Africa Yoon
Body
Memory
Transmission
BodyMemoryTransmission
The body enters the work before it becomes the subject.
BFA, Drama · Minor, Sociology
2000 · NYU Tisch School of the Arts
Africa’s formal training begins in theatre—before endurance, filmmaking, food, or KIMCHI BODY become part of the work.
Performance training
NYU Tisch · Experimental Theatre Wing / Lee Strasberg
At NYU Tisch, Africa studied within its New York studio system, including the Experimental Theatre Wing and Lee Strasberg. With permission, she also took additional non-NYU classes at Strasberg alongside actors outside her university cohort.
The body leaves the studio and enters public space.
What if the body itself could carry the message?
Training for endurance as public action
2009 · New York / Africa 101
Africa trains with movement practitioner Daniel Giel as running shifts from private exercise toward something performed, witnessed, and used to communicate.
The body becomes part of the message
2008–2010 · Africa 101 / I Love Africa
Running, performance, public engagement, and documentary media begin to operate as one practice. Physical action is no longer only preparation for the work—it becomes part of the communication system.
Putting the body inside the question
2010 · South Africa / Run to CIDA
Africa runs the distance from a student’s home toward CIDA City Campus, making the distance between educational opportunity and access physically visible.
The route becomes an encounter
2010 · South Africa / I Love Africa
On the road, Africa stops to push an older woman’s wheelbarrow. She gives the woman her running shoes and continues the run in her socks. The planned endurance action gives way to an unplanned act of exchange.
But movement doesn’t have to carry a message about something else. Movement can begin to speak for itself.
Change the intention of a movement, and the movement changes.
When does movement become expression?
2008–2010 · I Love Africa
Africa begins asking what separates an ordinary physical action from an expressive one. The question is no longer only how far the body can go, but what movement can mean.
Running opens into rhythm
2009 · New York / Movement study
Straight-line running gives way to jumping, rhythm, gesture, and play. Changing the intention behind the movement changes what the movement communicates.
Movement study
2010 · Italy / En route to Cannes
While running toward Cannes near the French border, Africa slips into dance and improvisation. Forward motion becomes material for play.
Movement study
2010 · Monaco / Stade Louis II
Near Stade Louis II, the run opens again into improvised dance—movement functioning as expressive language rather than simply transportation or exercise.
Then another question enters: What happens when the work is no longer about one body?
The work shifts from one moving body toward structures in which other people participate.
Passing the action on
2008–2010 · Africa 101 / I Love Africa
Africa brings young participants into the physical action. Endurance moves from an individual feat toward a shared task, teaching situation, and public encounter.
An embodied conversation
2019 · The Conversation / K America Foundation
With Korean adoptees, Africa facilitated a drama-based embodied experience using movement and dramatic exercises to explore identity, adoption, and relationships to birth family.
Physical action created another way to approach feelings that were difficult to reach through conversation alone.
Full-length documentation of the embodied session.
From audience to participation
2010 · CIDA City Campus / South Africa
A formal graduation environment opens into collective movement. Students, faculty, and guests stop functioning only as spectators and enter the event themselves.
The room becomes part of the work
2010 · CIDA City Campus / South Africa
Shown in full because the changing energy, duration, and participation of the room are part of the performance—not simply a highlight to be extracted from it.
The stage–audience boundary opens
2022 · Council of Korean Americans / Embrace Unity Award
Africa turns her award acceptance speech into a spoken-word performance, using the formal ceremony itself as performance space rather than delivering a conventional acceptance speech.
Participation changes the artist, too.
Culture enters the work through relationship, not extraction.
An encounter becomes a relationship
2021 · The Korean
An unexpected encounter with an older Korean woman at H Mart develops into an ongoing relationship around food, shopping, learning, and care.
What begins as a body story gradually becomes a story about cultural encounter and being changed through relationship.
The deeper story is not an ingredient. It is what encounter made possible.
Transmission
2021 · The Korean
Daniel Dae Kim shares Africa’s memoir with his audience. The meaningful gesture is not celebrity validation but transmission: someone from another community chooses to carry a story farther.
Embrace Unity Award
2022 · Council of Korean Americans
Africa is recognized for work building connection across racial and cultural communities.
Connection becomes reciprocal
2022 · Council of Korean Americans / Embrace Unity Awards
Africa joins a Korean-American community of cultural, civic, and business leaders. Fellow honorees included NCSOFT’s Dr. Songyee Yoon, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Judge Koh.
Encounter becomes a method.
What began as instinct becomes a method. Enter → Experience → Translate → Share
The question changes form
2011–2013 · The Skinny
The Skinny: How to Lose 100 Pounds and Change the World Too begins as development for a one-woman performance and musical.
The finished staged performance never happens—but the inquiry refuses to disappear. It changes form.
From personal story to shared movement
2012 · New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts
Dance and choreography workshops move a personal body-transformation story out of the individual body and into collective physical exploration.
