SINAE YOO
Selected by Dominico De Chirico
16.05.2024
Sinae Yoo
Pocalyeap
2024
Installation view at Jacobs' Booth
Jacobs’ Booth’s inaugural presentation, titled Pocalyeap, marks the Belgian debut of award-winning Korean artist Sinae Yoo.
The Booth remains faithful to its original function as a vitrine, now taking the form of a jewelry display case exhibiting accessories featured in Yoo’s film Derivative Messiah. These accessories were designed to evoke the aesthetic of a fictitious cult-inspired merchandise line called ‘Pocalyeap’ – a fashion brand created specifically for the 'Derivative Messiah’ series. The showcased necklace features a heavy steel chain adorned with an OLED LCD display; the earring (hanging from a life-sized silicon ear) sports an SD card. Both are presented on a levitating motherboard platform. The painting titled Art Student (POCALYEAP), depicts a manga-like, naked female figure with a mutilated body, set against a serene historical background. Her pose is seductive; her hands, seemingly not belonging to her body, elegantly hold up her long hair. Foam emerges from her ears and she has a ghoulish grimace. Thirst trap becomes a devotional icon – yet the central figure is deteriorating, as if the pressure to be beautiful and attractive is too much to take.
Sinae Yoo
Art Student (POCALYEAP), 2024
Acrylic and watercolor on paper
31.9 x 24 cm (unframed), 37,9 x 30 cm (museum glass frame)
Sinae Yoo
Internship (POCALYEAP), 2024
Stone, Surgical Steel, SD Card, Micro SD, Polymorph, Magnetic Levitation Module, Magnetic Float, and Power Adapter
9 × 9 × 16 cm excl. pedestal of 9 × 9 × 23 cm
With ‘Pocalyeap’, Sinae Yoo engages once again in communicating her subjective experience and her very personal Weltanschauung, through the use of symbols, metaphors, colors, and expressive forms that reflect the complexity of the human experience. — Domenico De Chirico
Derivative Messiah is Sinae Yoo’s latest ongoing interdisciplinary exhibition project. The film examines a messianic subject using various media such as performance, video, CGI, 3D print, ceramic, sound, and music composed by AI.
The overall narrative of the film revolves around an individual’s trauma induced by a transformation of 21st-century Messianism. In this secular messianism, we no longer wait for a Messiah full of promises. We anticipate, in our own ways, the interminable procession of the defeated and oppressed from the past; we possess the formidable power to either prolong or interrupt their agony. In fact, the present can always redistribute the cards and roles, changing the meaning of the past by contradicting the history written by the victors. The last word is never spoken, and we always have obligations to messianic debts. This secularized messianism is no longer passive patience waiting to be met, but the active and restless expectation of the sentinel, always ready for the sudden appearance of possibility.
Partially borrowing the theological idea that the end-of-time savior will eventually arrive one day but has not yet arrived, the artist captures a never-ending moment of waiting, highlighting the overpowering, narcissistic elements of salvation that operate like today’s organized religions.
Belonging is a key concept here. The film’s narrator states: “Specifically within the queer community, the seeking of community is a safety thing.” A shared belief allows you to let your guard down with other people. The (religious) cult can feel like a safe haven; a higher spirit will show you the way. The GPS is strikingly present in the first part of ‘Derivative Messiah’, evidently referencing religion in general or the Messiah in particular showing the way; the way to salvation. However, the destination in the film is the Church of Scientology – a prime example of a capitalist religious institution focused on emptying the pockets of its believers.
Cults exploit the human need for belonging. After God’s death was proclaimed by Nietzsche in the 19th century, many secular cults seem to have taken the place of religion. Fashion, especially the very niche fashion cults (focused on specific designers, certain club scenes, or music genres), could be seen as satisfying that desire to belong, a desire for community. More than ever, this takes on a narcissistic streak, recreating what the big religions do best: an us vs. them division. “Us” feels safe, “Us” belongs, “Us” is cool and they are not. In fashion cults, there is an aspiration for individualism, personal style, while at the same time belonging to a group of likeminded or “likedressed” individuals. The Instagram page @pocalyeap_secretsociety reads in its bio “NOT ORIGINAL WE ARE DERIVATIVE,” seemingly questioning the ability to achieve original individuality.
