PETRICHOR

VENUE: STUDIO CONCRETE

DATE: 23. JULY. 2020 - 27. SEPTEMBER. 2020

CURATOR: JULIANE WOLSKI

VENUE: ANTICHAMBRE, BERN, SWITZERLAND

DATE: 7. SEPTEMBER. 2019 - 21. SEPTEMBER. 2019

Sinae Yoo’s artistic practice explores the effects of alienation and servitude in the age of digitalized capitalism. The artist re-contextualizes digital media such as advertisements, video games, corporate aesthetics and pop-culture references to reflect the subjugation of human life under the umbrella of consumer culture. By juxtaposing the spiritual anchoring of individual life and the competitiveness of consumerism, she creates a tangible environment to engage with this everyday duality. 

In her project Petrichor, Yoo utilizes music to convey the intensity of competition in popular culture. Her interest stemmed from the observation that contemporary music is more “physical” than it was historically - in the sense today’s music is mastered with an emphasis toward compression and loudness as opposed to dynamics. As a consequence, the act of listening to music has shifted towards a multi-sensorial experience where these waves are not only heard as sounds, but also felt physically as vibrations. With advancements in audio technology, consuming music has transformed into a haptic experience.

An extreme manifestation of this technological development can be found in the car bass-blasting phenomenon called “flexing”, which emphasizes the customization of disproportionately powerful sound systems with amplifiers and subwoofers that are able to bend the structure of the car itself and sometimes shatter the windshield with their intensity. In Petrichor, Yoo alludes to this subculture as an archetype of the hyper-masculine power demonstrations prompted by the competitive atmosphere of capitalist societies.  

After two exhibitions in Rome (The Gallery Apart) and Prague (FUTURA) earlier this year, Yoo completed a third iteration of Petrichor for Antichambre in Bern. The first two presentations were substantially focused on music composition and the creative potential of underground culture as an emancipatory force against mainstream competitiveness, whereas her third show is a testament to Yoo’s interest for mainstream music from the viewpoint of extreme human behavior inspired by sound culture surrounding music, but not purely music itself.

Text by Simon Würsten Marin

Venue: The Gallery Apart, Rome, Italy
Date: 13. May. 2019 – 21. June. 2019
Photography: Giorgio Benni (Images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Gallery Apart)

The Gallery Apart is proud to present Petrichor, the second solo show by Sinae Yoo hosted in the gallery spaces. Exploring the sensory imagery of Sinae Yoo means living a sensory experience of great visual impact and which soon morphs into a meeting with themes, suggestions and requests related to ethical and moral foundations which have compelled human beings to question themselves and the environment where their earthly life unfolds. In the last few years, by exploiting a wide range of media, Sinae Yoo has investigated topics such as estrangement and bondage under the yoke of capitalism. Drawing on the visual culture as a defining part of advertising and video games, the artist evokes an aesthetic form of seduction which ensnares and shatters the souls in its virtual network.

The exhibition unfolds around the video installation that lends its title to the show. Petrichor is a word coined by some scientists during the Sixties to describe the distinct scent when a storm’s first raindrops hit the ground after a long period of dry weather. The video is the result of a close cooperation with a community of artists whom Sinae Yoo met in the city of Baltimore, where the artist lived during the last year and where the video was shot. The film features Elon Battle, composer and singer Mathew Starke, and poet Keenon Brice. The soundtrack was composed by Alex Deranian and Sylvain Gerboud.

Set in service stations and in car parks, Petrichor revolves around the car as an emblematic object of a regulatory, hyper-masculinized power. A world controlled and inhibited by the lean curves and by the powerful audio system of a muscle car. The artist uses subculture products to investigate the mechanisms which govern personal relationships and the relation with the expressions of the self which, in the capitalist system, are based on forms of extreme competitiveness. Capitalism, in fact, does not promise any salvation or redemption for the weak, but only default and debt, and in art, just like at work, the mainstream exploits and destroys the free subcultures, imposing submission, obedience and conformity to the dominant aesthetic canons.

The protagonists of Petrichor seek to escape this by giving life to scenes where music and drama serve as catalyst for emancipation, resilience and fortitude. The rebellion against the imposed uniformity goes through the exaltation of a space and of shared social practices, of a sociological habitus which here is defined “Glass flex”, a subculture where the affirmation of identity and social recognition is based on a competition over the biggest in-car audio system, over who has the most powerful subwoofers. The video installation and its score are inspired by such hyper- masculinized aesthetics.

