ABOUT / PHILOSOPHY
Art, the body and contemporary life.
SPACE MOUM is a South Korea-based arts and wellbeing practice founded by Soojin Pray. We explore how embodied artistic experience can support recovery, awareness and connection.
ART IS NOT AN ADD-ON
We begin with art itself.
We do not see art as decoration added to wellbeing. We begin with art itself—as a way of sensing, questioning and reorganising experience.
Art can create new forms of attention: to a sound, a gesture, another person or the place we inhabit. Its value is not limited to a measurable health outcome or improved productivity. It also opens space for uncertainty, interpretation and connection.
WHY THE BODY?
Experience begins in sensation.
Breath, weight, movement and listening make experience tangible. They offer ways to notice what is happening before it is put into words.
Our practice invites people to attend to their own pace and explore relationships between movement, sound and environment. Reflection can take the form of stillness, conversation, writing or drawing.
Explore THE LIVING BODY
KOREAN BODY CULTURE & YANGSAENG
The body in relationship.
Korean traditions offer ways of understanding the body not as an isolated object, but as something continually shaped through breath, movement, season, environment and relationship.
In our practice, yangsaeng is approached as the cultivation of life through everyday attention to the body and its surroundings. Korean movement traditions and ideas found in Donguibogam inform this inquiry; they are explored through artistic practice rather than offered as medical guidance.
SPACE MOUM does not reproduce tradition as heritage. We explore how these ideas can remain alive and meaningful in contemporary life.
WHY NOW?
Making room for attention.
Contemporary life can demand constant cognitive attention while leaving little room to sense the body or take a meaningful pause. Digital saturation and fragmented attention form part of the context in which we work.
Movement, sound and artistic participation offer occasions to slow down, notice and reflect. Our concern is the quality of experience: how people relate to themselves, one another and their surroundings.
FROM ARTISTIC INQUIRY TO SHARED EXPERIENCE
Across people, institutions and communities.
We translate artistic questions into participatory programmes, facilitator education, live sound, cultural projects and digital environments. Each setting brings different people, possibilities and responsibilities.
We welcome dialogue with Creative Health, Arts and Health, arts education and embodied practice communities as related fields of inquiry.
Read our field casesFOUNDER
Soojin Pray — Founder · Ritual Media Artist
Soojin Pray founded SPACE MOUM and leads its artistic direction. Her work with the body, movement and sound informs the practice, while projects bring together collaborators appropriate to their medium and context.
Her independent artistic and research practice, including Moum Daseureum, remains distinct from SPACE MOUM’s THE LIVING BODY programme.
Visit Soojin Pray’s official artist website