Sinae Yoo
Sister Testament (POCALYEAP), 2024
Steel chain, 1.51-inch transparent OLED LCD display, and two digitally printed glasses
37.8 x 7.5 cm
Sinae Yoo
Sister Testament (POCALYEAP), 2024
Steel chain, 1.51-inch transparent OLED LCD display, and two digitally printed glasses
37.8 x 7.5 cm
Sinae Yoo
Sister Testament (POCALYEAP), 2024
Steel chain, 1.51-inch transparent OLED LCD display, and two digitally printed glasses
37.8 x 7.5 cm
Sinae Yoo
Internship (POCALYEAP), 2024
Stone, Surgical Steel, SD Card, Micro SD, Polymorph, Magnetic Levitation Module, Magnetic Float, and Power Adapter
9 × 9 × 16 cm excl. pedestal of 9 × 9 × 23 cm
At the same time, the Pocalyeap accessories highlight our technology-dominated society by integrating SD and SIM cards into jewelry – the accessories closest to our skin. The voice-over in the film warns against the threats this ubiquity of technology poses: “Technology, it has the power to destroy. Don’t let it destroy your life. Don’t let technology take up all the space within your brain. Technology: devices to be used. But just make sure that device does not use you.” However, the digital/technological elements are combined with natural components, such as gemstones. Yoo still draws from nature and blends the uber-digitized with the handmade, the artisanal. In her work, Yoo often ventures into painting and ceramics.
Sinae Yoo
Triumph of Intelligent Sadcore (Petrichor) #2, 2021
Ceramic and mixed media
27 × 21 × 11 cm
Sinae Yoo
Penpal (Petrichor), 2023
Oil on canvas
116,5 × 80 cm
Sinae Yoo, Exhibition view Petrichor at Antichambre, Bern, Switzerland, 2019
There are numerous historical examples where artists create jewelry, but perhaps the most prolific were the Surrealists, who saw this wearable art as part of a total artwork or Gesamtkunstwerk (have a look at Max Ernst’s bedroom design, for instance). Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Meret Oppenheim, Max Ernst, and Man Ray are only a few of the artists who explored the potential of jewelry design as an extension and continuation of their artistic practice. While they introduced the spontaneity of form stemming from their automatic writing/creation, Sinae Yoo innovates by incorporating actual technological components into jewelry, presenting them atop a levitating platform.
Salvador Dalí, The Eye of Time. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, VEGAP, 2016. Courtesy of Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí.
Clipping from the Sunday Mirror Magazine, November 13, 1949 – Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery Library
The painting Art Student (POCALYEAP) references Renaissance paintings of the Madonna with child: devotional panels representing humility (quite opposite to the seductive pose of the figure in Yoo’s work, and deliberately so). When comparing the painting to Raphael’s The Small Cowper Madonna (circa 1505), for example, we observe similar pastoral settings with a castle in the background; roads meandering through the rounded hills. The Madonna has soft eyes and a harmonious smile. In contrast, Yoo’s Art Student appears on the verge of a mental breakdown – her presence within the harmonious natural setting is utterly contradictory.
Raphael, The Small Cowper Madonna (circa 1505), oil on panel, 59.5 x 44 cm (23 7/16 x 17 5/16 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Widener Collection, Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art
Sinae Yoo
Art Student (POCALYEAP), 2024
Acrylic and watercolor on paper
31.9 x 24 cm (unframed), 37,9 x 30 cm (museum glass frame)
Within her oeuvre, Yoo has shown a propensity for medieval religious signifiers, both in the form her canvases take, mirroring medieval panels and triptychs, and in her use of medieval symbols such as the Baphomet, a pagan demon/deity that has become an occult icon and a recurring figure in Yoo’s work.
In his book Dogme et ritual de la haute magie (1861; Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual), the influential French occultist Éliphas Lévi created the Baphomet that has become a recognized occult icon. The book’s frontispiece was a drawing of Baphomet imagined as a “Sabbatic Goat”—a hermaphroditic winged human figure with the head and feet of a goat, adorned with numerous esoteric symbols. But the figure itself has been around and worshipped since the 12th century.
In the past few years, using a wide array of media —painting, sculpture, film and installation—, Sinae Yoo has explored themes of alienation and servitude under the yoke of capitalism. Taking her cues from the visual culture of advertising and video games, the artist conjures an aesthetic of seduction that grinds the souls it ensnares within its virtual net. Yoo re-contextualizes digital media such as advertisements, video games, corporate aesthetics and pop-culture references to reflect the subjugation of human life under the umbrella of consumer culture. By juxtaposing the spiritual anchoring of individual life and the competitiveness of consumerism, she creates a tangible environment to engage with this everyday duality.
