Ji Hye Yeom

SHOW: All Speculative Scenario Coevolution/Symbiosis

The Midday Symptoms
한낮의 징후
2024
Moving Image
17min
Commissioned by Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Korea

This work allegorically charts the symptomatic blue crayfish’s descent into a primeval reality, symbolizing civilization's existential precarity and confrontation with universal truth. Plagued by failure, the creature abandons conventional philosophy, choosing the ‘Handstanderus’ identity as a solitary and inverted mode of survival against the backdrop of systemic collapse.

Study for Symptoms (Series)
징후 습작 (연작)
2024
Oil, acrylic, acrylic medium, and mixed media on canvas
65.1 x 53.0 cm

AI Octopus
에이아이 옥토퍼스
2020
Moving image
16min 35sec
Commissioned by The Asia Culture Center (ACC), Korea

If human species can learn tentacle acuity, bio-sympathy, and wisdom from the octopus, wouldn't we feel pains caused by anthropocentric thinking in a different way? AI is usually considered artificial intelligence, but in the title of AI Octopus, AI here means alternative intelligence, that could be deviating from brain-centered thinking. This work imagines what if the octopuses evolve their own intelligence further, make Octoficial Intelligence (octopus-like intelligence created by octopus) and visit the time and space we live in, then what could they tell us?

Symbioplot
심바이오플롯
2020
Moving image
20min
Commissioned by Soorim Cultural Foundation, and Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Korea

Symbioplot reconstructs a plot for catastrophe with the discovery of a symbiotic power that connects all life on earth. This work unfolds a myriad of stories that are entangled, intertwined, and caught up around symbiosis, coevolution and the narrative of catastrophe. For example, it amalgamates seemingly unrelated stories such as the history of coexistence between cells and mitochondria, the relationship among humans, dogs and livestock, the traces of how life on earth mutated in order to adapt to the environment, and a dialogue between an artist and an environmental engineer.

Fortitude (Series)
용기 (연작)
2021
Tempera on canvas
116.8 x 91.0 cm

I drew a magnified part of Pieter Brueghel’s print Fortitude on a canvas and painted it with tempera. Since tempera is an egg-based pigment, the canvas would be sensitive and acutely vulnerable to environmental factors, having marks of weathering, dissolving, drying, and cracking on its surface. Such changes by the chemical reaction of the pigment manifest a dynamic vitality, which could be seen as another version with another medium of what I would normally do with digital moving images to display their movement dramatically through rhythmic editing.

Study for Fortitude (Series)
용기 습작 (연작)
2021
Tempera on canvas
65.1 x 53.0 cm

Oysters
오이스터
2021
Poster
Various size

“Take Oysters, As You Like!”

Oyster is a work in the form of a disseminatable poster containing factors such as prototypes, motives, questions, and materials of the previous videos. This work, symbolically mirroring the flexibility of the invertebrate oyster, becomes a catalyst that disperses, mutates, and expands through the hands of the audience.

A Night with a Pink Dolphin
분홍돌고래와의 하룻밤
2015
Moving Image
21min 37sec
Supported by Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA Emerging Artist Grant), Korea

Based on my personal experience of encountering a pink dolphin in the Amazon, this work consists of four tiers: a folk legend about pink dolphins that inhabit only the Amazonian jungle, the region’s surrounding colonial history, a personal narrative of encountering a pink dolphin, and the operating forces of capitalism revealed through the representation of pink dolphins being consumed and absorbed in this world model.

Drawing
드로잉
2022~2024
Watercolor on paper
Various size