Youngjoo Yoo is a South Korean artist who came to ´ace through an agreement signed with ARKO—Arts Council Korea. Youngjoo had been doing a Production Residency for four weeks, at the end of which she exhibited her video work entitled Can you hear me? in the Políglota Room of our studio.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I believe life itself can be art. Life and environment are important sources for my artistic practice. These influences are evident in my choice of subject matter, but they have also influenced the forms in my work.

I greatly admire Dieter Roth’s method of exploring life and art. Roth kept all of his diaries and notebooks, preserved everything he consumed and filmed even his everyday life until its end. I appreciate his enthusiastic and thorough working methods. However, my aesthetic principle is less about producing objects for my creative practice. Sometimes I feel that artists are about to ruin this planet due to our compulsion to produce excessively: too much value is placed on artifacts as outcomes. On a human level, I believe I have an ethical obligation to avoid polluting our world. Throughout my recent projects I produced as few new objects as possible.

Now I’m more interested in the wonderful collective, core human spirit and idiosyncrasies of humankind. In my making, I question and explore what remains if my work won’t exist as an artifact. This concern keeps me engaged, and expands the boundaries of this aspect of my work. The process of exploring creativity grounded in a sustainable, non-making ethos is liberating and engaging. I now focus on sound, interviews, performance and writing realised as installations as a way of maximising conversation and minimising the productions of the obtained outcomes.