Installation view of 《Homo Paulinella, the lab Don't you cry dear Zarathustra》 (Platform-L, 2020) ©Yaloo

TheArtro presents two feature articles that shed light on Korean female artists and respond to their active role in the international art world. Korean female artists occupy an important position on the global stage, with works that not only deal with individual artists’ personal experiences, but also address Korean society’s various social and political issues with a transcendental worldview.

In this second cover, H. G. Masters focuses on the keywords "Monstrosity" and “futurity” as they relate to three artists’ work to provide an opportunity to imagine the present and future through art.

Installation view of 《Homo Paulinella, the lab Don't you cry dear Zarathustra》 (Platform-L, 2020) ©Yaloo

The artist Yaloo explores the hybridization and adaption of the human species in several recent projects. In 《Homo Paulinella, Photosynthesizing Post Human Scenario》 (2020), shown at Platform L Contemporary Art Center in 2020, Yaloo draws on the bio-physical properties of paulinella—named for the genus of freshwater amoeboids that has coopted a cynobacterium (bacteria that perform photosynthesis) into an endosymbiotic relationship—to visualize humans reconfigured to do the same.

In the installation, two human-like figures appear on adjacent screens, their vaguely human-female-looking heads modified with seaweed- and anemone-like features and appendages. The central channel of the video installation features images of the sun and arrays of solar panels, as well as microscopic views of green paulinella, and an ironic caption belittling the human emotions that we tend to cherish as markers of our consciousness:

“Your grief and pity are meaningless and shitty. Self-comfort is dirty. You are nothing but just a little witty.”

Images of the sun, an animated amoeboid, and green seaweed-like forms float in a montage of electronic music before a pair of green, hexagonal lips appears in a close-up of the Homo paulinella’s adaptive features. In this imagination of futurity, human evolution was not a function of technological innovation as we understand it, but an adaptive modification than draws on the universe’s fundamental forces.

And by our contemporaneous societal terms, the Homo paulinella is monstrous, in their visual markings of difference from Homo sapiens, but also, Yaloo’s renderings suggest, they still have the affective qualities of “cute” and “happy” and “playful”—in the meanings that we ascribe to such features today.

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