Installation view © Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art

As its first exhibition of 2024, the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art presents the award exhibition 《YALOO》, organized in collaboration with IBK Industrial Bank as part of a program supporting emerging artists. Uniting GMOMA’s long-standing commitment to young artists with IBK’s dedication to fostering new talent, this show is both the inaugural edition of the award exhibition and Yaloo’s first solo exhibition.

The title 《YALOO》—which is also the artist’s name—functions as a potential “proper noun” intended to become a persona and a pronoun, signaling the artist’s aspiration to be recognized as a symbolic figure.

Yaloo’s ongoing thematic investigations begin from personal memories and recollections. For instance, miyeok-guk (seaweed soup), a symbol of birthday meals in her childhood, evolves into the question of how seaweed—dating back to the Precambrian era—has survived across vast stretches of time to the present.

The fact that kelp is among the first life-forms on Earth to exhibit sexual differentiation develops into works that imagine a new human species by combining the characteristics of seaweed. Initiated by such inquisitiveness, the artist’s underwater trilogy is newly produced in 2024 versions for this solo exhibition at GMOMA.

In addition, Yaloo broadly and dynamically incorporates culturally distinctive elements—myth and folklore, science and technology, and K-culture—that have sparked imagination across eras, overwhelming viewers with powerful moving images.

Her questions not only reframe our awareness of how we look at “others,” but also press us to consider whether our inherited assumptions about “the human condition,” once taken as firm, remain sustainable today. Through sensory works that capture Yaloo’s singular near-future projections—new worlds expanded from desires for immortality, unfamiliar bodies, and interspecies coexistence—the exhibition invites the community to think anew about what it means to recognize one another’s existence and to return each other’s gaze.

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