COMO&HAPPY SCREEN_JANUARY 2019 «New Year Parade»

2018. 12. 31 – 2019. 02. 28

 *By popular demand, the exhibition period has been extended until March 14th, 2019.

Exhibition Venue & Open Hours

[COMO SCREEN]

SKT-Tower, Euljiro 1-ga Exit no.4 / Daejeon SKT Dunsan Bldg

08:30 ~ 19:00

[HAPPY SCREEN]

SK Bldg 4F

09:00 ~ 18:00

*Closed on weekends and public holidays

Artist Yaloo

Organizer Art Center Nabi, SK Telecom, SK Innovation

Inquiry 02 2121 0952

<Exhibition Statement>

The ‘Parade’, which has been held since the ancient Greek Dionysus Festival, possesses a long historical background and universality, as well as place specificity. Around the world, New Year’s Day is celebrated with a variety of festivals, inspiring the atmosphere as a ‘Parade’. In a spectacular display of fireworks, splendid native costumes and march to the lilting music, there is hope and wish implied with traditions, history, and culture. The ‘Parade’ may be what marks the beginning of a festival where people share the joy of being together and pray for the good of each other.

Opening the New Year of 2019, COMO & HAPPY SCREEN «New Year Parade» exhibition introduces Yaloo’s works that constantly explore the poetic potential of digital media via technology and techniques. Based on her identity, Yaloo’s world constitutes a poetic narrative that embraces the cultural symbols and wittily unfolds the consumer culture of the images and local characteristics of wealth and longevity. This allows her to face the various desires and greed inherent in human life.

<Yaloo Castle Site>(2019) explores the boundaries of the complex subtle intersection of historical narratives accumulated in perpetual time and the individual narratives that pass through them in the restored castle through skills and imagination. Walking along the Fukuoka Castle down the aisle, the audience will face the brilliant times of the past and the future to come in the form of video sculptures. It addresses the questions about the perpetuity of time and the cyclical flow of human life through the images of imaginative artifacts that depict the past, present, and future of historical sites.

<Yaloofarm Series>(2019) projects the artist herself to the legal alien farmers, also known as ‘Cornhead’, and explores the modern agriculture, consumer culture, and spirituality from their perspective. In the process of replicating, mixing, and transforming 3D images reconstructed through Virtual Reality, the images that are created provide an immersive experience reminiscent of a theme park.

Through «New Year Parade» exhibition, we invite you to another world in the ‘Parade’ of new media artist Yaloo’s bold and clear artworks. We wish you a great new year and hope you could march into a new world that will unfold before you.

 <Artwork Description>

<Yaloo Castle Site>(2019), modified for the screens at Nabi 2019

Historical sites outlive human lives from past, present, and beyond. At a restored historical castle, Yaloo creates a series of imaginary historical artifacts based on her research and experience during her residency in Fukuoka such as Yamakasa festival and related local traditions, contemporary femininity portrayed in everyday products in drugstores every corner, dying Nam June Paik’s giant TV Tower at Canal City, and so on. As the audience is invited to walk through the projected sculptures in the rows of the castle chambers, the artist and the audience together actively weave personal narrative into a grand narrative with the aid of imagination and technology. At the last room of the exhibition, the viewer enters the virtual Archaeological site via VR headset to complete their journey through the alternative world.

<Yaloofarm Series>(2019), modified for the screens at Nabi 2019

<Yaloofarm Series> is a series of video installations about legal alien farmers, ‘Cornhead’. Cornhead aliens are Yaloo’s mid-western alter ego. The project is loosely based on mid-western agricultural giants, John Deere and Monsanto, and related consumer cultures as well as the expanded identity of American corn as a goddess of nourishment to a product of manmade dystopia. From John Deere’s disposable party gear to Native American’s depiction of ‘corn mother’, <Yaloofarm Series> unapologetically explores contemporary agriculture, consumerism, and spirituality through the gaze of legal aliens. Yaloo collected visual data of John Deere and Monsanto products as well as North American folk-art depicting corn goddess and anti-GMO clip arts. Then, she multiplied, cut, and shifted around the pieces of found images to construct the story of ‘Cornhead’. The story unfolds with animated video collages utilizing 3D rendering software and 3D router in various forms of video installation from video sculpture, site-specific projection mapping to Virtual Reality application. The series of installation took multiple forms in different locations, including Vermont Studio center, ACRE project in Chicago, and the Chicago Artist Coalition.

<Yaloo's New Year Parade; Sipjangsaeng)>(2019), modified for the screens at Nabi 2019

*Sipjangsaeng (the ten traditional Symbols of Longevity)

With the motif of Sipjangsaeng, <Yaloo’s New Year Parade; Sipjangsaeng)> (2019) captures the human desire for the eternal youth. Sipjangsaeng is one of the most frequently encountered images during the New Year. Those images, such as cranes, pine trees, clouds, mountains, and rocks, have been commonly used for a long period of time and therefore might seem hackneyed and boring. However, with her distinctive sense of wit and expression of visual images, Yaloo has reconstructed them in her own way. By looking at <Yaloo’s New Year Parade; Sipjangsaeng)> (2019) in the public space where many people come in and out of the building just as people in the past had possessed and appreciated the objects ornamented with the symbols of the traditional symbols of longevity, it reminds us of our desires and wishes in the New Year.

<About the Artist>

Yaloo focuses on the transnational consumer culture and its phenomenon in this capitalistic society. Due to long years of living abroad, the attitude of her life reflects other people's eyes, and she habitually collects images and videos via Youtube and cell phone screenshots. Instead of printing and clipping the collected information, the process of mixing, cutting, copying, and pasting images in the digital world is repeated. She also makes 3D sculpture models out of images collected through VR equipment. She produces new images that express her own alternative narrative through various processes. The video works produced could be rendered in various forms such as single-channel videos, video projection mappings, sublimation transfer techniques, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, using 'versioning', one of the innate characteristics of digital media, and they lead the audience to an immersive experience reminiscent of a theme park. Yaloo, incessantly exploring the poetic potential of digital media, lets us confront the world we belong to and what we desire within it through her works.

Yaloo received the Lynn Blumenthal Scholarship from Video Data Bank in 2015 and won the Gold Prize at the Visual Arts Awards, sponsored by the New York Korean Foundation in 2016. She has held exhibitions in numerous cities around the world, including the Belgian Ridge Biennale and the Quebec Biennale. She finished her undergraduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and studied video art at the same graduate school. Currently, she is actively working as an artist between Korea and the US.

http://yaloopop.com/