Music plays a key role in the project Petrichor. The song “Shield” borrows the music that, in a stunning detail of the tryptich oil painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Hieronymus Bosch painted upon the posterior of one of his innumerable upsetting figures. The result is a completely new song that one of the protagonists featured in the video sings, which the spectators cannot in fact hear. The song is played on the upper floor of the gallery where the audience will listen to it while having the big mural work of art in front of them that Sinae Yoo has painted on the highest wall of the gallery, and on which the artist wrote “Inner music can be heard when you close your eyes”. It invites the viewer to rediscover the spiritual dimension that the consumerist society tends to reject. The abstract collages featuring the exhibition are inspired by such dimension and by its possible and personal visual representation.

Petrichor has been subsidized by Art Council Korea(ARKO), Kanton Bern, Kultur Stadt Bern, Swiss Art Council Pro Helvetia, The City of Prague, and The Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic. Thank you to friends in Baltimore & N.Y, The Gallery Apart team, and Center For Contemporary Art Futura team.

From The Gallery Apart.

Curator: Christina Gigliotti
Venue: Center for Contemporary Art FUTURA
Date: March 3, 2019 - April 28, 2019

For her first exhibition in the Czech Republic, Sinae Yoo presents Petrichor a film installation specifically produced for FUTURA.

In the past few years, using a wide array of media, Sinae Yoo has explored themes of alienation and servitude under the yoke of capitalism. Taking her cues from the visual culture of advertising and video games, the artist conjures an aesthetic of seduction that grinds the souls it ensnares within its virtual net. Set in gas stations and parking lots, Petrichor focusses on the automobile as the emblematic object of a hyper-masculinized normative power. A world controlled and inhibited by the sleek curves and booming sound system of a muscle car.

Petrichor is the result of a highly collaborative process with a community of artists Sinae Yoo met in Baltimore, where the film was shot. These include Elon Batlle, Mathew Starke, a musician, and singer, and Keenon Brice a poet, who star in the film, and Alex Deranian and Sylvain Gerboud, who composed its soundtrack. Though the daunting reality the films depicts seems all-pervasive and inescapable, its protagonists maintain a degree of agency. Music and theatricality act as catalysts for emancipation, resilience, and fortitude. Exhibition text From Center for Contemporary Art Futura.

Petrichor, 2019 a film was written and directed by Sinae Yoo. With Elon Battle (:3lON), Keenon Brice, and Mathew Starke. Music by Sylvain Gerboud (Dviance & Viancy's Attic), Sound by Alex Deranian, Camera by Corey Hughes, Sinae Yoo, Installation by Caroline Krzyszton, Ondřej Gerik, Cristo Madissoo and the project has been subsidized by Kanton Bern, Kultur Stadt Bern, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Art Council Korea (ARKO), The City of Prague, and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

More on Petrichor: Artribune, Art Viewer, Formeuniche, Zero, ArtRabbit 1, ArtRabbit 2, Wall Street International, The White Pube, Futura Project, The Gallery Apart, Artforum, MutualArt, Rome Gallery Tours

GUILT TRIP

VENUE: QUARK, Geneva, Switzerland
Date: January 17, 2019 - March 3, 2019
Photography: Annik Wetter

Guilt Trip is the title of an ongoing project by the artist Sinae Yoo. This multimedia investigation focuses on the gathering and mixing of visual materials that, in the artist’s words, “illustrates the capitalist pressures of living in an increasingly depressive achievement-oriented society”. The project is a multichannel video installation which depicts images of pleasure, guilt, alienation, and conformity to explore the ambiguous subjectivity of morality. A playful approach is inherent throughout the exhibition, despite the works dismal reality. Sinae Yoo composes a narration from a third-person point of view that explores the ambiguity of a new commandment in late-modern labor society that triggers both the frenzied search for fun and a rampant feeling of guilt in the face of imposed moral imperatives. The exhibition at Quark is part of an ongoing series of work that has taken different forms over the past year. In this variation, Yoo responds to the hybrid nature of the exhibition space and its strong commitment to visual & music. By using the oversized wall-stickers which are reminiscent of the arcade game images, she attempts to heighten the space bringing the audience an immersive experience. Exhibition text from QUARK.

This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Fondation Sesam, Circuit, Elisa Langlois, Fabrice Stroun, Megan Orsi, and Jérôme Baccaglio.

Venue: Neumeister Bar-Am, Berlin, Germany
Date: November 18, 2017 – February 10, 2018
Photography: Andrea Rossetti / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Neumeister Bar-Am, Berlin

‘Dancing Eyes’ is a single installation made of two video works, accompanied by a series of paintings on paper.

The first video captures dancers and performers hired to celebrate the opening of stores in public shopping districts in Seoul, and the light displays of illegal party buses that prey on a lonely, elderly audience. Exhibited on an oversized intercom interface, these images of gyrating dancers and fatigued mascots on break, place the viewer in the morally awkward position of monitoring from afar these faceless bodies, as they hover between exhaustion and spectacle.

