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BIO
Yaloo earned BFA and MFA in video art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been selected for fully funded international residencies such as Zer01ne and Asia Culture Center in Korea, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, Western Front and La Bande Video in Canada, the Headlands Art Center and Bemis Studio Art Center in USA. She was also awarded a Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Scholarship by Video Data Bank and won a Gold Prize in visual arts from the AHL Foundation in New York. Last year, she was part of a duo show at FACT Liverpool, UK. Through her work, she attempts to take a post-colonial, post-Western-centric, and post-human-centric approach to new media art by imparting on DIY production pipeline for immersive storytelling and interdisciplinary collaboration. Through experimental problem-solving and building her own production pipeline, Yaloo hopes to contribute to the diversity of the media languages of our everyday life.
Since the recent pandemic, Yaloo spent a significant amount of time in Seoul and got trained in a commercial 3D animation school. This experience helped her initializing experimental Sci-Fi works such as Homo Paulinella the Lab, Pickled City, and Super Coral Anti Fragile. These projects capture a unique sense of contemporariness of East Asian metropolis, where centuries of time and the dramatic pulses of our planet in the Anthropocene can be accessed in a small alley.
Super Coral Anti Fragile, 2023, 3D Animation
The work is edited and modified for 3 channel screens
When coral reefs go even more colorful in fact to produce fluorescent proteins to block the heat in response to the rise of seawater temperature not to be beautiful in human eyes. When the fluorescent-colored sunblock no longer holds up, the coral reefs eventually bleach and die. I consider this fact as a perfect setup for public video art. As I was completing the piece, I found some research evidence of Super Corals, the survivors of harsh Anthropocene environmental conditions with no human help. I pay homage to Super Coral’s fierce courage and transcendent beauty. I hope this piece adds to discussion on how to coexist between humans and non-humans.
Commissioned by Hyundai Motors Group
Sound composition: Yetsuby
Animation assistant: Hamin Song
Pickled City Window, 2023, 3D Animation on custom wallpaper
The work is modified for the installation
Yaloo depicts future underwater city by borrowing ideas from traditional artifacts and mythical imagination. Pickled City Window takes the inspiration from ‘Gwaebul (괘불),’ a large outdoor buddhist painting and ‘ Baekje gilt-bronze incense burner (백제금동대향로).’ Yaloo sees Gwaebul as an older version of a large scale media facade and Baekje gilt-bronze incense burner as a Sci Fi-artifact of Korean peninsula.
Funded by Zer01ne, Doosan Gallery
Sound: Yestuby
Production assistant: Hyejin Woo
Pickled City Elements, 2022, video sculptures
Pickled City by Yaloo is a series of submerged urban gardens of the not-too-distant future, imagined with the addition of elements reflecting the Anthropocene epoch, natural disasters, urban architecture influenced by technological development, and the human body. Over time, the artist has collected various images across digital media that reflect her interests, including environmental pollution, rising sea levels, anthropocentric thinking, and terraforming. Using these assembled 2D images (including Instagram memes, online streaming documentaries, and blog posts), she creates new images in 3D virtual space.
Yaloo suggests a new urban world view as she explores the delicate interrelationships between the virtual and real, above water and underwater, manmade nature and nature as a whole. Her urban plants may appear to breathe or to float in the water as organic shapes with viscera, with objects and textures that evoke urban architecture. The plants in Pickled City are presented in NFT form, each of them observable from two to four different perspectives; each one is a part of a series and unique artwork in its own right.
Yaloo’s approach involves the use of KitBash—an asset or commercial kit primarily applied in the gaming industry—to create her work with “urban kits,” which represent the most typical means of creating cities. Her approach could be seen as a new concept of collage. It is distinct from previous gaming and 3D industry approaches first and foremost in the way Yaloo uses virtual reality to split up her shapes by hand (motions) for modeling and rendering. It also follows a DIY approach that contrasts with the established method of construction based on different pipelines, including sculpting, modeling, and rendering. In the context of new media, this is similar to the workflow in which artists use existing tools to develop their own approaches, presenting experimental work in adventurous ways.
The works are available as NFT on Mars Green
Slippery, Moist, 2022, Book
The coming of a future post-human species, Homo paulinella, that needs no food or air to survive.
“Homo paulinella” is a project-based team presenting an underwater futuristic human narrative. The team is led by a media artist, “Yaloo” who creates immersive and experiential works for the audience with poetic and sensory aesthetics. She expands her worldview by collaborating and building relationships with artists in various fields. Slippery, Moist is a book that is written based on the Homo paulinella’s worldviewin collaboration with a writer and an illustrator, Hounyeh Kim. This book has been cross-edited in Korean and English and published in both hardcover and softcover versions.
The softcover version is waterproof mineral paper and meant to be read in water.
Homo Paulinella the lab is a multi-disciplinary art exhibition that incorporates natural science, visual art, sound art and literature. A speculative scenario of a post-human species called Homo paulinella, who has the photosynthesis ability to self-produce oxygen and energy, is depicted in a poetic and whimsical virtual experience through visual, sound and other design elements. The exhibitions delivers a playful and humorous interpretation of the result of Anthropocene via excessive and exaggerated sensory experience. Highly emotional, even childish monologue of the future human species asks what essentially defines a being as a human. In this turbulent, unpredictable time, the very basic question of where we, as a species, are going seems to be a more relevant question than ever. Would we be able to save the humanity by turning ourselves into seaweed? We invite you to this first introductory adventure of what is to be a long, reflective quest of celebrating the humanity.
Author for Slippery, Moist (미끌미끌, 축축한) : Hounyeh Kim
Hardcover Book - 979-11-6756-140-4 (02810)
Softcover Book - 979-11-6756-139-8 (02810)
The book was originally written for Homo Paulinella the Lab
Exhibition co-produced by the Korean Cultural Centre Canada
Photo credit: Alejandro Escamilla