Originality & Identity

Haena Yoo’s practice consistently begins by exploring how capitalist systems regulate and reorganize human emotion and the body. In her early work Maintain Disgust(2018), she exposed the asymmetry of global mobility through cultivation materials contained in plastic vessels, fundamentally questioning the concept of “containment.” This stemmed from the awareness that capitalism allows materials to circulate freely while controlling the movement and emotions of people. During this period, her central concern lay in how structural contradictions infiltrate personal experience.

In The Birth of Venus(2019), prompted by the personal experience of her mother’s cancer treatment, Yoo examined the capitalization of “wellness” in depth. Observing her mother oscillate between Eastern and Western healing methods, she recognized how contemporary society reframes illness and aging as “personal failure,” and how this framing fuels the expansion of the wellness and healing industries. Through this, she identified how the promise of health and beauty ultimately functions as a mechanism for endlessly renewing consumer subjects.

In her 2022 solo exhibition 《The Oriental Sauce Factory》 at Gallery Shilla, Yoo centered the non-material medium of scent—anchored in her father’s soy sauce factory—to critique neoliberal structures of production and consumption. The powerful smell of soy sauce carries a sense of “otherness” within industrial systems; in the process of being controlled, processed, and commodified, it evokes histories, women’s labor, and the embodied and emotional memories of East Asia. Yoo expands this scent into a sensorial device that reveals tensions between industry and human life.

By the time of her 2024 solo exhibition 《Self Love Club》 at Murmurs in Los Angeles, her thematic concerns had expanded toward the entanglement of colonial histories, neoliberalism, and the wellness industry that has produced “extreme individualism.” The historical transformation of yoga and Pilates, the norms of “self-care” appropriated by transnational capital, and the psychological pressure to constantly optimize oneself constitute the emotional structure Yoo examines. She points out how the imperative to “love yourself” is in fact a circular mechanism designed to return subjects to labor, giving sculptural form to the anxiety, desire, and fatigue borne by bodies that are simultaneously consumers and commodities.

Style & Contents

Yoo consistently merges material and immaterial elements to reconstruct narratives and systems. In works like Maintain Disgust, the juxtaposition of waste, disposable containers, and cultivation materials visually articulates cycles of circulation and stagnation while operating as metaphors for political and economic structures. Her formal language exists in a hybrid state between sculpture, installation, and performative mechanism, allowing the materials themselves to drive meaning.

In The Birth of Venus(2019), products associated with bodily management—cosmetics, oils, herbs, medications, exfoliating masks, perfume samples—constitute the primary materials. Combined with texts by Susan Sontag and Chantal Akerman, these elements reveal how the body, illness, and death become metaphorized and commodified. During this phase, her work embodied the aesthetics and violence of “body maintenance” through the inherent properties of the materials—scent, viscosity, texture, and functionality.

In 《The Oriental Sauce Factory》, her formal language expanded toward more systemic and mechanical structures. The installation’s “liquid circulation and filtration device,” which borrows the logic of a factory system, forms an ecosystem in which soy sauce flows and ferments as sculpture, video, scent, sound, and mechanical movement operate together. In the work Injection Machine: Tu m’(2022), ingredients such as fermented soybean blocks, jujubes, medicinal herbs, Tylenol, Advil, and oregano oil mix within a single tank, colliding with sculptural obstacles—demonstrating Yoo’s shift from object-based installation to a “functioning sculptural system.”

In the ‘L’Oriental’ series and the ‘I Was Placebo’ series in 2023-2024, Yoo narrows her focus toward experiments with glass, alcohol, medicinal herbs, jewelry components, and medical tools, developing a sculptural language in which preservation and decay, desire and healing, body and machine collide. In particular, the glass spheres of ‘I Was Placebo’ bind together surgical retractors and clamps with organic substances, constructing a single vessel that merges medical imagery with the materiality of private desire. In 《Self Love Club》, yoga mats, massage devices, exercise tools, herbs, mushrooms, and supplements expand across sculptural surfaces and structures, generating a sensorial environment in which body, industry, and history become densely entangled.

Topography & Continuity

Yoo is one of the few contemporary Korean artists to actively employ scent, fermentation, bio-materials, medicinal herbs, skincare products, and everyday consumer goods to explore the emotional structures of capitalism. By reframing East Asian elements—soy sauce, fermentation, herbal medicine, and caregiving labor—within modern, colonial, and capitalist systems, she positions herself not only as a sculptor but also as a “sensory critic” who analyzes social structures through embodied materials. Her works begin with personal narratives—her mother’s illness, her father’s factory—but extend these into industrial, historical, and economic structures to access broader social affect.

Formally, she has used states of matter, circulation, decay, and filtration as sculptural language. Her trajectory—from early waste-based installations to fermentation systems, liquid circuits, scent-text-sound environments, and later glass sculpture combined with medical instruments—demonstrates her expansion of sculpture’s boundaries and her understanding of materials as actants. These materials function not only as objects but as devices that perform emotional and social structures.

In recent works, she continues to connect body, capital, healing, hygiene, and technology, examining how humans engage with broader systems. The interplay of traditional sensory elements—fermentation, scent—with the wellness industry, consumer structures, and medical technology is grounded in her long-term experiments with materials and systemic thinking. Rather than shifting to entirely new topics, these developments represent a natural extension of her ongoing inquiry into sensory and material relations.

Her working life between Seoul and Los Angeles also shapes her concerns and sculptural approach. Differences in consumer culture, hygiene norms, technological environments, and caregiving systems inform her material choices and narrative framing, allowing for a perspective not fixed to a single cultural context. Within this framework, Yoo continues to begin from personal experience while reorganizing and comparing systems across regions, steadily developing a sculptural and sensory methodology attentive to the complexities of contemporary life.