At the Indian Canyons, the ancestral home to the Agua Caliente Tribe, stands a lone figure clad in glitter and gold. Her artist name is Yozmit and she transcends more than her surroundings, as she is encircled by the elements of California —Yozmit transcends gender, time, and space. She is a transgender music-visual performance artist who is also a costume designer. Her art and performance intend to spread her message of *DoYou* - "a process of becoming fully self-realized and acting upon self-identity. DoYou is [her] artistic mantra to shift power from external conformity to internal realization/” She has collaborated with the likes of Alex Sandar, Susanne Bartsch, The BOX New York, The Box London, Supper Club, Sleep No More, Queen on the Night, and has performed at Burning Man, Coachella, Life Ball, Lincoln Center, and many other notable venues and events. In our interview with Yozmit, we talk about her identity as “Two-Spirit” and the artistic value of SELF. Please read our exclusive interview with Yozmit below.

Where are you based?
The City of Angels called Los Angeles.

Can you give us the meaning behind the name “Yozmit”?
Myth about one’s SELF. It is the artist name that I created for myself as my higher channel alter ego which I try to live up to by creating an image and the energy space of Goddess named Yozmit as a male form.

You describe yourself as Two-Spirit and we would love to know more about what this term means in concern to your identity.
According to Wikipedia, “ Two-Spirit (also two spirit or, occasionally, twospirited) is a modern, pan-Indian, umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people in their communities who fulfill a traditional third-gender (or other gender-variant) ceremonial and social role in their cultures.“

I personally think all humans are Two-Spirit because they are born from a mother and a father. The duality is this magical, divine quality that humans possess, and accepting this dualistic human mind and taking it to a higher level of understanding is, to me, TRANScendence. For this reason, I also call myself TRANSCENDgender.

If people ask what my pronouns are, I say “Immortal”. When I need to categorize myself, which is always difficult for me because I feel that words cannot contain my energy, these words are the closest I found. From my research and intuition, I learned that well balanced Two-Spirit people usually have magic powers almost like a superhuman. They were the priests, healers, and shamans throughout the human history. That is why most people are intrigued or even threatened by these people in the world. Their energy has been suppressed, discriminated, and put down to the level of trannies in modern days. Let me ask you a question. Who is the most powerful person on earth at the moment? My answer is the Pope. In my view, this man in a skirt actually rules the world but we also look down upon other men in a skirt? Why?? Contradiction is also the primary concept of the human condition. Any superpower can be used for good and also for bad and for extreme measure, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The matriarchy went through its decay in the past and the patriarchy is going through with it at this very moment. The dark side of the feminine (toxic feminine) having a co-dependent relationship with the dark side of the masculine (toxic masculine) became the majority of our reality and that is why our world is at wherever we are right now. We are all created by Yin and Yang, Good and Bad, Negative and Positive, Male and Female. Embodying duality and all spectrum in-between is an enlightenment.

In my video piece, STAIRWAYS (2017), I reinterpret the imagery of Avalokitesvara - a bodhisattva who embodies the compassion of all Buddhas, particularly known for its two-spirit and transgender quality appearing as both male and female. Avalokitesvara's name translates into ‘one who hears all the sound of the world', meaning that she will help wherever there is the sound of crying from suffering.

My work as a Two-Spirit artist in this world is for me to restore this balance between The Sacred Feminine and The Sacred Masculine within myself using the art practice as my medicine. I believe this transformative self-healing process will evoke the shift in external landscape.

