About the Work
Bul-ssang, a hybrid dance project, began as an exploration and experiment in hybridity—mongrel forms, crossbreeding, mixed bloodlines, and hybrid identities. One of its central thematic inquiries focuses on the Buddha statue (Bulssang, 佛像), a symbolic code of East Asian culture.

The Buddha Bar—often regarded as an extreme example of Western Orientalism and postmodern hybrid imitation—represents a recontextualization and deterritorialization of the Buddha image. In Bul-ssang, Ahn Aesoon uses the Buddha statue as a mediating figure to present—through a nonlinear structure—the incessant nomadic mobility of contemporary Koreans living amid the indiscriminate mixing of Eastern and Western cultures, along with the liberating or chaotic modalities such mixing produces.

Onstage figures include Avalokiteśvara (Gwaneum), Kṣitigarbha (Jijang), Jesus, mountain spirits, one-eyed village totems (Jangseung), General Choi Young, the childbirth goddess Samshin Halmi, youthful Taoist figures, and immortals riding lions. These are no longer what they once were. They are either activated potentials—newly conceived, moving toward becoming—or kitsch plastic waste.

Hybridization of Dance Vocabulary and Grammar
Another experiment attempted in Bul-ssang is the hybrid crossbreeding of dance vocabularies and grammars. To express the collision, tension, fusion, and generation of new forms among diverse cultural codes, dancers appropriate traditional movement vocabularies from various East Asian cultures, fragmenting and disassembling gestures and motions.

Dancers who have worked with Ahn Aesoon over an extended period each selected different traditions as source material: Korean Hanryangmu, India's Kathak and Bharatanatyam, China's traditional martial art Dharma 18 Forms, and Japanese folk dance. Ahn Aesoon weaves the dancers' delicate movements as the weft, and their individualized, contemporary bodies as the warp, using her characteristic playfulness and improvisation as a loom to compose a panoramic landscape—an oasis of movement.

Hybridization with Adjacent Genres: Live DJing, Installation Art, Multimedia
Having long expanded the expressive limits of contemporary dance through multimedia, visual art, and live music, Ahn Aesoon actively experiments with hybridization across genres in Bul-ssang. In this work, renowned live DJ DJ Soulscape and installation artist Choi Jeong-hwa—known for pushing the extremes of visual culture—join longtime collaborators Yang Yong-jun (music), Kim Jong-seok (stage design), and VJ Shin Jung-yeop to merge and interact, collectively creating a single image, a single map.

Review
"As the title suggests, this work is a 'hybrid'—a mutation, a mixed and mongrel form—in both form and content. Even its central motif, the Buddha statue, resonates with the meaning of bulssang (pitiable), which aligns with Buddhist compassion... Despite countless processes of fusion and transformation, Ahn Aesoon's movement methodology remains firm: flexible and precise use of joints and muscles, elastic connectivity, circular breathing, and refined accents."
— Shim Jung-min, Dance Magazine, September 2009