Fashioning Resilience, Keunsu Cho
This video opens with aerial drone footage of a natural landscape filled with wild dandelions, filmed from a high, overhead perspective. Two women appear in the landscape, one wearing blue clothing and the other wearing red clothing. They walk near a river, then move together across an ancient trapezoidal stone structure, holding hands as they walk, dance, and smile. The scene shifts to an urban environment, where the two women continue walking hand in hand through city streets. The drone returns to wide views of the surrounding natural landscape. In a later sequence, the drone films the two women from above in a surveillance-like view as they stand on the stone structure. The drone and a man operating it become visible in the frame. Throughout the video, the same sentence is repeated at regular intervals through the voices of fourteen different narrators.
Title: Fashioning Resilience
Artist: Keunsu Cho
Date: 2024
Medium/Materials: Single-channel HD video
Dimensions: Video: 00:05:05
Form/Genre: Video art
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Mental health; Embodiment; Migration; Resilience
Artist Statement:
Keunsu Cho’s practice explores how art can function as a form of witnessing—holding experiences that resist resolution, diagnosis, or institutional definition. Working across fashion, video, and installation, he engages the body as both material and archive, shaped by uncertainty, bureaucratic pressure, and lived vulnerability. Rather than offering solutions, his work attends to endurance: what is repeated, sustained, and carried when reassurance no longer holds.
Fashioning Resilience is a research-creation video work structured around a repeated narration drawn from an email exchange with a graduate program director. This exchange followed Cho’s acceptance to a fully funded PhD program at a university in the United States and the subsequent denial of a student visa and refusal of entry at the border. Language intended to offer reassurance appears calm and rational; through repetition, it reveals the fragility of mental endurance under prolonged uncertainty.
The voice functions as a coping mechanism—not to persuade, but to endure. As the narration loops, the body registers tension, restraint, and vulnerability beyond what language can resolve. The work dwells in the gap between institutional reassurance and lived experience, reframing optimism as a practiced mode of survival rather than belief.
Here, mental health is framed not as a diagnosable condition, but as an embodied state shaped by migration regimes, bureaucratic systems, and the affective weight of institutional power. Aligning with patient-centered and lived-experience approaches in health humanities, the work positions the body as both subject and archive—holding what remains unspeakable within clinical and administrative language.
Cultural Context / Story Behind the Work:
This work was created in response to prolonged uncertainty following the denial of a fiancé(e) visa involving a U.S. citizen, as well as acceptance to a fully funded PhD program at a university in the United States and the subsequent denial of a student visa and refusal of entry at the border. The work reflects the psychological and embodied effects of navigating institutional and migration systems.
Rights for this Image:
This digital image is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You are free to share it for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the artist.
Learn More:
Instagram: @chokeunsu