A lot of your work as an artist revolves around the concept of “Self”. Why is this concept important to you and what has been your process in developing an art that is about Self?
Isn’t the most primary human condition about SELF? Whether it is art or else, anything in life? For me, the life here on earth is to understand about myself as an individual and trying to figure out the connection with others and the world around us. I view that we are all connected as one; however, in order for us to understand true oneness we have to be separated as individual units first. As a human with physical form, it is important to care about our image and ego. For a simple example: when you are hungry, where do you put your food? In your own mouth, right? That is the natural primary condition. For that reason, I believe that there is nothing wrong with being selfish and there is nothing wrong with having a strong ego. They are the great tools or a gateway to understanding deeper mysterious meanings of SELF. The more I investigate deeply within myself so selfishly, the more I see that I am not separated from external situations or other people through my own experience and experimentation. If I can be hungry, you can be too… if I feel pain, you can feel it too. You start to understand the concept of other’s needs because they operate with the same system as you. When we arrive at understanding this basic mechanism, we start to understand the word and that leads us to “compassion’. We all want the same thing. WE ARE ALL ONE having an individual experience. That is the very essence of the human relationship. Only through the door of SELF, we can realize infinite SELF that includes me and others and the universe. My work is very similar to the concept of Buddhism and I do it in my own creative way which I call *DoYou* by constantly holding the question in my heart “Who am I?”. I create my answers each moment using the medium of art, the “self-expression”.

Your new project *DoYou* is fascinating. As an awareness-based performance art campaign, what are your goals with the *DoYou* project, and how is it different from what you have done before?
I want to touch base on *DoYou* concept briefly. My art is about SELF. I gave my artist-self the name Yozmit, meaning “myth about one's self." Tapping into the goddess power, I created an alien-goddess named Yozmit in male form but embodying both the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine. Yozmit transcends gender but is a powerful compassionate heroine who guides me to my highest potential beyond the limitation of a trans-identified Korean male. As Yozmit's agent and caretaker, I create songs, looks, costumes, public performances and spread her message of *DoYou* . Do means “do”ing , and“you" - a process of becoming fully self-realized and acting upon self-identity. *DoYou* is my artistic mantra to shift power from external conformity to internal realization using art as a tool of transformation.

In the past, I focused highly on my own self-development and transformation but now I am putting importance on how to share that space with others and my community. *DoYou* has been a solo journey of my own creation but I am currently creating a team of collaborators and supporters to make the *DoYou* as a collective effort to reach and impact the bigger audience. Another platform of connecting with my audience is through giving my artist workshop and lectures to find supporters and also team members to create a giant melting pot of collaborations in many different levels.

In terms of context, I am putting a lot of focus on the music elements of *DoYou* project to make the music the main spinal cord of my performance work. I believe that sound has the most powerful influence on affecting the human mind.

What sort of impact do you hope that the *DoYou* project has with mainstream audiences?
In general practice, I am using my self-identity and image to become a clear mirror for my audience to reflect on themselves and initiate their own self-creation process. For that reason, my work is all about raising my own consciousness to keep my mirror clean at all times. Daily spiritual meditation, physical discipline, and art creation practice is just simply on-going maintenance work for that purpose. If my channel is clean, I can invite the good energies of the universe to freely flow through me and poured out into the world. I truly believe that NOW is the perfect time for *DoYou* project to be out in the mainstream world to become an agent of change where many people are more introspective and seeking deeper meanings in life due to the limitation caused by the current pandemic.

To explain my approach of promotion for *DoYou* to the mainstream audience, I am going to make another example of the way Buddha transmitted his teaching in the mainstream world in his time. When Buddha was enlightened, he had a very strong desire to share his wisdom with the rest of the world. But he was overwhelmed by the fact how he could teach this high-frequency material to the unenlightened general public. He started by selecting those who had a higher understanding and made them as his first initiated disciples and they started to transfer Buddha’s teaching to their students below. From one-on-one transmission and then to a small group and it expanded exponentially. I understand Jesus Christ used the same method as well. It is a hierarchal system of transmission almost similar to the Multi-level network marketing in modern-day terms. I started very small and reaching out to a small group of friends and fans in my circle and online is what I have done so far. I keep putting out my energy in all social media channels until it taps into Lyall Watson’s “The Hundredth Monkey Effect” (the idea that once a critical number of members copy behavior or follow an idea, it will be taken on by all en-masse, automatically, also can be called Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point”).

In this world, we strive to understand how we fit in as a general public when society is only welcoming a small percentage of people those who have money, power, and resource. I and *DoYou* ask the mainstream audience to think and challenge this conventional social structure by empowering individual advancement and enlightenment which will reveal a brand new paradigm of benefitting all beings on earth by creating win-win situation in energy exchange.

