We were lucky to catch up with Yozmit The DogStar recently and have shared our conversation below.

Yozmit, appreciate you joining us today. Can you share a story about the kindest thing someone has done for you and why it mattered so much or was so meaningful to you?

The kindest thing anyone has done for me is to support my living so that I was able to do my art because they truly believed in me. When I was struggling financially transitioning from fashion designer to a performance artist, one of my friends offered me a free space for me to continue exploring my new direction as an artist. This was during the time in my 30’s when I had to spend most of my days in training as an apprentice under a few different masters of theater, performance art, and traditional Korean music. It was the most confusing and mentally challenging time in my life. I had to invest time to hone my skills to learn to be a performer. My training took so much time and focus that I could not even think of generating income even though I knew very well how to support myself working in the fashion business. I had a hard time paying my bills and I really damaged my credit during this transition. It was the sacrifice I needed to make in order to commit to the long journey to serve my vision and find my direction as an artist. This side of an artist’s process is invisible to most people. There is not only the lack of financial or space support for the artist but also the depreciation of the value of creative or artistic practice in general. The role of individual “patrons of the arts” was more common in many different cultures in the past. This is quite sad and also dangerous in society to underestimate the power and impact of art. When we lose art, we lose humanity. I think there should be more spaces available for artists to create because having a dedicated space to make art is everything. But due to the increase of real estate value and gentrification in all the big cities, artists are getting pushed further and further away from society.

The living support that my friend gave me allowed me to become the artist I am today. I am utterly grateful for this and other friends in my artistic community who gave me their time, space, money, and help when I truly needed it the most. Without their deep support, most probably my art and artist Yozmit would not exist in this world.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am “Yozmit The DogStar”, a Transgender singer- songwriter, performance artist, and costume designer.

I started my career as a fashion designer then transformed myself into a performance artist when my opportunity to become a Kpop star was violently cut because of objections against my gender. I was heartbroken. After immigrating to California, I went on a spiritual artistic journey to find my voice as a trans-identified artist curating my own Music/Fashion/Performance Art Campaign called *DoYou*.

I apprenticed with Rachel Rosenthal who taught me to create using “Doing by Doing/“DbD experience, and Thomas Leabhart in Etienne Decroux’s Corporeal Mime. I have practiced the traditional Korean opera “Pansori” and “Gayageum-Byungchang” which are the backbones of my musical heritage for 18 years.

I use my voice, dance, and costumery as theatrical/shamanic trinity to tell stories about the goddess archetype who is my higher channel alter ego using my given male form but embodying both The Sacred Feminine and The Sacred Masculine. I create a look, costume, song, situations, public performances, and workshops that represent Yozmit The DogStar and spread her message of “DoYou”.

My self-given name Yozmit means ‘myth about one’s self’. Through ritualistic performance art, I combine theater, dance, pop culture, fashion, gender identity, mythology, and shamanism onto a single canvas. I use the content and form of the pop star to create DogStar, an icon of TRANS-formation, evolution, and new possibility. Inspired by the myth of Sirius, the core value of DogStar is the balance between self-reliant creation and service for the community. I use my persona to present the iconography of DogStar in the context of my awareness-based performance art campaign: *DoYou*. I share the creation process of DogStar to evoke *DoYou* in others. *DoYou* is a process of becoming fully self-realized and actualizing self-identity, it is my artistic mantra to shift power from external conformity to internal realization.

My goal as a self-sufficient artist is to inspire all who are similarly marginalized, to walk their own path by finding their authentic unique voice. Like echoes of effervescence ascending, we will liberate mainstream culture. My past work focused on my personal transformation. My current work expands to my community because I want to carry on the lineage of rich knowledge of self-identity and actualization that I found on my own journey.

In my song DogStar, I wrote, “Sunrise in the night”. My goal is to embrace the highest teachings to bring together the light and dark, yin and yang of my incomprehensible universe.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When someone is marginalized or rejected in society or a group, that victim automatically thinks that he/she has to work a lot harder to get attention or get what they want. This fact has been programmed deep inside my DNA and affected my adult life and my way of being out in this world. That is why I use creative art practice and music as a vehicle to heal my sacred wounds carved deeply by external influences by recognizing and expressing it. As I mentioned in my mission statement in the previous question, I use visual art, music, and dance as a shamanic/theatrical trinity to create an image of Goddess named Yozmit The DogStar as my higher channel alter ego to empower mySelf.
I was 19 when I arrived in LA, I did not speak much English. My family wasn’t well off to support my art education. So survival in this new world was a big deal as a closeted young Korean boy. I chose to study fashion which was the most artistic I could find and It is a vocation that I could generate income right away after graduation.

