Haena Yoo, Reformer Sequence (detail), 2024 © Haena Yoo

Haena Yoo’s exhibition at Murmurs recalled the aftermath of a deranged fitness class: yoga mats laid askew, motorized Pilates equipment sporadically animated, and strange sacks of murky liquid sat in helpless heaps on the floor. Accentuating the peculiarities of this scene, an anxious chorus of competing personal affirmations (“All is well,” “I’m a miracle worker”) reverberated from a single-channel video playing on a loop in an adjacent room (Who Is John Galt?, all works 2024).

Titled 《Self Love Club》, Yoo’s intriguingly bizarre exhibition took the ubiquitousness and underlying absurdity of wellness culture as its muse, framing it as an often goofy yet ultimately insidious sociocultural force. The central narrative here was the promise of metamorphosis hawked by the wellness-industrial complex, as well as the machinations for ultimately achieving it. In addition to the video, which interspersed yoga footage with images of products peddled by corporate wellness titans Goop and Erewhon, Yoo’s exhibition consisted of eight discrete sculptural installations, each of which was presented as an uncanny assemblage of odd (and often tortuous) parts. 

In Reformer Sequence, an amorphous, transparent plastic bladder—an object reminiscent of an amniotic sac or an IV bag—rested atop a motor-powered contraption that resembled a Pilates reformer. When activated, twin metal knobs kneaded the pliable sac, creating a friction poised to rupture its surface. These vigorous movements churned the teeming goo that floated around inside of it—a liquid suspension replete with tangled filaments of sea moss, goji berries, ginseng, and Chaga (organic medicinals commodified by the global wellness industry).

Two other visceral, strangely shaped sacks were placed as if in catatonic states of collapse on printed yoga mats that lay on the floor. They were accompanied by twin metal hand weights that resembled vertebrae, a material allusion that merged the form of the body with its own tool of modification. Elsewhere, Yoo’s plastic organs were subjected to a litany of torments: They were bound, folded, abraded, and tethered to various exercise straps and handles.

These unsettling choreographies served to pluck her sculptures from the realm of pure formal abstraction and instead situate them in relation to our frenzied cultural drive for bodily improvement. The symbolism here was unequivocal: Much like these eccentric sculptures, we are all sad sacks of fluid bound to the chains of our own private vanities. 

Yoo’s thematic musings were certainly in keeping with the current zeitgeist. I visited her exhibition shortly after seeing Coralie Fargeat’s body horror hit The Substance (2024), in which aging fitness star Demi Moore “births” her own perfectly youthful doppelgänger (Margaret Qualley), who parasitically relies on the elder Moore’s bodily fluids to sustain her pert looks. Yoo’s pond scum–filled bladders—as well their soft corporeal shapes—found echoes in the film’s grossly absurd yet beguiling visuals, which included untold scenes of souring fluids festering in needles and IV bags and bodies brought to the brink of destruction in pursuit of aesthetic perfection.

“Self Love Club” gestured toward similar monstrosities. In the sculpture Deep Breathing Sequence, for example, a massage motor mercilessly pumped another fluid-filled bladder as if it were a lung starved for air. Comparably, in Suffocate, a misshapen sac bulged against its restrictive binding, perhaps as a form of punishment for its unholy distortions. 

While Yoo did not specifically utilize fluids milked from living things, she did place particular emphasis on other processes of extraction. Her yoga mats, for example, featured printed images related to the mass Americanization of non-Western healing practices: Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn practicing asanas, advertisements for gua sha, and a portrait of Indra Devi from her 1959 book Yoga for Americans. While these mats offered a clever critique of colonial capitalist models of cultural consumption (and though their spongy, skin-like texture enhanced the installations’ overall visceral qualities), the sheer number of them teetered on redundancy. 

Ultimately, Yoo’s sculptures proved the most intriguing. In Lumps on the Root, for example, a knotty, tendrilous mass of gold-electroplated ginseng was suspended from a wall; here, the artist symbolically extracted the healing root from its utilitarian, medicinal context and presented it, quite literally, as a gilded luxury fetish. This metamorphosed sculpture not only actualized the body’s desire for alchemical transformation but also perfectly allegorized the extractive capitalist underbelly of the wellness industry itself.

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