IM Youngzoo: The Late 故

IM Youngzoo (b. 1982, Busan, South Korea) presents a multimedia environment in which ritualistic belief and modern technology are entwined. For the past decade, she has investigated how these seemingly antithetical systems both function as “survival technologies”: tools for sensing and enduring existential uncertainty. Driven by idiosyncratic, expansive research, her work positions personal and collective memories of shamanistic traditions within the context of Korea’s rapid techno-economic transformation.

The exhibition title pairs two honorifics for the deceased: “the late” in English and the Chinese 故 (“go”), contrasting the ideas of an adverse relationship to time and a deep, ancestral past. IM interprets the Korean funerary practice of gamyo—building “empty graves” to mislead death and therefore defer it—as a proto-metaverse interface. Much like virtual reality, her work renders scenes beyond human perception, turning the gallery into a site where death is displaced and reconfigured.

IM’s recent residency in New York, during which she conducted research on topics from migratory birds gone astray to death café communities, further extended her inquiry into the uncertainty of existence across disparate geographies. Bridging contrasting temporalities across cultures, the exhibition imparts a sense of fractured belief, whereby orientation is destabilized. This disorientation is embodied through the physical acts of standing, sitting, reclining, seeing, listening, and touching.