Shinbyeong (신병)

Work for a gallery show on folklore and superstitions around the world. I ended up reading into indigenous Korean shamanism. In some forms of it, shinbyeong is the initial possession of a shamanic candidate by a god or spirit, which manifests as an illness with physical and mental symptoms, up to and including hallucinations and fugue. It is the first touch of the limitless chaos of the other world, where all existence (including gods and human souls) originates from. The mudang, the shaman, is the medium through which the chaos/gods and the cosmos/physical world connect.