Emily Yong Beck

The Pit is proud to present Victory Food Chicago-based artist Emily Yong Beck's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition includes new ceramic vessels and sculptures made by the artist over the past year.

Made with the idiosyncratic precision of a craftsman and the exuberance of a fan, Emily Yong Beck's sculptures are beaming with zeal. The ceramic vessels feature familiar figures from American and Japanese cartoons, ones you might find in comic books or in animated tv shows. They are figures that carry with them a whole universe of fantasy and imagination. But these oft-reproduced figures take on a new identity when rendered by the artist's hand. Beck brings them into her world, softening the edges and merging them into one another, adorning the shapes she makes with clay.

A selection of sculptures, some inspired by traditional Korean vessel shapes, are displayed like the traditional pottery she grew up seeing when she lived in Korea for short periods of her childhood. Crowded in small shops, the pottery became an accessible object rather than some precious heirloom behind glass. Similarly, the works in Victory Food nearly burst out of themselves wanting to escape the kind of plastic containment of their pasts and follow the artist into the world now.

Beck says that many of the sources of inspiration for her work come from the kinds of things she consumed when she was younger (consumed being the operative word here). She considers, now with some distance, these things that might have been seemingly innocuous, fed to her by a culture in which she was raised now take on a strangeness when viewed from a new angle. It mirrors the experience one might have of seeing these ceramic vessels themselves — from far away you might see abstract organic patterns but with a double take you will recognize Yoshi or Pikachu. With this gesture, Beck, considers the subliminal political messaging of popular culture, the cuteness and whimsy used as a technique of propaganda. The exhibition's title "Victory Food" comes from an American propaganda effort to encourage soldiers to drink milk insisting that it contained all the nutrients necessary for strong troops to be victorious.

This type of political or corporate messaging infiltrating something as benign as milk is unavoidable in today's world. Sometimes in Los Angeles, mostly when you're heading West, you might encounter little robots roaming the streets. They cross busy intersections with a kind of reticent boldness, flinching or stopping abruptly if some foreign objects appear in their path. They have little faces, cute ones, smiling ones and have names — human names, sometimes they have digital eyes that blink. The robots are often delivering food but also advertising movies, companies, and restaurants. But the anthropomorphized machines deliver their message with a smile and a wink.

Emily Yong Beck (b. 1999, Daegu, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary ceramic artist who received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2021. Yong Beck’s work has been featured in the solo exhibitions Lions & Lambs, Gaa Gallery Provincetown, MA, Spoonful of Sugar at New Image Art, Los Angeles, CA, and a two-person presentation with Gaa Gallery at NADA New York, NY. Yong Beck has been awarded residences at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Newcastle, ME, and Township10, Marshall, NC. Yong Beck lives and works in Chicago, IL, where she co-runs the exhibition space, The Latent Space.