We love that your mother serves as an example for your career as an artist. Why?
My voice as an artist comes from my mother’s oppression in her DNA of becoming a singer. She is a living example of the damaged feminine in modern Korean society and every woman of humanity. She wanted to be a singer when she was in high school, but in conservative 1950s Korea, being a female singer was tantamount to being a prostitute. Nevertheless, she secretly sang in a jazz club in the American army base after school. When her brother found out, she was stopped publicly and violently as he considered her actions to be a shame to the family name. Shortly after this incident, she married my father and became a housewife, and a few years later, I was born. Her traumatic memories continued in my blood through my own journey of becoming a singer in Korea. When I attempted to become a pop singer, the first thing I was told from my music label was not to reveal my gender identity. I was bullied and physically abused by my music producer because of who I was. After Seoul, I came back to the US and started to train myself seriously in many different art disciplines to create art and music on my own without getting any middleman involved. Through this process, I started to see the bigger picture of power dynamics in the realm of gender and the total disharmony between masculine and feminine. I decided to create art that will help restore this balance within my self which I believe will evoke the shift in the external landscape. So sharing my voice and music nearly half-century later from the day my mother was beaten and dragged off stage by her brothers is an attempt to heal my family DNA from this unjust, unkind, and antiquated global culture which is just as pandemic as COVID19. As I have written in the lyrics of my song DOGSTAR (2019), “Sunrise in the night", my goal is to embrace the highest teachings to bring together the light and dark, yin and yang of my incomprehensible universe.

We know a lot of your projects like “Do You: The Migration of Monarchs” draw upon your Korean heritage and showcases your trans-identity. What sort of impact has being a Korean immigrant and LGBTQ-identified individual had on you being an artist in LA?
In a college class in Korea just before I moved to the US, I was taught that anything other than heterosexual is considered mental sickness and it had to be treated in the mental hospital. I was suffering from much more severe oppression caused by cultural shame and guilt put on by the family and society as an LGBTQ-identified person than most people in the US. In some extreme cases, people were disowned by family and were told they should commit suicide. I felt like I had to work even harder to achieve material success in a world that marginalized people like me. So being a Korean immigrant and LGBTQ-identified person was both a magical and powerful combination to transform myself using art and self-expression as a tool. Moving to LA was definitely a liberating experience to express myself more freely and achieve my personal goal more easily.

It’s really cool that you have a background in fashion and that you can design your own costumes for performances. To be quite honest, we are obsessed with your costumes. Can you tell us about how you built the connection between fashion and performance for your work as an artist?
Thank you! I went to fashion school and I started my professional career as a fashion designer. Since I wasn’t trained as an artist when I was young because my family could not afford expensive art training. Fashion was the vehicle I could be creative and also to generate income right away as an immigrant because the aspect of survival played an important role back then. I enjoyed fashion a lot but was very disempowered by the business of fashion supporting consumerism and superficiality manufacturing meaningless things. I needed to tap into something more philosophical or pure form of creation and most importantly to answer myself “why” I create or design. I wanted to go deeper than just creating pretty things or doing something beyond the purpose of making money. When you start to be not desperate about survival, you also think about what you really want to do in your life. I also found out that I also love wearing my own creation and being in front of an audience rather than being a behind the scene creator. There was a performer inside me. So I transformed myself into a performance artist through the training of physical theater —Corporeal Mime, Modern Dance), Rachel Rosenthal’s performance theater technique called DBD (Doing By Doing),and traditional Korean music such as Pansori and Gayageum. Through this process, I found the way that I could elevate the context of fashion into something higher, as a context of art. I see it as starting from the surface and looked within, by doing so, it gave me a completely different meaning about the surface.

What is your process for designing costumes for certain projects? What role do you see the costumes having in your work?
I design the costumes first and it gives me an idea about the performance or a character. I let the process unfold organically from that point on. Something wants to be birthed and all I have to do is to follow the Golden Ball of creation which is what my teacher Rachel Rosenthal emphasized in her teaching. You start from a single impulse and take action and this will lead you to another step and then things get created. This is the concept of Doing By Doing technique (DBD).

