Artwork Unveiling and Exhibition Opening

Over the last three months in residence at 836M, artist Yaloo has explored and developed a multi-media art installation featuring an experimental animated short about Shininho, an 86-year-old female Korean KPOP idol, a notorious pirate of the East Asian Ocean.
Yaloo's new work, Shininho Opening Number and Underwater Trilogy explores the intersection of technology, culture, and nature in San Francisco, the greater West, and the American West in a transhistorical and planetary approach. The fictional character centered in this piece is based on her living grandmother, Shininho, who is reimagined as a KPOP idol and pirate. While addressing generational Neo-Confucian trauma and the turbulence of modern Korean history, Shininho's journey reveals the complex layers and nuances of historical events, cultural heritage, and contemporary issues. Combining and employing themes related to KPOP idol culture, temple architecture, Korean shamanism, cross-cultural mythologies, and history, Yaloo's work examines the role of art in a time of rapid technological transformation and socio-historical shifts.
The piece, designed in collaboration with architect Wooyoung Ro, features script elements by writer Jidon Jung, a soundtrack by producer and DJ Yetsuby, and graphics by Handi Kim. The animation shorts were created with assistants Angus Oakes and Jonghoon Ahn.

The unveiling will consist of a short presentation and a brief Q&A session. Due to the site-specific nature and size of the piece, a maximum of 20 guests will be permitted to view it at a time. The piece is 10 minutes long, and guests will be given a group number upon entry.
Tickets are limited to 2 per order. Seats are limited and given on a first-come-first-served basis. Please contact 836M at [email protected] if you have any accessibility needs, such as seat reservations. Please arrive on time, as the presentation will begin promptly at 6:30 pm.

Yaloo is a multimedia installation artist from Seoul who recently relocated to Los Angeles. Through her work, she attempts to take a post-colonial, post-Western-centric, and post-human-centric approach to new media art by imparting a DIY production pipeline for immersive storytelling and interdisciplinary collaboration. There is rich creative potential to be appreciated in DIY computer graphics productions and immersive storytelling, especially when independent artists from different cultural, political, and social backgrounds take control of their creative agency. In the mainstream commercial output of digital media, individual artists perform tasks in a hyper-modernized Fordist process, where a thousand people divide their roles into small pieces. Like many independent media artists, Yaloo attempts to explore radically different visual possibilities through experimental problem-solving and to build her own production pipeline. Ultimately, Yaloo hopes to contribute to the diversity of the media languages in our everyday lives.

She earned a BFA and MFA in video art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been selected for fully funded international residencies in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, and the USA. Yaloo is currently a professor at the Experimental Animation Department at the California Institute of Arts.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

836M Gallery, 836 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, United States