Maria Yoon, a.k.a. Maria the Korean Bride, is a New York-based performance artist and filmmaker. She is best known for her extended performance art project and film where in the course of nine years, she gets married in all 50 of the United States, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia and the US Virgin Islands.
Yoon felt an inordinate pressure from her parents and the Korean American community to marry after turning 30. She first responded by making a calendar full of bachelors who wanted to propose to her to start a conversation with her father. The Marriage Proposal Series 2003 Calendarsold out of its first printing at the New Museum bookstore. Yoon, however, felt the project reinforced stereotypical male roles.
Maria the Korean Bride
She took the hanbok her mother had given her for her 30th birthday and decided to make a further art project out of it. She started by marrying two people in Las Vegas on a friend's vacation trip. She married in Hawaii in a traditional wedding ceremony. In Detroit, she married an artist dressed as Death. When she experienced racism in Wisconsin, she married a shirt representing the company where she experienced the incident. Her final wedding was held in Times Square in New York City, officiated by Jimmy McMillan, of the Rent is Too Damn High party. Yoon selected her husband from a raffle. Yoon writes the all vows herself and never smiles out of cultural respect and to honor Korean wedding ceremony custom. She has expressed that Wyoming was her favorite experience in the U.S. for the change of scenery it offered and people's friendliness. Though awarded a number of grants and donations, the project was largely self-funded.
In Montana, the minister, a recent newlywed, said "She’s asking some really good questions about the institution." In New Hampshire Yoon got lectured by a minister on the project and there have been people who have bowed out of the project because of her support of gay marriage.
Ghost weddings
After learning about police in northwest China charging a man with murdering two women with mental disabilities, alleging that he wanted to sell their corpses to be used in so-called "ghost weddings" on BBC.com, Yoon took an interest in incorporating the old practice of marrying the dead into her work. In July 2017, after a local Taoist priest had an omen that marrying a deceased man would be unlucky, Yoon married an imaginary husband at a Taoist temple in the Xizhi District of New Taipei City, Taiwan. She wore a pink hanbok with her wrist tied with a red string to a memorial tablet representing the fake individual. Still, many Taiwanese avoided attending the filming of the performance out of superstition, and the priest ritually cleansed the film crew with incense.