I don’t start from the master draft and execute exactly but I do it completely backward. The master draft gets revealed at the end like a huge surprise. In other words, the story is not written from the beginning, it gets told after completing the creation cycle.

The role of costume in my performance work is to reveal certain archetypes or characters that I want to come through my energy space. It is very similar to the concept in traditional Korean shamanism where the costume and props are the medicine object that connects the shaman and the gods from supernatural dimensions. So creating a costume in this way (Doing By Doing) lets the character come alive and takes a life of its own. I patiently wait and see who wants to reveal itself through me. A Goddess, Alien or Geisha, warrior….or all of the above.

It is impressive to think about how you utilize the space of your public performances, even the space of the costume as an extension of your own body.
Yes. Space is a crucial part of my performance. Sometime space inspire the performance or change the whole direction of my performance. Costume itself to me is another space. space within space. almost equal to huge spaceship in the outer space. It is definitely a vehicle I ride or drive. A mother ship or a sanctuary. I feel protected and safe in it.

Do you have a favorite costume that you have designed and worn? How long did it take to make?
I love my victorian aesthetics space gowns with clear dome headpieces which I call “space gowns”. It has a component of luxury and utility. It is my version of the COVID-19 proof body mask. I love combining old and new. What if this ancient earthy shaman has a love child with high-tech aliens, what kinda of outfit will that baby wear? I always like to combine two different extremes which create high drama.

Costume building time depends on each costume and its process. Sometimes it comes within a few hours to create the concept or basic sketch or even a mock-up. I try to spend as much time as possible to work on details to complete the outfit as a work of art. I usually do all the detailed handwork myself such as stitching, building, beading and etc. It is a meditation. It takes weeks to a year. And it is also becoming a continuing process as my performance gets developed with it and it keeps getting updated or built on almost like adding more spaces to your house. Building a deck, adding a guest house, renovating a kitchen type of things. Costume creation is not so much different from architecture.

What has your creative process been like during COVID-19 and quarantine?
I have been even more committed to my art and creative process. I feel the need to be even more creative than at any other time of my life. It really provided me with the situation that I can focus and create things that I couldn’t do before. This giant machine of humanity stopping its greed-driven vicious cycle of non-sense production relieved me from great anxiety the system was creating so I could create with more ease and flow. I found so much joy disconnecting myself from the external world and go deeper within myself and found freedom and true direction that I want to be a service to humanity to give guidance to create a new environment that I want to see in this troubled world.

How have you been able to stay positive during shelter-in-place?
I always try to see the brighter side of things. I am very optimistic.

I saw this crisis as an opportunity to grow spiritually for myself and all humanity. This is the very test to go to our next level of our evolution as a whole. This is a very chance for us to reflect, rethink, and redesign our future by making changes and taking corrective actions at the very moment. I see it as a global reset. Whether this is a pandemic or plan-demic or combination of both, I sensed that the collective unconscious human mind decided that we have to stop everything. This is a divine intervention for humanity to take a vacation while the divine justice is met to restore balance on the earthly plane which will restore the balance in our planet. Our human evolution is so crucial to other life around us on our planet. COVID-19 is the landmark in history that our ascension has taken place. Humanity into Divinity shift.

What is your life motto?
*DoYou*! Go do and experience the highest realization of yourself! We all deserve to “BE”, “DO”, “HAVE” best of the best in this world. It is our human and divine right and the only thing we are here to do. Enjoy every bit of it. But Do No Harm to others or the environment. Never ever forget to have fun and be surprised by the outcome.

To learn more about Yozmit, please follow her via the below platforms:
www.yozmit.com
Patreon
Soundcloud
Youtube: yozmitube
Instagram: Yozmit
Facebook: yozmit.ny

*Yozmit’s new album “SUN MOON DOOR” is available on all music channel such as iTunes, Spotify etc.

Photography by Ted Sun.

EDITORIAL - Glitter & Gold - Yozmit