Haena Yoo’s studio is located on the outskirts of greater Seoul, in one of the so-called Knowledge Industry Centers developed during an investment boom in the pandemic years. While there are hundreds of these high-rise office-factory complexes still under construction across South Korea, those that are already completed exist almost like ghost buildings, sparsely populated and far from the real estate havens they were conceived to be. It is there, in a limbo of liquid capital, that Haena Yoo established a transitory home for sculptures that often look like science experiments and resist efforts to contain them in fixed forms. “It’s very unsettling,” she said of her work, “and that’s a kind of extreme emotion—discomfort—that I like.”
In the studio this past spring, Yoo was amassing cartons of gelatin, a material often used as a food preservative and a base for cosmetic products. Laid out on the floor were sealed vacuum packs containing mundane objects being tested for durability in different kinds of conservation. Nearby were yoga mats with photographic images printed on them, mass-produced foam rollers that resembled slick Brancusian figures, and metal objects cast in the shape of massage and relaxation tools. There were shelves full of glass bottles filled with organic matter, including bricks of meju (fermented soybeans) and gold-painted ginseng laid out in a line on a cart with electric hot plates used for boiling. They were reminiscent of vessels filled with herbs for “wellness” or liquor that one might see in an Asian grandma’s living room, evoking a strange mix of traditional healing methods and tools for self-care.
After splitting her time between Seoul and Los Angeles for years, Yoo settled in Korea around the beginning of the pandemic to stay with her mother, who was battling cancer, and later died. Left with an excess of medications and supplements, the artist decided to liquidate, circulate, and incorporate them into her work. “I wanted to create a cure-all for diseases amidst the pandemic,” she said of creations that draw on processes like cultivation and fermentation. One such work, Milky Way Table (2021), lived through the run of her exhibition titled “The Oriental Sauce Factory” at Murmurs gallery in LA, with the “sauce” comprising things like soybeans fermenting in an acrylic-encased pool filled with pills and health supplements from American drugstores as well as East Asian natural products.
Haena Yoo: I was the placebo, 2023.
Photo Michael Popp/Courtesy Bibeau Krueger, New York
Recent works have taken the form of blown glass orbs, such as I was the placebo (2023), which contains organic materials like turkey tail mushrooms and hwanggi (a medicinal root) soaked in liquid, trapped again between the forces of preservation and decay. That work was featured in a show last year at New York’s Bibeau Krueger gallery titled “Severance,” after the hospital that Yoo’s mother stayed in before her death.
“We’ve talked a lot about failure,” Yoo said during our correspondence, after we talked about her plans to split time once again between Seoul and LA. “I want to convey systemic/socio-structural failure through my work. I want to take such failures as a given reality and reflect them.” By short-circuiting systems of containment and fixed states, Yoo’s work generates tension that can awaken us to get real about illusions of art’s comfortable neutrality in a time of unbridled crisis.