The second video, shown on a monitor, intercuts images of still convulsing dead animals about to be turned into food-stuff, with scenes from ‘Dancing Eyes’, a 1996 arcade game from which the installation derives its title, which show the undressing of crudely rendered woman by way of game-play. The sickening sense of dread that permeates these garishly-colored hyper-commodified bodies, neither dead nor alive, is further reinforced by the score, which Yoo composed in collaboration with American sound artist Sentinel.

Rather than placing herself in a ‘critical’, moralizing position, Yoo’s work grapples openly with its morbid fascinations, weighing her own capacity to fabricate aesthetic distance, to derive pleasure from the commodification of her subject’s vitality, with a melancholic search for empathy. Exhibition text by Ché Zara Blomfield

This project has received support from sic! Raum für Kunst, Luzern(CH), the Stadt Bern, Kanton Bern and Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Venue: sic! Raum für Kunst, Luzern, Switzerland
Date: October 15, 2017 – November 25, 2017
Photography: Andri Stadler / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and sic! Raum für Kunst, Luzern

Sinae Yoo’s work addresses themes of cultural confluence, the promises and pressures of neoliberal systems and consumer societies, and the relationship between intimacy and exhibition. Her multimedia work combines diverse materials, techniques and aesthetic styles: sleek, industrially manufactured plastics are juxtaposed with handmade ceramics, digitally produced imagery mirrors sensory experiences, and cosmetic products are employed as painting materials. Sensually and subtly, Yoo explores the question of how virtual and physical perceptions can be intertwined and translated into an individual, self-reflecting reality.

For her solo exhibition at sic! Raum für Kunst in Lucerne, Sinae Yoo has realised two new video pieces in collaboration with the American sound designer Sentinel:

The display panel of the video «Dancing Eyes I» calls to mind the large monitors used as intercom systems in Korean apartments and hotel rooms, which function as both instruments of control and windows to the world. The work shows a montage of mascots promoting different products along high streets and in front of supermarkets. Intended to amuse and animate customers, the figures in «Dancing Eyes I» emanate a curious melancholy – perhaps as they were caught in moments of apparent candidness: a figure in a cat costume sits on a bench at the roadside, a weary rabbit takes a moment’s rest on a park bench, and a yellow bear with an oversized head and bulging eyes clumsily tries to use his smartphone. Beneath the cheerful, brightly coloured costumes, there are flickers of human emotion – hints of sadness and exhaustion. With this, Sinae Yoo alludes to the exploitative working conditions of the neoliberal system and the associated societal pressures of self-optimisation and the constant willingness to perform.

These works juxtapose Yoo’s own recordings with found material from the internet, leading to combinations of images in which she looks for formal and contextual analogies: for example, in «Dancing Eyes II», sequences depicting the convulsing flesh of maritime creatures are set against images of Korean dancers tasked with encouraging passers-by to visit a certain restaurant. This widespread Asian advertising technique came to Yoo’s attention while she was walking through the streets of Seoul. Various video clips depict animal carcasses spasming involuntarily as a result of being filleted alive. Neural impulses from the brain are sent to the body during these final moments. The footage is accompanied by scenes from a South Korean video game that show a female anime figure – who is stuck in the body of a fish – being undressed by the player. Scenes from ‘Dancing Eyes’, a 1996 arcade game from which this exhibition finds it’s title, depict the methodical stripping of poorly rendered woman by way of puzzle game.

The fragmentary arrangements are at once unsettling and fascinating. Ostentatiously displayed eroticism is contrasted with the vulnerability of the human and animal body. Artificiality and posturing come face to face with intimate, tactile moments. The dancers’ synchronised movements are presented as empty, perfunctory gestures, similar to the neural reactions of the dead animals. Storylines geared towards individual freedom collide with the moral and ethical values of the individual. In asking how empathy can manifest itself in a progressively rationalised and economised environment, Yoo addresses two contrasting tendencies: while we are becoming increasingly immune to depictions of violence, exploitation and advertising slogans, at the same time digital communities are giving rise to new forms of empathy. In this sense, digital technologies represent a potential way of creating a new sensitivity towards the world. Exhibition text by Eva-Maria Knüsel.

Yoo also creates a visual world that illustrates the richness of her perception as well as her differentiated approach to contemporary image strategies. But rather than pointing a moralistic finger, she presents the manifestations of human existence in today’s world with a playful, panoptic eye.

Artist Talk – Empathy and Immunity

SHADOW RIFT

Curated by: Domenico de Chirico
Venue: The Gallery Apart, Rome, Italy
Date: December 13, 2016 – February 11, 2017
Photography: Giorgio Benni, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Gallery Apart, Rome

Vivid free interpretation of situations, objects, figures and a complex sign language in pop culture and extended cultural exchanges as they move through historical motifs and compositions, posing notions of an expressive self, this is the general starting point for the artistic work of Korean artist Sinae Yoo (*1985). Currently living in Switzerland, for her first solo exhibition in Italy at The Gallery Apart in Rome, she has produced a large new work series, including: a video accompanied by the soundtrack, installations, drawings and ceramics.

