Yaloo’s residency will explore the development of and culminate in a multi-media art installation featuring experimental animated shorts about Shininho, an 86-year-old female Korean KPOP idol who is also a notorious pirate of the East Asian Ocean. Her ship, named after her, sets the stage for a speculative maritime adventure.
As a recent transplant from Seoul to the West Coast, Yaloo explores the intersection of technology, culture, and nature in San Francisco, the greater West, and the American West in a transhistorical and planetary approach. She will examine the role of art in a time of rapid technological transformation and socio-historical shifts, recombining historical narratives and cultural and natural influences that have shaped the region. During her residency at 836M, the gallery space functions as a project space and an ever-shifting media art installation.
History often reflects the victor’s perspective, which may obscure the truth. It is crucial to question, research, and reimagine our historical narratives. Yaloo will create a fictional character based on her living grandmother, Shininho, as a KPOP idol and pirate. While addressing generational Neo-Confucian trauma and the turbulence of modern Korean history, Shininho’s journey reveals the complex layers and nuances of historical events, cultural heritage, and contemporary issues.
The project at 836M will focus on Korean immigration culture and Asian history in the San Francisco area. The story unfolds as Shininho drifts on the shores of San Francisco.
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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.
