YALOO
Pickled City
We had the pleasure of intersecting with Yaloo during our Silent Screen program in 2021. Yaloo is a talented artist and educator who works and lives in Chicago and Seoul. Her work seamlessly blends history, tradition, and pop culture reimagined within the digital realm. This year Yaloo is our solo artist spotlight for Silent Screen and she envisioned an underwater cityscape that stands in contrast to the semi-arid climate of Denver, Colorado. We are pleased to share a thoughtful essay by Joyce Chung that delves into the underpinnings of Yaloo’s practice. You can view Yaloo’s work across each of our six public LED’s as a feature of Supernova 7th Dimension’s Silent Screen program.
Digital Technologies Shaping a Smart Future
By Joyce Chung
Yaloo uses digital tools to explore relationships with nature along with the coexistence of humans, non-human species, and artifacts within the context of climate change and globalization. Working in a wide range of digital media and technologies including 3D modeling, motion capture, VR, AR, and animation, Yaloo focuses on how technological advancement may possibly enable alterations of earth systems and fundamental transformations in human activities. She also utilizes the malleability of glitch, abstract codes, and signals of digital information in examining the ways in which these systems are tied to the shifts of cultural identities and symbols in response to globalized consumerism.
Pickled City, 2022, is based on the search for a sustainable solution for future living. The artist conceived the work when exploring water as an accessible and alternative habitat. Pickled City is set in an imaginary world beneath the ocean, echoing with the sounds of wildlife that occupy the space. The portrayal of the city is familiar, reminding audiences of scenes depicted in Sci-Fi films: towering architectural structures with fast moving laser lights, segments of buildings venturing downward amidst the seaweed and the coral, chunks of large gogottes, and fish-like creatures in pixelated skin languidly floating through the water.
Dynamic linkages among both real and fictitious ecological and technological systems are central to this work. Yaloo takes mundane images in everyday life and mimics the environment of Earth to make the underwater I’m city accessible and habitable for the current humans to live in. At the same time, the artist incorporates an array of myths such as Shaman folktales and totemic artifacts of Korea into her work. For example, inspired by an ancient relic of a Gilt-bronze Incense Burner from Korea depicting a world of a mix of imaginary and real beings, the artist envisions the city as a site in which new forms of digital wildlife come into being and coexist with future humans. Notably, in her moving image practice, Yaloo examines the processes through which the invention of new devices and tools changes our daily lives. Of this work, Yaloo says that she believes “advanced technology plays a critical role in achieving environmental sustainability.”[1] Replete with animals, plants, in the new ecosystem and biological diversity fabricated by digital technology, Pickled City invites audiences to imagine new ways of interactions as an alternative form of living, while questioning the limits and capabilities of technological advancement and its impact on our lives.
In another artwork, Birthday Garden, 2022, Yaloo uses specific objects that are closely associated with Korean pop culture, such as facial masks and K-pop dance. Following her experiences in Korea, Japan, and the United States, the artist subverts the meaning and values embedded in cultural symbols. Birthday Garden, for instance, depicts images of guardian fairies, dancing to K-pop, in modernized versions of traditional clothing featuring the moves of different generations of a family. Now widely popular within youth cultures across the globe, K-pop is used by the artist as a vernacular material to trace changes in the relationship between younger and older generations. Another cultural reference incorporated in the work is seaweed, an essential element in the local cuisine in Korea. Particularly, seaweed soup is traditionally eaten as a birthday breakfast in honor of one's mother. The digitalized images of seaweed layered with unexpected technological distortions and glitches of social media reflect how the emergence of global consumerism, characterized by the rapid circulation of cultural commodities and symbols, has unwittingly changed the nature of culture itself, which is now being defined by a shared set of global influences rather than national interests. Similarly, the artist uses face mask sheets in probing various forms of beauty standards that underpin cultural differences.
By developing borderless realms of existence, oscillating between the real and unreal, Yaloo complicates our responses to technology. With each audience and their individualized capacity to imagine and transform, the artist takes a speculative stance towards navigating the possibilities of a new environment as well as creating new future human principles.
[1] Interview between the author and the artist on June 1, 2022
