Particles completes grunt’s exchange with organizations and artists in Seoul, South Korea. This international program began in 2018 with Instant Coffee’s project Pink Noise Pop Up , which saw curator Vanessa Kwan, artist collective Instant Coffee and Vancouver-based artists Jeneen Frei Njootli, Casey Wei, Krista Belle Stewart and Ron Tran mount an exhibition and a series of events at two partnering organizations in Seoul. This year’s program includes an artist residency, an exhibition and a curatorial visit.
RESIDENCY
Artist: Yaloo, April 18th – May 17th, 2019, Western Front Media Arts/ grunt gallery
Talk: Animation Show and Tell
Featuring Yaloo, with Howie Tsui and Lianne Zannier
April 25th, 7 PM.
Location: Grand Luxe Theatre at the Western Front.
Produced in collaboration with Western Front Media Arts
VISITING CURATORS
Curators: InYoung Yeo (Art Space One, Seoul) and Soojung Yi (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul).
May 8th – 17th, 2019.
Curator’s Talk and Open House
InYoung Yeo and Soojung Yi with Yaloo
May 13th, 6:30 PM
Location: Grand Luxe Theatre at the Western Front
At this Curator’s talk, Seoul-based curators InYoung Yeo (Art Space One) and Soojung Yi (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) will discuss digital technologies, art and urbanism. Yeo and Yi will address the conditions of production, collaboration and presentation in Korea and the influence of digital technologies on arts communities and the public realm. The event will also showcase the latest work in progress by Yaloo, developed while in residence at Western Front.
EXHIBITION
dot.dot.dot.
Artists: Sejin Kim and InYoung Yeo.
Curated by Vanessa Kwan with InYoung Yeo
May 10 – June 22, 2019.
Opening Reception: May 9, 7 – 10 PM. Location: grunt gallery
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. Far from decrying the advance of ‘the digital’ the artists represent an embedded yet critically engaged position. Their works contend, as we all must, with an embodied perspective in a technological environment that, in both promise and imperfection, is intertwined with our survival.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture. Particles: Seoul to Vancouver is produced in partnership with Western Front Media Arts, the Banff Centre for the Arts and Pacific Crossings
Participant Bios
Yaloo is a media artist currently based in Seoul and Chicago. Her work creates poetic narratives that explore regionalism, consumer culture and digital interactivity using transcultural icons such as corn, ginseng, and cosmetics. Via alternative video imaging technologies such as video projection mapping, sublimation transfer techniques and virtual reality, intimate relationships between consumerism and regionalism are mediated in spectacular, multi-faceted digital landscapes. She completed an MFA (2015) and BFA (2011) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus on digital image-making and digital installation. She was the first recipient of Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Scholarship by Video Data Bank (VDB). Since 2009 she has shown her work internationally, including exhibitions in Seoul, Malmö, Frankfurt, Brooklyn, Seattle, Columbus, and Chicago. Her work is often site-specific with a strong research component, and recent residencies include the Bemis Studio Art Centre, Fukuoka Asian Museum of Art, Headlands Centre for the Arts, and High Concept Labs, Chicago
InYoung Yeo is an independent curator and director. With a background in English Literature, Illustration and Fine Art in countries including UK, US and Korea, she founded Space One, an independent artist-run space, in Seoul in 2014. Since then, she has put together various collaborative exhibitions, working and experimenting with emerging artists and art spaces from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, UK, US and Canada, among others. Some of her recent curatorial projects and exhibitions include Intersections of Common Space and Time supported by Seoul Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut Seoul; Gender Hierarchy supported by Geothe-Institut Singapore in collaboration with Grey Projects Singapore; A.I.MAGINE Seoul City, Seoul National University commissioned, Seoul Digital Foundation, Seoul Data Science Lab Project; a three-way dialogue with the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017; East Asia Goethe-Institut project ‘A Better Version of 人’ programs in Korea.
Soojung Yi was born in Busan, Korea. Yi worked for Daejeon Museum of Art as Curator of Media Art and worked for Art Center Nabi (Seoul) as a creative director, where her focus was the production of media art for the public realm. There she researched the rising number of media façades in urban space and its interaction with the public. She joined the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul) 2012 and has been working for the exhibition and projects related to media arts. Her previous projects include The Future is Now! New Media Collection from MMCA, Korea, Younghae Chang Heavy Industries (2013); Shirin Neshat (2014); Infinite Challenge-Women Media Pioneers in Asia, Anechoic Project-experimental films and music performances (2014); and William Kentridge (2015).
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.