within today’s medical and wellness industries to extractable ingredients, mugwort and astragalus are active participants in dialogue with the sick body and guiding the process of restoration. The video performance seeks to recover the role of relational perception in healing practices, activated through rocking—an expanded perceptual field, a diffuse mode of perception and environmental attunement through which the body registers and responds to overlapping sensory, energetic, and environmental conditions beyond measurable inputs.
This work forms part of the broader umbrella project Massage Shop Codes and emerges from the artist’s field research in unlicensed massage shops, where therapists combine the massage technique of rocking with herbal treatments performed through steam and smoke.
Direction/Choreography : Yon Natalie Mik
Choreographic assistant: Park Ji-yoo
Performers: Park Jin-ju, Seo Chae won
Camera: Jung Hye-jin
Camera assistant: Jo Mal
Editing: Jung Hye-jin, Yon Natalie Mik
Title Cards: Son Hyunkyung
Sound: Noh Eun-sil