The Skinny: Weight Loss to World Issues
2013 · KRUU-FM
The inquiry moves again—from performance development and choreography into recurring radio conversation.
The form changes. The question survives.
Enter the practice
2016 · Inside American Fitness / PBS
As Host and Executive Producer, Africa repeatedly enters the physical practices she is reporting on instead of remaining outside them.
Listen → Enter → Attempt → Test → Join → Reflect
Another body offers the grammar. Africa tests it in her own. What remains becomes language she can pass on.
Processing Heritage Radio Network
2021
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Africa reflects on a life spent bringing entertainment and activism together—and on the difference between knowing about an experience and carrying it in one’s own body.
By 2021, she is beginning to articulate aloud what the archive has already shown.
The method now has a name: The body is an instrument.
Movement. Breath. Voice. Presence.
The performing body as instrument
2026 · Current practice / Africa Yoon × Laure Mafo
With Cameroonian-French pansori artist Laure Mafo, Africa’s current inquiry moves between movement, breath, voice, rhythm, and listening.
The work asks how a performing body can receive another person’s rhythm, change through encounter, and answer with form.
Working study
If the body is an instrument—what does it already know?
08. Body → Memory → Transmission
What does your body know that you have never put into words?
What has it carried, inherited, learned, forgotten, or transformed?
How can that embodied knowledge become movement, sound, image, story, or technology that another person can encounter?
At CultureHub Korea / SeoulArts, Africa proposes a collaborative studio built around these questions.
She brings a structure for embodied inquiry. Students bring the knowledge already carried in their bodies, languages, histories, and artistic disciplines.
The work begins with what neither side can know in advance.
What might it become when we make it visible, audible, movable—and shareable?
Across more than two decades, Africa Yoon’s work has moved through theatre, endurance, film, participatory media, teaching, writing, food, sound, and movement. The forms change, but a method persists: enter experience through the body; let it become story; transform it through another medium; offer it back as an encounter.
At CultureHub Korea / SeoulArts, BODY → MEMORY → TRANSMISSION becomes a shared studio practice. Africa brings a structure for embodied inquiry, not a fixed answer. Students bring the knowledge already carried in their bodies, languages, histories, and artistic disciplines. Together they ask what survives translation, what changes through encounter, and how movement, sound, image, text, and technology can make embodied knowledge shareable without reducing it.
The residency culminates not in students reproducing Africa’s work, but in a collaborative environment capable of changing her work too.
What does the body know—and what becomes possible when that knowledge is made visible, audible, movable, and shared?
20년이 넘는 시간 동안 아프리카 윤의 작업은 연극, 장거리 달리기, 영화, 참여형 미디어, 교육, 글쓰기, 음식, 소리와 움직임을 넘나들어 왔습니다. 형식은 달라져도 하나의 방법은 계속됩니다. 몸으로 경험에 들어가고, 그것을 이야기로 만들고, 다른 매체를 통해 변형한 뒤, 다시 누군가가 만날 수 있는 경험으로 건넵니다.
CultureHub Korea / 서울예술대학교에서 BODY → MEMORY → TRANSMISSION은 공동의 스튜디오 실천이 됩니다. 아프리카는 정답이 아니라 몸을 통해 탐구할 수 있는 구조를 가져옵니다. 학생들은 각자의 몸, 언어, 역사, 예술적 훈련 속에 이미 축적된 지식을 가져옵니다. 함께 우리는 번역 속에서 무엇이 남고, 만남 속에서 무엇이 변하는지, 그리고 움직임·소리·이미지·텍스트·기술이 몸에 축적된 지식을 단순화하지 않으면서 어떻게 다른 사람과 나눌 수 있는 형태로 만들 수 있는지를 탐구합니다.
이 레지던시의 결말은 학생들이 아프리카의 작업을 재현하는 것이 아닙니다. 학생들이 만든 작업이 아프리카 자신의 작업까지 변화시킬 수 있는 공동의 환경을 만드는 것입니다.
몸은 무엇을 알고 있는가? 그리고 그 지식을 보이게, 들리게, 움직이게, 함께 나눌 수 있게 할 때 무엇이 가능해지는가?
Kimchi Body
Artist
Interdisciplinary artist · Teaching artist · Writer · Media maker
Africa Yoon works across performance, movement, participatory media, film, writing, public engagement, and intercultural practice. She earned a BFA in Drama from NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a minor in Sociology, with training that included the Experimental Theatre Wing and Lee Strasberg. Her work includes How Are You? The Millennium Development Goals; Africa 101 / I Love Africa; The Skinny; PBS’s Inside American Fitness; and The Korean, published in English in 2021 and in Korean translation as 우연하고도 사소한 기적 in 2022. Across changing forms, Yoon returns to the body as artistic material and as a carrier of memory, culture, and change. Her current KIMCHI BODY research asks how embodied knowledge can become movement, sound, text, image, and technology that another person can encounter.
