Curated by Vanessa Kwan with InYoung Yeo

dot.dot.dot. brings together Seoul-based artists Sejin Kim and InYoung Yeo for their first presentations in Canada. Working at the intersection of media and installation, Kim and Yeo’s practices explore the omnipresence of interactive technologies and their varying effects on human experience.

InYoung Yeo’s Happily Ever After considers the entanglements of bodies with technology and each other; here “lust” becomes subject of the artist’s research processes. Beginning with the idea of technology as a contemporary interlocutor for human desire, Yeo approaches sex, gender and sexuality as both highly mediated by and resistant to the “compressive” nature of digital intelligences. Lust becomes an impulse that drives technological interaction at the same time as it can never be fully satisfied by it. This loop constitutes what Yeo explores as a system of repetition and deferral – a new and ongoing set of frustrated co-dependencies. Her work represents these as repeated patterns and forms, inhabiting the gallery as an edition of wallpaper and a new sculptural work. Yeo states, “Depicting the intertwined physical relationship among people to people and people to technology, the project addresses the wider scope of the cyclical and repetitive pattern of our behavior in consuming the ‘disillusionment’ of satisfaction in its manipulation and distortion.“

Sejin Kim’s two-channel video work, Mosaic Transition refers to the contentious flow of polluted air across borders and nation-states across Asia. The flow of pollution – a product of prevailing wind currents and industrial production in China and elsewhere – is a defining factor in lived experience across the Korean Peninsula; millions rely on apps and real-time data visualization software to assess the liveability of local atmospheric conditions. Mosaic Transition employs these technological advances as both revelatory and potentially fictive: Kim’s work is inspired by recent political fallout when images of C02 emissions were mobilized in Congress in South Korea – only to be debunked as fictional visualizations. The video work is created to emulate algorithmic data calculations: using open source imagery as material, Kim creates a series of images that overwrites itself in a perpetual cycle of apparent fact and its subsequent replacement. The system and its machinations – alongside glitches, effects, screen captures and overlays – are textured and fast moving, as the real world effects of environmental crisis dovetail with the tools and technologies of data collection and manipulation.

Throughout, the artists explore deep influences on human behaviour and perception; far from decrying the advance of ‘the digital’ the artists represent an embedded yet critically engaged position. They contend, as we all must, with an embodied perspective in a technological environment that, in both promise and imperfection, is intertwined with our survival.

This exhibition is part of Particles: Seoul to Vancouver, a program of exchange between artists, curators and institutions.

Artist bios
InYoung Yeo is an independent artist, curator and director based in Seoul. Her work expands from artistic materialization of drawing, painting, installation works to curatorial projects with interdisciplinary approaches in topics of Gender, A.I. and Urbanization as her main area of research. She explores various forms of manifestation in visual patterns based on logical structures of the human ‘mind’ and coincidences in the multidimensional time and space. Yeo has put together and participated in various projects, exhibitions, residencies, talks and workshops in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, US among others. Some of her major projects and exhibitions include Intersections of Common Space and Time a public art intervention project in Seoul, supported by Seoul Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut Seoul; Gender Hierarchy exhibition and related programs at Grey Projects, LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, in partnership with Geothe-Institut Singapore ; A.I.MAGINE, an art and technology collaboration project with Seoul City, Seoul National University, Seoul Digital Foundation, Seoul Data Science Lab Project at Art Center Nabi, Space One, Goethe-Institut Seoul; a three-way dialogue as a part of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017; East Asia Goethe-Institut A.I. research project A Better Version of 人. Her work has been included in group exhibitions A Free Breakfast, Multitude, Bare; and solo exhibitions a three-way dialogue, Space and Visual Interview.

Sejin Kim received her MFA in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art in London and MA in Film/TV from Sogang University in Seoul. She works with a variety of media apparatuses, including documentary realism and cinematic language to explore relationships between individuals and contemporary cultural systems. Her work has been shown internationally including selected solo exhibitions: The Chronology of Chance, Media Theater, Seoul; Prizma Residency #1, Prizma Space, Istanbul, Turkey; The Proximity of Longing, Cultural Station 284, Seoul. Selected group exhibitions include The Arrival of New Women, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Galaxias Maculates, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Valdivia, Chile; Future is Now!, La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille, France; The Shade of Prosperity, INIVA, London; Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011, ICA Gallery, London & S1 Art Space, Sheffield, UK; Life Stage, Art Centre Nabi, Seoul; The 4th Gwangju Biennale: PAUSE. She is the recipient of the Songeun Art Prize, Bloomberg New Contemporaries), and The 4th DAUM Prize, and she has participated in artist residencies at HIAP-Helsinki international Artist Program, SeMA Nanji Art Studio, Seoul, ISCP-International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York, Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon, Seoul, Goyang National Art Studio, and Taipei Artist Village, Taiwan.

Image credit: Sejin Kim, Mosaic Transition, 2-channel video (work in progress)