The Tutelar Guardian of Forgotten Tales

The Tutelar Guardian of Forgotten Tales is the first completed chapter of Soojin Pray’s ongoing ritual-media project We, We Wish. It began with an artist-led dawn ritual performed and filmed at Seonbawi Rock on Inwangsan Mountain, Seoul, on 1 January 2023.

Across twelve ritual scenes, the artist works with mask, movement, breath, repetition, sound, and ritual objects. These elements function not as theatrical decoration, but as media through which fragmented cultural memory is carried, transformed, and made perceptible. The twelve scenes were later developed as digital relics and assembled into one 10-minute 45-second single-channel moving-image work.

The project does not reenact a traditional Korean shamanic ceremony. It reconfigures ritual structures through the artist’s trained body and contemporary media practice. A black unfinished mask operates as both guardian and aperture: a face for what remains unnamed, and a threshold through which memory can enter without being reduced to personal identity.

The work asks how embodied cultural knowledge may enter digital media without becoming spectacle or a fixed image of tradition. Digital media does not claim to preserve the original event in full. Instead, it carries partial traces of the ritual across different sites, scales, and viewing conditions.