Before I talk about my journey of transformation as an artist and performer, I want to talk about my mother who is my primary influence in evoking the artist in me.

My mother was a singer, a frustrated one. When she was in high school, she wanted to be a singer, but in 1950s Korea, being a female singer or entertainer was almost equal to being a prostitute in a social hierarchy that was a very conservative, family-oriented, Confucian. She often sang in a jazz club in the American army base in Seoul secretly after school. When her brother found out about this, he came to her gig and dragged her offstage, beating her in the process. He took her back home saying that her action was a shame to the family name. Shortly after her high school graduation, she married my father and became a housewife, and a few years later, I was born.

I liked creating fashion but I was always interested in wearing my own creations to show in front of an audience or clients rather than designing for other people’s needs. At the end of my fashion career in LA, I started to style for Korean pop artists. This made me end my career as a fashion designer and move back to Korea to start a new career as a pop singer. I felt that if they can do what they do, I could do it too and do it better. After a year in Seoul there was not much progress in cutting an album. Conflicts arose with producers and production companies over artistic direction and my gender identity. I was even physically abused by the producers. This traumatic experience was a breaking point to wrap my recording contract and come back to LA. But I realized that I still wanted to be a performer, and that I had to carry on with my music and performance without getting a middleman involved. Having to work in the fashion industry again to make a living was very difficult, but this time I had a sense of purpose. I was working full time and at night I spent my time producing music and taking various performing arts classes. Since then on, I spent about ten years working under different masters in performance and theater, including Tom Leabhart (Etienne Decroux Corporeal Mime Technique ), Rachel Rosenthal (Performance Theater and DBD technique), and traditional Korean music (Pansori and Gayageum) to transform my body and mind into a performer.

After a decade of apprenticeship and working in a theater and dance company, I moved to New York City to establish myself as a solo interdisciplinary performance artist incorporating sound (singing), visual arts (fashion), and movement in a short abstract cabaret piece at the avant-garde performance-based nightclub, The Box. I have traveled and performed for the last 15 years with this company as a headlining performer. I also performed in Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) in 2010 and won the Queen of LifeBall Award in Vienna, the biggest HIV and Aids fundraiser in the world. Living and working as a professional artist in NYC was a very difficult job but I learned about how to be resilient not only to survive but also to continue creating in the extremely harsh conditions of this big city. I want to find out if this is true by experimenting with it myself. “If you can make it NY, you can make it anywhere.” I gathered a lot of wisdom and experience from being in show business and it opened me up to international performing in London and other European countries. Around this professional development and successes, I even got invited to perform back in Seoul. This was a huge coming-in-a-full-circle experience in my career, especially after what happened in Seoul 15 years ago trying to be a KPop star.

After spending 10 years in NYC, I came to LA to work on my own Music/Fashion/Performance art campaign called *DoYou*. I started applying for grants and opportunities to curate and produce my own music and performance events for my own community and also for the mainstream art and music business .

I am on a journey to the next paradigm in my personal spiritual direction as a giver and in my career as a leader, artist-entrepreneur, healer, and educator. Although my work as *DoYou* and Yozmit gathered momentum and manifested success since its beginning in 2014, so far, it has been a solo journey of creation, production, and promotion. At this pivotal moment in my life, I hope to find the next level of development which will help me to find people to assist, manage, produce, and promote and manifest my dream team to elevate *DoYou* into a collective effort to deliver my message and art with quality, efficiency and abundant flow.

In 20 years of performing on four continents, I have created and broken boundaries about where my art belongs. I performed on the streets, in churches, temples, city facilities, universities, science conferences, pizzeria, museums, and nightclubs. I perform for children, senior citizens, British royals, and prison inmates; for one person and for 40,000 people in one stadium. I believe my art belongs everywhere and anywhere it can be seen, heard, and felt, breathing through every heartbeat, but LA is truly where it was born.The spirit of LA makes me and my art possible. Until my message of *DoYou* and *The DogStar Effect* reaches the tipping point, I will continue to sing, dance, and create locally and globally.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

cre·a·tive

adjective: creative
1 relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work

When I think about being creative or being an artist, I often think about the image from the tarot card “Magician”. It is the #1 card in the deck after the “Fool” card which is #0. Something gets created from nothing.

