Palace Kneading (MSC I), 2026
Video performance, 12 minutes, single-channel video
Palace Kneading is a ghost story about how healing practices performed by women have been displaced through shifts in state power and gendered regimes of knowledge, and how these transformations persist under contemporary conditions of precarious labor.
The movement of kneading, embodied by the ghost figure, serves as both the haunting subject and structuring logic of the film. Its repetitive, tactile force sustains the presence of a ghost trapped in a massage shop. She was once a palace healer during the Goryeo Dynasty, later de-legitimized under the Confucian order of the Joseon period, and now works 24 hours a day in a massage shop near the palace.
Filmed in an actual unlicensed underground massage shop near Gyeongbok Palace in northern Seoul, the work situates the ghostly body within present-day labor conditions, where the cosmotechnic of kneading persist under regimes of marginalization and exploitation.
The spoken words in the film—memories of giving and receiving massage—draw on oral histories from the artist’s non-extractive fieldwork, conducted over two years through kinetic interviews with unlicensed massage workers in Seoul, many of whom are migrant women from China and Thailand, as well as single mothers.
Direction/Choreography: Yon Natalie Mik
Performer: Yon Natalie Mik
Camera: Jung Hye-jin
Camera assistant: Jo Mal
Editing: Jung Hye-jin, Yon Natalie Mik
Title Cards: Son Hyunkyung
Spoken Words: Yon Natalie Mik