Pickled City - K-ARTIST

Pickled City

2023
Single-channel video, sound, color
4min 40sec
About The Work

Yaloo has continuously explored the poetic possibilities of digital media through digital moving images, including projection-mapped sculptures, media façades, and VR. Her work draws on a wide range of timeless cultural elements—her own identity, myths, folktales, science and technology, and K-culture—to construct poetic narratives that unfold immersively through technological media.
 
Having lived abroad for a long time, Yaloo has developed an attitude toward life shaped by the gaze of the Other. Like gleaning, the artist habitually collects images and videos through YouTube and mobile phone screenshots. In the digital realm, she repeatedly mixes, cuts, copies, and pastes the collected materials.
 
The images she gathers embody transnational consumer culture and its accompanying phenomena. Through various technological processes, Yaloo recombines and edits these images, producing new visual narratives that articulate her own stories.
 
Yaloo’s work playfully engages our senses with vivid visual imagery and diverse digital media while, through storytelling grounded in reality, prompting reflection on the world we inhabit and inviting us to imagine possible futures.

Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Yaloo’s solo exhibitions include 《Shininho Docking》 (RIP Space, Los Angeles, USA, 2025), 《Shininho Opening Number》 (Mihakgwan, Seoul, 2024), 《Yaloo》 (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, South Korea, 2024), 《Wicked Ocean》 (Elektra Gallery, Montreal, Canada, 2023), and 《Homo Paulinella the Lab: Don’t You Cry, Dear Zarathustra》 (Platform-L, Seoul, 2020).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Yaloo has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《The 24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2024), 《Positive Feedback》 (Gallery BHAK, Seoul, 2024), Future Media Festival (Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C- Lab), Taipei, Taiwan, 2024), 《City of Gaia》 (Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2023), and the 《DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2023》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2023).

Awards (Selected)

Yaloo’s awards include the GMoMA & IBK Young Artists Awards (2024) and the 1st H/ART AveNEW New Media Art competition (2023).

Residencies (Selected)

Yaloo has also participated as a resident artist at 836M (San Francisco, USA, 2024), Pier 2 (Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2024), Hyundai Motors’ ZER0NE (Seoul, 2022), and the Asia Culture Center’s Creators in Lab (Gwangju, 2019).

Collections (Selected)

Yaloo’s works are included in the collections of the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art.

Works of Art

Transnational Consumer Culture and Its Accompanying Phenomena

Originality & Identity

Media artist Yaloo examines consumer culture and norms around the body/surface through everyday images gathered under the “gaze of the Other.” In her solo exhibition 《Yaloo House, Yes! Sebum》(Whistle, 2017), the work Yaloopark, Yes! Sebum, giant fruits with cosmetic concerns(2017) addresses our desire for “perfect surfaces”—as seen in glossy supermarket fruits and dense pharmacy beauty displays—with humor and satire. Giant fruit characters, scent and sound, opening/closing theme songs, and a fortune-drawing device actively engage the senses, translating digital imagery into a playful mode of spectatorship.

She then expands personal experience and local research into “imaginary archaeology.” Yaloo Castle Site, Imaginary Archaeology(2018–2019) gathers local cues—the Yamakasa festival, pharmacy displays reflecting contemporary femininity, and Nam June Paik’s broken TV tower at Canal City—to craft fictive relics installed via projection inside Fukuoka Castle. As viewers walk through rooms in sequence, they trace how a private narrative amplifies into a public one.

A turning point arrives with the adoption of a posthuman narrative in 2020. The solo exhibition 《Homo Paulinella the Lab: Don’t You Cry, Dear Zarathustra》(Platform-L, 2020) conceptualizes a “new humanity that lives by photosynthesis,” starting from childhood birthday seaweed soup and extending to curiosity about Precambrian survival strategies and algal composition/reproduction. The collaboration with conceptual artist Hunye Kim, Homo Paulinella the Lab: Don’t You Cry, Dear Zarathustra(2020), proposes beings who remove hatred/fear/aggression and practice coexistence through art/science—marking a shift from critical observation to a propositional worldview.