Sinae Yoo, Exhibition view Petrichor(OLED ART WAVE edition), 2021, single channel video, 4K, stereo, 11’30’’, 2746 x 5786 x 782 mm
Sinae Yoo, Petrichor, Exhibition view at the Contemporary Art Center FUTURA, Prague, 2019, HD video and sound, 161 x 440 cm
Sinae Yoo, Guilt Trip, Exhibition view, QUARK, Geneva, 2019
In 2016, Yoo was awarded the Aeschliman Corti Award, which is known as the largest private art prize in Bern. Her first solo exhibition took place at the Kunsthaus Langenthal in the same year. In 2017, she received a commission from Canton Bern and her work has become part of the Seoul Museum of Art Collections. In 2018, her video was displayed at the Swiss Art Award in Basel. In 2019, she received the national grant from the Arts Council Korea and opened her solo exhibition at the Center For Contemporary Art Futura in Prague. In 2020, she participated in an online project with the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 2021, she collaborated with LG x PEACHES. In 2022, she received a commission to produce a video for the Ulsan Art Museum.
Sinae Yoo’s solo booth for Cylinder at Frieze Seoul 2023 got awarded ‘Focus Asia Stand Prize’
At the latest edition of Frieze Seoul, CYLINDER was awarded the Focus Asia Stand Prize 2023 for their solo presentation of Sinae Yoo. The artist created an installation consisting of a new series of works including an altarpiece and smaller votive-like paintings that were unveiled from behind curtains, the series collectively titled ‘Post Truth’, exploring how the concept has become increasingly relevant in our modern society, where objective facts are often dismissed in favour of subjective beliefs and opinions.
Yoo has been putting up art projects and exhibitions as an exhibition maker (under the moniker ‘MEEK’) since 2019.
Sinae Yoo
Internship (POCALYEAP), 2024
Stone, Surgical Steel, SD Card, Micro SD, Polymorph, Magnetic Levitation Module, Magnetic Float, and Power Adapter
9 × 9 × 16 cm excl. pedestal of 9 × 9 × 23 cm
Sinae Yoo
Sister Testament (POCALYEAP), 2024
Steel chain, 1.51-inch transparent OLED LCD display, and two digitally printed glasses
37.8 x 7.5 cm
Sinae Yoo
Pocalyeap
2024
Installation view at Jacobs' Booth
To learn more about this work and Jacobs’ Booth
CONTACT US
SINAE YOO
Selected by Dominico De Chirico
16.05.2024
Sinae Yoo
Pocalyeap
2024
Installation view at Jacobs' Booth
Jacobs’ Booth’s inaugural presentation, titled Pocalyeap, marks the Belgian debut of award-winning Korean artist Sinae Yoo.
The Booth remains faithful to its original function as a vitrine, now taking the form of a jewelry display case exhibiting accessories featured in Yoo’s film Derivative Messiah. These accessories were designed to evoke the aesthetic of a fictitious cult-inspired merchandise line called ‘Pocalyeap’ – a fashion brand created specifically for the 'Derivative Messiah’ series. The showcased necklace features a heavy steel chain adorned with an OLED LCD display; the earring (hanging from a life-sized silicon ear) sports an SD card. Both are presented on a levitating motherboard platform. The painting titled Art Student (POCALYEAP), depicts a manga-like, naked female figure with a mutilated body, set against a serene historical background. Her pose is seductive; her hands, seemingly not belonging to her body, elegantly hold up her long hair. Foam emerges from her ears and she has a ghoulish grimace. Thirst trap becomes a devotional icon – yet the central figure is deteriorating, as if the pressure to be beautiful and attractive is too much to take.
Sinae Yoo
Art Student (POCALYEAP), 2024
Acrylic and watercolor on paper
31.9 x 24 cm (unframed), 37,9 x 30 cm (museum glass frame)
Sinae Yoo
Internship (POCALYEAP), 2024
Stone, Surgical Steel, SD Card, Micro SD, Polymorph, Magnetic Levitation Module, Magnetic Float, and Power Adapter
9 × 9 × 16 cm excl. pedestal of 9 × 9 × 23 cm
With ‘Pocalyeap’, Sinae Yoo engages once again in communicating her subjective experience and her very personal Weltanschauung, through the use of symbols, metaphors, colors, and expressive forms that reflect the complexity of the human experience. — Domenico De Chirico
Derivative Messiah is Sinae Yoo’s latest ongoing interdisciplinary exhibition project. The film examines a messianic subject using various media such as performance, video, CGI, 3D print, ceramic, sound, and music composed by AI.
