Yaloo is a South Korean visual artist who specializes in digital media. She earned her BFA and MFA in video art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and moved from Seoul to Los Angeles in 2023. Currently, she teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in the Department of Experimental Animation.
Her art focuses on creating digital video installations by collecting everyday moments and turning them into engaging stories. Yaloo uses site-specific installations to reframe fragmented narratives. She seeks to explore unique visual approaches through experimental techniques and emphasizes a DIY production style that encourages collaboration among diverse independent artists.
Yaloo’s work also reflects her experiences as a Korean living abroad and addresses themes like cultural relativism and the impact of new technologies. She aims to highlight both the absurd and humane aspects of technology while exploring humanity’s potential and limitations in relation to the natural world.
About Shininho Destiny
Shininho Destiny is an immersive art installation located at 836M’s gallery space. It was created during Yaloo’s residency at 836 M from September to December 2024. Like many of Yaloo’s works, including Pickled City, this project develops over multiple years, with each version focusing on different ideas and elements.
Shininho Docking is the first part of the Shininho Destiny project, which centers on a character named “Shininho,” an 86-year-old K-pop idol and pirate ship captain, inspired by Yaloo’s grandmother. The story unfolds through animation, sculpture, sound, and text.
During Yaloo’s time at 836M, Shininho Destiny became a team effort exploring imaginative stories. It features graphics by artist Handi Kim, a ten-minute soundtrack by Yetsuby, narrative writing by Jidon Jung, animation help from Angus Oakes and Jonghoon Ahn, and a sculptural installation by Wooyoung Ro. Each collaborator added depth to Shininho’s story, connecting it to modern Korean history, Korean immigration culture, Asian mythology, and the relationship between technology, culture, and nature in South Korea and the American West. Shininho’s journey will reveal the complex layers of historical events, cultural heritage, and contemporary issues as the project continues to evolve.
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Yaloo earned a 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 the 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.
Since the recent pandemic, Yaloo spent a significant time in Seoul. This experience helped her initialize Underwater Trilogy – Homo Paulinella the Lab, Pickled City, and Birthday Garden. All three chapters of the trilogy project capture a unique sense of contemporariness proper to the East Asian metropolis, where centuries of time and the dramatic pulses of our planet in the Anthropocene can be accessed in a small alley.
Through her work, she attempts to take a post-colonial, post-Western-centric, and post-human-centric approach to new media art by imparting a DIY production pipeline for immersive storytelling and interdisciplinary collaboration. There is rich creative potential to be appreciated in DIY computer graphics productions and immersive storytelling, especially when independent artists from different cultural, political, and social backgrounds take control of their creative agency. In the mainstream commercial output of digital media, individual artists perform tasks in a hyper-modernized Fordist process, where a thousand people divide their roles into small pieces. Like many independent media artists, Yaloo attempts to explore radically different visual possibilities through experimental problem-solving and to build her own production pipeline. Ultimately, Yaloo hopes to contribute to the diversity of the media languages in our everyday lives. Yaloo is currently a professor at the Experimental Animation Department at the California Institute of Arts.
Wooyoung Ro is a Seoul-based designer. After studying architecture, Ro has continued his work in installations and furniture design. Ro reinterprets the mechanical and functional principles and details—often unfamiliar in daily life—found in everything from small machines to construction sites, factory equipments, and urban infrastructure, into organized structures or furniture on a human scale.
Jidon Jung is a novelist. He writes novels, essays, criticism, and screenplay. His books include Naega Ssaudeshi (As I Struggle), Modeun geoseun yeongwonhaetda (Everthing was Eternal), Dangsineul wihan geosina dangsinui geoseun anin (It is For You but Not Yours), …Scroll!, Space (non)fiction, Insaeng yeongu (Life Studies), Brave New human, etc… He was the recipient of the Young Writer’s Award Grand Prize, Munji Literary Award, Kim Hyun Literary Award, and the Kim Yong-ik Novel Awar. He participatedd in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale as a writer for the Korean Pavilion.
Yetsuby, a Seoul-based producer and DJ, is half of the ‘Salamanda’ and one of the founders of the ‘Computer Music Club.’ Yetsuby denies the established notions or forms of art and believes in the power of ‘time’ of music. She spins the music possessed by freaky vibes and textures, including the genre of breaks, jungle, and bass. Her recent EP, released on the ‘JIN(Taiwan)’ label in February 2022, was loved for its delightful glitchy drum and bass sound. Her mixes have been featured on multiple domestic & international radio stations, including Seoul Community Radio and NTS Radio.
Handi Kim was born and raised in South Korea. She studied Ceramic Craft in the Korean capital before moving to The Netherlands to study graphic design. She enjoys working with a variety of mediums, expanding her skillset, not to mention her aesthetic judgements at the same time.
Angus Oakes is a digital CG artist from Lyons, Colorado. He currently lives in Valencia, CA, and attends school at California Institute of the Arts as an undergraduate in Experimental Animation, where he plans to graduate in May 2025. His art practice primarily utilizes 3D platforms, such as Blender and Houdini, but also mixes 2D hand-drawn and stop-motion animation mediums. He also has a passion for real-time audio-visual art for shows and concerts and real-time projection for interactive installation and new media art. Currently, he is working on his undergraduate thesis project, which he plans to finish in the Spring/Summer of 2025.
Instagram: @an.gusoakes
Jonghoon Ahn is a new media artist and film director based in Los Angeles and South Korea. He combines film and interactive XR elements to explore the boundary between reality and virtuality. His experimental films and XR engage audiences through participation and technology, often addressing themes of social inequality. Ahn holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Entertainment Design from Kookmin University in Seoul and is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Art and Technology at the California Institute of the Arts. His work emphasizes audience interaction, utilizing motion recognition and specific gestures to make viewers an integral part of the artwork. By blending live action with 3D animation, he creates immersive experiences that challenge perceptions of reality and virtuality.