Most recently, Yaloo extends her universe along two axes. The ‘Pickled City’(2022–) series imagines a deep-sea eco-city that blurs human/non-human boundaries (Pickled City Dive Ver.2022(2022); Pickled City(2023)), while the ‘Shininho’(2024–) series builds an alternative historical narrative by combining the artist’s grandmother (born 1938) with the motif of an East Asian female pirate (solo exhibitions 《Shininho Opening Number》(Mihakgwan, 2024), 《Shininho Destiny》(836M, 2024–2025), 《Shininho Docking》(RIP Space, Los Angeles, 2025)). The former advances a post-anthropocentric ecological sensibility; the latter reorders layers of memory, myth, and history by repositioning an overlooked subject.

Style & Contents

Her production method is akin to “digital sketching/gleaning.” She gathers images from YouTube and mobile screenshots, then repeatedly mixes, cuts, copies, and pastes to synthesize new narratives. In works like Yaloopark, Yes! Sebum, giant fruits with cosmetic concerns(2017), projection-mapped sculpture combines with scent/sound/mechanical devices to turn viewing into immersive play. Media façades and VR likewise extend moving images across entire spaces as “moving poems.”

Yaloo Castle Site, Imaginary Archaeology employs a site-specific format that leverages the sequential architecture of Fukuoka Castle. Video-mapped objects are staged along a path of room–corridor–room, culminating in VR entry into a “virtual site.” The viewer’s movement becomes an editing device that layers “personal narrative → collective narrative → virtual archive.”

In 《Homo Paulinella the Lab: Don’t You Cry, Dear Zarathustra》, three-channel video, motion/VR, projection mapping, and digital printing are integrated as the “skin” of a laboratory-like environment. Collaboration with the Algal Research Center (National Institute of Fisheries Science) lends scientific grounding to the visual language, while constructs such as photosynthetic bodies and obsolete organs translate SF into concrete corporeality. The balance between worldbuilding and display is key to this phase.

Since 2022, the formal vocabulary has become more stratified. Pickled City Dive Ver.2022(2022) and Pickled City Dive(2023) combine 3D animation, VR, and light/scent objects to realize the deep-sea city’s “luminous ecology,” while Pickled City(2023) pairs single-channel video with structures and sound to visualize urban rhythms.

Within the ‘Shininho’ series, hologram fans, 3D scans, wood-pillar sculptures (modular building materials), and soundscape/text connect to construct the symbolic field of a ship’s hold/dock (Shininho World Tour(SONGEUN, 2024); 《Shininho Docking》(RIP Space, 2025)). The media façade Plastic Glitter Ending(2023) harnesses The Hyundai Seoul’s large public screen as a stage for narrative expansion.

Topography & Continuity

Yaloo’s distinctiveness lies in the “poetic compositing of digital images” and an asymmetric coupling of popular icons—myth/science—personal history. Beginning with humorous readings of consumerist surfaces, she expands into local memory, biology/ecology, deep-sea urban worldbuilding, and alternative history/elder womanhood, while consistently maintaining an immersive logic that opens the viewer’s senses.

Her development can be summarized as: observation of everyday icons and surfaces; narrative expansion connected to place and tradition; a posthuman proposal grounded in scientific research; and a diversification of worldbuilding into eco-cities/alternative histories. As seen in group exhibitions such as 《The 24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》(SONGEUN, 2024) and 《City of Gaia》(Asia Culture Center, 2023), she increasingly transplants research-driven worlds across exhibition halls, public screens, and VR platforms, broadening modes of reception.

Within the landscape of contemporary Korean art, Yaloo offers a model that merges the technical aesthetics of media art with the language of popular culture—“accessible yet thought-provoking.” Internationally, she adapts this grammar to local contexts across North America (RIP Space, Los Angeles; 836M, San Francisco), Taiwan (C-Lab), and Canada (Elektra Gallery).

Looking ahead, she is likely to continue in tandem: technical experimentation (holograms/VR/projection mapping) and research-based worldbuilding, expanding the “poetic possibilities of digital media” across public forums—gallery spaces, urban screens, and online platforms.

Works of Art

Transnational Consumer Culture and Its Accompanying Phenomena

Exhibitions