The overall narrative of the film revolves around an individual’s trauma induced by a transformation of 21st-century Messianism. In this secular messianism, we no longer wait for a Messiah full of promises. We anticipate, in our own ways, the interminable procession of the defeated and oppressed from the past; we possess the formidable power to either prolong or interrupt their agony. In fact, the present can always redistribute the cards and roles, changing the meaning of the past by contradicting the history written by the victors. The last word is never spoken, and we always have obligations to messianic debts. This secularized messianism is no longer passive patience waiting to be met, but the active and restless expectation of the sentinel, always ready for the sudden appearance of possibility.
Partially borrowing the theological idea that the end-of-time savior will eventually arrive one day but has not yet arrived, the artist captures a never-ending moment of waiting, highlighting the overpowering, narcissistic elements of salvation that operate like today’s organized religions.
Belonging is a key concept here. The film’s narrator states: “Specifically within the queer community, the seeking of community is a safety thing.” A shared belief allows you to let your guard down with other people. The (religious) cult can feel like a safe haven; a higher spirit will show you the way. The GPS is strikingly present in the first part of ‘Derivative Messiah’, evidently referencing religion in general or the Messiah in particular showing the way; the way to salvation. However, the destination in the film is the Church of Scientology – a prime example of a capitalist religious institution focused on emptying the pockets of its believers.
Cults exploit the human need for belonging. After God’s death was proclaimed by Nietzsche in the 19th century, many secular cults seem to have taken the place of religion. Fashion, especially the very niche fashion cults (focused on specific designers, certain club scenes, or music genres), could be seen as satisfying that desire to belong, a desire for community. More than ever, this takes on a narcissistic streak, recreating what the big religions do best: an us vs. them division. “Us” feels safe, “Us” belongs, “Us” is cool and they are not. In fashion cults, there is an aspiration for individualism, personal style, while at the same time belonging to a group of likeminded or “likedressed” individuals. The Instagram page @pocalyeap_secretsociety reads in its bio “NOT ORIGINAL WE ARE DERIVATIVE,” seemingly questioning the ability to achieve original individuality.
Sinae Yoo
Sister Testament (POCALYEAP), 2024
Steel chain, 1.51-inch transparent OLED LCD display, and two digitally printed glasses
37.8 x 7.5 cm
Sinae Yoo
Internship (POCALYEAP), 2024
Stone, Surgical Steel, SD Card, Micro SD, Polymorph, Magnetic Levitation Module, Magnetic Float, and Power Adapter
9 × 9 × 16 cm excl. pedestal of 9 × 9 × 23 cm
At the same time, the Pocalyeap accessories highlight our technology-dominated society by integrating SD and SIM cards into jewelry – the accessories closest to our skin. The voice-over in the film warns against the threats this ubiquity of technology poses: “Technology, it has the power to destroy. Don’t let it destroy your life. Don’t let technology take up all the space within your brain. Technology: devices to be used. But just make sure that device does not use you.” However, the digital/technological elements are combined with natural components, such as gemstones. Yoo still draws from nature and blends the uber-digitized with the handmade, the artisanal. In her work, Yoo often ventures into painting and ceramics.
Sinae Yoo
Triumph of Intelligent Sadcore (Petrichor) #2, 2021
Ceramic and mixed media
27 × 21 × 11 cm
Sinae Yoo
Penpal (Petrichor), 2023
Oil on canvas
116,5 × 80 cm
There are numerous historical examples where artists create jewelry, but perhaps the most prolific were the Surrealists, who saw this wearable art as part of a total artwork or Gesamtkunstwerk (have a look at Max Ernst’s bedroom design, for instance). Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Meret Oppenheim, Max Ernst, and Man Ray are only a few of the artists who explored the potential of jewelry design as an extension and continuation of their artistic practice. While they introduced the spontaneity of form stemming from their automatic writing/creation, Sinae Yoo innovates by incorporating actual technological components into jewelry, presenting them atop a levitating platform.
Salvador Dalí, The Eye of Time. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, VEGAP, 2016. Courtesy of Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí.