In ‘Shadow rift’, Sinae Yoo seeks to deconstruct the privileged sense of the Western theoria: the sight. Seeing does not mean exclusively seeing, as each gaze needs a concealment. This typically Deriddan practice implies that the reflection upon the sight, upon the vision, upon the gaze and the eye, intertwines inextricably with the touch: «If two gazes look into each other’s eyes, can we say that in that right moment they are touching each other?».

Vision and touch, distance and proximity interlace like a chiasm and the con-tact of the eyes is given as a condition, so that the look and the encounter with the other occur contemporaneously. The essence of this discourse is unquestionably ethical: Sinae Yoo investigates the mode of being and the ability to deal with the other. Such ocular theory results, so to speak, in a technological impasse: the vision becomes tact and the sight becomes contact. Therefore, the relationship with the other deconstructs the movement between proximity and distance, their presumed duality and their nitid separation. In the extreme vicinity the eye cannot see anymore, points and touches like a finger and so ultimately, its function becomes digital, no longer optic but haptic (i.e., tactile object recognition). The aim is to highlight a new relationship, built and realized through the sight and by opening the eyes to the world. To quote the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, « we have to touch without touching, that is to know how to touch without touching, without touching too much.

Within the exhibition, rich in synaesthesia, the reflection on the look becomes also a question of identity which takes concrete form integrating with the distances typical of the spectral, immaterial and pharmaceutical cyberspace: here it is possible to kiss from a distance.

‘Shadow rift’ welcomes the visitors with a doormat typical of South Korea, which is usually placed outside or inside the doorway of a house or a building in order to allow people to clean the sole of footwear before entering a place. The invitation to perform a ritualistic gesture, a ceremonial custom, serves as the introduction to an exhibition that collects every aspect of a private world. Once inside, the visitor is overwhelmed by a protective atmosphere where a series of messages, symbols and objects universally recognizable are kept. To welcome the visitor there is a mobile shield, symbolically representing an immune subject, visual result of the achievement of a possible stage of digital cleaning and personal privacy. The prevailing blue colour of the installation is a sample of the distinctive blue pot of the Nivea creme. The well-known ‘snow-white’ crème, having special functions that allowed to keep the skin as white as alabaster, obtained a sudden success as it could also be stored for a long period of time. In the work of Sinae Yoo, the cosmetic product acquired a metaphorical relevance since it is acknowledged in unison as one of the oldest product of the German mass product, although it dates back to the Nazi regime, when it was defined as the ‘Jewish crème’ because the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Beiersdorf, where the lotion was produced, was Jewish. For some evident historical references, it is possible to start an antithetical reflection between antigen and antibody, internal and external, friends and foes, I and the other, pure and impure, negativity and positivity. A collection of sushi-boxes, featuring ‘embryonic’ creatures made of ceramic , clearly unravels the issue of packaged food, through the use of perfect and eye-catching incubators, in order to reassure the consumers: it is a formal statement against the question of the aesthetic similarity of commercial mass products. On the other hand, the drawings aim at investigating the relationship, generally problematic, between the social and biological sphere. A further installation consists of a series of columns containing surveillance cameras, covered with a semi-transparent fabric, aimed at highlighting the impossibility of clarity in interpersonal relationships. Indeed, according to a totally Freudian vision, human existence is not limpid even to itself and such lacuna has an effect also on the relationship with the other. On the lower floor of the gallery, decorated with Nivea crème tins, there is the video ‘The Dead by Many Firsts’ (2016), accompanied by a soundtrack purposely composed for the video, where a blind girl swims in bluescreen-like water: it is the ghost of the ghost who lives in a status of deification of his own mental hygiene and who tries narcissistically to boost, with regard to healthiness, the image that the others can have of himself, through the use of an adaptable mimic and of protective models of the screen lock. Moreover, the video seeks to explore the concept of cyber-hygiene, in the 21st century, along with its multiple meanings not of immediate understanding. In this respect, indeed, quoting the British journalist Ben Hammersley: «The most important life skill we’ll be teaching our children over the coming decades will be cyber-hygiene. Fighting infections in the 21st century is less about washing your hands and more about not clicking on untrusted email attachments. Those of us who don’t understand this will be shunned as digitally unclean. Exhibition text by Domenico de Chirico /The Gallery Apart.

The exhibition features a live act by a young German performer and choreographer Nils Amadeus Lange. He makes a one to one performance exploring different forms of intimacy & hygiene with Nivea cream based on Sinae Yoo’s video ‘The Dead by Many Firsts’ (2016).

More on Shadow Rift: Droste Effect, ATP Diary, Art Viewer, The Kinsky, Artribune, The Gallery Apart, Inside Art