Magicians can see into other realms of reality other than what we can see, touch, hear, smell, taste with our physical body. It is almost like having the 6th sense.
If you look at the designs of this magician card, you see a figure holding a wand in one hand pointing to the sky and the other hand’s finger pointing to the ground. Which means “As above, so below”. He is bringing energy from above to below. It represents “Transparent Intelligence”. So the magician himself is the conduit or a channel to manifest higher realm of existence into our physical reality with 4 different tools laid on the table in front of him which are the 4 suits. Wand(fire)= Creativity, Cups(water)=emotion, Sword(air)=logic, Pentacle(earth)=Material things. Please look up the image of this card on the internet which will really help. The wisdom attributed to this figure in antiquity combined a knowledge of both the material and the spiritual world, which rendered the writings attributed to him of great relevance to those who were interested in the interrelationship between the material and the divine.

I think the problem of the modern world is misunderstanding the definition of “creative”. Artist or creative person is not just a person who has a skill to make pretty things. Being creative to me is a combination of, first, open-mindedness coming from a childlike quality of innocence, open enough to be a fool in the tarot card I explained above. To be a fool, it takes a tremendous amount of will power and also trust in oneself or the universe. From a logical people’s standpoint they can almost look stupid or crazy. It is also like a salmon traveling against the stream. Extremely focused, driven, and resilient to get to where they need to go. We just don’t know how but they do it and it blows my mind whenever I watch them. In Korean zen tradition, one famous monk “Seung San” calls it “Don’t Know” mind. I think all these explanations above point to one thing. It is that mysterious place you cannot explain with words. Some people call this place God, Goddess, universe, higher power, supernatural, super intelligence, Buddha, etc. Nowadays in tech, they call it “quantum”. Secondly,This creative person has the power of concentration and the discipline to manifest something into the physical reality. Third, the quality of surrendering to the power that is mysterious and much more powerful than you imagine within yourself. I am talking about the transcendence of ego or one’s spiritual advancement. This person has gained the wisdom to go beyond the logical mind or pierce through the logical mind to move into one’s heart. Material world exists inside the spiritual realm. Most material problems will be solved if we build the understanding of spiritual dimension, but definitely not vice versa. We human beings automatically think that if we don’t see with our physical eyes, it doesn’t exist. This is the problem that humanity faces at this very moment of history. We try to solve everything with a logical mind and the levels of material. It is a very limited approach to things and not wise. The end destination of this process will lead into self-destruction just like the end of sword suit(=logic, mind) in tarot card “10 of sword” – hitting the rock bottom.

We try so hard to understand and give too many meanings to things. In other words, we use too much brain function non-stop all day. There is no moment in our lives for this transparent intelligence to come through from the higher reality to the divine. Creative person is not just an artist. Creative person is someone who is so open-minded enough to be in complete harmony with his/her/their logic and feeling, the balance between the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine. Someone who understands “not understanding” and someone who embodies “mystery”. I believe that not everyone can be an artist but all human beings have the potential to be creative.

Creativity is a spiritual realm. It is the state of mind. We can gain access through practice or intent. It is our birthright in human quality that can tap into the divine. It is the higher mind. It is compassion. It is harmony. It is a balance of yin and yang. It is true beauty. It is enlightenment.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.yozmit.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/yozmit
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yozmit.ny
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/yozmit-the-dogstar-18a8ab2b
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/yozmit
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@yozmitube
• Linktree: https://linktr.ee/yozmit
• Others: My music on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/6qHba5lMfNuqma7qUu1UVu?si=NBnprC4sQIeLts1VFM6YqQ My music on apple: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/yozmit/528342981 My soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/yozmit My online Store: https://yozmit.square.site

Image Credits
Stephen Hue Photography, Brian Carr, Yozmit, HongJangHyun, Ted Sun, Alex Emmons Jamais Vous Kyle Kupres