Joonhee Myung | JUNOS
Demon Hunters, Hanok Rooms
When I was a child in Chile and Russia, there was always one strange room in our house: a hanok room set like a showroom, lacquered furniture glowing, silk hanbok waiting for visiting guests. People smiled for my father’s camera; after they left, the room fell back into its careful silence. I didn’t know it then, but that small stage was my first lesson in the third culture I was growing up in: tradition displayed, not lived. A door to a world I couldn’t yet enter.
Lately I’ve been watching K-pop’s fascination with demon hunters. Idols in enameled armor, dispatching shadows with choreography as weapon. On stage, they name the monster, then pierce it with a hook, a drop, a chant. It’s camp and myth, but also something else: a public ritual for killing what hunts us. Maybe that’s why the aesthetic travels so far; everyone recognizes the shape of an enemy that wears your own face.
My first demon was smell. On an early school bus morning, the boys yelled that my food stank. It was kimchi and doenjang from breakfast, a soft cloud of home that turned toxic in a foreign aisle. I folded into myself like a note no one would read. I learned what many migrants learn: that your love can sound like rot in another language. I stopped taking Korean food to school. I stopped breathing deeply. I started hunting the parts of me that made other people flinch.
Years later, protest pans in Santiago rang like tin stars. Cacerolazos cracked the night and told the city to wake up. I lay in bed with stone on my chest, listening. On another night, in another dream, a wolf’s eye met mine through a cave wall. “Live without borders,” it said. “Break the rock.” I tried. I bloodied my fingers. And still the wall held.
Pop makes a cleaner promise. In three minutes, the demon is named, routed, redeemed. The chorus returns, a circle closes. K-pop stages build cathedrals of repetition, eight counts as liturgy, lightsticks as talismans, a crowd’s fanchant as spell. It’s easy to laugh at the theatrics until you need them. Because what is performance if not a way to use your body to say what your mouth can’t?
I did not become a diplomat or a policy expert, though I studied toward both. I abandoned the languages I could perform to hunt for one that felt like mine. Film gave me movement when nouns betrayed me. In my short film Teojeon (Hometown) I walked the alleys of Seochon, trying to map a home that finally let me breathe. In Born, I turned toward the garden, toward the wind, shadow, and the lives beyond my own. In my artbook Zanmulgyeol, the slender white curve of an egret suspended above an engineered urban stream. The camera wanted continuity, the kind born of rivers and long takes, not the censor’s cut. I learned to carry a shot like you carry a bowl of water, steady, listening for the surface to ripple when truth arrives.
This is where the demon hunter motif and my childhood join hands. The enemy I’ve been fighting isn’t a horned thing outside me; it’s the polite room that taught me to smile for strangers and go silent when they left. It’s the bus aisle that made me choose breathlessness over belonging. It’s every audition to be legible. K-pop’s hunters give that fight a costume you can wear. My cinema gives it a body you can move in for longer than a chorus.
And yet, I don’t want to be purified. I want to be complicated. The hanok room was a wound, but it was also a portal: a wardrobe to a world where my grandmother’s hand still pours plum wine, where jeong holds even when language thins. The wolf’s eye was terror, but also kinship. Chile’s pans were anger, but also music. If idols slay demons at the edge of a stage, I am interested in what happens after the curtain: when the monster returns as a memory, softer, asking to be carried instead of killed.
In Seoul, I kept a small one-room like a hanok’s echo, bright cushions on the floor, a cat named Sweet Rain drifting between my ankles, the mountains behind Seochon Village drawing a slow breath. I wrote there. I filmed. I listened to the city’s broken tempo and tried to braid it with the pulse of the stream. When I filmed in single, fluid shots, I wasn’t proving virtuosity; I was refusing to cut the world where it wants to stay whole. Movement, not montage, became my language, like wind through reeds, like a dancer crossing an alley at the end of Teojeon, trance-walking herself free.
So when I watch a K-pop stage hunting demons, I’m not thinking about enemies. I’m thinking about choreography as a map through shame. I’m thinking about how many of us from the margins have learned to weaponize rhythm: to turn the bus aisle into a runway, the hanok showroom into a studio, the protest into a metronome. I’m thinking about how a hook can plant a prayer into the top forty, how a fandom’s chant can teach a child in another hemisphere that her smell is not a curse but a kitchen, and kitchens are holy.
If there is a thesis, it is this: my work is not about victory; it is about passage. Demon hunting as I understand it is not extermination; it is exorcism of the lie that you must become odorless to be loved. It is the slow recovery of breath, breath in which kimchi and river algae and old wood and plum wine can coexist. It is refusing to let institutions decide which memories survive.
I still return to that first room. In the essay’s last frame, I open its sliding door. The lacquer is cracked now; the silk hangs like a tired moon. I step inside with a camera and a bowl of stew. The lens fogs. I let it. The fog is proof that something warm has finally arrived. Outside, somewhere, a crowd counts eight, again and again, until the body remembers. Inside, I set the bowl down on the floor and press record.
The spirit doesn’t hide.
Or maybe she’s been here all along.
She isn’t mine to banish.
She is mine to carry, until she teaches me her new name.
Joonhee Myung is a Korean writer and interdisciplinary artist working between Seoul and Santiago, exploring diaspora, ecology, and family archives under the name JUNOS.