Clipping from the Sunday Mirror Magazine, November 13, 1949 – Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery Library
The painting Art Student (POCALYEAP) references Renaissance paintings of the Madonna with child: devotional panels representing humility (quite opposite to the seductive pose of the figure in Yoo’s work, and deliberately so). When comparing the painting to Raphael’s The Small Cowper Madonna (circa 1505), for example, we observe similar pastoral settings with a castle in the background; roads meandering through the rounded hills. The Madonna has soft eyes and a harmonious smile. In contrast, Yoo’s Art Student appears on the verge of a mental breakdown – her presence within the harmonious natural setting is utterly contradictory.
Raphael, The Small Cowper Madonna (circa 1505), oil on panel, 59.5 x 44 cm (23 7/16 x 17 5/16 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Widener Collection, Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art
Sinae Yoo
Art Student (POCALYEAP), 2024
Acrylic and watercolor on paper
31.9 x 24 cm (unframed), 37,9 x 30 cm (museum glass frame)
Within her oeuvre, Yoo has shown a propensity for medieval religious signifiers, both in the form her canvases take, mirroring medieval panels and triptychs, and in her use of medieval symbols such as the Baphomet, a pagan demon/deity that has become an occult icon and a recurring figure in Yoo’s work.
In his book Dogme et ritual de la haute magie (1861; Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual), the influential French occultist Éliphas Lévi created the Baphomet that has become a recognized occult icon. The book’s frontispiece was a drawing of Baphomet imagined as a “Sabbatic Goat”—a hermaphroditic winged human figure with the head and feet of a goat, adorned with numerous esoteric symbols. But the figure itself has been around and worshipped since the 12th century.
In the past few years, using a wide array of media —painting, sculpture, film and installation—, Sinae Yoo has explored themes of alienation and servitude under the yoke of capitalism. Taking her cues from the visual culture of advertising and video games, the artist conjures an aesthetic of seduction that grinds the souls it ensnares within its virtual net. Yoo re-contextualizes digital media such as advertisements, video games, corporate aesthetics and pop-culture references to reflect the subjugation of human life under the umbrella of consumer culture. By juxtaposing the spiritual anchoring of individual life and the competitiveness of consumerism, she creates a tangible environment to engage with this everyday duality.
Sinae Yoo, Exhibition view Petrichor(OLED ART WAVE edition), 2021, single channel video, 4K, stereo, 11’30’’, 2746 x 5786 x 782 mm
Sinae Yoo, Petrichor, Exhibition view at the Contemporary Art Center FUTURA, Prague, 2019, HD video and sound, 161 x 440 cm
Sinae Yoo, Guilt Trip, Exhibition view, QUARK, Geneva, 2019
In 2016, Yoo was awarded the Aeschliman Corti Award, which is known as the largest private art prize in Bern. Her first solo exhibition took place at the Kunsthaus Langenthal in the same year. In 2017, she received a commission from Canton Bern and her work has become part of the Seoul Museum of Art Collections. In 2018, her video was displayed at the Swiss Art Award in Basel. In 2019, she received the national grant from the Arts Council Korea and opened her solo exhibition at the Center For Contemporary Art Futura in Prague. In 2020, she participated in an online project with the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 2021, she collaborated with LG x PEACHES. In 2022, she received a commission to produce a video for the Ulsan Art Museum.
Sinae Yoo’s solo booth for Cylinder at Frieze Seoul 2023 got awarded ‘Focus Asia Stand Prize’
At the latest edition of Frieze Seoul, CYLINDER was awarded the Focus Asia Stand Prize 2023 for their solo presentation of Sinae Yoo. The artist created an installation consisting of a new series of works including an altarpiece and smaller votive-like paintings that were unveiled from behind curtains, the series collectively titled ‘Post Truth’, exploring how the concept has become increasingly relevant in our modern society, where objective facts are often dismissed in favour of subjective beliefs and opinions.
Yoo has been putting up art projects and exhibitions as an exhibition maker (under the moniker ‘MEEK’) since 2019.
Sinae Yoo
Internship (POCALYEAP), 2024
Stone, Surgical Steel, SD Card, Micro SD, Polymorph, Magnetic Levitation Module, Magnetic Float, and Power Adapter
9 × 9 × 16 cm excl. pedestal of 9 × 9 × 23 cm
Sinae Yoo
Sister Testament (POCALYEAP), 2024
Steel chain, 1.51-inch transparent OLED LCD display, and two digitally printed glasses
37.8 x 7.5 cm
Sinae Yoo
Pocalyeap
2024
Installation view at Jacobs' Booth
To learn more about this work and Jacobs’ Booth
CONTACT US
2024 © Jacobs' Booth